Sumac shook her head. “Mama being the youngest of six girls, there’s no shortage of Waterstriders at Hickory Lake Camp. I have about a thousand Waterstrider cousins. And Grandmama’s good for another forty years just for stubbornness, I guess, by which time I likely won’t care. But she does make me so mad, sometimes. Uncle Dag never could do anything right for her.”
Not that he wanted to discourage one of his few partisans, but Dag groped for his supposed maturity and managed, “Cumbia never had an easy life. Nor very rewarding. Or not the rewards she wanted.”
Sumac shrugged, and sighed. “I know. Oh, feh, of all the ways Grandmama makes me crazy, the worst is when I end up going on about her like this. Don’t listen, Dag.”
You and me both, youngin’. “How’re Cattagus and Mari? ” he asked, to put her at her ease again.
She brightened. “Still wheezing and bickering. I love Great-uncle Cattagus. I’ll give Fairbolt this, if I could make a marriage like Mari and Cattagus, or like Massape and him, it wouldn’t seem half bad.”
“So, um,” said Fawn-it would be Fawn-“where’d you get all those snake skins, Sumac? ”
Sumac’s eyes sprang wide. “And if that wasn’t the strangest thing I’d ever seen! We’d taken a short cut across the Barrens to reach the Trace, and went to ford a river, and found all these drowned snakes!”
“Half-drowned snakes,” came a bitter voice from behind. Dag glanced over his shoulder at Rase, who seemed to be reminded of some grudge.
“I told you to use your groundsense,” said Sumac, entirely without sympathy. “Anyway, we stopped to collect as many as we could. The skins will fetch us some useful coin at the ferry, I figure.”
Rase put in, “It had us in a puzzle, how all those rattlers came to be washed up there. I wondered if there’d been a flash flood, but Sumac said there was no other sign of it. The Barrens are a queerer place than I’d thought.” He shook his head in wonder.
Dag smiled benignly.
–-
Camp that night was lively with the exchange of tales. Dag eventually confessed to the snakes. To Dag’s relief, Fawn and Barr took up much of the burden of explaining Raintree and their river journey. Sumac had less to offer, but her words seemed just as exotic to the entranced farmer boys, describing a quiet winter patrolling out of New Elm, a camp some forty miles west of the Trace that covered most of the territory between the Barrens and the Hardboil. Rase had been a trainee in her patrol, and showed every sign of the usual hopeless infatuation Sumac tended to engender in young men. Dag did not waste pity on his plight. If he was any good-and she wouldn’t be taking him back to Fairbolt if he weren’t- one of the younger Crow girls would doubtless make short work of him.
One way or another, the boy might never see his home camp again. Dag stifled a grin.
Watching his niece across the flickering firelight, Dag found himself curiously unsettled. She was like a breath of bracing northern air to him, a song of his lost home. He did not regret his exile. One glance at Fawn was still enough to lift his heart near into his throat in wonder.
He’d cut off the weight of his past like shearing through a towrope, and he had no desire to drag that barge again. But. Yet. Still…
Sumac threw curiously unsettled glances back. Ever since Dag had returned from Luthlia maimed and strange when she was rising fifteen, she’d made a bit of a hero of her only Redwing uncle. Unlike Neeta, she had few illusions about him-she’d surely seen him at his worst, many times-but everyone in the family knew she’d chosen the patrol over the knife-making apprenticeship her father had offered because of him.
All her adult life he’d been the same dry patroller fellow, the one kinsman who never criticized her choices, as solidly planted as her favorite tree. She could not have been more startled if a hickory tree had risen up, shaken the dirt from its roots, and run off with a farmer girl. Leaving whatever hammock end she’d had tied to him lying forlorn upon the ground.
Despite any confusion in her heart, she was polite and even friendly to Fawn. As the tales of malices and river bandits, medicine making and walnut magery wound on, Dag trusted she realized Fawn was his partner, not his pet. She managed choked but sincere congratulations at the news of their impending child, and a wholly sincere gleam of evil delight that was pure Sumac when she said, “I can’t wait to tell them at home!”
–-
When Dag made his habitual bedtime patrol of their camp’s perimeter that night, Arkady fell in beside him.
In a voice remarkably neutral even for him, Arkady said, “Interesting woman, your niece.”
“She is that.”
“… How old is she? ”
Dag’s brows rose. He’d thought Arkady shrewder at estimating folks’ ages than anyone he’d ever met. “Let me think. I was about twenty-two when she was born, because it was the year I was patrolling up on the Great North Road. So she must be, um, almost thirty-five, now. She’s Dar’s second-born, see. Her arrival was greeted with much relief and rejoicing in Tent Redwing, I can tell you. Omba’s credit with our mama rose immensely.”
“She does not appear to be string-bound.”
“No.”
“Betrothed? ”
“Not as far as I know.”
“One wonders why not. No tragedies? ”
“I’m not sure she would have said. She’s certainly had serious suitors. Omba calls them the String of Bodies.”
Dag could feel Arkady’s slow blink in the darkness.
Dag set aside a truly overwhelming temptation to tease Arkady, and said seriously, “You’re a subtle man, when it comes to folks’ insides. If you can figure it out and tell us, Tent Redwing would be grateful. I’ve patrolled with her a time or two. She doesn’t hate men, she doesn’t prefer girls. Granted, her first few dewy suitors were crushed by Dar, but they weren’t up to her weight anyway. After that she kept ’em out of sight, naturally.”
“Naturally.”
“The family stopped worrying that she’d make a mistake some time back. Now I suspect the family has started wondering if even a mistake might be better than nothing.” To think Omba would know was unjust. Sumac’s parents were loyal to each other, even if Dar was a difficult man.
“She’s more of a puzzle than she looks at first glance.”
“Yep.”
“Rather like her uncle, that way. Hm.” Arkady wandered off into the darkness.
Dag watched him go. Hm, indeed!
15
A cracking thunderstorm, blowing in hard just before dawn, ended their nice dry spell. By the time everyone turned out to settle the spooked animals and recapture wind-scattered gear, gray daylight arrived, but it wasn’t till midmorning that they set off through the trailing drizzle, bleary-eyed. Fawn let Dag talk her into riding inside the wagon; he and Barr were protected in the boatmen’s rain cloaks Fawn had fashioned back on the Fetch. At least the boiling brown creeks in this more settled country were mostly bridged again.
Fawn wasn’t sure whether to be surprised or not that Sumac and her partner elected to trail along with them at the wagon’s pace “just till the ferry.” Sumac rode between Dag and Arkady, chatting animatedly whenever the rain eased. Fawn supposed she and Dag had a lot of catching up to do. Arkady didn’t seem to be saying much, but he didn’t come up on the wagon box at all that day to continue Calla’s lessons. Edged out of the prime spots at Sumac’s stirrups by their seniors, Barr and Rase trailed a trifle disconsolately. But camp that night was not nearly the sodden misery Fawn expected, because Finch and Indigo scouted out a run-down barn that its owner let to benighted Trace travelers. The roof leaked and the old boards thrummed in the gale, but it beat huddling together under the wagon all hollow.
The clouds broke up into a humid pale heat by the next noon as they came to the edge of the Hardboil Valley, quite as wide as that of the Grace. The shining ribbon of river wound through spring-green woods and fields that
