steamed with the recent rains. As they slithered carefully down the muddy road, Fawn caught her first glimpses of the ferry town, which bore the arresting name of Mutton Hash, and of the ferry itself, which seemed to be the familiar flat barge hauled from shore to shore by a rope-wound capstan. But here, two big boats worked in parallel, one coming while the other was going.
The water was wider than Fawn had imagined, over half a mile, and Mutton Hash the biggest settlement she’d seen for weeks, not a mere village but a lively river town. As they neared she could make out boatbuilders and goods sheds, hotels and liveries, brewers, bakers, smiths, a ropewalk, tanneries, and horse dealers, and she marveled at how comfortably familiar it all seemed to her now. There was also, she discovered as they arrived near the riverbank, a line for the ferry backed up for two blocks. Besides local wagons, riders, and a lot of foot traffic, the entire forty-mule tea caravan had somehow got ahead of them again.
Such a clot seemed to be an expected thing, because the way down to the landing was lined with booths and hawkers selling food, drink, and goods to the bored and waiting travelers. Fawn stood in her stirrups and sniffed inviting smells: meat pies, funnel cakes, beer, honeyed tea.
Sounds, too-someone was playing a fiddle quite as well as Berry did, quick and sweet. The fiddler started an old river song, the music dancing high and low, and Fawn’s heart caught. She kicked Magpie closer.
The fiddler was a lean, tall woman standing on a stump to the side of the road, elbow sawing, her blond hair drawn back in a lank horsetail shining in the sun…
“Berry!” shrieked Fawn in astonishment.
Berry looked up and grinned across the heads of the crowd clustered around her, seized a breath before a repeat to whip her bow through the air in greeting, and continued with her tune. She looked much less surprised than Fawn felt. Hawthorn stood at her feet holding out Bo’s shapeless felt hat. When he craned his neck and spotted Fawn, he plunked the hat down between his sister’s tapping toes and elbowed his way toward her. By the time he arrived, she’d slid from her saddle and was able to give him a heartfelt hug, which he didn’t even shrug off in boy embarrassment. Oh, my! He’s taller than me!
“What are you doing here? ” Fawn demanded.
“Waiting for you, partly. Mostly waiting for Whit to finish fussing with his little pack train.”
What pack train? “Is everyone all right? ”
“Oh, sure. ’Cept my raccoon eloped, halfway up the Gray.” Hawthorn frowned in memory of this defection.
Fawn didn’t think there was any oh sure about it, but she gave up the urge to shake him as Berry finished her tune and cried, “Lunch break! Try Mama Flintridge’s dried peach pies over there, best in the valley!”
She jumped off the stump, stuffed her fiddle in its leather bag, grabbed the hat, and passed through the throng to Fawn, collecting a few more coins on the way. The hugs this time were mutual.
“Berry!”
“Sis! You made it! We figured if we were going to cross paths at all, this would be the place.”
“Where’s Whit and the others? ”
Berry swung an arm toward the river. “He has a day job working the capstan on one ferryboat, and Hod’s on the other. Bo’s keeping an eye on our horses and gear at a place across the river. Farther from the taverns.”
Dag and Barr dismounted and made their way to Berry, rather more easily than Fawn had, in time to hear this. Folks glanced at the tall Lakewakers and edged back, mostly-then stared openmouthed when they exchanged happy hugs with the grinning fiddler.
“How did you all end up here? ” asked Fawn. “I thought you’d taken berths on a keelboat bound for Tripoint.”
“We did, and I do believe upstream keelboat hauling was a shock to Whit-he’d thought he worked hard on a farm. Anyways, our fool boat boss managed to get his hull stove in by a floater just above the mouth of the Hardboil. We made it to shore and worked back to the village there, but it was plain that boat wasn’t going anywhere for some time, not to mention we’d lost half its lading to the wet. Well, we heard there that the ice hadn’t even broke up yet on the upper Grace, but the Hardboil was clear. So we found berths on another keel headed up to Mutton Hash, that being as high as we could get by boat.”
Mutton Hash marked the head of navigation for the Hardboil River. The Trace crossed the Hardboil, not by chance, Fawn guessed, just below some thirty miles of impassable shoals and rapids, the hazard that gave the whole river its name. Legend had it there had once been a bridge and a city upstream at a narrow high point, but both were fallen into the mists of time, buried by the encroaching woods.
Fawn nodded.
“Whit always was divided in his mind between the river and the road,” Berry continued. “This way he gets some of both. I was agreeable, because I figure it’ll cut three or four weeks off the trip home. If we’re to build another flatboat before the fall rise, we’ll need that time.”
Might we get there in time to plant a kitchen garden, too? “Did you get the letter I sent you in Graymouth? ”
“Yep, thanks.”
“You didn’t come all this way just on the chance of meeting us, did you? Because we weren’t sure till the last we’d even be coming home this year.”
“No, but we’ve been keeping a lookout all the same. We knew from asking at the ferry that you two hadn’t passed ahead of us-Dag is memorable all by himself, and when the pair of you are together, folks notice. I won’t say we haven’t been lingerin’ a bit in hope, but I want to start north soon. Before your brother buys any more horses.” She made a face.
The ferry pulled into the landing with shouts and a rumble as the gangplank was laid out. Walkers and wagons heaved up the slope, and the crowd shifted as the new passengers hurried to take their place.
While some of the tea caravan’s younger and less jaded mules were taking exception to their offered boat ride, Hawthorn dashed down to tell Whit about the arrivals.
Whit came thumping up grinning like mad, hugged Fawn, and wrung Dag’s hand. “You made it! Hoped you might! Hey, I bet I could squeeze you on right now.”
“Thanks, but we’re not alone,” said Dag. “We’re traveling with some other folks. Young homesteaders. Theirs is that green wagon up there.”
“Sage is a blacksmith, going to look for work in Tripoint,” Fawn added.
“Even better. Bring them along! I have so much to show you.” Whit glanced back at the filling ferry; a big fellow guarding the gangplank, clearly the ferry boss, was glowering after him. “But I have to go back to work now. Can’t quit in the middle of a day, it wouldn’t be right. I’ll talk to you more when you get aboard, unless you end up on Hod’s boat, and then he’ll tell you all about it. Berry or Hawthorn will take you to our digs, I guess. Where’s Remo? ”
Barr stiffened a little. “He stayed at New Moon.”
Whit blinked. “Oh. Why? ”
“There was this girl,” said Fawn, as the simplest answer. Which had to suffice, as the ferry boss followed up his glower with a bellow. Whit waved and ran back to the boat.
Whit seemed both changed and unchanged. He was definitely broader in the shoulders. He plainly retained his sometimes-alarming enthusiasm for the new; if his ability to stick with a tough job to the end was improved by his marriage, so much the better. As Dag led them all over to introduce Berry and Hawthorn to the company, Fawn decided to save her most important family news for some less crowded moment.
Whit’s ferry slogged all the way across the river and back again before their turn came to clamber aboard. Fawn thought the boat rode alarmingly low in the water when the ferry boss finally slid the gate pole across. Whit and the southern boys seemed to become instant comrades, Whit because he was a friendly cuss, and the others because they’d heard so much about him that it likely felt they already knew one another. Despite their growing up not thirty miles from the Gray, the Hardboil was the largest river some of them had yet seen, and they were agog with it. Under the ferry boss’s amused eye they were permitted a few turns on the four-man capstan.
Dag’s attention was mainly taken keeping Copperhead from picking a fight with all the strange horses jammed up around them. Some of the other travelers eyed the Lakewalkers suspiciously, but the ferrymen evidently saw enough of their sort as to excite no comment, at least not out loud. Well, Sumac drew covert stares, but if any of the men were thinking rude thoughts, the Lakewalkers doubtless kept their groundsenses furled in this crowd, and so could take no offense.
