Dag started forward once more, only to stop again when Whit said, “Dag-does Fawn seem a little peaked to you? Not quite her usual cheerful self? ”
Concerned, Dag turned to face him. “Does she seem so to you? Seeing her every day, I might not notice subtler changes. And of course her ground is so bright and busy right now with its making, it tends to overwhelm everything else. I’d thought she was holding up real well, all things considered, but if you think not, maybe I should…”
“Huh? ” said Whit. “Making? ”
“Didn’t she tell you yet? ”
“Tell me what? ”
Well… Dag supposed he had an equal right to this announcement.
“We’re expecting a child”-would it be coaxing lumps from fate to say our first child?-“in the early winter. Fawn says she’s hoping it’ll be around my birthday, though I think that might be a bit early.”
Whit stepped back a pace, eyes and mouth both wide, before he laughed in astonishment. “Hey! I’ll be an uncle! And Berry will be an aunt! How about that? Oh, I can’t wait to tell them at home.” His black brows drew in. “Wait a minute. What of all those tricks you were telling me about, before Berry and I got married, for delaying things? ”
Dag hoped Whit couldn’t see the heat in his cheeks in this dimness.
“Well. Nobody said they were perfect tricks. Accidents happen even to Lakewalkers, you know.”
“I guess!”
“I was, um… distracted.”
Whit, blight him, sniggered. Dag ignored him with what dignity he could muster and trod off once more, Whit tagging after.
“Well, if she’s increasing, that accounts for it,” said Whit, sounding satisfied to have his mystery solved. “Short-tempered, too, I bet, heh.”
“Not noticeably,” Dag growled.
They walked on in silence for a few moments after that.
An accident? Or accidentally on purpose? Dag hoped his own mind wasn’t playing tricks on him to that extent. What threat had New Moon Cutoff offered him, after all, to make him want to claim his wife so irrevocably at just that moment? A threat of ease? He had to admit, the offer of a life like Arkady’s gentle, protected usefulness was a real temptation, as much for the usefulness as for the protection. But not there, not in the south.
Dag counted time in his head. All those weeks and miles gone by already, and the tiny fire within Fawn’s womb had not faded or faltered, but had clung with dogged, Spark-like determination. Maybe it’ll be a girl, he allowed himself to think. Strong like her mama. Maybe it was finally safe to let himself start thinking of that new spark as a real person, original and astonishing. Maybe. Oh, my heart. It almost hurt to have it stretched so far beyond its former-safe, secret, shriveled-boundaries.
Yet by whatever chance they had arrived, he was not sorry to be on this road.
–-
Five days later, Dag was rethinking that belief.
It hadn’t been wrong, merely much too simpleminded. This was nothing like the northward leg he’d pictured back when he and Fawn had left Hickory Lake-a vision that actually took him some effort to recall-just the two of them, a lingering spring, and plenty of bedroll time together. Yet the whole point of this journey had been to put fresh pictures in their heads, because the old ones hadn’t seemed up to the new tasks they faced. He could hardly complain because his scheme was working to excess.
He turned in his saddle to look back over the cavalcade. Sixteen people and twenty-five animals made nearly a full-size patrol, without a patrol’s training. He wasn’t quite sure how he’d been elected patrol leader. Still, his old system of giving as few orders as possible, because every time you did people would come to expect them, and then badger for them, and then grow too stiff to move without them, seemed to apply here as well.
This disparate clump of folks was blending better than he’d hoped.
The river crew was used to frequent dealings with strangers, which helped ease the less traveled Alligator Hat boys. Sumac accepted the Bluefields as her esteemed uncle’s tent-kin with barely a bump, and Rase wouldn’t dare say boo to her, so that settled him. Arkady kept his own counsel as usual, but Dag knew he was taking it all in.
Berry, Calla, and Fawn had swiftly formed a sisterhood, and it was only now, after watching them pass tasks smoothly from hand to hand, helping one another and laughing together over various female jokes, that Dag realized how painfully isolated Fawn had been at New Moon Cutoff. The medicine tent had tolerated her for Dag’s sake, but not one Lakewalker woman there had truly taken her up to teach her the ways of their inner world. Which led him to a very unexpected contemplation of Sumac as odd woman out in this company, neither farmer woman nor patroller man. Maybe that was why she rode so often beside odd-man Arkady.
But Fawn’s eyes, wide with wonder as the company climbed day by day up into the true mountains, made his every effort worth it. The hillsides tilted up higher and steeper until, she noted with a flatlander’s alarm, the sky had shrunk by half, as if stolen away. Tiny rivulets trickled over cliffs to fall like spun thread into secret crevices lined with pink splashes of mountain laurel. Fern fiddleheads unfurled into delicate fronds around dark and abundant springs. Green, ankle-high umbrella apples sheltered spring beauties and bloodroot, and the white and pink trillium after which Fawn’s mother had been named cascaded in waves down the slopes, all familiar northern wildflowers that made her smile in recognition.
“I finally see why you wouldn’t let us call those hills around Glassforge mountains,” she told Dag.
“There are mountains up in northeast Seagate even bigger than these,” Dag said. “So tall it’s winter on top all year round, and the snow and ice never melt off.”
“You’re pulling my leg!” said Finch.
“Nope. Seen it with my own eyes,” said Dag. “Floating up all white against the blue summer sky, the peaks and ridges like something out of a dream.”
“I wonder if you could make a trade in that ice,” said Whit thoughtfully.
“Pack it down in the summer and sell it to folks.”
“It would be a lot of work, climbing a mountain that high,” said Fawn in doubt. “And ice is heavy. Maybe it could be slid down somehow…”
“Actually,” said Dag, “folks in those parts cut ice from their ponds in the winter and store it in cellars packed in straw. It lasts longer than you’d think.”
“That sounds a bit more practical,” said Fawn.
“Huh,” said Whit. “The things you learn travelin’. I might try that at home.”
Once he’d carefully described what they would be up against, Dag let the farmer boys sort themselves out to tackle the first big mountain pass. That dawn, the four pack animals were unloaded and added to the wagon traces, and the wagon’s cargo reduced. Bo was left at the foot of the pass to guard their gear, because he really wasn’t quite as recovered from the belly stab of last fall as he made out, and Hod set to guard Bo. The plan was to make it to the top by midday and down as far as the first good stopping point, then send some of the boys and the unloaded pack animals back to Bo’s camp for the night. The other half of the party would rest up till they arrived next day, then continue the almost equally painstaking descent, using rocks and logs to help brake the wagon’s wheels and prevent a disastrous runaway. After that would be another four days of relatively easy travel up another long, running valley before they had to do the drill again.
Everything went according to plan till they were halfway up the hill at midmorning, and came upon another wagon blocking the road.
Dag, flanked by Indigo, rode around it to encounter a bizarre sight.
The team hitched to it consisted of three mules and a skinny horse, blowing and marbled with wet and dried white sweat; one of the mules, a wheeler, was down on its knees, tangled in the traces. A woman knelt next to it, weeping, a burning brand in her hand.
A rough, weak voice issued from the depths of the wagon’s raised canvas cover: “Light its fool tail on fire! That’ll get it up!”
“Missus, what are you doing to that poor mule? ” cried Indigo in outrage.
She turned up a red, tear-streaked face, crisscrossed by brown hair falling from its topknot in messy strands. She might have been any age between an exhausted twenty and an equally exhausted thirty, her shirt sweat-
