a wince. Remo whispered, Ow. And smoothly, like a spreading stain, the shimmering ground shield spread out through Whit’s skin all over his body. Top to toe. Yes.
“Well, now what? ” asked Whit, fingering the walnut.
“Didn’t you feel that? ” asked Sumac.
“Not especially.” Whit looked up and blinked. “What? Are we done already? ”
“Yep.” Dag eased upright and stretched and clenched his fingers, grimacing as the tension unwound in his back. Whit leaped up and capered around the fire, demanding that Barr and Remo describe what they saw with their groundsenses.
Grouse Basswood, apparently still waiting for the human-sacrificeand- cannibalism part to start, blinked and said in a disappointed voice, “Is that it? He didn’t do nothing!”
“Now do Berry!” said Whit in a burst of enthusiasm. “And Hawthorn.”
Hawthorn crowed assent; Bo thumped him on the side of the head.
Hod hovered, grinning hesitantly. “And me? ”
Berry clutched her hair and laughed uneasily. “I’ll be snatched bald!”
Arkady eyed Dag’s slump on the log, and said, “May I try the next one? ”
Dag’s head jerked up, and he squinted in surprise; Arkady cast him a nod. Sumac’s encouraging grip on Arkady’s shoulder pushed him forward. Barr gave Dag a hand up; Dag staggered and stood a moment with his hands on his knees till his light-headedness passed.
Arkady swallowed, taking Dag’s place on the log. Fawn repeated the operation on Berry’s hair with her sewing scissors and a lot of female consultation about just where to cut to best conceal the growing back.
“You Lakewalkers have to give me some of your ground reinforcements later on these here finger cuts,” Berry said sternly as she seated herself with the hair strands laid out in front of her, “so’s I can play my fiddle.”
At the chorus of volunteers, she nodded in satisfaction, and began.
Berry’s bloodstained hair braiding was considerably neater than Whit’s, and swifter.
Arkady caught up her ground on his second try-Dag was impressed- and wound it into his involution with seeming ease. Arkady did complex and delicate involutions in his work from time to time; any sharing-knife maker or senior medicine maker, Dag thought, ought to be nearly as practiced and adept. His hopes rose. If more makers than Dag and the admittedly extraordinary Arkady could be taught this technique, it became far more than a stunt. It might even be a solution. Although even Arkady gasped when he let his shaped involution go, his face draining;
Sumac caught his arm and held him upright till his breathing steadied.
“Best stop for tonight,” said Dag. “That gives us three different samples to study.” The groundwork on each was slightly different, and Dag wasn’t sure which would be best. When he had perfected the skill, he decided, he would go back and redo Fawn’s. Although he didn’t think her shield overbuilt; if anything, he wanted to make it twice as strong, for her and for the child-he rather thought by now it was going to be their daughter, though the shield made it hard to be sure-growing so swiftly within her.
“That didn’t look so bad,” said Vio, watching Berry.
“This is just what they let us see,” Grouse grumbled.
Berry and Barr then flummoxed each other when he attempted a ground reinforcement on her pricked fingers and had it slide off. Arkady was called over to consult.
“Well, the shield repels groundwork, all right,” said Arkady, stroking Berry’s hand and frowning. “It doesn’t seem to care if the intent of the groundwork is good or not. You can break the shield by removing the necklace, but I’d rather you didn’t, just yet.”
Berry studied his slightly haggard face and nodded understanding.
“My word, yes, it would be like sinking the boat you’d just launched. I’ll just wash my fingers good and tie strips on them for the night. They’re only little cuts. They’ll be fine in the morning.”
Dag caught Arkady’s glance. “See why it won’t be finished till I figure out how to make the shield something the farmer can take on and off?”
“Something to think about, to be sure.” Arkady’s shoulders were as bowed with fatigue as after emergency medicine work, but his coppery eyes gleamed with excitement.
“What I don’t understand,” said Grouse, “is why you Lakewalkers would want to do something that stops you from doing things.”
“Really, this seems pointless,” murmured Neeta.
“It’s not Lakewalkers I want to protect farmers from,” said Dag-not entirely, leastways-“though I expect that might have some interestin’ consequences. It’s malices. Blight bogles.”
Grouse’s face screwed up. Another farmer who didn’t quite believe in a menace he’d never seen and barely heard of-or he wouldn’t be so anxious to move north, Dag reckoned. Vio looked more wary.
The show over, the company broke up to seek their respective bedrolls.
As the night breeze sighed in the trees, Dag hugged Fawn close.
She cuddled in tight under their blankets and said, “That was well done, Dag.”
“Well started, maybe. It all seems a long way from done to me.”
“Mm,” she said. “But stop and think about how far you’ve come since last year this time.”
He hardly needed to sense her clouded ground to feel her little spurt of memory, a ripple of tension across her back under his only hand.
“Hm? ”
“How far we’ve both come,” she went on more quietly. “Last year this time… I’d already made my big stupid mistake, and was just working up to running away from home in a panic. Well, not panic, exactly. Desperation, maybe.”
He let his fingers seek those back muscles, rubbing the remembered strain out of them. No more desperation for you, Spark. Not if I can help it.
“Me… let me think. Out walking my thousandth routine patrol, I suppose, before Chato’s courier called us down to Glassforge. I’d spent too many years just about one bad night’s sleep away from tossing it in and sharing, and was getting mighty tired of that state of mind. I do remember that.”
Her slim little fingers chased bad memories out of his muscles in turn. “Could you have imagined us, here, now? Could you have pictured doing such a making as you did tonight? ”
“Gods. No. Nor any other making. Not in my wildest dreams. My dreams mostly not being good dreams, see.”
“There you go, then.” Her lips pressed a warm circle on his collarbone, then curved up. “I s’pose the advantage of being a gloomy cuss is that all your surprises are good ones.”
He snickered. “Point, Spark.”
–-
The following afternoon brought them to the foot of the next pass, where they made an early stop to sort out the most efficient plans for getting the wagons up it. With a dawn start, Dag hoped the whole company could make it to the bottom of the far side by tomorrow night.
That vale, rugged and almost as unpeopled as the Barrens, was the last where this land humped up like a giant’s blanket folds; the trail at its head would lead over and down into the settled country approaching the Grace Valley. Dag felt a funny little flutter in his belly at that thought.
Spark and I and our youngin’ are coming home. It would be a home to make, carved new out of unknown territory, even though their sort of homesteading was unlikely to involve chopping trees and pulling stumps.
On his bedtime perimeter patrol that night, Dag became aware he was being shadowed by Neeta. Maybe he needed to vary his habits; he was getting too easy to ambush. He reluctantly slowed his steps and let her come up to him, not anxious to reopen the argument about his direction of travel.
“Nice night,” she remarked.
“Ayup.” It was star-spangled, the cool darkness drenched with the green scents of spring, alive with bug and frog songs.
“You know…”-she touched his sleeve, her smile turning warm-“you’d be welcome in my bedroll.”
What, had she been inspired by Sumac’s ploy? Did she mean to seduce him into turning south? What was this, with all these lovely young women flinging themselves at his head this season? And where were they all when I was twenty-two, and could have done something about it? The depressing answer, Not born yet, presented itself
