“Well, I’m thinking… one of us needs both hands free in case of trouble, and that’s already not me.” He hesitated. “We’re not going to be hunting this malice, but there’s no doubt it’ll be hunting us. If it catches us”-he drew breath-“just so you know, I have my bonded knife around my neck.”
She stared at his throat, at her hands.
“If the job has to be done, it’ll be at the last moment, because, well, because. But that means you won’t be able to hesitate. Can you do the needful? ”
“I… don’t know,” she answered honestly.
He nodded. “You’ll find your way if you have to.” He made his voice confident, unwavering, bland. Such situations had come up before, of course, though more common in legend than fact. For the first time he wondered if any of those prior ill-fated heroes had been as desperately unwilling to share as he was right now. Likely. A year ago, this would have been easy, his barren future scant grief to give up. Things seemed to be coming at him out of their time.
Fatherhood, for one. He wanted to watch over his late-come little girl as a live papa, not as a dead legend. Not even as a living absence, as his own father had been. I want to see how her tale comes out… The sudden thought of her at the mercy of strangers, as Owlet now was at his, made his heart go hollow.
No need to burden Tavia with these reflections, no, nor any fraught last words, either. “The malice,” he said, “will give you all the gumption you need. Trust me on this.”
She nodded unhappily.
–-
It was upwards of an hour before Sumac dragged back. Whit almost shot her.
Fawn looked up from the far side of the little fire where she was attempting to help Calla attempt to help Arkady with Barr. As the ominous shape loomed out of the dark and the dual gleam could be made out as Sumac’s eyes, Whit lowered his quivering crossbow. “Give some warning, why don’t you? ” he gasped.
“I bumped grounds with Neeta,” Sumac said, voice flat. Neeta was off in the woods somewhere, trying to guard their whole perimeter by herself. Sumac’s hair was in disarray, her face branch-whipped and strained. She added tightly, “You can see that blighted fire for a hundred paces through the trees. And smell it. Put it out.”
“Not yet,” said Arkady in a blurry voice, from deep in his trance.
“Need the boiled water…” Sumac looked around, taking in the scene in some dismay, Fawn thought.
Barr lay on a blanket, right boot off and trouser leg cut away, his lower leg held across a towel on Arkady’s lap. Arkady’s hands hovered over the bloody mess. The hideous pink bone ends that had been sticking out through his burst skin earlier had been pushed beneath it once more, mating up under Arkady’s most powerful groundsetting. The maker had seemed unshaken by the bone break-the worst Fawn had ever seen or imagined- but had complained bitterly, back when he’d still been able to speak, about all the dirt he had to work in. Barr’s face was the color of suet, and he looked as if he wished he could pass out again, as he had a couple of times so far. Remo gripped his white-knuckled hand and wiped his sweating forehead with a wet cloth.
The rest of the group was scattered back under the trees, taking care of the animals and one another. When the last of the mud-bats had vanished over the eastern ridge, the shaken company had pushed forward a quarter mile into deeper woods, then turned off the road at a shallow stream and struggled up it as far as they could drag the wagons.
The boys had pushed the two wagons as deeply under the cover of some spreading oak trees as they could be squeezed; Fawn doubted it was enough.
Sumac ran an aggravated hand through her escaping hair. “If you… oh, blight. Keep the fire. With all these unveiled farmer grounds and this herd of animals, nothing with groundsense could miss you, dark, trees, or no. Blight, have a party and dance.”
“I’ll pass,” said Barr weakly from his blanket.
It might almost have been a joke; the wheezy bark it won from Sumac might almost have been a laugh. The laugh leached away as she met Fawn’s anxious eyes.
“I couldn’t catch them-couldn’t get near them,” she said. “Other side of the river, up the ridge, those rocks rise up in ten- and twentyfoot blocks. No way for miles either side to get a horse up. Fawn, I’m sorry.”
Barr squeezed his eyes shut.
Mutely, Fawn held out her left wrist, wrapped in its wedding cord.
Sumac’s lips parted; she strode around the fire and gripped it. “Ye gods, he’s still alive!”
“Yes. Remo and Arkady said. We keep checking.”
“His patrol always claimed Dag was a blighted cat, but this…! How can he-where can they have-”
A jerky wail interrupted her as Vio ran out of the dark. “My baby! Did you find Owlet? ”
Judging from the spasm of her hand, Sumac barely kept herself from flinching away. She dropped Fawn’s wrist and turned to the desperate woman. “No. I lost them over the ridge. Couldn’t follow.”
“How can you have lost them! You’re a Lakewalker, you’re supposed to be magic!”
Sumac stiffened. “I can’t blighted fly!”
Fawn pushed herself up to stand between the pair, hitching up the torn fabric of her shirt. Left-handed, because her right side wasn’t working too good. With Arkady drawn deep into the urgency of the bone break, Fawn had to wait for her turn, so Berry had done her best to clean out the deep gouges fore and aft in her shoulder, wrapping them in a strip of torn cloth. It would hold for the moment. Fawn wasn’t about to complain of the throbbing pain with Barr down there gritting his teeth on much worse.
“We think Dag’s still alive,” Fawn said. “If he is, he’ll go after the child if he can.” If he hadn’t been dropped on those rocks like Barr, and left lying up there in some broken agony.
“How do you know? ” Vio demanded.
“Because… because he’s Dag.”
Vio’s mouth thinned. “Can’t we send out searchers? ”
“Are you mad? ” said Remo.
“I’ll go by myself, if none of you big men and Lakewalkers will!”
Grouse, coming up behind her, said, “Don’t be a fool, Vio.”
The girl Plum hovered-skinny, hollow-eyed, dark hair straggly.
Her distraught mama, earlier, had screamed at her for not helping hang on to her baby brother; her frantic papa had hit her for crying.
She was pretty quiet now, creeping to cling once more to her mama’s skirts, because no matter how bad it got, where else did a five-yearold have to go?
Vio gave her husband a hard look. “I don’t see anybody else volunteering, now, do I? ”
Fawn put in more quietly, “We all lost folks. Neeta her partner, Sumac her uncle, me, well. And if Barr gets to keep his leg it’ll be a miracle.”
A disagreeing grunt from Arkady. All in a day’s work for him, was this?
“If this is a contest, I don’t think much of the prizes,” Fawn finished, ignoring that last. “What we need is to work together.”
Vio stared venomously at her. “You can’t know what it’s like to lose a child.”
On the list of pointless things to say to the woman, Yes, I do seemed pretty high up. So Fawn said nothing, and was shortly glad of it when Vio’s hard voice broke. “Owlet’s so little.”
Sumac started to rub, then winced and dabbed, at her scratched face. “There’s not a lot of question in my mind Dag would have wanted me to turn back and look after you all.” Her glance at Fawn added, Especially you.
In an effort to be practical, because someone needed to, Fawn put in, “We found another dead mule along the road. I don’t know if you had time to notice, but didn’t neither of those mules have their harness taken off. If they’d died natural, those tea caravan boys wouldn’t have left their loads on ’em, nor the hides either, likely. That says to me they must have been attacked and forced away or run off. But we haven’t spotted any human bodies yet.”
Sumac’s brow furrowed. “Sounds like trouble to the north, all right. Besides no traffic coming down, I ’specially don’t like that we haven’t even met anyone running away our way.”
“Except for that first malice,” Fawn pointed out.
“There was that.” Sumac grimaced. “Going forward seems a bad idea. Going back is no better. We’d be open targets in that burned-over country. Staying here’s no good, either. We hit that mud-bat pack hard. No question they’ll be back looking for more. But I know the worst would be to scatter into the woods with no blighted
