like, but they’ve no need to hide themselves now. They should be all right.”
Tavia said eagerly, “Neeta recovered her horse, so she decided she’d ride north and try to find the others, wherever they’d gone after Calla and Indigo got away, and maybe make contact with the local patrollers, get us more help.”
All as good and sensible as it could be, under the difficult circumstances, but where was Fawn? Plainly, no one here knew.
Dag led the party around to their near-cave under the ledge. Arkady knelt down by Pakko, opening his ground to the man’s injury in that keen daunting way of his. “Interesting,” he murmured.
Dag, familiar by now with that particular tone of voice, sincerely hoped his sprained ankle would qualify as boring. He made introductions, which he hoped the glazed-eyed Pakko understood, and went on, “I didn’t think it was good for the break to sit untreated this long, with his muscles in spasms around it like that, but while I’d have been willing to go in after the bone alignment, I wasn’t too sure of those disrupted nerve cords.”
“Right on all counts,” said Arkady. He sat back on his heels and frowned at Dag. “You should be a patient right now, not an assistant, but need drives all. His skin is unbroken, bar some abrasion, and I’d like to keep it that way. That means we do it all by groundsetting techniques. I want you to do the heavy work, go in and carefully realign the two vertebrae, and place ground reinforcements across the fracture lines. Are you ready? ”
Now? Dag’s relief having arrived, now he wanted to go search for his wife, blight it! And child. Yet Fawn wasn’t out there alone, he reminded himself. She’d had her kin with her… his thought snaked on, when last seen. Dag eyed the helpless, hurting Pakko, and controlled his frenzy of impatience. Fawn’s phrase, Soonest begun, soonest done, drifted through his head. “Just a moment.” Carefully, he sat on Pakko’s other side, laid his bad leg out, undid his arm harness, and set it aside.
While Dag was pulling body, mind, and ground together, Arkady called, “Tavia, Calla, Indigo, set up camp here. We won’t be moving this patient tonight. It wants six fit fellows, and we’re going to need to fashion a rigid board carrier to tie him to, first.”
Pakko swallowed, and said, “If I’m not going to walk again, sir”- he did not say aloud, but Dag understood, If I’m just going to be lying in a bedroll pissing myself-“I’d rather you found my knife.”
Arkady gave him an enigmatic look. “You’ll have time to make that choice later. Ready, Dag? ”
Arkady could scout the lay of his land and choose his tactics as swiftly as Dag, and for the same reason: forty years of experience. Despite his weariness, Dag found himself relaxing into that trusted leadership.
He stretched his fingers, real and ghostly; sight and sound dropped away as he sank into the shared hinterland of flowing ground.
It was not healing so much as making ready to heal. Pain moved with hot red violence. Muscles cried. The sculpted bones themselves were cool, solid, reassuring, yet like strange lace down and in, alive with blood both flowing and blocked, bruised and clotted. Arkady handled the much more delicate nerves, like ropes and whips and threads of fire, down and in, down and in…
“Hold up,” Dag murmured, following with a ground-touch; Arkady gasped and broke out of his beginning ground lock. Dag couldn’t have fallen into a lock right now if all their lives had depended on it; his heart was too outwardly drawn, wild to regain the world and all it held. It made him a good anchor, he supposed. What Arkady was doing was complicated, a fiendishly difficult task accomplished with as much grace as any dance, and a strange sort of pleasure to observe just in its own right, apart from any consequences.
“Thanks,” muttered Arkady. “Good job. You can pull out now…”
Dag inhaled, blinked, sat up as their mountainside refuge rushed back into his senses. How much time had gone by? The sun seemed notably lower.
“He passed out a while back,” reported Calla, wiping Pakko’s clammy face with a damp cloth.
“I’m not surprised,” said Dag, and rolled away, pale and shaking.
That was good! he thought with elation. Gods, he liked this work. Magery at full stretch. Allowable magery. He crawled to prop his shoulders up against the cool rock wall of the overhang, and let other people do everything else for a few minutes. Tavia brought him water, and a dried strip of ruddy New Moon plunkin.
Surely this discharged his last obligation to fate; as he was Pakko’s good luck, perhaps someone else would be Fawn’s, passing the debt around. Now it was Dag’s turn to pursue his own ends. And no one had better get in his way.
Just as soon as I can stand up.
“Will Pakko walk again? ” asked Tavia diffidently.
Dag shook his head. “Too early to say. It’ll be a week before the swelling goes down enough to tell the permanent damage. But he’ll live to see his wife again.”
When Arkady, at length, rolled back and propped his own shoulders, looking much like a wet rag, Dag said, “I need to go look for Fawn.”
“Tomorrow,” said Arkady. “I promise we’ll get you down off this mountain first turn.”
“I can get myself down.”
Arkady made a rude noise. “How, fall? I grant you it would be quick.”
Dag touched his left arm. “Something’s not right.”
Arkady’s gaze flicked, quick and keen; he frowned, but did not argue that particular point. It disturbed Dag that he did not. “I suppose I can’t stop you, short of tying you up.”
“That wouldn’t stop me, either.”
“Absent gods, Dag, if you’ve half the sense of a plunkin, you’ll wait for help.”
I am the help. Dag frowned.
“And falling downhill or not, it would be dark by the time you could get to the wagons,” Arkady added. “I suppose that’s the one known meeting place, at this point. Otherwise you’ll have this whole valley to search.”
“Mm,” said Dag trying to think it through. Everyone here was just as exhausted and short of sleep as he was. Calla was also missing a spouse. Dag would have quashed any half-crippled patroller of his who suggested a jaunt so plunkin-brained. Still… he touched his marriage cord again, rubbing it through the rips in his shirt, but it gave him no further enlightenment. Changed, yes, but what did that mean?
Perhaps his and Fawn’s questionable cord weaving was simply running down naturally.
No. This is wrong.
Dag found an unexpected ally in Owlet, who had awakened during the groundsetting session. Flustered by the influx of strangers, the child began crying again for his mama. Dag ruthlessly let him. Tavia quickly handed him off to Calla, who had no better luck calming him. Arkady, returning from washing up in the streamlet, winced at the noise.
“Best to get this child back to his family,” Dag observed over the ruckus. “Before he cries himself sick or takes a tumble down the hill. There’s no need to keep him up here in the cold another night.”
“Who are you volunteering? ” said Tavia. “You couldn’t carry him!”
“I could,” said Indigo unexpectedly. “Go with Dag and help look for the Basswoods.” A glance exchanged with Calla added, And Sage and Finch and Ash.
“Huh.” Tavia rubbed a hand over her weary face. “I guess Calla and me between us would be enough help out up here tonight. I mean, with Arkady and all.”
Calla added, bouncing the child to no other effect than to give the wails a waver, “His parents have to be crazy with worry and grief right now. Cruel to leave them that way any longer than needed.”
“Where would you look? ” said Arkady, weakening under the onslaught.
“There’s been a tail of smoke coming up from the woods near the Trace all day, ’bout eight, ten miles north, looks like,” said Dag. “I’ve been checking it. Seems like a campfire, and on the route Calla and Indigo said our folks took. If not our people, it’s some people, who might have seen them.”
“And you plan to walk two miles down this hill, cross a river, walk another mile to the road and more miles down it, with a sprained ankle, before dark? ” inquired Arkady. “Lugging this little screamer? You’re not heroic, Dag, you’re mad.”
Getting there. For the tenth time today, Dag hobbled to the drop-off and cast his groundsense out to its farthest, thinnest reach.
For the first time today, he received a response: far below, a long, plaintive whinny echoed up the ravine- slashed slopes.
Dag grinned. “Who said anything about walking? Seems my ride’s turned up. If Indigo can get me down this
