joined with Bo’s mumble, and Fawn looked up from the circle of Dag’s arms to find their tender reunion had an audience, crowding up around them: Bo and Hawthorn and Hod, Ash and Finch and Sage, unfamiliar Trace travelers-no, wait, she thought she recognized some of the tea caravan muleteers, nice fellows, if a bit rough around the edges.
Whit shouldered through the mob, crying, “Buried her? Buried her!
What’d you want to go and do a stupid thing like that for?” He knelt and pulled her away from Dag long enough to give her a hard and quite unprecedented brotherly hug. Dag tolerated this briefly, with a weird benign smile, then drew her back.
“Whit,” said Fawn in suspicion, “did you stick that fishin’ worm in my hair? You’d reckon a fellow your age would’ve outgrown such things!”
A muleteer’s voice rose in a quaver. “He raised her! That Lakewalker sorcerer raised her up from the grave!”
“Don’t think about it,” muttered Dag into her now worm-free hair.
“Don’t think about it.” As if to protect her from nightmare visions- hers, or his?
Another muleteer, one of the young ones-what was his name?
Spruce, that was it-went to one knee on their other side, and held out a hand quivering in entreaty. “Mister, Mister Lakewalker Bluefield, sir… would you raise my brother too? He’s younger’n me, it was his first trip, and I surely do dread taking the word of this back to our mama… oh, please!”
Dag stared back in bewilderment, his face as blank as if someone had hit him over the head with a shovel. Only Fawn felt his flinch as some realization slotted in. “Oh. No, you don’t understand. Absent gods. No one is that good a medicine maker. Fawn was never dead in the first place. You blighted fools buried her alive.” His arms trembled, tightened.
“I can’t help your brother. I’m sorry.”
Fawn began to piece it together. She supposed she ought to be horrified, but really, her outrage echoed Whit’s. “You buried me and didn’t even wait for Dag? Bo!”
“We thought for sure he was a goner, too,” Bo said in shaky apology.
“You could tell by my marriage cord he wasn’t! We told you that before!”
“Mebbe one o’ those other Lakewalkers could’ve, but we didn’t have none of them. Nobody thought to ask that girl who rode by, Neeta, she was in such a hurry ’bout that hurt patroller stuck up on the hill.”
Dag gave Bo a sharp glance, but he was distracted by the muleteer pulling on the remains of his sleeve.
“Please, sir, he weren’t but twenty years old, and dead without a mark on him. Just like her…” The muleteer nodded eagerly at Fawn.
Dismay, pity, and horror chased one another across Dag’s face.
“And my friend Bootjack…? ” said another muleteer, joining the first down on one knee. Fawn and Dag were suddenly surrounded by a mob of supplicating men. One tried to reach out to touch her, but his hand fell back, daunted by Dag’s renewed clutch and glare.
“You don’t understand,” Dag repeated, and under his breath: “Oh gods, I’ll have to talk.”
Beleaguered, Dag began a halting explanation of ground, malices, the walnut shields, and his hopes for supplying the defense to more farmers than just his Bluefield tent-kin. Someone gathered up the discarded necklaces and placed them in a pile at his knee; at Fawn’s urging, they were passed around the crowd so that the men might grasp with their hands what they did not quite take in through their ears. Some looked very interested, though the close friends and kin of the dead muleteers plainly wanted a different answer, and kept trying to get it through amending their questions. Bo and Whit and the Alligator Hat boys all testified to the parts they’d seen, which seemed to help; between that and Dag’s obvious exhaustion, the press around them eased from dangerous desperation to mere disappointment. One or two stared at Fawn in a lingering alarm that seemed disproportionate to her small, rumpled self.
Her small, rumpled, filthy, triumphant self. She and Whit and Berry deserved the bow-down of all bow-downs, Fawn thought. So when the argument about walnut shields and raising the dead ran down at last, she clambered up, eager to show Dag the remains of their malice.
The cool spring night spun crookedly around her head as she straightened; she groped for Dag’s arm, which he wrapped around her again, dropping his stick to do so. Only then did she discover what Dag had done to his ankle. His bare right foot was twice its normal size, colored a streaked deep purple that would have looked fine on a petunia but was very wrong for human skin. She led him in a mutual stagger over to show off the decaying traces of the wings-Dag made sure to warn everyone not to touch the poisonous blight of the malice’s remains, and no souvenir taking, either. He plainly didn’t even want to camp so close to it, but the deepening dark and everyone’s utter exhaustion looked to keep them all planted in this clearing till morning.
Everyone in Sumac’s party had carried light bedrolls and food with them, for the failed flight to Laurel Gap, and most folks had hung on to them despite their forced malice march. While Dag looked after his horse with the help of Sage, being careful not to let Fawn out of his sight, she nibbled a piece of hardtack till her stomach settled, then was able to get down a couple of strips of dried plunkin. The meal made her cold shakiness pass off. She was reminded of the very first time she had met Dag, with his firm belief in grub as a cure for shock, and smiled a little.
Her bedroll had contained a wedge of soap, and despite the hour she wanted a bath above all things. They borrowed a lantern from one of the muleteers and made their way across the road and around a crook in the creek to a pool of sorts. It was too chilly for lingering; they stripped down and splashed quick, although Fawn soaped up and rinsed her hair twice, holding her breath and shaking her head underwater, to be sure.
She fussed over Dag’s ankle, not to mention his impressive new collection of gouges and bruises, and he fussed over her shoulder. They could do no more with their filthy clothes than whack them against a tree trunk and shake them out before skinning damply back into them.
It would be better when they got back to the wagons and their gear.
Meanwhile, this… helped.
It wasn’t till they were lying down together between two thin blankets on the grass that her mind began to turn over the events of the past day, imagining other, grimmer outcomes. Then she cried, muffled in Dag’s shoulder. Mostly, he just held her, but then, he’d hardly let her out of his arms since… since she’d… been dug up out of her grave.
Which seemed horror enough, till she dwelled on not being dug up. To have come all this way, and survived so much, only to be killed on the last leg, not by bandits or mud-men or malices, but just by an ignorant misunderstanding…
“Shh,” he murmured into her hair, when her shudders renewed.
She swallowed to control her sniffling-was she crying too much?-and managed, “Is the baby all right after all that, can you tell? ”
Under her hands she could feel the familiar stillness of his concentration as he went deep with his groundsense. “Yes, seems to be,” he said, coming back up and blinking at her, eyes a mere gleam in the firelight and shadows. “Far as I can tell, leastways. She’s no bigger than your little finger yet, you know. But I’ll have Arkady check when we meet up again, for luck.”
Fawn melted with relief. But-“She? You sure, now?”
“Yep,” he said, and if his voice was tinged with a faint, smug glee, well, that was all right by her. As she shivered again, he said blandly, “We’ll name her Mari.”
His gentle teasing was a deliberate distraction from her grave thoughts, and she was grateful for it. “Hey, shouldn’t you ask me about that? ” She cogitated. “What about Nattie? ”
“Dirla’s a nice name for a smart strong girl. Or Sumac.”
“Too confusing, if Sumac’s going to be around with Arkady. Maybe for later.”
“Later,” he murmured. “Ah. I like later.”
“No baby animals, that’s for sure. I do sometimes wonder what my parents were thinking.” They’d certainly never pictured her as a grownup woman-then or later. “Can you imagine a grandmother still named Fawn?”
“With great delight.”
She snickered, and poked him fondly. “Just don’t you ever start saying, Yes, Deer.”
She could feel his smile in her curls, and finally grew warm enough to stop shivering. She wondered when a thin bedroll on plain grass had started to seem such unutterable luxury. As long as Dag is in it with me, and we’re
