I’ve figured out, is a village-one street wide and two thousand miles long.
It’s been a great place for you to tell your tale. Because river folks get around to gossip. And swap yarns like they were barter. And sometimes, change each other’s minds even when you aren’t looking on.”
Dag shook his head. “The absent gods may know what kind of path I blazed down the Grace Valley. I sure don’t. Did I light a fire, or was it all a damp sputter and right back to the gloom?”
“Why are all or nothing the only two choices, here?” Fawn asked tartly. “What I think is-”
Dag looked down, brows rising at the resolve in her voice.
“What I think is, you’re trying to carry a lazy man’s load. Inside your head, you’re trying to lift the whole world all by yourself, in one trip.
No wonder you’re exhausted. You’ve got to start smaller.”
“Smaller! How much smaller can I get?” Dag motioned down at the riverbank, by which Fawn guessed he meant to indicate their modest flatboat. A rhetorical reply in any case, so she paid no heed to it.
“Your own ground. I know it’s true because you told me so yourself, and you never lie to me: the first thing a maker has to make is himself. But nobody ever said he had to do it by himself.”
“Do you have a point, Spark?”
She ignored his stung tone and answered straight out. “Yes. It’s true for cooking or sewing or boatbuilding or harness making or crafting arrows-so I don’t guess it’s false for groundwork. Before you tackle any new job, first you have to get your own tools in order, clean and sharpened and tidy and laid out ready to hand. The main tool for groundwork is your own ground. And yours, from everything everyone has ever told me about such things, has got to be in the most awful mess right about now.
“What I think you need is another maker. Not a farmer girl, much as she loves you, and not just a couple of earnest patroller boys, as much as they want to help, because they don’t know beans about that trail, either, but instead someone like Hoharie or Dar.” Fawn took a breath, shaken by a moment of panic when she realized that Dag, unlike any member of her family ever, was actually listening to her. The notion that a man so strong might actually change or do something differently on the basis of something she’d blathered was alarming. Back when she’d longed in vain for any sign that she was heard, had she ever imagined also accepting responsibility for the results? Well, they’re in my lap now. She gulped.
“So… so I’ve been asking around. Every visiting Lakewalker I could get to talk to me up in the day market, I asked about the best medicine makers in these parts. They told me about a lot of different folks, but the one they all talked up is a fellow named Arkady Waterbirch. Seems he’s to be found at a Lakewalker camp called New Moon Cutoff, which is less’n thirty miles northeast of here, right off the Trace. Not much more’n a day’s ride away for ol’ Copperhead.” She added in anxious appeal, “They call him a groundsetter, whatever that means.”
Dag looked taken aback. “Really? That close? If…” But then he rubbed his forehead with his left arm and smiled ruefully. “Oh, gods, Spark. Wouldn’t I just… but it won’t work. It would be Dar and Hoharie all over again, don’t you see?” His teeth set in unfond memory.
“I’ve patrolled down this way a time or two. These southern Lakewalkers haven’t got any more use for farmers than the ones back in Oleana do-and more land jealousy, what with the camps being squeezed up between farmer areas. And with malices so seldom found in these parts, the farmers don’t even give their patrollers that thin gratitude we get in the north. Though when a southern patrol does find a little sessile, ’bout once in a lifetime, you’d think it was the Wolf War breaking out again, the way they carry on… anyway. I doubt the pair of us would be any more welcome at New Moon Cutoff than we were at Hickory Lake.”
“Maybe, maybe not, if we made it plain we were just visiting. Seems to me it was mainly your tent-kin who thought I was a problem they had to fix.”
“Mm,” said Dag.
Fawn swallowed. “Or you could go without me. At least to see the man, and ask. I’d be all right staying with Berry and Whit.”
“You’re the light that I see by, Spark. I’m not letting go of you again.”
The flash in his eyes reminded her of the lantern reflection off Crane’s knife blade, held tight to her throat, that had shimmered across Dag’s face just before… just before.
“Then we’ll both go, and I’ll deal with whatever I’m dished out. If it’s no better than Hickory Lake, it’ll be no worse, either, and I survived that.” She pulled the unbreakable walnut from her pocket and rolled it curiously in her hand. “What you’re doing now all by yourself isn’t working, you say. If any of the rest of us could help you, we would have by now. Time to try something else. Stands to reason Dag! And if this Arkady fellow doesn’t work out, either, well, at least you can scratch him off your list, and be that much farther along.”
She watched his face scrunch up in doubt so intense it looked like pain, and added, “I can’t be happy while you’re hurtin’. We have some time to pass anyhow, waiting down here at the edge of the world for the cold to end before we travel. You’ve kept all your promises to show me the river, and Graymouth, and the sea. Now you can just show me New Moon Cutoff for dessert. And if it’s not as fine as the sea, at least it’ll be new to me, and that’ll be good enough.” She gave a determined nod, which made him smile, if a bit bleakly.
“If that’s what you really think, Spark,” he said, “then I’ll give the fellow a try.”
3
Two days of cold rain masked Dag’s disinclination to travel to New Moon Cutoff, so Fawn did not badger, but she did draw Barr and Remo into the project. When the next day dawned clear, the three of them had Dag on the road north, if not early, at least before noon. Barr and Remo claimed to be interested in buying horses for a better price than found in the Drowntown market, where the flatboat men not wishful to join keeler crews bid for mounts to carry them back home on the Tripoint Trace. Fawn wasn’t sure Dag was fooled, because he looked pretty ironic about it all, but he didn’t say anything cutting. Fawn rode rather guiltily on her new mare, now named Magpie; three sets of saddlebags were piled onto Copperhead, led by his master; the patroller men strode.
Or tried to. Outside of Graymouth, the road became a quagmire.
It was nearly impassable to wagons-they paused several times to offer help to farmers with wheels stuck up to the hubs; and once, the man was so desperate that he even accepted the offer, despite the three tall strangers being Lakewalkers. Though his thanks, afterward, were brief and worried, cast over his shoulder as he urged his team into motion once more. Pack trains of horses or mules made fairly good time on the hoof-pocked verge-a couple of them passed by southbound, bringing in loads of cotton, tea, and other mysterious local goods to the river port. Barr, however, complained bitterly about slogging in his farmermade boots, new bought in Graymouth.
“Don’t they fit right?” Fawn asked. “I thought you said you’d broken them in. Do they leak?”
“No more than you’d expect,” said Barr. “But look!” He raised one knee to display a boot.
From her saddle, Fawn looked blankly down at it.
“There must be ten pounds of mud stuck to each foot!” fumed Barr.
Fawn glanced at Remo, standing with his hands on his hips and grinning at his partner, and realized that his boots, though damp and stained, were largely clump-free. “Hey, Remo, how come your boots aren’t like that?”
Remo held out a leg and smugly rotated his ankle. “My cousin made these for me. They’re groundworked to shed the mud.”
“Cheer up, Barr,” Dag advised, smiling faintly. “I’ll help you fix them when we make camp tonight. Didn’t you learn how to renew leatherwork when you were on patrol back in Oleana?”
“Well, yes, but-”
“He usually sweet-talked one of the girls into doing it for him,” remarked Remo, staring off artlessly over sodden fields.
“I was going to say, renew, yes, but these boots have never been worked at all! I thought that needed to happen while they’re first made.”
“Usually, but I’ll see what I can lay in,” said Dag. “It’s not like I haven’t done trail fix-ups on leather gear ’bout ten thousand times.”
They trudged onward past a hamlet boasting an inn of sorts, but they still had two hours of daylight left for
