This won blank looks from both women. Bluefield was not a Lakewalker name, nor had Dag claimed a camp of origin. Before they could pry into this oddity, he hurried on. “I came about a sharing knife. But I could come back later.”

A look of inexplicable enlightenment crossed the camp captain’s face. “Oh, no, if you witnessed anything, I definitely want it now. Take a seat, we’ll be starting soon.” She waved to a bench along the back wall. “Sorry, I thought you were our medicine maker out there.”

They were at some cross-purpose, it seemed. But before Dag could open his mouth to uncross them, the other woman peered out the window and said, “Ah, here they come. Absent gods, what a sick and sorry pair they look.”

“They’re going to be a lot sicker and sorrier when I’m done with ’em.” Amma Osprey ran a stray strand of gray hair, escaped from the braid at her nape, back over her ear, then folded her arms and her lips equally tightly as the door opened.

Two young men limped through. One was shorter, tawny-haired, and sturdy with muscle. But his right hand was bandaged, and his arm rested in a sling. His fair, square face was bruised. His shirt was clean and didn’t quite fit him—borrowed? — but his trousers were spattered with dried blood. He walked decidedly bent over.

The one who followed was taller, brown-haired, maybe a bit older than his companion, though still very young to Dag’s eyes. His face was even more bruised, one eye swollen shut, lower lip twice its proper size. Beneath his torn shirt his ribs were wrapped in cloth strips. Chicken tracks of black stitches marched up two long cuts on his left arm. His knuckles were swollen and scabbed, though he gingerly helped himself along with a stick in his right hand.

Two patrollers who’d lost a fight last night, obviously. To each other? They collected equally cold and silent glowers from the two women as they shuffled into line. The tawny youth made one attempt at a winning smile, wilting swiftly as the scowls deepened. Dag squinted in curiosity. He really ought to excuse himself and go. Instead, he sank back on his bench like a hunter lying up in tall grass, silent and unnoticeable.

Amma Osprey began curtly, “Not the least of your offenses is that I had to pull two of your comrades off their camp leaves this morning to take your places in patrol. You can remember to apologize to them, too, when they get back.”

Dag had done that in his time, cut his camp rest short in order to fill in for a sick or injured or bereaved patroller.

The dark one looked, if possible, more hangdog, but the tawny one raised his bruised face and began, “But we didn’t start it! We were just—”

The camp captain held up a quelling hand. “You’ll have your say in a moment, Barr. I promise you.” It sounded more threat than promise; in any case, the tawny youth subsided.

Steps sounded on the wooden porch, and the door swung open once more. A broad-shouldered woman stepped through, nodded to the other two, and scowled at the youths. By the yellow leather gloves stuck in her belt and the thick-soled boots on her feet, Dag identified her as a ferrywoman; by her age and stride, likely the boat boss. She pulled a lumpy cloth from her belt, and said, “I found this piece up in the woods back of Possum Landing this morning.”

“Oh, good,” said the camp captain. “Remo, do you have the rest?”

The dark youth hitched around and pulled another lumpy cloth from his shirt, reluctantly handing it over to his captain. She slid off the table and laid open both scraps. Dag was disturbed to see the pieces of a broken sharing knife, carved from pale bone. Such a knife was supposed to break when it released its burden of mortality into the ground of a malice, but Dag already had an uncomfortable suspicion that there had been no malice involved, or these two patrollers would be in much better odor this afternoon. Amma Osprey swiftly aligned the shards.

“That’s got it all, Issi,” she reported. The ferrywoman nodded satisfaction; the dark youth, Remo, let out a faint breath.

“Now we have a council quorum,” said the skirted woman. The three exchanged nods and settled, two in chairs, Amma hitched up on the edge of the table again. The two young patrollers were not invited to sit.

“All right,” said the camp captain grimly to the pair, “start explaining. How did this get started?”

The two exchanged unhappy looks; Remo of the swollen mouth waved a purpling hand at his companion, and said, “Oo ’ell ’m, Arr.”

Barr gulped and began, “It was a good deed, blight it! It really got started when that last coal flat tried to take the Riffle when the water’d got too low, ten days back, and tore out its bottom and dumped its load for half a mile down the shoals. Remo and I took out a narrow boat to pick off some of the crew that had got themselves hung up in the white water and the cottonwood wrack. Probably saved three flatties from drowning. Anyway, they seemed to think so. We hauled ’em into the tavern at Pearl Bend looking sorry as wet rats. Got them all dried out, on the outside anyway. At least they bought us drinks. Seeing as everyone was saved, they were all in a mood to celebrate, except maybe the boat boss who’d lost his cargo. So some of the keelers who’d helped out and the flatties started some games.”

“You know you are not to play games of chance with farmers,” said Amma Osprey in a dangerous voice. Because Lakewalkers were inevitably accused of sorcerous cheating in such situations. Although only if they had the ill luck or poor judgment to actually win.

“’Ee ’idn’t,” protested Remo.

“It was arm wrestling,” said Barr. “With a couple of the keelers. And despite what they claimed, we didn’t cheat—though I could have, blight it!” The peculiar indignation of the accused not-quite-guilty livened his voice, and Dag, still quiet on his bench by the wall, suppressed an upward mouth twitch.

“It made me so mad,” Barr went on. “So I told them it was true, but they could protect themselves from evil Lakewalker influences with metal helmets, like what you see the soldiers of the old Lake League wearing in the broken statues, which was what those helmets had been for, see. And they bought it. By the next afternoon, we had half the flatties up at Possum Landing walking around with their cook pots and wash bowls stuck on their heads. It was, it was”—he struggled for a moment, eyes brightening in defiant memory—“it was glorious.” His jaw set, then slacked instantly as he winced and rubbed its bruises.

“So that’s where that fool nonsense came from!” cried the ferry boss, Issi, in a voice that shook in a good imitation of anger. She turned away from the truants and rubbed her face till the betraying laugh lines were smoothed back out. Dag, who could just picture a herd of naive Lakewalker-fearing flatboat crews wandering about the Landing in their clanking makeshift helmets, laid his palm hard over his jaw and kept listening. Oh, to have been here last week!

“I was just balancing the scales a bit,” Barr continued. “You know what we do for those stupid farmers, and how little thanks we get in return. And it wasn’t hurting anyone, till your crew told them it was all a fiddle.”

The ferry boss sighed. “It took my girls near three days to talk them out of it. Even then, some of them refused to give up their headgear.” She added reflectively, “The rest were plenty mad, though. The Possum folks and the older flatties gave ’em a ripe ribbing for it all.”

Captain Osprey pinched the bridge of her nose. “Despite all that, I suppose it would have all passed downstream harmlessly at the next rise, if you two unaccountable fools hadn’t gone over there last night and stirred them up again. Why?”

“I was baited,” Barr admitted in a surly voice.

“Tol’ yuh,” his partner muttered, rolling his good eye.

“How?” demanded the patrol captain.