Maybe, for Verel’s ground flicked out to touch Dag’s wedding cord, concealed from ordinary eyes by his rolled-down sleeve. “It seems just like a real cord,” he said doubtfully.

“It is.”

Verel was plainly itching to get Dag alone and ask how they’d woven it. Dag longed even more to take the medicine maker aside and squeeze out everything he knew about healing, groundlock, beguilement, and a hundred other complexities. But that wasn’t the reason the irate camp captain had tracked him here.

Amma Osprey said grimly, “The old ways have worked for better ’n a thousand years. Nothing lasts that long without good reason. Let farmers keep to farmers, and Lakewalkers to Lakewalkers, and we’ll all survive. Mixing things up is dangerous. Which is fine if it falls on your own fool head, but not so fine when it falls on someone else’s.” She gestured, inarguably, toward Verel’s bandaged hand.

“Is that all you want?” Dag challenged. “For the problem to go somewhere else?”

She snorted. “If I tried to shoulder the troubles of the whole world, I’d go mad. And Pearl Riffle would be lost. I run Pearl Riffle patrol. My neighbor camps run their territories, and their neighbors do the same, all the way to the edge of the hinterland and on to the hinterlands beyond, and so we all get through. One by one and all together. I have to trust them; they have to trust me. Trust me not to go haring off after swamp gas, for one thing. So I’ll thank you, Dag No-camp, to keep yourself to yourself and not stir up these people worse in my territory.”

“I’ll be gone on the rise,” said Dag. He pointed to the windless sky, chilling gold-and-blue as the sun slanted. “Though I can’t control the rain.”

“That works for me,” said Amma Osprey. She stood abruptly, signaling an end to the talk. The other two rose as well, though their brows seemed wrinkled as much in troubled thought as in irritation.

Clearly, this was not a good moment to bring up the matter of a spare sharing knife again. Dag sighed and lifted his hand to his throbbing temple in polite farewell.

Fawn kept an eye out, but Dag did not return to the scavenging site before the coal boat boss came by with a barrow and bought back their pile. Berry scrupulously divided the scanty handful of coins five ways. On the walk back upstream to the Fetch, Bo silently split off and disappeared up the hill in the lengthening shadows toward Possum Landing village.

Berry just shook her head. At Fawn’s noise of inquiry, she explained, “Bo and I have a pact. He don’t drink the boat’s money. He’s kept to it pretty good, so far.” She sighed. “Don’t suppose we’ll see him again till morning.”

Still huffing with the chill despite dry clothes, Whit and Hawthorn built up the fire in the Fetch’s hearth while Fawn and Berry dodged around each other whipping together a hot meal. Dag, looking troubled, strolled in as Fawn was dishing out beans and bacon. He met her questioning look with a headshake.

“Maybe a walk after supper?” she murmured to him as he sat at the table.

“That’d be good,” he agreed.

A walk and a talk. There was something pressing on Dag’s mind, sure enough. Fawn was distracted keeping her good food coming, happy just to have a real, if cramped, kitchen to cook in after a summer of smoking herself as well as her meals over an open fire. She encouraged the hesitant Hod to eat up, and then he lurched to the opposite extreme and gobbled as if someone were going to snatch his food away. Whit chided him, and Fawn bent her head and grinned to watch Hod earnestly taking Whit for an authority—on table manners, of all things. Hawthorn chattered on about all the different ways he might spend his coal-salvaging coins. Berry encouraged him to save them; Whit advised him to invest them in something he might resell for a higher price downstream.

“Something nonbreakable would be smart,” Fawn suggested, winning an irate look from Whit. Dag smiled a little in his silence, and Fawn’s heart was eased. A nippy night was falling beyond the cabin’s square glass windows—frost might lace them by morning—but inside it seemed cozy and bright in the light of the oil lantern. Comfortable. It felt like friends in here, and Fawn decided she liked the feeling very well.

Dag’s head turned toward the bow; he laid down his fork. In a moment, heavy feet sounded crossing the gangplank, and then a thump as someone jumped to the deck. The boat rocked a trifle. A fist pounded on the front door—hatch, Fawn corrected her thought—and a male voice bellowed, “Boss Berry, send out that long Lakewalker you got hiding in there!”

“What?” said Whit, as Dag grimaced. “Someone for you, Dag?”

“Quite a few someones, seems like,” sighed Dag.

“Bother Bo for not being here,” muttered Berry, and stood up from her bench. Whit and Fawn followed her through the cabin; she motioned Hawthorn back. Hod hunched fearfully, and Dag did not rise, though he ran his hand through his hair and then leaned his chin on it.

“Berry!” shouted the voice again. “Out with him, we say!”

“Hush, Wain, you’ll wake all the catfishes’ children with your bawling,” Berry shouted back irritably. “I can hear you fine, I ain’t deaf.” She pushed open the hatch and strode through. “What’s this ruckus, then?” Whit followed at her elbow, and Fawn at Whit’s.

One of the big keelers loomed on the front deck between the goat pen and the chicken coop. Dag had left Copperhead tethered for the night to a tree up on shore, well away from the path, with an armload of hay to keep him occupied, but Daisy-goat bleated nervously at the noisy visitor. The man—Wain? — held a torch aloft. The orange light flickered over his broad face, flushed not with exertion or cold but beer, judging by the rich smell wafting from him.

On the shore, a mob of perhaps twenty people had gathered. Fawn stared in alarm. She recognized some of the keelers who had passed them going down to Pearl Bend earlier—you couldn’t forget those red-and-blue striped trousers, more’s the pity. The others might be townsmen, with one or two women. Some held oil lanterns, and a couple more had torches. Against the shadowy bank, the crowd seemed to glow like a bonfire.

The keelers routinely wore knives at their belts, some of a size to rival Dag’s war knife, but not a few were also gripping stout sticks. Six of the keelers were holding up a door on their shoulders, hinges and all, and on it lay a shape bundled in blankets, whimpering. Their frowns ranged from tense to grim, their grins from wolfish to foolish. Fawn thought they seemed more excited than angry, but their numbers were disturbing. Stirred up by the noise, several men came out from the neighboring boats to lean on their side-rails and watch.

“Mark the boat carpenter says those high-and-mighty Lakewalker sorcerers refused to heal his wife. She’s in a fearsome bad way.” Boss Wain jerked a thick thumb over his shoulder at the huddled shape on the door. “So we ’uns from the Snapping Turtle took a show of hands and offered to make this one do it!”

A murmur of agreement and a surge forward rippled through the crowd, followed by a sharp cry as the door was jostled. The broad-shouldered keelers holding it up looked awkwardly at each other and steadied it with more care.

Fawn wondered if she should claim Dag wasn’t here, and if a violent search of the Fetch would follow, but before she could open her mouth, Dag ducked through the front hatch and straightened up to his full height—a good hand taller than the keeler boss, Fawn was happy to see.

“How de’,” he said, in his deep, calm, carrying voice. “What seems to be your trouble?”

The keeler’s head sunk between his shoulders, like a bull about to charge. “We got us a real sick woman, here.”

Dag’s glance flicked toward the shore. “I see that.”