Berry climbed onto the roof to watch two neighboring boats launch at the same time and tangle their long side oars, with a lot of swearing. Berry scrubbed at the grin on her lips. “I think we’ll go next,” she said to Fawn at her shoulder. “It’s a dice roll, at this point. With a crowd like this, you want to go late enough to get the highest water, but not so late that some hasty fool before you wrecks his boat and blocks the channel again.”

Still, the launch seemed leisurely. Hawthorn dodged back and forth untying ropes from the trees and casting off, and Hod limped around to roll them up in neat coils, two at the front corners and two at the back corners. The oarsmen did not sit to their long sweeps, but stood, walking or leaning back, pushing or pulling as needed. Berry took the rear steering oar, with Bo and Whit on one side sweep and Dag and Remo on the other. It made Berry’s shouted directions simple: “Farmer side, pull!” “Patroller side, pull!” “Now the other way, patrollers! Turn her!”

A thump shook the boat as the hull glanced off a hidden stump. A crash from the kitchen sent Fawn racing inside to make sure everything was locked down and to check, for the third time, that her cook fire was well-banked and penned behind its iron barrier. When she came out again the boat was in the middle of the river, which still looked bigger than from shore. They swung into alignment with the channel. In contrast to its earlier placid clarity, the water was an opaque bright brown and visibly rolling, carrying along storm wrack from far upstream in an impressive current. She couldn’t imagine the bruised Remo swimming it now.

Fawn debated whether to cling to the bench by the front door or climb to the more precarious roof, then decided she was tired of being too short to see things. She climbed up and found herself a spot in the exact middle just beyond the radius of any of the three oars. She sat down firmly, wishing there were side railings, or a handle to grip. Maybe she could talk Bo into adding one. But for now the view was very fine.

They entered the Riffle proper, and the Fetch picked up speed. Dag suddenly yelled, “Bear right, boss! There’s a big snag about two feet under down there!”

Berry stared where his finger pointed. “You sure? I don’t see a boil!”

“Try me!”

“All right,” said Berry dubiously, and leaned on her oar to twist the boat past, alarmingly close to some highly visible rocks on the far side. Bo had to lift his sweep to clear them, and shot his boss a questioning look, which she answered with a shrug before leaning on her oar to bring the boat around again. Whit, lending his strength to Bo, looked utterly exhilarated.

“Your boat steers like a drunk pig,” Remo said, hauling briefly backward against the current at her next order.

“Yeah, it ain’t no narrow boat, is it,” Berry returned cheerfully, un-offended. “Live and learn, patroller.”

A flatboat crowding close behind them chose to veer wider around the rocks. With a loud clunk, it shuddered almost to a stop, then began to swing around its bow. Cries of dismay and a lot more swearing followed as its crew fought to keep it from turning broadside to the current. Berry looked at Dag and raised her brows high. He touched his temple back at her.

“Well, live and learn,” Berry repeated, in quite another tone.

Fawn stared back at the receding Lakewalker ferry landing, wondering if they were being watched by irate council eyes. They passed rocks, clogs of dead trees and debris including a bloated sheep, and less visible hazards, then the river widened and the odd swirls like soup boiling disappeared. The surface smoothed.

“Ease up, boys, we’re over the Riffle and away at last,” said Berry. “It’s a straight reach for the next three miles.”

Dag and Bo stood down from their sweeps. On the easy stretches, Fawn understood, the oarsmen would take turnabout, and the boat would float along all day without stopping. Dag came over, sat down beside her, stretched out one leg, and gave her a hug around the shoulders. “All right, Spark?”

“It’s wonderful!” She stared at Pearl Bend, already falling behind on the far shore, and back to the boat boss, now leaning happily on her oar. “We’re going so fast!”

Berry’s agreeing grin stretched as wide as the river. “Fast as a horse can trot!”

The Fetch made thirty river miles before the dank autumn dusk, when they tied to the bank for the night in the middle of, as nearly as Fawn could tell, nowhere. Berry explained regretfully that she didn’t want to try running downriver in the dark—Whit’s appalling suggestion. In addition to the hazards of rocks, stumps, sand bars, ledges, and wrack, the river divided frequently around shifting islands. A boat choosing the wrong side might find itself stuck in a channel that petered out into impassible thatch, and its crew plagued with the arduous task of towing it up around the head of the island again, difficult enough for a keelboat, designed for such work, worse for a balky flatboat. Boats had been abandoned in such situations, Berry said. Fawn poked Whit to silence when he began to volunteer Dag for a night pilot. Even were Dag’s groundsense recovered to its full one-mile range, some of these islands were as much as five miles long. And the river was quite scary enough in daylight.

After that, Fawn was too busy fixing dinner to worry further. With the excitement of the day wearing off, everyone seemed glad to turn in early. In addition, Fawn suspected Dag was still bone-weary from healing the Pearl Bend woman, at some level underneath the mere physical. He seemed to wrap himself around Fawn in their bedroll more for comfort than anything else; from the intensity of his clutch he was feeling low on comfort tonight. She wondered if having Remo aboard bothered him. A curtain gave no privacy from groundsense. Although since farmers couldn’t veil their grounds at all, she supposed Remo must have shut himself off, as Dag often did, to spare himself the abrasion. Weary herself, her musings trickled into sleep.

They made a dawn start, and by midday, the clouds had thinned and the sun came through, if still a bit pale and watery, which Fawn thought lifted everyone’s moods. At Berry’s suggestion she experimented with the clever iron oven that fitted in the Fetch’s hearth, and was able to produce pies for lunch without stopping the boat. Or setting it on fire, a fact of which she was more proud than of the pies, which, truly, everyone ate with flattering appetites. In the afternoon, she found Dag taking a break from his oar, lounging on the bench on the front deck keeping pleasantly idle company with Copperhead, Daisy-goat, and the chickens. She leaned over the rail and eyed the smooth, brown water. The Fetch seemed to be outracing a sodden log, but that floating leaf was definitely pulling ahead.

“Dag,” she said, “do you think you could catch us enough fish for dinner?”

He opened his eyes and sat up. “What kind?”

“I don’t even know what kinds there are in this river. Bo was going on about how much he liked a good channel catfish fried up in a cornmeal crust. Do you think you could get enough of them to feed eight?”

His slow smile tucked up the edges of his mouth. “I could try, Spark.”

He rose and stretched, only to drape himself over the side of the boat just behind the pen, his left arm trailing down. His hook barely grazed the water. Fawn watched in sudden doubt. When he’d persuaded that big bass to leap so startlingly into their laps at Hickory Lake, they’d been in a much smaller boat, with lower sides. The Fetch’s rail seemed awfully high to expect any fish to jump over. Were catfish even the jumping sort? Fawn had a dim idea that they lurked about on the river bottom.

When nothing happened in about ten minutes, Fawn considered wandering back to her domain by the hearth to think about what she could do with bacon for dinner, again, except she was afraid Dag was falling asleep. Granted he would doubtless wake up when he hit the water, and he could swim better than she could, and if she grabbed for his legs he might simply pull her over with him, but still. But then he stiffened, muttering, “Ha.” She craned her neck.