“If that’s what you really think, Spark,” he said, “then I’ll give the fellow a try.”

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 walking; only Fawn looked back in regret. When dusk descended, they found a high spot off the road to make a camp. Fawn was not impressed with its comforts, although the boys did get a fire going despite the damp. She unpacked their food and shared it around.

Dag and Barr were soon heads down over the offending boots. Dag, quite adeptly it seemed to Fawn, instructed Barr in how to persuade them to be more waterproof. Muddy boots. Soon to be un-muddy boots, but which would not then walk on their own, nor force their owner to dance through the night, nor stride leagues at a step. So much for glamorous Lakewalker magic, wicked necromancy, rumors of cannibalistic rites. If only other folks could see these fellows as I do…

“Hey, Fawn!” Remo called from beyond the firelight, where he’d been rustling around along a weed-choked drainage ditch. “Want an alligator?”

“No!” she cried back in alarm. “I don’t want one!” Had he found one? How big? Could it smell her new shoes from there? If so, would it be angry? And if Remo caught it, instead of being promptly bitten in traplike jaws as his carefree enthusiasm deserved, would he make her try to cook it…?

Remo came tromping back out of the darkness with a wriggling form stretched between his two hands. Boot magic was temporarily abandoned as Barr jumped up to look, too. Dag, unhelpfully, sat on his log and grinned at Fawn’s expression. Which would have annoyed her more except his grins had grown too rare, lately.

“It’s… small,” said Fawn as the beast was eagerly presented to her gaze. A foot and a half of struggling lizard; Remo had one hand firmly clamped around its long snout and the other stretching its lashing tail. It hissed protest and churned its short legs, trying to claw its captor.

“Just a baby,” agreed Remo. “They hatch from eggs, they say. Like chickens.”

The bulging yellow eyes, with vertically slit pupils, looked even less friendly than a chicken’s. Baby or no, this was not, Fawn sensed, an animal that would welcome cuddling. Bo’s tale of the boy, the bear cub, and the thorn would have come out very differently in the end, if the boy had drawn the barb from the paw of a creature like this.

When the Oleana boys had finished exclaiming over the catch, they then squabbled over whether to let it go again. Fawn gave this plan no encouragement.

Even barring what horrors a malice might make of such a creature, those things grew, presumably, into what had mauled that boy at the Lakewalker camp. And if she volunteered to cook it, it couldn’t end up introduced alive into her bedroll later, although she supposed the boys would be more likely to try that game on each other than on Dag. They weren’t her own brothers. Their ruckus would still disrupt her sleep.

They toasted the meager fragments over the coals. Fawn found that alligator meat tasted like some off cross between pork and the boiled crab claw she had tried in the Drowntown market-and like campfire smoke, of course, but everything tasted of that. It would beat starving, but Fawn did not foresee a future in alligator farming. Treating the skin did keep the patroller boys occupied for the rest of the evening, leaving Fawn to cuddle with Dag in their reptile-free bedroll in a vain attempt to get warm.

When the camp finally settled for the night, she murmured into his collarbone, “Dag…?”

“Mm?”

“I thought what you and Remo discovered about unbeguiling, back up on the Grace, was pretty exciting. I figured you’d be talking about it to every new Lakewalker we met. Instead, I don’t recall as you’ve even spoken to any Lakewalker we’ve passed.”

He gave an unrevealing grunt. The verbal equivalent to that thing he did with his eyelids, she decided.

“I been wondering why not,” Fawn finished, refusing to be daunted.

He sighed. “It wasn’t quite that simple. Yes, my trick works to unbeguile farmers, I’m sure of that part, but I still don’t know what the effects are on the Lakewalker, to be taking in all that strange ground. I’m willing to experiment on myself. I’m less willing to put others at risk, till I know-” He broke off.

“What?”

“What I don’t know yet.”

She wanted to reassure him, to say, Well, at least we’re heading in the right direction to find out, but for all she knew she’d dragged them out on a fool’s errand. Tomorrow would-might-tell. “You will let this Arkady fellow know all about it, though, won’t you? Promise?”

“Oh, yes,” he breathed, stirring her curls. “Sleep, Spark.”

–-

Midday, on a side road striking west from the Trace, they passed from fallow fields into woods; Dag guessed they were crossing out of farmerowned land onto that of the Lakewalker camp. The camp itself came up sooner than he’d expected, only a few miles farther on. Magpie, recognizing her former home, tried to pull ahead, and for the first time Fawn had to rein back to her companions’ walking pace. The road climbed a low rise that proved to be a former river bluff, and Dag’s heart gave an odd lurch when he glimpsed the familiar glint of lake water through the leafless trees. I’ve been long away from home, this patrol. This cutoff was an old watercourse of the Gray River, which had ages ago looped thirty miles west instead, leaving this crescent-shaped lake and the groove of land in which it lay.