The two gate guards both had their knives out, tense with alarm, but Arkady waved them back. He was plainly shaken; his lips moved on a-name?-Sutaw. He straightened himself, fastidiously flicked the trailing red drops from his fingers, inhaled, and said coldly, “That was an inexcusably clumsy piece of groundsetting. If you were an apprentice of mine, I’d have your hide for groundwork that ripped into a patient like that.”

All the blood seemed to drain from Dag’s head, so deep was his relief. He’s seen this. He knows what it is. It looks normal to him. It’s a known groundsetting technique. Not malice magic. I’m not turning into a malice…

Dag only realized he’d fallen to his knees when Fawn appeared at his side, her voice anxious. “Dag? Are you all right? Are you laughing, or crying? ” She pulled his hand away from his face. His shoulders shook.

“I’m not sure, Spark,” he groaned. “Both, I think.” Only now, when it was so abruptly removed, did he realize just how much that secret terror had been riding him, sapping his strength. Had he been a fool?

Maybe not.

Arkady rubbed his chiseled chin. And, at length, sighed. “You all had better come down to my place. I don’t think I can deal with this in the middle of the road.”

“All of them, sir? ” said Neeta, with a dubious look at Fawn.

“They seem to come as a set. Yes, all. Tavia, tell the women I’ll be having four guests for lunch today.” He walked over and extended his right hand to Dag.

Indeed, I need a hand.

Dag took it, hauling himself upright again.

A half-mile walk, leading the horses, brought them all to Arkady’s place, and Fawn stared in astonishment. After her experience at Hickory Lake Camp she’d thought she knew what Lakewalker tents were like: crude, deliberately temporary log cabins, usually with an open side protected by hide awnings, clustered in kin groups around a dock space or central fire pit. The dwellings she’d glimpsed at Pearl Riffle had been similar. This… this was a house.

Two huge trees laden with dark green leaves like drooping tongues- but not a blossom in sight at this season-bracketed a stone-paved walk.

Atop a foundation cut into the slope and lined with fitted stones, several rooms rambled, built of silvery-gray weathered cedar planks, roofed with split-wood shingles, and connected by a long porch. The windows gleamed with real glass. Barr and Remo, Fawn was consoled to note, also stared openmouthed; by camp standards, it was practically a palace.

Dag seemed less surprised, but then, Fawn wasn’t exactly sure if he was paying attention. After his brief, scary breakdown at the gate, he’d recovered himself and was looking awfully closed. Again.

They tied the horses to the porch rail and followed Arkady into what appeared to be a main room, pausing to wipe their feet after him twice, once on a mat outside and again on a rag rug just inside the door. The far wall had a whole row of glass windows and a door onto an unroofed porch overlooking the lake. A large hearth to the right was fitted up for cooking, which Fawn suspected might include cooking up medicines. By the hearth stood a sturdy table, waist height for working, but near the windows was a lower, round one that seemed just for eating. It boasted real lathe-made chairs, with stuffed cloth cushions tied on. At Hickory Lake, folks had mostly made do with trestle tables and upended logs.

“You can wash your hands at the sink,” Arkady directed, and busied himself with his water kettle and a teapot, of all things. Fawn guessed that he was buying time to think about what to do next; he’d said almost nothing on the walk from the gate, beyond laconically pointing out patrol headquarters and the medicine tent, bracketing the entry road.

Those, too, had been plank-built and houselike.

Beneath a lakeside window, the tin-lined sink had a water barrel with a wooden tap to its right, a drain board to the left. Fawn filled the washbasin and took her turn with a cake of fine white soap, watching while Dag did his one-handed trick with the soap and water after her. Arkady, she noticed, paused to covertly watch that, too. The patroller boys followed suit; the very dirty water was dumped down a drain, where it gurgled through a wooden pipe leading outside. It was all as handy as a well-furbished farm kitchen, and as hard to shift. Fawn fancied she could almost hear Dag thinking, Sessile! and not in a tone of approval.

They sat five around the table and watched while Arkady poured out tea into fired clay mugs, and offered a pitcher of honey. Fawn sipped the sweet brew gratefully, wondering who was supposed to start, and if it would be up to her. To her relief, Arkady began.

“So-ex-patroller-how have you come to me? New Moon Cutoff seems a long way from Oleana.” He took a swallow and settled back, watching Dag narrowly.

It was a-deliberately?-broadly worded question. Dag looked somewhat desperately at Fawn. “Where to begin, Spark? ” he asked.

She bit her lip. “The beginning? Which would be Glassforge, I guess.”

“That far back? All of it? You sure? ”

“If we don’t explain how your knife got primed at Glassforge, you won’t be able to explain what you did with it at Bonemarsh, and Hoharie herself said she thought that was magery.”

Arkady’s eyes widened slightly at the word. “Who is Hoharie? ”

“Hickory Lake’s chief medicine maker,” Dag explained.

“Ah.” Arkady went still, taking this in. “Do go on.”

“How about if I start? ” said Fawn. Their tale had to convince the groundsetter to take Dag seriously, despite Dag’s running off to mix with farmers. Because if they could be let into the camp on this man’s bare word, they could surely be thrown out the same way. Plain and true.

Nothing else would do. Just as well; Fawn didn’t think she could tell fancy lies to that penetrating coppery stare.

“It was coming on strawberry season last summer in Oleana, and I was going to Glassforge to look for work on account of-” She took a breath for courage. The intimate parts of this tale would be new to Barr and Remo, too; it was almost harder to speak it in front of them than this shiny stranger. “On account of as I’d got pregnant with a farm boy who didn’t care to marry me, and I didn’t care to stay around and deal with what my life would be at home once it came out. So, the road. Dag’s patrol was called down there to help search for a malice that was running a bandit gang in the hills. A couple of the bandits-a mud-man and a beguiled fellow-snatched me off the road because I was pregnant, it seems.”

Remo’s eyes widened, and Barr blinked, but both kept their mouths shut tight. Arkady’s hand touched his lips. “So it’s true that malices need pregnant women for their molts? ”

“Yes,” said Dag. “Though they’ll also use pregnant animals if they can’t get humans. It’s not actually the women they crave, it’s the fastgrowing ground of the youngsters they bear, and the, the template of bearing. To teach them how, see. I arrived… almost in time. There was this cave. The malice ripped the ground from Fawn’s child about the time I hit its mud-man guards. I was carrying a pouch with two sharing knives in it, one primed and one bonded to me. I tossed the pouch to Fawn, who was closer, and she put both knives in the malice, one after the other.”

“Wrong one first,” confessed Fawn. “The unprimed one. I didn’t know.”

“You couldn’t have,” Dag assured her. He stared rather fiercely at Arkady, who in fact showed no signs of wanting to criticize this.

“It had me by the neck at the time, which is where these came from,” Fawn went on, touching the deep red dents marring the sides of her throat, four on one side and one on the other.

“So that’s what those are!” said Arkady, startled into leaning forward and peering. He drew his hand back before actually touching her. “I didn’t think to find blight scars on a farmer. Those are the freshest I’ve ever seen. That sort of ground injury doesn’t often come our way down here.”