“I wonder what mistake they will make? ”

He snorted. “Hard to say, Spark.” His strong, dry hand found hers, and her cold little fingers stole warmth from it gratefully. “I do know Arkady’s not keen on spending two years of his time training me up as a groundsetter just to have me go off north and treat farmers. If I-we- became members of this camp, we’d have to abide by camp rules and discipline.”

“We? ”

He sucked a fortifying breath through his nose. “Wouldn’t that be something to have done, though? For the first time ever, get a farmer girl accepted as a full-fledged member of a Lakewalker camp? ”

“Would they? ”

“I wouldn’t stay for less. I hope I made that plain.”

Fawn rather thought he had. Her brows scrunched. She felt rattled, and she suspected he did, too. This offer-if it got made-wasn’t anything she’d ever expected or planned on, but then, nothing about her life since she’d met Dag had been anything that she could have imagined back when she’d first fled West Blue. My whole life is an accident. But some of her accidents had been happy far beyond her dreams, and she had surely chosen to put herself in the way of both good and bad, when she’d first set foot to the road. Am I Dag’s greatest accident, too?

At Arkady’s place Dag lit a lantern against the cool gloom, smiled slowly, and observed, “Seems we have the house to ourselves.”

The gold glint in his eye wasn’t only from the lantern light. Fawn dimpled back. “That’s a nice change,” she said agreeably.

Dag had been reticent about offering lovemaking since the patroller boys had returned, only partly due to fatigue from his long training days and, now, occasional draining groundwork under Arkady’s supervision.

The partners laid their bedrolls in the main room, and there was a door to close between, but wooden walls did not much block groundsense.

Tonight Dag and Fawn had a brief gift of privacy, if they could seize it before the beer ran out at the pig roast. They took turns washing up quickly in the sink, then Dag carried the lantern to their end room.

Fawn unrolled their bedding, and helped Dag off with his shirt and arm harness. He returned the favor, folding down her blouse as though it were a flower’s petals; they stood facing on their knees, skin to skin, each leaning into the other for support and heat. They’d made love in many different moods, from merry to mournful; tonight, it seemed to Fawn, there was something almost desperate in Dag’s grip.

“Gods, Spark,” he muttered. “Help me remember who I am.”

She hugged him tight. He released his clutch in favor of a caress, long fingers gliding over her bare back, winding in her hair, and she thought, not for the first time, that with all his touch being channeled through his single hand, he paid it a more reverent attention. And so, as a consequence, did she.

She whispered into his shoulder, “Wherever we are, you can always come home to me.”

He bent his face to her curls, handless arm tightening around her, and breathed her in. It was gently done; she had no call to think of a drowning man drawing air. “Always,” he promised. They sank to their bedroll of residence.

–-

Dag woke slowly in a gray morning light feeling vastly better, and he smiled to remember why. Fawn still slept. He lifted his arm from around her coiled warmth, then rolled over and opened his second eye.

At his face level, half a dozen pairs of beady little eyes stared back at him in unblinking fascination.

“You again!” he groaned at the field mice. “Go on! Shoo!”

Fawn came awake at his voice, sat up on her elbow, and took in their visitors. “Oh, my word. They’re back.”

“I thought you said you’d got rid of them yesterday. Again.”

“I did. Well, I thought I did. I took the box halfway around the lake and dumped them in the woods.”

Dag contemplated these leftovers from his frustrating shielding experiments.

Survivors all; had they been especially determined? They’d have to be, to trek back across half of New Moon Camp. “I’d think a farmer girl like you would have more ruthless ways of getting rid of mice.”

“Well, if they were piddling up my pantry, sure. But the only crime this bunch committed was to fall in love with you. Death seemed too cruel a penalty for that.” Her big brown eyes blinked at him in consideration.

“Beguiled,” he corrected austerely. “I don’t think mice have brains enough to fall in love.”

She dimpled. “I never noticed as it took brains.”

“There is that, Spark.” He creaked to his feet, peered a bit blearily around the room, found his slat box, tipped it on its side in front of the staring mice-whose heads turned in unison to track him-and chivvied them into it. Carrying them out the door onto Arkady’s roofless porch, he poured them over the rail. They fell with only a few faint squeaks, bouncing unharmed in the grass below, and, shocked out of their trance, scampered away. For now. Dag shook his head and trod back inside, where Fawn was sitting up lovely-naked and laughing behind her hand.

“The poor things!”

He grinned and opened himself to her bright ground as if basking in sunlight. Then went still, blinking.

Within her vivid swirl spun a brighter spark yet. He knew it at once, from that heartbreaking almost-month that he and Kauneo…

Fawn had no groundsense. It was his task to track when the brilliant changes in her ground signaled her time of fertility, and switch to alternate forms of pleasuring each other. For all the eight months of their marriage and before, she had trusted him to do so. How had he missed the signals last night? Blight it, he’d known it was almost time…!

No, not blight it, never in the same breath with this. That breath tangled in his throat in a ball of guilt, terror, and joy. If he’d taken one of Challa’s surgical knives and laid open his own chest wall, his heart could not be more exposed in this moment.

It might not catch. More than half of all such conceptions never did; many of the remainder failed in the first few weeks, barely delaying the woman’s monthly. It was one of the strongest, if least discussed, Lakewalker social rules to make no comment upon those blazing signs in a woman’s ground unless she brought them up herself. Should he say anything until he was more sure? When would that be? Fawn had been pregnant once before; how soon would she recognize her own symptoms?

Would they be the same, for this half-blood child? If that spark survived to become a child…?

“Dag? ” said Fawn doubtfully. “You feeling all right? Why’re you lookin’ at me like that? ”

He fell to his knees beside her, crouched, gathered her up in his arms, hugged her fiercely and protectively. Feeling as helpless as he’d ever been. “Because I love you,” he told her.

“Well, sure,” she said, a bit shaken by his fervor. “I knew that.” She hugged him back, bemused.

Absent gods. What do we do now?