In summer, Fawn guessed couples came here to spoon. Even for northerners like themselves, this wasn’t quite outdoor spooning weather. She cuddled in gratefully under Dag’s right arm. Though the view was romantic, and Dag shared warmth generously, it was plain he was not in a romantic mood. He was in his worrywart mood, and he’d been stuck in it for days, if not weeks. Plenty long enough, anyhow.
Fawn fingered the walnut in her pocket, and said quietly, “What’s troubling your mind, Dag?”
He shrugged. “Nothing new.” After a long hesitation, while Fawn waited in expectant silence, he added, “That’s the trouble, I guess. My mind keeps looping and looping over the same problems, and never arrives anywhere different.”
“Same paths do tend to go to the same places. Tell me about them, then.”
His fingers wound themselves in her curls, as if for consolation or courage, then his arm dropped back around her and snugged her in; maybe she wasn’t the only one feeling the chill.
“When we two left Hickory Camp at the end of the summer-when we were thrown out-”
“When we left,” Fawn corrected firmly.
A conceding nod. “My notion was that if I walked around the world with my eyes new-open for a time, the way you’ve made them be, I could maybe see some way for farmers and Lakewalkers to work together against malice outbreaks. Because someday, the patrol won’t be perfect, and a malice will get away from us again, not in the wilderness or even by a village like Greenspring, but by a big farmer town. And then we’ll all be in for it. But if Lakewalkers and farmers were already working together before the inevitable happens… maybe we’d have a fighting chance.”
“I thought the Fetch was a good start,” Fawn offered.
“Good, but… so small, Spark! Eight people, and that’s counting you along-with. For six or so months of trying.”
“So, that’d be, um, sixteen folks a year. A hundred and sixty in a decade. In forty years, um…” A long hesitation while Fawn secretly tapped her fingers in her skirt. “Six or seven hundred.”
“And if the crisis breaks next year, and not forty years from now?”
“Then it won’t be any worse than if you hadn’t tried at all. Anyhow”-really, you’d think despair was his favorite corn-husk dolly, the way he clutches it-“I think your count is way off. There was all my kin in West Blue you talked to, and those teamsters from Glassforge, and Cress that you healed in Pearl Riffle and all her kin, and boatloads of boatmen along the river. And your show at the bandit cave with Crane; gods, Dag, they’ll be talking about that up and down these rivers for at least as many years as folks’ll be trying to wear those stupid pots of Barr’s. This river, I’ve figured out, is a village-one street wide and two thousand miles long.
It’s been a great place for you to tell your tale. Because river folks get around to gossip. And swap yarns like they were barter. And sometimes, change each other’s minds even when you aren’t looking on.”
Dag shook his head. “The absent gods may know what kind of path I blazed down the Grace Valley. I sure don’t. Did I light a fire, or was it all a damp sputter and right back to the gloom?”
“Why are all or nothing the only two choices, here?” Fawn asked tartly. “What I think is-”
Dag looked down, brows rising at the resolve in her voice.
“What I think is, you’re trying to carry a lazy man’s load. Inside your head, you’re trying to lift the whole world all by yourself, in one trip.
No wonder you’re exhausted. You’ve got to start smaller.”
“Smaller! How much smaller can I get?” Dag motioned down at the riverbank, by which Fawn guessed he meant to indicate their modest flatboat. A rhetorical reply in any case, so she paid no heed to it.
“Your own ground. I know it’s true because you told me so yourself, and you never lie to me: the first thing a maker has to make is himself. But nobody ever said he had to do it by himself.”
“Do you have a point, Spark?”
She ignored his stung tone and answered straight out. “Yes. It’s true for cooking or sewing or boatbuilding or harness making or crafting arrows-so I don’t guess it’s false for groundwork. Before you tackle any new job, first you have to get your own tools in order, clean and sharpened and tidy and laid out ready to hand. The main tool for groundwork is your own ground. And yours, from everything everyone has ever told me about such things, has got to be in the most awful mess right about now.
“What I think you need is another maker. Not a farmer girl, much as she loves you, and not just a couple of earnest patroller boys, as much as they want to help, because they don’t know beans about that trail, either, but instead someone like Hoharie or Dar.” Fawn took a breath, shaken by a moment of panic when she realized that Dag, unlike any member of her family ever, was actually listening to her. The notion that a man so strong might actually change or do something differently on the basis of something she’d blathered was alarming. Back when she’d longed in vain for any sign that she was heard, had she ever imagined also accepting responsibility for the results? Well, they’re in my lap now. She gulped.
“So… so I’ve been asking around. Every visiting Lakewalker I could get to talk to me up in the day market, I asked about the best medicine makers in these parts. They told me about a lot of different folks, but the one they all talked up is a fellow named Arkady Waterbirch. Seems he’s to be found at a Lakewalker camp called New Moon Cutoff, which is less’n thirty miles northeast of here, right off the Trace. Not much more’n a day’s ride away for ol’ Copperhead.” She added in anxious appeal, “They call him a groundsetter, whatever that means.”
Dag looked taken aback. “Really? That close? If…” But then he rubbed his forehead with his left arm and smiled ruefully. “Oh, gods, Spark. Wouldn’t I just… but it won’t work. It would be Dar and Hoharie all over again, don’t you see?” His teeth set in unfond memory.
“I’ve patrolled down this way a time or two. These southern Lakewalkers haven’t got any more use for farmers than the ones back in Oleana do-and more land jealousy, what with the camps being squeezed up between farmer areas. And with malices so seldom found in these parts, the farmers don’t even give their patrollers that thin gratitude we get in the north. Though when a southern patrol does find a little sessile, ’bout once in a lifetime, you’d think it was the Wolf War breaking out again, the way they carry on… anyway. I doubt the pair of us would be any more welcome at New Moon Cutoff than we were at Hickory Lake.”
“Maybe, maybe not, if we made it plain we were just visiting. Seems to me it was mainly your tent-kin who thought I was a problem they had to fix.”
“Mm,” said Dag.
Fawn swallowed. “Or you could go without me. At least to see the man, and ask. I’d be all right staying with Berry and Whit.”
“You’re the light that I see by, Spark. I’m not letting go of you again.”
The flash in his eyes reminded her of the lantern reflection off Crane’s knife blade, held tight to her throat, that had shimmered across Dag’s face just before… just before.
“Then we’ll both go, and I’ll deal with whatever I’m dished out. If it’s no better than Hickory Lake, it’ll be no worse, either, and I survived that.” She pulled the unbreakable walnut from her pocket and rolled it curiously in her hand. “What you’re doing now all by yourself isn’t working, you say. If any of the rest of us could help you, we would have by now. Time to try something else. Stands to reason Dag! And if this Arkady fellow doesn’t work out, either, well, at least you can scratch him off your list, and be that much farther along.”
She watched his face scrunch up in doubt so intense it looked like pain, and added, “I can’t be happy while you’re hurtin’. We have some time to pass anyhow, waiting down here at the edge of the world for the cold to end before we travel. You’ve kept all your promises to show me the river, and Graymouth, and the sea. Now you can just show me New Moon Cutoff for dessert. And if it’s not as fine as the sea, at least it’ll be new to me, and that’ll be good enough.” She gave a determined nod, which made him smile, if a bit bleakly.