“They have to be looking for you, Spark. I sure would be, if I were your”—He bit off the last word, whatever it was, abruptly. Chewed and swallowed it, too, as if uncertain of the taste.

She said uneasily, “I don’t know. Maybe if I went back now, Stupid Sunny would think I had been lying. To trap him. For his stupid farm.”

“Do you care what he thinks? Compared to your kin, anyway?”

Her shoulders hunched. “Once, I cared a lot. He seemed… he seemed splendid to me. Handsome…” In retrospect, Sunny’s face was round and bland, and his eyes far too dull. “Tall…” Actually, short, she decided. He was as tall as her brothers, true. Who would come up maybe to Dag’s chin. “He had a good horse.” Well, so it had appeared, until she’d seen the long-legged beasts the patrollers all rode.

Sunny had shown off his horse, making it sidle and step high, making out that it was a restive handful only an expert might dare bestride. Patrollers rode with such quiet efficiency, you didn’t even notice how they were doing it. “You know, it’s odd. The farther away I get from him, the more he seems to… shrink.”

Dag smiled quietly. “He’s not shrinking. You’re growing, Spark. I’ve seen such spurts in young patrollers. They grow fast, sometimes, in the crush, when they have to get strong or go under. Takes some adjusting after, be warned—like when you put on eight inches of height in a year and nothing fits anymore.”

An example not, she suspected, pulled out of the air. “That was what I wanted.

To be grown-up, to be real, to matter.”

“Worked,” he said reflectively. “Roundaboutly.”

“Yes,” she whispered. And then, somehow, finally, the dam cracked, and it all came loose. “Hurts.”

“Yes,” he said simply, and put his arm around her shoulders, and snugged her in tight to him, because she had not cried all that night or day, but she was crying now. Dag studied the top of Fawn’s head, all he could see as she pressed her face into his chest and wept. Even now, she choked her sobs half to silence, shuddering with their suppression. His certainty that she needed to release the strain in her ground was confirmed; if he’d been forced to put it into words for her, he might have said that the fissures running through her seemed to grow less impossibly dark as her sorrow was disgorged, but he wasn’t sure if that would make sense to her. Sorrow and rage. There was more erosion of spirit here, going back further, than the malice’s destruction of her child.

His instinct was to let her weep the grief out, but after a time his worry roused anew as she clutched her belly once more, a sign of physical pain returning. “Sh,” he whispered, hugging her one-armed. “Sh. Don’t be making yourself sick, now. Would you like your hot stone again?”

Her clutch transferred to his sleeve and tightened. “No,” she muttered. She briefly raised her face, mottled white and flushed where it was not dark with bruises. “ ‘M too hot now.”

“All right.”

She ducked back down, gaining control of her breathing, but the tight stress in her body didn’t ease. He wondered if her abandonment of her family without a word was as appallingly ruthless as it seemed, or if there was more to the tale, but then, he came from a group that watched out for each other systematically, from partnered pairs through linkers to patrols to companies and right on up in a tested web. I sure would be looking for you, Spark, if I were your—and then his tongue had tangled between two choices, each differently disturbing: father or lover. Leave it alone. You are neither, old patroller. But he was the only thing she had for a partner here. So.

He lowered his lips toward her ear, nestled in the black curls, and murmured,

“Think of something beautifully useless.”

Her face came up, and she sniffed in confusion. “What?”

“There are a lot of senseless things in the world, but not all of them are sorrows. Sometimes—I find—it helps to remember the other kind. Everybody knows some light, even if they forget when they’re down in the dark. Something”—he groped for a term that would work for her—“everyone else thinks is stupid, but you know is wonderful.”

She lay still against him for a long time, and he started to muster another explanation, or perhaps abandon the attempt as, well, stupid, but then she said,

“Milkweed.”

“Mm?” He gave her another encouraging hug, lest she mistake his query for objection.

“Milkweed. It’s a just a weed, we have to go around and tear it out of the garden and the crops, but I think the smell of its flowers is prettier than my aunt’s climbing roses that she works on and babies all the time. Sweeter than lilacs. Nobody else thinks the flower heads are pretty, but they are, if you look at them closely enough. Pink and complicated. Like wild carrot lace gone plump and shy, like a handful of bitty stars. And the smell, I could breathe it in…” She uncurled a little more, unlocking from her pain, pursuing the vision.

“In the fall it grows pods, all wrinkled and ugly, but if you tear them open, beautiful silk flies out. The milkweed bugs make houses and pantries of them.

Milkweed bugs, now, they aren’t pests. They don’t bite, they don’t eat anything else. Bright burnt-orange wings with black bands, and shiny black legs and feet... they just tickle, when they crawl on your hand. I kept some in a box for a while. Gathered them milkweed seeds, and let them drink out of a bit of wet cloth.” Her lips, which had softened, tightened again. “Till one of my brothers upset the box, and Mama made me throw them out. It was winter by then.”

“Mm.” Well, that had worked, till she’d reached the tailpiece. But nonetheless her body was relaxing, the lingering shudders tamping out.

Unexpectedly, she said, “Your turn.”

“Uh?”

She poked his chest with a suddenly determined finger. “I told you my useless thing, now you have to tell me one.”

“Well, that seems fair,” he had to allow. “But I can’t think of…” And then he did. Oh. He was silent for a little. “I haven’t thought of this in years.

There’s a place we went—still go—every summer and fall, a gathering camp, at a place called Hickory Lake, maybe a hundred and fifty miles northwest of here.

Hickory nuts, elderberries, and a kind of water lily root, which is a staple of ours—harvesting and planting in one operation. Lakewalkers farm too, in our way, Spark. A lot of wet work, but fun, if you’re a child who likes to swim. Maybe can show… anyway. I was, oh, maybe eight or nine, and I’d been sent out in a pole-boat to collect elderberries in the margins, around behind the islands.

Forget why I was by myself that day. Hickory Lake sits on clay soil and tends to be muddy and brown most of the time, but in the undisturbed back channels, the water is wonderfully clear.

“I could see right to the bottom, bright as Glassforge crystal. The water weeds wound down and around each other like waving green feathers. And floating on the top were these flat lily pads—not the ones whose roots we eat. Not planted, not useful, they just grew there, probably from before there ever were Lakewalkers.

Deep green, with red edges, and thin red lines running down the stems in the water. And their lily flowers had just opened up, floating there like sunbursts, white as… as nothing I had ever seen, these translucent petals veined like milky dragonfly wings, glowing in the light reflecting off the water. With luminous, powdery gold centers seeming flowers within flowers, spiraling in forever. I should have been gathering, but I just hung over the edge of the boat staring at them, must have been an hour. Watching the light and the water dance around them in celebration. I could not look away.” He gulped a suddenly difficult breath.

“Later, in some very dry places, the memory of that hour was enough to go on with.”

A hesitant hand reached up and touched his face in something like awe. One warm finger traced a cool smear of wet over his cheekbone. “Why are you crying?”