“Scented oil,” he answered. “They have seven or eight kinds.”

“What do you use it for?” Fawn asked innocently.

Dag mentally consigned his comrade to the middle of the Dead Levels. “Sore muscles,” he said repressively.

“Well, I suppose you could,” said Razi thoughtfully.

“Scented back rubs,” breathed Dirla in a warm voice. “Mm, nice idea.”

“How useful of you two to stop by,” Dag overrode this before it could grow more interesting still, either to himself, who didn’t hanker after a repeat of the discomforts of his ride from the Horsefords’, or to Fawn, who would undoubtedly ask more questions. “Happens I need this trunk taken back downstairs to the storeroom.” He stood up and pointed. “Lug.”

They grumbled, if lightheartedly, and lugged.

Dag closed the door behind them, shooed Fawn to her own room, and followed.

Wondering if he dared ask just where that shop was located, and if it might be on the way to the harnessmaker’s. Walking the patterns in the marshes west of Glassforge took six days.

Dag chose the closest section first, and so was able to bring the patrol back to the hotel’s comforts that night, and to check on Fawn.

After an increasingly worried search of the premises, he found her shelling peas in the kitchen and making friends with the cooks and scullions. With some relief, he gave over his vision of her as distressed and lonely among condescending Lakewalker strangers although not his fear of her imprudently overtaxing her strength.

For the next section he chose the most distant, of necessity a three-day outing, to get it out of the way. Dag met the complaints of the younger patrollers with a few choice tales of swamp sweeps norm of Farmer’s Flats in late winter, icily gruesome enough to silence all but the most determined grumblers. The patrol was able to leave most of their gear with the horses, but the need for skin protection meant that boots, shirts, and trousers took the brunt of the muck and mire. When they draggled back to Glassforge late the following night, they were greeted by the attendants of the hotel’s pleasant bathhouse, conveniently sited with its own well between the stable and the main building, with a marked lack of joy; the laundresses were growing downright surly at the sight of them.

This time Dag found Fawn waiting up for him, filling the time and her hands by helping to mend hotel linens and coaxing stories from a pair of seamstresses.

He returned the next night to exchange tales with her over a late supper. He held her fascinated with his account of a roughly circular and distinctively flat stretch of marsh some six miles across that he was certain was a former patch of blight, recovering and again supporting life—most of it noxious, not to mention ravenous, but without question thriving. He thought the slaying of that malice must have predated the arrival of farmer settlers in this region by well over a century. She entertained him in turn with a long, involved account of her day’s adventures in the town. Sassa the Horseford brother-in-law, now home again, had stopped by and made good on his promise to show her his glassworks.

They had capped the tour with a visit to his brother’s papermaking shop, and for extras, the back premises of the ink maker’s next door.

“There are more kinds of work to do here than I ever dreamed,” she confided in a tone of thoughtful speculation.

She had also, clearly, overdone; when he escorted her to her door, she was drooping and yawning so hard she could scarcely say good night. He spent a little time persuading her ground against an incipient cold, then checked the healing flesh beneath the ugly malice scabs for necrosis or infection and made her promise to rest on the morrow.

The next day’s pattern walk was truncated for Dag in the early afternoon when one patroller managed to trade up from mere muck and leeches to a willow root tangle, water over his head, and a nest of cottonmouths. Leaving the patrol to Utau, Dag rode back to town supporting the very sick and shaken man in front of him. Dag was not, happily, called upon to do anything unadvised and perilous with their grounds on the way, though he was grimly aware Utau had urged the escort upon him against just that chance. But the snakebit man survived not only the ride, but also being dipped briskly in the bathhouse, dried, and carried up and slung into bed. By that time, Chato and Mari had been found, allowing Dag to turn the responsibility for further remedies over to them.

Some news Mari imparted sent Dag in search of Fawn even before a visit to the bathhouse on his own behalf. The sound of Fawn’s voice raised in, what else, a question, tugged his ear as he was passing down the end stairs, and he about-faced into the second-floor corridor. A door stood open—Saun’s—and he paused outside it as Saun’s voice returned:

“My first impression of him was as one of those grumpy old fellows who never talks except to criticize you. You know the sort?”

“Oh, yes.”

“He rode or walked in the back and never spoke much. The light began to dawn for me when Mari set him at the cap—that’s the patroller in the end or edge position of a grid with no one beyond. We don’t spread out to the limits of our vision, d’you see, but to the limits of our groundsenses. If you and the patrollers to your sides can just sense each other, you know you aren’t missing any malice sign between you. Mari sent him out a mile. That’s more than double the best range of my groundsense.”

Fawn made an encouraging noise.

Saun, suitably rewarded, continued, “Then I got to noticing that whenever Mari wanted something done out of the ordinary way, she’d send him. Or that it was his idea. He didn’t tell tales often, but when he did, they were from all over, I mean everywhere. I’d start to add up all the people and places in my head, and think, How? I’d thought he had no humor, but finally figured out it was just maddening-dry. He didn’t seem like much at first, but he sure accumulated.

And you?”

“Different than yours, I’ll say. He just arrived. All at once. Very…

definitely there. I feel like I’ve been unpacking him ever since and am nowhere near the bottom yet.”

“Huh. He’s like that on patrol, in a way.”

“Is he good?”

“It’s like he’s more there than anyone… no, that’s not right. It’s like he’s so nowhere-else. If you see?”

“Mm, maybe. How old is he really? I’ve had trouble figuring that out—”

Suppressed ground or no, someone was bound to notice the swamp reek wafting from the hall on the humid summer air pretty soon. Dag unquirked his lips, knocked on the doorframe, and stepped inside.

Saun lay abed wearing, above, only his bandages; the rest, however clothed, was covered by a sheet. Fawn, in her blue dress, sat leaning back in a chair with her bare feet up on the bed edge, catching, presumably with her wriggling toes, whatever faint breeze might carry from the window. For once, her hands were empty, but Saun’s brown hair showed signs of being recently combed and rebraided into two neat, workmanlike plaits.

Dag was greeted with broad smiles on two faces equally fresh with youth and pale with recent injury. Both hurt near-fatally on his watch—now, there was a thought to cringe from—but their expressions showed only trust and affection. He tried to muster a twinge of generational jealousy, but their beauty just made him want to weep. Not good. Six days on patrol with nary a malice sign shouldn’t leave him this tired and strange.

“How de’, Spark. Lookin’ for you. Hello, Saun. How’re the ribs?”

“Better.” Saun sat up eagerly, his flinch belying his words. “They have me walking up and down the hall now. Fawn here’s been keeping me company.”

“Good!” said Dag genially. “And what have you two found to talk about?”

Saun looked embarrassed. “Oh, this and that.”

Fawn returned more nimbly, “Why were you looking for me?”