Fawn stood back with her hands on her hips and gave him a slightly frustrated look; as if, for all her questions, he walked in a place she could not follow.

“So,” she said slowly, “if things move their grounds, can pushing on grounds move things?”

Dag blinked in faint shock. Was it chance or keen logic that brought her question so close to the heart of Lakewalker secrets? He hesitated. “That’s the theory,” he said at last. “But would you like to see how a Lakewalker would move the ground in that bowl from one side of the table to the other?”

Her eyes widened. “Show me!” Gravely, he leaned over, reached out with his hand, and shoved the bowl about six inches.

“Dag!” Fawn wailed in exasperation. “I thought you were going to show me magic.”

He grinned briefly, although mostly because he could scarcely look at her and not smile. “Trying to move anything through its ground is like pushing on the short end of a long lever. It’s always easier to do it by hand. Although it’s said…” He hesitated again. “It’s said the old sorcerer-lords linked together in groups to do their greater magics. Like matching grounds for healing, or a lovers’ groundlock, only with some lost difference.”

“Don’t you do that now?”

“No. We are too reduced—maybe our bloodlines were adulterated in the dark times, no one knows. Anyway, it’s forbidden.”

“I mean for your pattern walking.”

“That’s just simple perception. Like the difference between feeling with your hand and pushing with your hand, perhaps.”

“Why is pushing forbidden? Or was that linking up in bunches to push that’s not allowed?”

He should have known that the last remark would elicit more questions.

Throwing one fact to Fawn was like throwing one piece of meat to a pack of starving dogs; it just caused a riot. “Bad experiences,” he replied in a quelling tone. All right, by the pursing of her lips and wrinkling of her brow, quelling wasn’t going to work; try for distraction. “Let me tell you, though, not a patroller up Luthlia way survives the lake country without learning how to bounce mosquitoes through their grounds. Ferocious little pests—they’ll drain you dry, they will.”

“You use magic to repel mosquitoes!” she said, sounding as though she couldn’t decide whether to be impressed or offended. “We just have recipes for horrible stuff to rub on our skins. Once you know what’s in them, you’d almost rather be bit.”

He snickered, then sighed. “They say we are a fallen folk, and I for one believe it. The ancient lords built great cities, ships, and roads, transformed their bodies, sought longevity, and brought the whole world crashing down at the last.

Though I suspect it was a really good run for a while, till then. Me—I bounce mosquitoes. Oh, and I can summon and dismiss my horse, once I get him trained up to it. And help settle another’s hurting body, if I’m lucky. And see the world double, down to the ground. That’s about it for Dag magic, I’m afraid.”

Her eyes lifted to his face. “And kill malices,” she said slowly.

“Aye. That mainly.”

He reached for her, swallowing her next question with a kiss. It took the better part of a week for Dag’s boat anchor of a conscience to drag him out of the clouds and back onto the road. He wished he could just jettison the blighted deadweight. But one morning he turned back from shaving to find Fawn, half-dressed and with her bedroll open on the bed, frowning down at the sharing knife that lay there.

He came and wrapped her in his arms, her bare back to his bare torso.

“It’s time, I guess,” she said.

“I guess so, too.” He sighed. “Not that you couldn’t count my unused camp-time by years, but Mari gave me leave to solve the mystery of that thing, not to linger here in this brick-and-clapboard paradise. The hirelings have been giving me squinty looks for days.”

“They’ve been real nice to me,” she observed accurately.

“You’re good at finding friends.” In fact, everyone from the cooks, scullions, chambermaids, and horse boys up to the owner and his wife had grown downright defensive of Fawn, farmer heroine as she was. To the point where Dag suspected that if she demanded, Throw this lanky fellow into the street! he’d shortly find himself sitting in the dust clutching his saddlebags. The Glassforgers who worked here were used to patrollers and their odd ways with each other, but it was clear enough to Dag that they just barely tolerated this mismatch, and that only for the sake of Fawn’s obvious delight. Other patrons now drifting in, drovers and drivers and traveling families and boatmen up from the river to secure cargoes, looked askance at the odd pair, and even more askance after collecting whatever garbled gossip was circulating about them.

Dag wondered how askance he would be looked at in West Blue. Fawn had gradually grown reconciled to the planned stop at her home, partly from guilt at his word picture of her parents’ probable anxiety, and partly by his pledge not to abandon her there. It was the only promise she’d ever asked him to repeat.

He dropped a kiss on the top of her head, letting his finger snake around and drift over the healing wounds on her left cheek. “Your bruises are fading now.

I figure if I bring you back to your family claiming to be your protector, it’ll be more convincing if you don’t look like you just lost a drunken brawl.”

Her lips twitched up as she caught his hand and kissed it, but then her fingers drifted to the malice marks on her neck. “Except for these.”

“Don’t pick.”

“They itch. Are they ever going to drop off? The other scabs did already.”

“Soon enough, I judge. It’ll leave these deep bitter-red dents underneath for a time, but they’ll fade almost like other scars. They’ll turn silvery when they’re old.”

“Oh—that long shiny groove on your leg that starts behind your knee and goes around up your thigh—was that a malice-clawing, then?” She had mapped every mark upon him as assiduously as a pattern-grid surveyor, these past days and nights, and demanded annotations for most of them, too.

“Just a touch. I got away, and my linker put his knife in a moment later.”

She turned to hug him around the waist. “I’m glad it didn’t grab any higher,”

she said seriously.

Dag choked a laugh. “Me too, Spark!” They were on the straight road north by noon. They rode slowly, in part for their dual disinclination for their destinations, but mostly because of the dog-breath humidity that had set in after the last rain. The horses plodded beneath a brassy sun. Their riders talked or fell silent with, it seemed to Dag, equal ease. They spent the next afternoon—rainy again—in the loft of the barn at the well-house where they’d first glimpsed each other, picnicking on farm fare and listening to the soothing sounds of the drops on the roof and the horses champing hay below, didn’t notice when the storm stopped, and lingered there overnight.

The next day was brighter and clearer, the hot white haze blown away east, and they reluctantly rode on. On the fifth night of the two-day ride they stopped a short leg from Lumpton Market to camp one last time. Fawn had figured an early start from Lumpton would bring them to West Blue before dark. It was hard for Dag to guess what would happen then, though her slowly unfolding tales of her family had at least given him a better sense of who he would encounter.

They found a campsite by a winding creek, out of view of the road, beneath a scattered stand of leatherpod trees. Later in the fall, the seed-pods would hang down beneath the big spade-shaped leaves like hundreds of leather straps, but now the trees were in full bloom. Spikes stood up from crowns of leaves with dozens of linen-white blossoms the size of egg cups clustered on them, breathing sweet perfume into the evening air. As the moonless night fell, fireflies rose up along the creek and from the meadow beyond it, twinkling in the mist.