“Cooking ware?” she said hopefully.

“Next building over,” he promised.

One at a time, he pulled three more folded hides from dusty back shelves, and Fawn staggered under the weight of each as they took them to the clerk’s table to be signed out. He also, after judicious study, selected a sturdy packsaddle in good condition from a rack of such horse gear. They hauled it all out through the double doors onto the end porch.

Dag prodded the three big bundles with his toe. “Now these,” he said, “are actually my own. Bit surprised to still find them here. Two were sent down from Luthlia after I came home, and the other I picked up about three years back during a winter season I spent patrolling in the far south. This one, I figure for your papa. Go ahead and unroll it.”

Fawn picked apart the stiff, dry rawhide cords and unfolded what appeared to be an enormous wolf skin. “My word, Dag! This thing must have been as big as a horse!”

“Very nearly.”

She frowned. “You can’t tell me that was a natural beast.”

“No. Mud wolf. The very one they found me under at Wolf Ridge, I’m told. My surviving tent-brothers—you’d say brothers-in-law—skinned and tanned it for me. Never had the heart to tell them I didn’t want it. I put it in Stores thinking someone would take it off, but there it’s sat ever since.”

She wondered if this same beast had savaged his left hand. “It would make a rug for our whole parlor, back in West Blue. But it would be rather horrible, knowing how you came by it.”

“I admit I’ve no desire to look at it. Depending on how your papa feels about me by now, he might wish it hadn’t stopped gnawing on me so soon, but on the whole I think I won’t explain its history. The other two are worth a look as well.”

Fawn unfolded the second big pelt, and recoiled. Heavy black leather in a shape altogether too human was scantily covered with long, ratty gray hair; the mask of the thing, which had a manlike look, still had the fanged jaw attached.

“Another mud wolf. Different version. Fast and vicious, and they moved like shadows in the dark. That one for Reed and Rush, I think,” said Dag.

“Dag, that’s evil.” Fawn thought it through. “Good choice.”

Dag chuckled. “Give them something to wonder about, I figure.”

“It’ll give them nightmares, I should imagine!” Or was that, I hope? “Did you kill it?” And for pity’s sake, how?

Dag squinted at the mummified horror. “Probably. If not that one, plenty like it.”

Fawn refolded and bound up both old hides, and undid the third. It was thinner and more supple, and hairless. She unrolled and kept unrolling, her brows rising in astonishment, until fully nine feet of…of whatever it was lay out on the porch floor. The fine leather had a beautiful pattern, almost like snakeskin magnified, and gleamed smoothly under her hand, bronze green shading to rich red-brown. For all that the animal was as long as a horse, it seemed to have had short, stubby legs; wicked black claws still dangled from their ends. The jaws of this one, too, had been set back in place after tanning, and were frankly unbelievable, like a stretched-out bear trap made of teeth.

“What kind of malice made that? And what poor creature was it made from?”

“Not a mud-man at all. It’s an alligator—a southern swamp lizard. A real, natural animal. We think. Unless one of our ancestor-mages got really drunk. Malices do not, thank all the absent gods, emerge too often so far south of the Dead Lake, but what happens when they do get hold of these fellows is scarcely to be imagined. The southern wetlands are one of the places you want to do your patrolling in winter, because cold makes the alligators, and the alligator-men, sluggish. That one we just caught on an ordinary hunting and trapping run, though.”

“Ordinary? It looks as if it could eat a man in two bites!”

“They’re a danger along the shores of the channels. They lie in the water like logs, but they can move fast when they want. They clamp onto their prey and drag it down into the water to drown, and rip it up later, after it rots a bit.” He bent and ran his fingers along the shiny hide. “I should think your papa and Whit could both get a pair of boots out of this one, and belts and something for your mama as well.”

“Dag,” said Fawn curiously, “have you ever seen the sea?”

“Oh, yeah, couple of times. The south shore, that is, around the mouth of the Gray River. I’ve not seen the eastern sea.”

“What’s it like?”

He sat back, squatting, fingers still caressing the swamp-lizard skin, and a meditative look came over his face. “First time was almost thirty years ago. Never forget it. West of the Gray, between the river and the Levels, the land is flat and mostly treeless. All mounted patrols in that wide-sky country. Our company commander had us all spread out, half a mile or more apart, in one long line—that sweep must have been fifty miles across. We rode straight south, day after day. Spring it was, the air all soft and blue, and new green coming up all around, and flowers everywhere. Best patrolling I ever did in my life. We even found one sessile, and did for it without hardly pausing. The rest was just riding along in the sunshine, dangling our feet out of the stirrups, scanning the ground, just barely keeping touch with the patrollers to the right and left. End of the week, the color of the sky changed, got all silvery and light, and we came up over these sand dunes, and there it was…” His voice trailed off. He swallowed. “The rollers were foaming in over the sand, grumbling and grumbling, never stopping. I never knew there were so many shades of blue and gray and green. The sea was as wide and flat as the Levels, but alive. You could feel with your groundsense how alive it was, as if it was the mother of the whole wide green world. I sat and stared…We all dismounted and took off our boots, and got silly for a while, running in and out of that salty water, warm as milk.”

“And then what happened?” Fawn asked, almost holding her breath.

Dag shrugged. “Camped for the night on the beach, turned the line around and shifted it fifty miles, and rode back north. It turned cold and rained on the way back, though, and we found nothing for our pains.” He added after a moment, “Wood washed up on the beach burns with the most beautiful strange colors. Never saw anything like.”

His words were simple and plain, as his words usually were; Fawn scarcely knew why she felt as though she were eavesdropping on a man at prayers, or why water blurred her eyes.

“Dag…” she said. “What’s beyond the sea?”

His brows twitched up. “No one’s sure.”

“Could there be other lands?”

“Oh, that. Yes. Or there were, once. The oldest maps show other continents, three of them. The original charts are long gone, so it’s anyone’s guess how accurate the copies are. But if any ships have gone to see what’s still there, they haven’t come back that I ever heard. People have different theories. Some say the gods have interdicted us, and that anyone who ventures out too far is destroyed by holy curses. Some guess the other lands got blighted, and are now all dead from shore to shore, and no one’s there anymore. I’m not too fond of that picture. But you’d think, if there were other folks across the seas, and they had ships, some might have got blown off course sometime in the last thousand years, and I’ve never heard tell of any such. Maybe the people over there have interdicted us, till our task is done and all’s safe again. That would be sensible.”

He paused, gazing into some time or distance Fawn could not see, and continued, “Legend has it there is, or once was, another enclave of survivors on our continent, to the west of the Levels and the great mountains that were supposed to be beyond them. Maybe we’ll find out if that’s true someday, if anyone, us or them, ever tries to sail all around the shore of this land. Wouldn’t need such grand ships for hugging the coast.”