“With silver sails,” Fawn put in.
He smiled. “I think that’s got to happen sometime. Don’t know if I’ll live to see it. If…”
“If?”
“If we can keep the malices down long enough for folks to get ahead. The river men are bold enough to try, but it would risk a lot of resources, as well as lives. You’d need a rich man, a prince or a great lord, to fund such a voyage, and they’re extinct.”
“Or a bunch of well-off men,” Fawn suggested. “Or a whole big bunch of quite ordinary men.”
“And one fast-talking lunatic to coax the money out of their pockets. Well, maybe.” He smiled thoughtfully, considering this vision, but then shook his head and rose. Fawn carefully rerolled the astonishing swamp-lizard skin.
Dag went back inside to cadge paper, ink, and quills from the clerk, then they both sat at the nearest trestle table in the dappled shade to write their letters to West Blue. Fawn didn’t miss West Blue—she’d longed to get away, and she hadn’t changed her mind on that—but she couldn’t say her feet were planted in their new soil yet. Given the way Lakewalkers kept moving around, maybe home would never be a place. It would be Dag. She watched him across the table, scribbling with his quill clutched in his right fingers and holding down the paper, lifting in the warm breeze, with his hook. She bent her head to her own task.
Dear Mama, Papa, and Aunt Nattie. We got here day before yesterday. Had it only been two days? I am fine. The lake is very… She brushed the quill over her chin, and decided she really ought to say more than wet. She wrote large, instead. We met up with Dag’s aunt Mari again. She has a nice…Fawn scratched out the start of cabin and wrote tent. Dag’s arm is getting better. And onward in that vein, till she’d filled half the page with unexceptionable remarks. Too much blank space left. She decided to describe Sarri’s children, and their campsite, which filled the rest with enough cheery word pictures to grow cramped toward the end. There.
So much left out. Patroller headquarters, and Fairbolt Crow’s peg-board. Dar, the unnerving bone shack, Dag’s angry mama, the futility of the sharing knife after all this journey. Dag’s dark, nervy mood. The threat of swimming lessons. Naked swimming lessons, at that. Some things were best left out.
Dag, finishing, handed his letter across for her to read. It was very polite and plain, almost like an inventory, making clear which gifts were for which family members. Both horses and the packsaddle were to be Mama’s, as well as some of the fine furs. The mud-man skin for the twins was blandly described, entirely without comment. Fawn grinned as she pictured the three alarming hides being unpacked at West Blue.
Dag stepped inside and returned the quills and ink to the clerk, coming out with the letters folded and sealed just in time to greet a girl who rode up, bareback, on a tall, elegant, dappled gray mare. A dark foal about four months old pranced after, flicking his fuzzy ears; he had the most beautifully shaped head and deepest liquid eyes Fawn had ever seen on a colt, and she spent the time while Dag and the girl organized the packsaddle trying to make up to him. He flirted with her in turn, yielding at last to ear scratching just there. Fawn couldn’t imagine her mother riding that mare, nor any of her family; maybe the dappled beauty could be broken to harness and pull the light cart to the village, though. That would turn a few heads.
A man dressed as a patroller came riding from the direction of the headquarters building. He turned out to be a courier on his way south, apparently a trusted comrade; exactly what old favor Dag was calling in was not clear to Fawn, but however dubiously he greeted the farmer bride or raised his brows at Dag, he had undertaken to deliver the bride-gifts. He stopped with them long enough to get a clear description of the Bluefield farm and how to find it, and then he was off, with the silvery mare following meekly on a lead and the colt capering and scampering. The horse girl, trudging back to Mare Island, looked after them with a downright heartbroken expression.
Dag then led Fawn off to the next storehouse, where they found some lightly used cooking gear—not a proper kitchen’s worth, but at least a few things to permit more elaborate meals over an open fire than sliced raw plunkin and tea. And, to Fawn’s joy, several pounds of cotton from south of the Grace River, cleaned and combed, an equally generous bag of washed wool, and three hanks of good flax. The tools Aunt Nattie had given Fawn for a wedding present would find their proper use. Despite her burdens her steps were lighter turning back toward their campsite, and she made plans for getting Dag to hold still long enough to measure his gnarly feet for socks.
The following day Dag returned from the medicine tent with no sling or splints, but with a smile on his face that would hardly go away. He flexed and stretched his hand gratefully. He reported he’d been instructed to take it easy for another week, which he interpreted liberally as no weapons practice yet. Everything else he embraced immediately, including Fawn.
To her muffled alarm, the next thing he did that afternoon was make her put down her spindle and go with him for her first swimming lesson. She was distracted from her fear of the water only by her embarrassment at their lack of clothes, but somehow Dag made both better. They picked their way past the bending cattails into water to his waist and her chest. At least the lake’s murkiness gave them a more decent cloak, its greeny-gold translucence turning opaque just a short way down. The top foot of the water was as warm in the sun as a bath; beneath that it grew cooler. The soft mud squelched between Fawn’s curling toes. They were accompanied by a dizzy escort of water bugs, flocks of little black ovals that whirled merrily like beads on a string, and agile water striders, their thin legs making dimples in the brown surface as they skated along. Dag promptly made the bead-shaped bugs an example to Fawn, inviting her to spin them down in little whirlpools with her hands and watch them bob right back to the surface.
Dag insisted she was naturally more buoyant than he, taking the opportunity to pat her most buoyant parts. Fawn thought his assertion that It doesn’t matter how deep the water is, Spark, you’re only going to use the top two feet overly optimistic, but under the influence of his confidence and unfailing good cheer, she gradually began to relax in the water. By the second day, to her own astonishment, she floated for the first time in her life; on the third afternoon, she achieved a dog paddle of several yards.
Even Dag had to admit that the lake’s muddiness made Hickory Lake residents all tend to smell a bit green by the end of the summer—sooner than that, Fawn did not say aloud—but Sarri took Fawn into the woods and showed her where a clear spring ran that not only allowed her to give lake-scrubbed clothes a final rinse, but also to draw water that didn’t need to be boiled before drinking. Fawn managed her first laundry day, and sniffed their clothes, drying on a line strung between two trees, with satisfaction at a job well done.
That afternoon, Dag came in with a small turkey to pluck. Fawn happily started a bag to save feathers, looking ahead to pillows and ticks. They roasted the bird over their fire and invited Mari and Cattagus to help eat it up. Fawn ended the evening casting on her first cotton yarn to her double-ended needle set for Dag’s socks, and feeling that this place might become home after all.
Two days later, instead of a swimming lesson, Dag took her out in one of the narrow boats. He had a specially shaped hook for his wrist cuff that allowed him to manage his paddle. Fawn, after a brief lesson on the dock, was placed in the front with a paddle of her own. She felt nervous and clumsy at first, looking over all that expanse of water with Dag out of sight behind her, but she soon fell into the rhythm of the task. Around behind Walnut Island, winking water gave way to a surface that was downright glassy, and Fawn relaxed still more. They paused to admire a dead tree reflected in the water, its bare white branches startling against the green of the woods. It was a roosting place for broad-winged hawks, a few circling gracefully overhead or perching on the branches, and Fawn smiled to remember the day they’d been startled by that big red-tail near Glassforge. Any larger predators, Fawn had gathered, were kept off the islands by Lakewalker magic.