Fairbolt didn’t speak, merely raising his brows in question.

“I’ll want to talk to that courier,” said Dag. “And have a fresh look at whatever large-scale maps we have of the northern Raintree region.”

Fairbolt accepted this with no more comment than a short jerk of his chin. “Get up behind me, then. I’ll give you a lift to headquarters.” He kneed his horse around, and Dag stepped up on a stump and slid aboard. The burdened beast took to the road again at a rapid walk.

Fawn’s eyes were hot but dry. Mostly. Blinking, she ducked inside her tent flap to see what she could do to help get Dag’s saddlebags in order.

9

I t was midnight before Dag returned to Tent Bluefield. Fawn raised her head at the sound of his steps, falling slower than usual out of the dark, and poked up their campfire coals with a stick, lighting their candle stub from it. In the weak flare of golden light his lips gave her a smile, but his eyes seemed abstracted.

“I was wonderin’ if you were going to get any chance to sleep,” she said quietly, rising.

“Some. Not much. We’ll be saddling the horses just before dawn.”

“That’s no way to start out, all tired. Should I stay awake to get you up?” It wouldn’t be that many more hours at this point.

“No. Someone will come for me. I’ll try to go out quiet.”

“Don’t you dare go sneaking off without waking me,” she said, a little fiercely, and led him inside, where the contents of his saddlebags were laid out in neat stacks. His bow lay next to them, its quiver stuffed with arrows. “I was going to pack up your gear, but then I thought I’d better have you check first, see if I got everything right.”

He nodded, knelt, and began handing her stacks, briefly inspected; she tucked them into the bags as tidily as she could. The only thing he set aside was his tambourine in its leather case. Fawn wanted to ask Won’t you need that to celebrate the kill? but then thought perhaps he wanted to protect it, this riding-out being out of the routine. The other possibilities she refused to contemplate. She closed the flaps, buckled them, and turned to pick up the last item, laid out on the trunk beside the flickering stub.

“You’ve got no sharing knife. You want to take this one?” She held her—their—knife out to him, tentatively.

His face grew grave. Still kneeling, he took it from her and drew it from its sheath, frowning at the faded writing on the bone blade. “Dar thinks it won’t work,” he said at last.

“I wasn’t thinking of it for your first pick. Only to keep by you just…just in case. If there were no other choices.”

“There will be a dozen and more other knives among my company.”

“How many patrollers are going?”

“Seventy.”

“Will it be enough?”

“Who knows? One is enough, but it can take all the rest to get that one to the right place at the right time. Fairbolt will hold all the regular patrols going out, and fold in the ones coming home, but he has to think not only of sending help, but of defense.”

“I’d think sending help would be the best defense.”

“To a point. Things might go badly in Raintree, but also another malice could pop up here in Oleana. Since this commotion will put everyone behind schedule—again—it’s just that more likely. That’s the problem with malices emerging so randomly. Nice when we go months and months at a time without one, but when they come up in a bunch, we can get overwhelmed.” His brows drew in; slowly, he resheathed the knife, handing it back to her with a somewhat apologetic grimace. “Better not. I have an old bad habit of jumping into things feetfirst, and that’s not my job this time.”

She accepted his words, and the knife, with a little nod, although her heart ached.

“I have some ideas,” he went on, his mind clearly elsewhere. Or perhaps several elsewheres. “But I’m going to need more recent news than what that courier brought. She near rode her horse to death, but she was still two days getting here. Part of what went wrong at Wolf Ridge was due to, hm, not so much bad, as old information. Though for whatever consolation, I’m not sure but what we’d have done just the same if we had known what was coming down on us. If we’d spared a few more to the ridge, it would just have been that many more dead. And a few was all we had.” His mouth set in irony. “The help from out of the hinterland not having arrived yet.”

Fawn didn’t think Dag’s company would be dawdling on their road tomorrow.

There seemed so little she could do for him. Socks. Arrows. Packing. It all felt so trivial. All things he had accomplished perfectly well for himself for years before she’d come along to so disrupt his life. She might help by putting him to bed and sitting on him, maybe; it was clear his body needed its rest, and equally clear his mind would scarcely allow it. She raised her hands and began tenderly unbuttoning his shirt. As her wrist moved, her eye was caught by the gold beads of her marriage cord. He needs to be thinking about his task, not about me. But time was growing desperately short.

“Dag…”

“Mm, Spark?” His fingers in turn gently twisted themselves in the curls of her hair, letting the locks flow over and between them.

“You can feel me through your wedding cord, right? And all the other married Lakewalkers, Mari and Cattagus and all, they can do the same for each other?”

He nodded. She drew his shirt off that long, strappy-muscled torso, folding it up atop his clean and mended riding trousers for morning. Later in the night. Whatever that grim predawn hour was.

She went on, “Well, I can’t. I’ve taken your word that our cords work the same as everyone else’s, but I can’t feel it for myself.”

“Others can tell. And tell you.”

“Yeah, well, except I can’t be all the time asking, twenty times a day. Cattagus for one doesn’t take to being pestered. And besides, he’ll have his own worries about Mari.”

“True,” he conceded, eyeing her.

She slipped out of her own shirt, his hand helping not so much for need, as to trail over her skin in passing. The light touch made her shiver. “I want to know in my own heart. Isn’t there anything at all you can do to, to make me feel you? The way all the others can?”

He said after a moment, “Not the way the others can, no. You’re no Lakewalker.”

Nor ever would be, but his wording caught her attention. “Some other way?”

“Let me…think about that for a little, Spark. It would take some unusual groundwork.”

Stripped for sleep, he was altogether unaroused. If he felt half as distracted as she did right now, that was no surprise. She felt obscurely that she ought to send him off having been thoroughly made love to, but for the first time ever, such intimacy felt forced and unhappy. That was no good either.

“You’re all tense. How if you lie down and I give you a back rub? Might help you sleep.”

“Spark, you don’t have to—”

“And a real good foot rub,” she added prudently.

He rolled over into their bedroll with a muffled noise indicating abject surrender, and she smiled a little. She started at his neck. His muscles there were plenty hard and tense, though this seemed poor compensation for the limpness elsewhere. The corded unease gave itself up but slowly as her hands pressed, slid, caressed. Unhurriedly, she worked her way from tousled top to gnarly toe, not making love, just loving.

Perhaps the lack of expectation paid off; in any case, when he at length rolled over again a more alert interest had clearly returned to him. There might yet be sleep for him tonight, if the long way around. She slid down against him to capture his mouth in a deep kiss; his own hand snaked around her shoulder and began tracing lazily over her. She tried to soak up every sensation, hold them like painted patterns on her skin, but racing time washed them constantly beyond her reach.