My head hurts. My ground hurts. But no such collapse was happening now. Dag clutched the thought to himself as if it were hope. Perhaps the morning would bring better counsel, or even better counselors than one battered old patroller so frighteningly out of his depth. Dag sighed, levered himself up, and stumbled back to his bedroll.
What the morning brought was distractions, mainly. A pair of scouts returned from the south to report much the sort of chaos Dag expected—farmer and Lakewalker refugees scattered all over, improvised defenses in disarray—but also encouraging signs of people beginning to sort themselves out with the news of the death of the malice. About midday, some two dozen Bonemarsh exiles cautiously approached. Dag assigned his patrol of cleanup volunteers the initial task of helping them to identify and bury their dead, including the woman maker, and scavenge the village for still-usable supplies that might be carried off to the other north Raintree camps that would be taking in the nearly two thousand homeless. The Raintree Lakewalkers were likely in for a straitened winter, coming up. Bonemarsh casualties, he was glad to learn, had been relatively low. No one seemed to know yet if the same had been the case for that farmer town the malice had taken first.
Three of the Bonemarsh folks agreed to stay and help nurse their groundlocked makers and the hapless would-be rescuers. The makers all had names, now, and life stories that the returned refugees had determinedly pressed on Dag. He wasn’t sure if that helped. In any case, he sent the first batch of locals off with a patroller escort and an earnest request to send him back any spare medicine makers or other experts who might be able to get a grip on his lethal puzzle. But he didn’t expect much help from that quarter, as every medicine maker in Raintree had to be up to the ears in nearer troubles right now.
He had slightly more hope of the full patrol of twenty-five he sent home that afternoon, carrying both a warning to Hickory Lake of their neighbor’s impending winter shortages, and a much more urgently worded plea for Hoharie or some equally adept maker to come to his aid. To stay at Bonemarsh, Dag selected the best medicine makers—for patrollers—his company had, including several veteran mothers or grandmothers, whom he figured for already knowing how to keep alive people who couldn’t talk or walk or feed themselves. Small ones, anyway. They can work up.
He hadn’t expected them to work up to him, however. “Dag,” said Mari, with her usual directness, “the bags under your eyes are so black you look like a blighted raccoon. Have you had anybody look you over yet?”
He’d been thinking of quietly hauling one of the better field medicine fellows out of range of the grove to examine him. Mari, he realized glumly, was not only at the top of that list by experience and ground-sense skill, but would corner any substitute and have the story ripped out of him in minutes anyway. Might as well save steps.
“Come on,” he sighed. She nodded in stern satisfaction.
He led off to his stump of last night, or one like it, sat, and cautiously opened himself. It took a couple of minutes, and he ended with his head bent nearly to his knees. Still hurts.
He heard a long, slow hiss through her teeth that for Mari was as scary as swearing. In a tone of cool understatement, she observed, “Well, that don’t look so good. What is that black crap?”
“Some sort of ground contamination. It happened when I…” he started to say, ground-ripped the malice, but changed it to, “when I tried to draw the malice off from Utau, and it turned on me. It was like bits of it stuck to me, and burned. I couldn’t get rid of it. Then I closed up and passed out.”
“You sure did. I thought you were just ground-ripped—hah, listen to me, just ground-ripped—like Utau. Does that, um…hurt? Looks like it ought to.”
“Yeah.” Dag turned his groundsense on himself, closing his eyes for an instant to feel more clearly. Two of the gray patches on his left arm, separate last night, seemed to have grown together since like two water droplets joining. I’m losing ground.
Mari said hesitantly, “You want me to try anything? Think a bit of ground reinforcement might help, or a match?”
“Not sure. I wouldn’t want to get this crud stuck to you. I suspect it’s”—lethal—“not good. Better wait. It’s not like I’m falling over.”
“It’s not like you’re dancing a jig, either. This isn’t like…Utau’s ground, it’s like it’s scraped raw, shivering and won’t stop, but you can see it’ll come right in its own time. This…yeah, this is outside my ken. You need a real medicine maker.”
“That’s what I figured. Hope one shows up soon. Meantime, well, I can still walk, it seems. If not jig.” Dag hesitated. “If you can refrain from gossiping about this all over camp, I’d take it kindly.”
Mari snorted. “So if this had happened to any other patroller, how fast would you have slapped him onto the sick list?”
“Privileges of captaincy,” Dag said vaguely. “You know that road, patrol leader.”
“Yeah? Would that be the privilege to be stupid? Funny, I don’t seem to recall that one.”
“Look, if anybody with more skill shows up here to hand this mess on to, you bet I’ll be on my horse headed east in an hour.” Except that he could not ride away from what he carried inside, now, could he? “I have no idea who the Raintree folks can spare or when, but I figure the soonest we could get help from home is six days.” He stared around; the afternoon was growing hazy, with a brassy heat in the air that foreboded evening thundershowers.
Mari glanced toward the grove, and said quietly, “Think those folks will last six more days?”
Dag let out a long breath and heaved himself to his feet. “I don’t know, Mari. Does look like we need to rustle up some kind of tent covering to gather them under, though. Rain tonight, you think?”
“Looks like,” she agreed.
They strolled silently back to the dead grove.
He wasn’t sure how much Mari talked, or didn’t, but a lot of people in the grove camp that evening seemed to take it as their mission to tell him to go lie down. He was persuadable, except that with nothing to do but sit cross-legged on his bedroll and stare at the groundlocked makers, he found himself drifting into hating them. Without this tangle, he could have gone home with today’s patrol. In three days’ time, held Spark hard and not let go even for breathing. His earlier weariness of this long war was as nothing to his present choked surfeit. He slept poorly.
By late the following afternoon, two of the older makers had lost the ability to swallow, and one was having trouble breathing. As Carro, one of Mari’s cronies from Obio’s patrol, held the man up in her lap in an effort to ease him, Dag knelt beside the bedroll and studied his labored gasps. Breathing this bad in a dying man was normally a signal to share, and soon. But was this fellow dying? Need he be? His thinning hair was streaked with gray, but he was hardly elderly; before this horror had fallen on him, Dag judged him to have been hale, lean and wiry. Artin was his name, Dag didn’t want to know, an excellent smith and something of a weapons-master. Under his own tracing fingers, Dag could read a lifetime of accumulated knowledge in the subtle calluses of Artin’s hands.
Mari blotted the face and hair of the nearby woman she had just spent several fruitless minutes trying to get water down, while the woman had writhed and choked. “If we can’t get more drink into them in this heat, they aren’t going to last anything like five more days, Dag.”
Carro nodded to the man in her lap. “This one, less.”
“I see that,” murmured Dag.
Saun paced about. Dag had guessed he would volunteer for the patrol lingering in Raintree to assist the refugees, and indeed he’d scorned an offer to ride back to Hickory Lake yesterday; but, taking his partnership with Dag seriously, he’d instead requested assignment to this duty. He slept in the now-reduced camp to the east off the blight, but lived at Dag’s left elbow in the daytime. Which would be a fine thing if only Saun acted less like a flea on a griddle in the face of these frustrations.