In the deep dark that night she rolled up small and scared, sniveling miserable, stupid tears for the lack of Dag. She buried her face in her blanket edge. With none to see her, she supposed she might bawl to her heart’s content, but she really didn’t want to make unnecessary noise. She hoped any predator within ten miles would be too replete with scavenged mud-men to hunt farmer girls and plump, tired horses. She slept badly despite her exhaustion.

She’d figured the last morning would be the worst, and truly, she woke hurting just as much as she’d suspected she would. But it would be a much shorter leg than yesterday, and at the end of it, she would find Dag. Her cord still assured her of this; if anything, her arm throbbed more clearly, if more worrisomely, with each passing mile. Barely an hour into the morning’s ride she found Hoharie’s campsite just off the track, the dirt cast over the campfire ashes still warm. Only the level terrain and Fawn’s switch kept Grace plodding forward into the long afternoon.

As the light flattened toward the west, Fawn rode abruptly out of the humid green of the endless woods into an open landscape metallic with heat. We’re here.

The woods gave way to water meadows, their grasses gone yellow and limp. The sorry shrubs scattered about bore drooping brown leaves, or none. It all looked very sodden and strange. But ahead, she could see a trickle of cook-fire smoke from a stand of skeletal trees along a leaden shoreline. She didn’t need her stolen map anymore, hadn’t for the past two hours; her aching body bleated to her, There, there, he’s over there. Hoharie and her little troop were just dismounting.

As Fawn rode up, Mari came striding out of the trees, waving her arms and crying urgently, “Close your grounds! Close your grounds!”

Hoharie looked startled, but waved acknowledgment and turned to check Othan and the patrollers, who apparently also obeyed. She saw Fawn, who brought Grace to a weary halt just a few paces away, and her face set, but before she could say anything, Mari, coming to her stirrup, continued.

“You’re here sooner than I dared hope! Dirla fetch you?”

“Yes,” said Hoharie.

“Praise the girl. Did you run across the patrol we sent back home?”

“Yes, about a day out of Hickory Lake.”

“Ah, good.” Mari’s eye fell on Fawn, hunched over her saddlebow. “Why’d you bring her?” The tone of the question was not dismissive, but genuinely curious, as though there might be some very good, if obscure, Lakewalkerish reason for Fawn’s presence in Hoharie’s train.

Hoharie grimaced. “I didn’t. She brought herself.”

Fawn tossed her head.

Othan leaned over and hissed at her, “You lied, farmer girl! You promised to turn around!”

“I did,” said Fawn defiantly. “Twice.”

Hoharie looked not-best-pleased, but the shrewd and curious look on Mari’s face scarcely changed.

“Did you get a look at Utau, when you passed the patrol?” asked Mari. “We sent him home in Razi’s care.”

“Oh, yes,” said Hoharie. She dismounted and stretched her back. Really, all her party looked as hot and tired and dirty as Fawn felt. So much for Lakewalker conceit about their stamina. “Strangest ground damage I ever saw. I told Utau, six months on the sick list.”

“That long?” Mari looked dismayed.

“Likely less, but that’ll hold Fairbolt off for three, which should be about right.”

They exchanged short laughs of mutual understanding.

Fawn slid off sweaty Grace, who stood head down and flop-eared, liquid eyes reproachful, legs as stiff as Fawn’s own. Saun came out of the grove to Mari’s shoulder, trailed by a couple of other patrollers, both older women. As the women began to confer with Hoharie and Mari, he strode up to Fawn, looking astonished.

“You shouldn’t be out here! Dag would have a fit.”

“Where is Dag?” She craned past him toward the grove. So close. “What’s happened to him?”

Saun ran a hand over his head in a harried swipe. “Which time?”

Not a reassuring answer. “Day before yesterday, about the time Dirla rode in to Hickory Lake. Something happened to Dag then, I know it. I felt it.” Something terrible?

His brows drew down in wonder, but he caught her by the arm as she tried to push past him. “Wait! You can’t close your ground. I don’t know if you’d be drawn in, too—wait!” She wrenched out of his grip and broke into a stumbling run. He pelted after, crying in exasperation, “Blight it, you’re as bad as him!”

Among the trees, a number of people seemed to be collected together in bedrolls under makeshift awnings of blankets and hides, four women under one and four men under another. They lay too still for sleep; not still enough for death. A little way off, another bedroll was partly shaded under a blanket hitched to an ash tree’s limbs. Fawn fell to her knees beside it and stared in shock.

Dag lay faceup under a light blanket. Someone had removed his arm harness and set it atop his saddlebags at the head of the bedroll. Fawn had watched his beloved face in sleep, and knew its shape in all its subtle movements. This was like no sleep she’d ever seen. The copper of his skin seemed tarnished and dull, and his flesh stretched too tightly over his bones. His sunken eyes were ringed with dark half circles. But his bare chest rose and fell; he breathed, he lived.

Saun slid to his knees beside her and grabbed her hands as she reached for Dag. “No!”

“Why not?” said Fawn furiously, yanking futilely against his strong grip. “What’s happened to him?”

Saun began to give her a garbled and guilty-sounding account of his trying to help by slaying mud-men in pots—Fawn gazed in bewilderment toward the boggy shoreline where he pointed—that she could only follow at all because of the prior descriptions of the groundlock she’d heard from Dirla. Of Dag, leaping into the eerie danger to save somebody named Artin, which sounded just like Dag, truly. Of Dag being sucked into the lock, or spell, or whatever this was. Of Dag lying unarousable all these three days gone. Fawn stopped fighting, and Saun, with a stern look at her, let her wrists go; she rubbed them and scowled.

“But I’m not a Lakewalker. I’m a farmer,” said Fawn. “Maybe it wouldn’t work on me.”

“Mari says no more experiments,” said Saun grimly. “They’ve already cost us three patrollers and the captain.”

“But if you don’t…” If you don’t poke at things, how can you find anything out? She sat back on her heels, lips tight. All right: look around first, poke later. Dag’s breathing didn’t seem to be getting worse right away, anyhow.

Mari, meanwhile, had led Hoharie and Othan out to the mud pots, then back through the grove to examine the other captives. Mari was finishing what sounded to Fawn like a more coherent account of events than Saun’s as they came over and knelt on the other side of Dag. Her tale of Dag’s ground match with Artin’s failing heart had the medicine maker letting out her breath in a faint whistle. Even more frightening to Fawn was Mari’s description of the strange blight left on Dag’s ground from his fight with the malice.

“Huh.” Hoharie scrubbed at her heat-flushed face, smearing road dirt in sweaty streaks, and stared around. “For the love of reason, Mari, what did you drag me here for? In one breath you beg me to break this unholy groundlock, and in the next you insist I don’t dare even open my ground to examine it. You can’t have it both ways.”

“If Dag went into that thing and couldn’t get himself out, I know I couldn’t. I don’t know about you. Hoped you’d have more tricks, Hoharie.” Mari’s voice fell quiet. “I’ve been picking at this knot for days, now, till I’m near cross-eyed crazy. I’m starting to wonder when it will be time to cut our losses. Except…all of those makers’ own bonded knives went missing during the time they were prisoners of the malice. Of the nine people down, only Bryn is carrying an unprimed knife right now. That’s not much to salvage, for the price. And I’m not real sure what would happen to someone locked up like that trying to share, or to her knife—or to the others. We had ill luck with those mud-puppies, that’s certain.”