“No.” He caught the hand and kissed it. “Just tired, I guess.” He hesitated. “Thinkin’.”
“Is that the sort of thinkin’ where you sit like a bump for hours, and then jump sideways like a frog?”
He smiled despite himself. “Do I do that?”
“You do.”
“Well, I’m not jumping anywhere today.”
“Good.” She rewarded this resolve with a kiss, and then several more. It unlocked muscles in him that he hadn’t known were taut. One muscle, at least, remained limp, which would have disturbed him a lot more if he hadn’t been through such convalescences before. Must rest faster.
Dag spent the next three days mired in much the same glazed lassitude. He was driven from his bedroll at last not by a return of energy, but by a buildup of boredom. Out and about, he found unexpectedly intense competition for the sitting-down camp chores among the ailing—Utau, Cattagus, and himself. He watched Cattagus, moving at about the same rate he did, and wondered if this was what it was going to feel like to be old.
There being no hides to scrape at the moment, and Utau and Razi having shrewdly been first in line to help Cattagus with his elderberries, Dag defaulted to nut-cracking; he had, after all, a built-in tool for it. He was awkward at first with the fiddly aspects, but grew less so. Fawn, who plainly thought the task the most tedious in the world, wrinkled her nose, but it exactly suited Dag’s mood, not requiring any thought beyond a vague philosophical contemplation of the subtle shapes of nuts and their shells. Walnuts. And hickory shells. Over and over, very reliably. They might resist him, but only rarely did they counterattack, the hickory being the more innately vicious.
Fawn kept him company, first spinning, then working on two pairs of new riding trousers, one for him and one for her, made of cloth shared by Sarri. Sitting with him in the shade of their awning one afternoon, she remarked, “I’d make you more arrows, but everyone’s quivers are full up.”
Dag poked at a particularly intractable nutshell. “Do you like making arrows better than making trousers?”
She shrugged. “It just feels more important. Patrollers need arrows.”
He sat back and contemplated this. “And we don’t need trousers? I think you have that the wrong way round, Spark. It’s poison ivy country out there, you know. Not to mention the nettles, thistles, burrs, thorns, and bitey bugs.”
She pursed her lips as she poked her needle slowly through the sturdy cloth. “For going into a fight, though. When it counts.”
“I still don’t agree. I’d want my trousers. In fact, if I were waked up out of my bedroll in a night attack, I think I’d go for them before my boots or my bow.”
“But patrollers sleep in their trousers, in camp,” she objected. “Although not in hotels,” she allowed in a tone of pleasurable reminiscence.
“That gives you a measure of importance, then, doesn’t it?” He batted his eyes at her. “I can just picture it, a whole patrol riding out armed to the teeth, all bare-assed. Do you have any idea what the jouncing in those saddles would do to all our tender bits? We’d never make it to the malice.”
“Agh! Now I’m picturing it!’ She bent over, laughing. “Stop! I’ll allow you the trousers.”
“And I’ll thank you with all my heart,” he assured her. “And with my tender bits.” Which made her dissolve into giggles again.
He could not remember when she’d last laughed like this, which sobered him. But he still smiled as he watched her take up her sewing once more. He decided he would very much like to thank her with his tender bits, if only they would get around to reporting for duty again. He sighed and took aim at another hickory shell.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, while he was still recuperating, Fawn’s monthly came on—a bad one, it seemed, alarmingly bloody. Dag, concerned, dragged Mari over to Tent Bluefield for a consultation; she was reassuringly unimpressed, and rattled off a gruesome string of what Dag decided were the female equivalent of old-patroller stories, about Much Worse Things She Had Seen.
“I don’t recall the young women on patrol having this much trouble,” he said nervously, hovering.
Mari eyed him. “That’s because girls with these sorts of troubles gener’lly don’t choose to become patrollers.”
“Oh. Makes sense, I guess…”
Softening, Mari allowed as how Fawn was likely still healing up inside, which from the state of the scars on her neck Dag guessed to be exactly the case, and that the problems should improve over the next months, and even unbent enough to give Fawn a tiny ground reinforcement in the afflicted area.
Dag thought back to his too-few years with Kauneo, how a married man’s life got all wound about in these intimate rhythms, and how they had sometimes annoyed him—till he’d been left to wish for them back. He dealt serenely, wrapping hot stones, and coaxing some of Cattagus’s best elderberry wine out of him and into Fawn, and her pains eased.
At last, one bright, quiet morning, Dag hauled his trunk out under the canopy for a writing desk and took on the task of his letter to Luthlia. At first he thought he would keep it painlessly short, a sentence or two simply locating each bone’s malice kill. He was so much in the habit of concealing the complications of the unintended priming; it seemed so impossible to set it out clearly; and the tale of Fawn and her lost babe seemed too inward a hurt to put before strangers’ eyes. Silence was easier. And yet…silence would seem to deny that a farmer girl had ever had any place in all this. He weighed the smooth shards of Kauneo’s bone in his hand one last time before wrapping them up in a square of good cloth that Fawn had hemmed, and changed his mind.
Instead he wrote out as complete an account of the chain of events, focusing on the knives, as he could manage, most especially not leaving out his belief of how the babe’s ground had found refuge from the malice. It was still so compressed he wasn’t sure but what it sounded incoherent or insane, but it was all the truth as he knew it. When he was done he let Fawn read it before he sealed it with some of Sarri’s beeswax. Her face grew solemn; she handed it back with a brief nod. “That’ll do for my part.”
She helped him wrap up the packet carefully, with an outer cover of deer leather secured by rawhide strings for protection, and he addressed it to Kauneo’s kin, ready for Razi to take up to the courier at patroller headquarters. He fingered the finished bundle, and said slowly, “So many memories…If souls exist, maybe they lie in the track of time we leave behind us. And not out ahead, and that’s why we can’t find them, not even with groundsense. We’re lookin’ in the wrong direction.”
Fawn smiled wryly into his eyes, leaned up, and kissed him soft. “Or maybe they’re right here,” she said.
Fairbolt turned up the next day. Dag had been half-expecting him. They found seats on a pair of stumps out in the walnut grove, out of earshot from the busy campsite.
“Razi says you’re feeling better,” Fairbolt remarked, looking Dag over keenly.
“My body’s moving again, anyway,” Dag allowed. “My groundsense range still isn’t doing too well. I don’t think Hoharie’s notion that it has to come all the way back before I patrol again is right, though. Halfway would be good as most.”
“It’s not about you going back on patrol, for which judgment I’ll be relying on Hoharie and not you, thanks. It’s about your camp council summons. I’ve been holding ’em off on the word that you’re still too injured and ill after Raintree, which is harder to make stick when it’s seen you are up and about. So you can expect it as soon as that Heron Island dredging fracas is sorted out.”
Dag hissed through his teeth. “After Raintree—after all Fawn and I did—they’re still after a camp council ruling against us? Hoharie, and I, and Bryn and Mallora and Ornig would all be dead and buried right now in blighted Bonemarsh if not for Fawn! Not to mention five good makers lost. This, on top of the Glassforge malice—what more could they possibly want from a farmer girl to prove herself worthy?” His outrage was chilled by a ripple of cold reflection—in forty years he had never been able to prove himself worthy, in certain eyes. He’d concluded sometime back that the problem was not in him, it was in those eyes, and no doing of his could ever fix it. Why should any doing of Fawn’s be different?