Her sharpening cramps almost doubled her over when she tried to rise; he gave her a hand up. She stuffed the pouch and rolled sleeve in her shirt. Leaning on each other, they staggered for the light.
“What about the mud-men? Won’t they jump us again?” asked Fawn fearfully as they came out on the path overlooking the dead ravine.
“No. It’s all over for them when their malice dies. They go back to their animal minds—trapped in those made-up human bodies. They usually panic and run. They don’t do too well, after. We kill them for mercy when we can. Otherwise, they die on their own pretty quick. Horrible, really.”
“Oh.”
“The men whose minds the malice has seized, its fog lifts from them, too.
They revert.”
“A malice enslaves men, too?”
“When its powers grow more advanced. I think this one might have, for all it was still in its first molt.”
“And they’ll… be freed? Wherever they may be?”
“Sometimes freed. Sometimes go mad. Depends.”
“On what?”
“On what they’ve been doing betimes. They remember, d’you see.”
Fawn wasn’t entirely sure she did. Or wished to.
The air was warm, but the sun was setting through bare branches, as though winter had become untimely mixed with summer. “This day has been ten years long,” Dag sighed. “Got to get me off this bad ground. My horse is too far away to summon. Think we’ll take those.” He pointed to two horses tied to trees near the creek and led her down the zigzag path toward them. “I don’t see any gear.
Can you ride bareback?”
“Usually, but right now I feel pretty sick,” Fawn admitted. She was still shaking, and she felt cold and clammy. Her breath drew in as another violent cramp passed through her. That is not good. That is something very wrong. She had thought herself fresh out of fear, a year’s supply used up, but now she was not so sure.
“Huh. Think you’d be all right if I held you in front of me?”
The unpleasant memory of her ride with the bandit this morning—had it only been this morning? Dag was right, this day was a decade—flashed through her mind.
Don’t be stupid. Dag is different. Dag, on the whole, was different from any other person she’d ever met in her life. She gulped. “Yeah. I… yeah, probably.”
They arrived at the horses, Fawn stumbling a little. Dag ran his hand over them, humming to himself in a tuneless way, and turned one loose after first filching its rope, shooing it off. It trotted away as if glad to be gone. The other was a neat bay mare with black socks and a white star; he fastened the rope to her halter to make reins and led her to a fallen log. He kept trying to use his left limb to assist, wincing, then remembering, which, among all Fawn’s other hurts, made her heart ache strangely.
“Can you get yourself up, or do you need a boost?”
Fawn stood whitely. “Dag?” she said in a small, scared voice.
His head snapped around at her tone, and tilted attentively. “What?”
“I’m bleeding.”
He walked back to her. “Where? Did they cut you? I didn’t see…”
Fawn swallowed hard, thinking that her face would be scarlet if only it had not been green. In an even smaller voice, she choked out, “Between… between my legs.”
The loopy glee that had underlain his expression ever since the killing of the malice was wiped away as if with a rag. “Oh.” And he did not seem to require a single further word of explanation, which was a good thing, as well as being amazing in a man, because Fawn was out of everything. Words. Courage. Ideas.
He took a deep breath. “We still have to get off this ground. Deathly place. have to get you, get you someplace else. Away from here. We’ll just go a little faster, is all. You’re going to have to help me with this. Help each other.”
It took two tries and considerable awkwardness, but they both managed to get aboard the bay mare at last, thankfully a placid beast. Fawn sat not astride but sideways across Dag’s lap, legs pressed together, head to his left shoulder, arm around his neck, leaving his right hand free for the reins. He chirped to the horse and started them off at a brisk walk.
“Stay with me, now,” he murmured into her hair. “Do not let go, you hear?”
The world was spinning, but under her ear she could hear a steady heartbeat.
She nodded dolefully.
Chapter 5
By the time they arrived at the deserted valley farm, both the back of Fawn’s skirt and the front of Dag’s trousers were soaked in too-bright blood.
“Oh,” said Fawn in a mortified voice, when he’d swung her down from the horse and slid after her. “Oh, I’m sorry.”
Dag raised what he hoped was an admirably calm eyebrow. “What? It’s just blood, Little Spark. I’ve dealt with more blood in my time than you have in your whole bitty body.” Which was where this red tide should be, blast and blight it. I will not panic. He wanted to swing her up in his arms and carry her inside, but he did not trust his strength. He had to keep moving, or his own battered body would start to stiffen. He wrapped his right arm around her shoulders instead, and, leaving the horse to fend for itself, aimed her up the porch steps.
“Why is this happening?” she said, so low and breathy and plaintive he wasn’t sure if it was to him or herself.
He hesitated. Yes, she was young, but surely—“Don’t you know?”
She glanced up at him. The bruise masking the left side of her face was darkening to purple, the gouges scabbing over. “Yes,” she whispered. She steadied her voice by sheer force of will, he thought. “But you seem to know so much. I was hoping you might… have a different answer. Stupid of me.”
“The malice did something to you. Tried to.” Courage failing, he looked away from her gaze to say, “It stole your baby’s ground. It would have used it in its next molt, but we killed it first.” And I was too late to stop it. Five blighted minutes, if he had only been five blighted minutes quicker… Yes, and if he’d only been five blighted seconds quicker, once, he’d still have a left hand, and he’d been down that road and back up it enough times to be thoroughly tired of the scenery. Peace. If he had arrived at the lair very much sooner, he might have missed her entirely.
But what had happened to his spare sharing knife, in that terrible scramble?
It had been empty, but now he would swear it was primed, and that should not have happened. Take on your disasters one at a time, old patroller, or you’ll lose your trail. The knife could wait. Fawn could not.
“Then… then it’s too late. To save. Anything.”
“It’s never too late to save something,” he said sternly. “Might not be what you wanted, is all.” Which was certainly something he needed to hear, every day, but was not exactly pertinent to her present need, now was it? He tried again, because he did not think his heart or hers could bear confusion on this point.
“She’s gone. You’re not. Your next job is to” survive this night “get better.
After that, we’ll see.”
The twilight was failing as they stepped into the gloomy shadows of the farmhouse kitchen, but Dag could see it was a different mess than before.
“This way,” Fawn said. “Don’t step in the jam.”
“Ah, right.”
“There’s some candle stubs around. Up over the hearth, there’s some more. Oh, no, I can’t lie there, I’ll stain the ticks.”
“Looks flat enough to me, Little Spark. I do know you should be lying down.
I’m real sure of that.” Her breathing was too rapid and shallow, her skin far too clammy, and her ground had a bad gray tinge that went hand in hand with grave damage, in his unpleasant experience.
“Well… well, find something, then. For in between.”
Now was not, definitely not, the time to argue with female irrationality.
“Right.”
He poked up the faint remains of the fire, fed it with some wood chips, and lit two wax stubs, one of which he left on the hearth for her; the other he took with him for a quick exploration. A couple of those chests and wardrobes upstairs had still had things in them, he dimly recalled. A patroller should be resourceful. What did the girl most need? A miscarriage was a natural enough process, even if this one was most unnaturally triggered; women survived them all the time, he was fairly sure. He just wished they had discussed them more, or that he had listened more closely. Lie flat, check, they’d got that far.
Make her comfortable? Cruel joke… peace. He supposed she’d be more comfortable cleaned up than filthy; at any rate, he’d always been grateful for that when recovering from a serious injury. What, you can’t fix the real problem, so you’ll fix something else instead? And which of you is this supposed to aid?
Peace. And a bucket and an unfouled well, with luck.
It took more time than he’d have liked, during which to his swallowed aggravation she insisted on lying on the blighted kitchen floor, but he eventually assembled a clean gownlike garment, rather too large for her, some old mended sheets, an assortment of rags for pads, actual soap, and water. In a moment of ruthless inspiration, he broke through her reticence by persuading her to wash his hand first, as though he needed help.
She still had the shakes, which she seemed to take for residual fear but which he recognized as one with the chilled skin and grayness in her ground, and which he treated by piling on whatever blanket-like cloths he could find, and building up the fire. The last time he’d seen a woman coiled around her belly that hard, a blade had penetrated almost to her spine. He heated a stone, wrapped it in cloth, and gave it to Fawn to clutch to herself, which to his relief seemed finally to help; the shakes faded and her ground lightened. Eventually, she was arranged all tidy and sweet and patient-like, her curl around the stone relaxing as she warmed, blinking up at him in the candlelight as he sat cross-legged beside the tick.
“Did you find any clothes you could use?” she asked. “Though I suppose you’d be lucky to find a fit.”
“Haven’t looked, yet. Got spares in my saddlebags. Which are on my horse.
Somewhere. If I’m lucky, my patrol will find him and bring him along sometime.
They had better be looking for me by now.”
“If you could find something else to wear, I bet I could wash those tomorrow.
I’m sorry that—”
“Little Spark,” he leaned forward, his ragged voice cracking, “do not apologize to me for this.”
She recoiled.
He regained control. “Because, don’t you see, a crying patroller is a very embarrassing sight. M’ face gets all snivelly and snotty. Combine that with this blue eye I’ve got starting, and it’d be like to turn your stomach. And then there’d just be another mess to clean up, and we don’t want that now, do we.”
He tweaked her nose, which was on the whole an insane thing to do to a woman who’d just saved the world, but it worked to break her bleak mood; she smiled wanly.
“All right, we’re making great progress here, you know. Food, what about food?”
“I don’t think I could, yet. You go ahead.”
“Drink, then. And no arguments with me about that one, I know you need to drink when you’ve lost blood.” Are losing blood. Still. Too much, too fast. How long was it supposed to go on?
Candlelight explorations in the rather astonishing cellar yielded a box of dried sassafras; uncertain of the unknown well water, he boiled some up for tea and dosed them both. He was thirstier than he’d thought, and set Fawn an example, which she followed as docilely as a naive young patroller. Why, why do they do whatever you tell them like that? Except when they didn’t, of course.
He sat against the wall facing her, legs stretched out, and sipped some more.
“There would be more I could do for you on the inside, patroller tricks with my groundsense, if only…”
“Groundsense.” She uncurled a little more and regarded him gravely. “You said you’d tell me about that.”
He blew out his breath, wondering how to explain it to a farmer girl in a way she wouldn’t take wrong. “Groundsense. It’s a sense of… everything around us. What’s alive, where it is, how it’s doing. And not just what’s alive, though that’s brightest. No one quite knows if the world makes ground, or ground makes the world, but ground is what a malice sucks out to sustain itself, the loss of which kills everything around its air. In the middle of a really bad patch of blight, not only is everything once alive now dead, even rocks don’t hold their form. Ground’s what groundsense senses.”
“Magic?” she said doubtfully.
He shook his head. “Not the way farmers use the term. It’s not like getting something for nothing. It’s just the way the world is, deep down.” He forged on against her frankly blank look. “We use words from sight and touch and the other senses to describe it, but it isn’t like any of those things, really. It’s like how you know… Close your eyes.”
She raised her brows at him in puzzlement, but did so.
“Now. Which way is down? Point.”
Her thumb rotated toward the floor, and the big brown eyes opened again, still puzzled.
“So how did you know? You didn’t see down.”
“I…” She hesitated. “I felt it. With my whole body.”
“Groundsense is something more like that. So.” He sipped more tea; the warm spice soothed his throat. “People are the most complicated, brightest things groundsense sees. We see each other, unless we close it down to block the distraction. Like shutting your eyes, or wrapping a lantern up in a cloak.
You can—Lakewalkers can—match our body’s ground to someone else’s body’s ground.
If you get the match up really close, almost like slipping inside each other, you can lend strength, rhythm… help with wounds, slow bleeding, help with when a hurt body starts to go all wrong down into that cold gray place. Lead the other back to balance. Did something like that for a patroller boy last—ye gods, last night? Saun. I have to stop thinking of him as Saun the Sheep, it’s going to slip out my mouth someday, and he’ll never forgive me, but anyway. Bandit whaled him in the chest with a sledgehammer during the fight, broke ribs, stunned his heart and lungs. I whacked my ground into a match with his right quick, persuaded his to dance with mine. It was all a bit brutal, but I was in a hurry.”