“You can’t know that,” soothed Vayve. “I believe that knife you took with you was quite old as well, wasn’t it? Their fates might simply have been reversed.”
“Then maybe I should have taken both.” But Neeta’s hands unclenched, and she sighed. She added wryly, “I just don’t know when I’ll have a chance at another, is all. All of my tent-kin are disgustingly healthy.”
Patroller humor, but Tavia put in more seriously, “No one ever wants to share around here. Nobody in my tent will give me a primed knife because nobody even has one. Mama won’t even give me permission to bond to a blank! She says I’m much too young. Neeta claims that in Luthlia, they say if you’re old enough to patrol, you’re old enough to pledge!”
In Oleana, too. Dag thought of his patroller cousin who’d shared at age nineteen. Much too young. Both sides in this argument seemed right to Dag, which wrung his brain a bit. Or maybe it was his heart.
Bestirring himself to give the young patroller’s mind a more hopeful turn, Dag inquired, “So, will you be patrol leader tomorrow? ”
“Not yet,” Neeta said glumly, then added, “But our camp captain promised me the next place to open up.”
“How many patrols does New Moon Cutoff field? ”
“Eight, when we’re at full strength.” She frowned at him. “You’re a funny fellow. Those Oleana boys say you’re obsessed with farmers.”
“You should stop by Arkady’s place and talk with my wife Fawn,” said Dag, driven to dryness by her tone. “You could compare malice kills. She slew one, too, did Barr or Remo tell you that? Up near Glassforge.”
And it wasn’t a mere sessile.
Her nose wrinkled. “It sounded pretty garbled. You had to lend her your knife, didn’t you? ”
Dag tilted his head. “We’re all lent our knives, in the end.”
“But she can never share in return.”
And glad I am of it. But even that was only half true. The strange tale of Fawn’s lost babe was nothing he wanted to repeat here, if the boys had actually had the wit to keep it close. “Many Lakewalkers never share, either-weren’t you just now complaining of that? ”
Dag had, he realized, an audience of three, far from warm, but bemused enough by this upcountry stranger to not bolt. Neeta had taken the last seat, Tavia leaned comfortably against one of the porch posts, and Vayve seemed in no hurry to return to whatever task he’d interrupted. He swallowed, and swung abruptly into what he’d come to think of as the ballad of Greenspring, much as he’d explained it to Arkady, and to dozens before him. Dag’s words were growing all too smooth-polished with use, but, he hoped, not so glib as to fail to carry the weight of his horror. By the time he came to his description of the children’s burial trench, his listeners’ eyes were dark with pity, though their mouths stayed tight.
“Your answer’s simple enough, it seems to me,” said Neeta, when he at last ran down. “Chase all your farmers back south of the Grace. Not that we want them.”
“You ever try to run a farmer off his land? There’s nothing simple about it,” said Dag.
“That part’s too true,” said Vayve. “A hundred years back, New Moon folks still used to change camps, winter and summer. Then it got so that if you left your land for a season, you’d come back to find it cleared, plowed, and planted. We finally had to hold our territory by sitting on it, dividing tents between here and Moss River. And send folks from the camp council down to Graymouth and get lines drawn on pieces of farmer paper to say we owned it! Absurd!”
“The cost to us of teaching farmers is nothing to the cost everyone will pay if we don’t,” said Dag stubbornly.
“In your north country, maybe,” said Tavia.
“Everywhere. We have to begin where we are, with whatever piece we have in front of us. Never miss a chance to befriend and teach- there’s a task anyone can start.”
Vayve made a little gesture at Dag’s upper arm, the wedding cord beneath his jacket sleeve unconcealed from her groundsense. She said dryly, “I’d say you took befriending a bit far, Oleana man.”
Not nearly far enough, yet. Dag sighed, rose, touched his brow politely.
“I’ll check back about those bone blanks. Good day, ma’am. Patrollers.”
–-
Over the next week Dag grew increasingly absorbed by the work in the medicine tent. Not that he hadn’t been in and out of the hands of the makers plenty before, but this shift in his angle of view, looking down the throats of such varied problems, made a bigger difference than he’d have guessed. As a patroller, he’d never visited the medicine tent except as a last resort; now, as part of that last resort, he found himself not only understanding, but actually reciting, that annoying maker chant of Why didn’t you come in sooner?
A half-dozen folks a day turned up with minor ailments or injuries, although once a man was carried in with a broken leg, and a day later, more interesting and much more difficult, an aged woman with a broken hip. Still more delicate was a woman with an ugly tumor in her breast, which Arkady was treating daily by pinching off its blood supply, tiny vessel by tiny vessel. His explanation of why he didn’t try to destroy it by ground-ripping gave Dag chills-tumor ground could be nearly as toxic as malice spatter, it appeared. Arkady began taking Dag with him on his daily round of tent visits, too, although Dag was uncertain how he’d earned this advancement, since though he might fetch, carry, or hold, he was still not allowed to do even the simplest groundwork.
The old casebooks packed on the shelves, once Challa taught him how to interpret them, proved unexpectedly gripping. They reminded Dag of patrol logs: stained, tattered, with terrible handwriting and baffling abbreviations. But also like patrol logs, the more he read the more he began to see what was between the lines as well as what was on them. The folks trickling into the tent showed Dag how the makers treated some complaints; the books taught him about things he hadn’t yet seen, and so he squinted at their pages daily till the light failed. With his late start as a maker’s apprentice, he felt urgent to catch up any way he could, and he overcame his halting north-country tongue to ask Challa and Arkady as many questions as Fawn might.
His head was bursting with it all when he came back to Arkady’s place one midafternoon for a forgotten bundle of tooth-extraction tools, to find Fawn curled weeping in their bedroll. He lowered himself beside her as she sat up, hastily drying her eyes and pretending to yawn. “Oh, you’re back! I was just having a nap. It always makes me all rumpled and funny-looking, sleeping in the daytime.” But her smile lacked its dimple, and her big brown eyes were bleak.
“Spark, what’s wrong?” He ran his thumb gently down the moist tracks from her eyes.
“Nothing.” She shook her dark curls, abandoning, to his relief, her shaky subterfuge. “I’m just… being stupid, I guess.”
“It’s not nothing. Because you’re not stupid. Tell me. You can tell me anything, can’t you?” He hoped so. Because here, so far from home and kin, he was all she had.
She sniffed dolefully, considered this, nodded. “I’m just… it’s just… it’s all right at night, when you come back and talk to me, but it’s been so quiet all day since Barr and Remo left. And I ran out of things to do.” She waved her empty hands. “I finished sewing the last of the drawers, and I ran out of yarn for socks, and there’s not even any cooking or cleaning, because Arkady’s neighbor women do all that. It’s too gray and cold to sit outside, so I just sit in here, and, and do nothing. Which isn’t as much fun as I’d ’a thought.” She rubbed her face, then said in a lower voice, “I can’t possibly be homesick for West Blue, because I don’t want to go back there. Maybe it’s just my monthly coming on. You know how that makes me cranky.”
He bent and kissed her damp temple, contemplating both her notions.
It was perfectly possible, as he well knew, to be homesick for a place one didn’t want to go back to. And her monthly was indeed coming on. All true, he thought, but incomplete. “Poor Spark!” He lifted her hands one by one and kissed them, which made her gulp and sniff again.