About a third of the squares had hard wooden pegs stuck in them. Most of them were in groups of sixteen to twenty-five, and Fawn realized she was looking at patrols—some squares were full of little holes as though they might have been lately emptied. Each peg had a name inked onto the side in tiny, meticulous writing, and a number on its end. Some of the pegs had wooden buttons, like coins with holes bored in the middle, hung on them by twisted wires, one or two or sometimes more threaded in a stack. The buttons, too, were numbered.
“Oh!” she said in surprise. “These are all your patrollers!” There must have been five or six hundred pegs in all. She leaned closer to search for names she recognized.
Fairbolt raised his brows. “That’s right. A patrol leader can keep a patrol in mind, but once you get to be a company or camp captain, well, one head can’t hold them all. Or at least, mine can’t.”
“That’s clever! You can see everything all at once, pretty nearly.” She realized she needed to look more closely at Two Bridge Island for names. “Ah, there’s Mari. And Razi and Utau, they’re home with Sarri, oh good. Where’s Dirla?”
“Beaver Sigh,” said Dag, watching her pore over the display. “That’s another island.”
“Mm? Oh, yes, there she is, too. I hope she’s happy. Does she have a regular sweetheart? Or sweethearts? What are the little buttons for?”
Mari answered. “For the patrollers who are carrying sharing knives. Not everyone has one, but every patrol that goes out needs to have two or more.”
“Oh. Yes, that makes sense. Because it wouldn’t do a bit of good to find a malice and have no knife on hand. And you might find another malice, after. Or have an accident.” Dag had spoken with a shudder of the ignominy of accidentally breaking a sharing knife, and now she understood. She hesitated, thinking of her own spectacular, if peculiar, sharing knife accident. “Why are they numbered?”
Dag said, “The camp captain keeps a book with records of the owners and donors, for if a knife is used. To send the acknowledgments to the kinfolk, or know where to send the pieces if they chance to be recovered.”
Fawn frowned. “Is that why the patrollers are numbered, too?”
“Very like. There’s another set of books with all the names and next of kin, and other details someone might want to know about any particular patroller in an emergency. Or when the emergency is over.”
“Mm,” said Fawn, her frown deepening as she pictured this. She set her hands on her hips and peered at the board, imagining all those lives—and deaths—moving over the landscape. “Do you connect the pegs to people’s grounds, like marriage cords? Could you?”
“No,” said Dag.
“Does she always go on like this?” asked Fairbolt. She glanced up to find him staring at her rather as she’d been staring at the patroller board.
“More or less, yes,” said Dag.
“I’m sorry!” Fawn clapped her hand to her mouth in apology. “Did I ask too many questions?”
Fairbolt gave her a funny look. “No.” He reached up and took a peg out of the Missing circle, one of two jutting there. He held it out at arm’s length, squinting briefly at the fine print on the side, and grunted satisfaction. “I suppose this comes off, now.” With surprising delicacy, his thick fingers unwound its wire and teased off one numbered button. The second he frowned at, but twisted back into place. “I never met the Luthlia folks; never got up that way. You be taking care of the honors on this one, Dag?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Thanks.” He held the peg in his palm as if weighing it.
Dag reached up and touched the remaining peg in the red circle. “Still no word of Thel.” It didn’t sound like a question.
“No,” sighed Fairbolt.
“It’s been near two years, Fairbolt,” Mari observed dispassionately. “You could likely take it down.”
“It’s not like the board’s out of room up there, now is it?” Fairbolt sniffed, stared unreadably at Dag, gave the peg in his hand a toss, and bent down and thrust it decisively into the square marked Sick List.
He straightened up and turned back to Dag. “Stop in at the medicine tent. Let me know what they say about the arm. Come see me after you have that talk with Dar.” He made a vague gesture of dismissal, but then added, “Where are you going next?”
“Dar.” Dag added more reluctantly, “Mother.”
Mari snorted. “What are you going to say to Cumbia about that?” She nodded at his arm cord.
Dag shrugged. “What’s to say? I’m not ashamed, I’m not sorry, and I’m not backing down.”
“She’ll spit.”
“Likely.” He smiled grimly. “Want to come watch?”
Mari rolled her eyes. “I think I want to go back out on patrol. Fairbolt, you need volunteers?”
“Always, but not you today. Go along home to Cattagus. Your stray has turned up; you’ve no more excuse to loiter here harassing me.”
“Eh,” she said, whether in agreement or disagreement Fawn could not tell. She cast a vague sort of salute at Fairbolt and Dag, murmured, “Good luck, child,” at Fawn, in a rather-too-ironical voice, and took herself out.
Dag made to follow, but stopped with a look of inquiry when Fairbolt said, “Dag.”
“Sir?”
“Eighteen years ago,” said Fairbolt, “you persuaded me to take a chance on you. I never had cause to regret it.”
Till now? Fawn wondered if he meant to imply.
“I don’t care to defend this in the camp council. See that it doesn’t boil up that high, eh?”
“I’ll try not,” said Dag.
Fairbolt returned a provisional sort of nod, and Fawn followed Dag out.
Missus Captain Crow was gone from the outer room. Outside, the sky had turned a flat gray, the water of the lake a pewter color, and the humidity had become oppressive. As they made their way down the porch steps to where the horses were tied, Dag sighed. “Well. That could have gone worse.”
Fawn recognized her own words tossed back to her, and remembered Dag’s. “Really?”
His lips twitched; it wasn’t much of a smile, but at least it was a real one, and not one of those grimaces with the emphasis on the grim he’d mostly had inside. “Really. Fairbolt could have pulled my peg and chucked it in the fire. Then all my problems would have been not his problems anymore.”
“What, he could have made you not a patroller?”
“That’s right.”
Fawn gasped. “Oh, no! And I said all those mouthy things to him! You should have warned me! But he made me mad, talking over the top of my head.” She added after a moment’s reflection, “You all three did.”
“Mm,” said Dag. He pulled her into his left arm and rested his chin on her curls for a moment. “I imagine so. Things were moving pretty fast there for a while.”
She wondered if the patrollers had all been saying things to one another through their groundsenses that she hadn’t caught. For sure, she felt there was a good deal back there she hadn’t caught.
“As for Fairbolt, you won’t offend him by standing up to him, even if you’re wrong, but especially if you’re right. His back’s broad enough to bear correction. He doesn’t much care for folks who go belly-up to him to his face then whine about it behind his back, though.”
“Well…stands to reason, that.”
“Indeed. You didn’t make a bad impression on him, Spark. In fact, judging from the results, you made a pretty good impression.”
“Well, that’s a relief.” She paused in puzzlement. “What results?”
“He put my peg in the sick box. Still a patroller. The camp council deals with any arguments the families can’t solve, or arguments that come up between clan heads. But any active patroller, the council has to go through the camp captain to deal with. It’s like he’s clan head to all of us. I won’t say Fairbolt will or even can protect me from any consequences of this”—he shrugged his left arm to indicate his marriage cord—“but leastways he’s keeping that possibility open for now.”
Fawn turned to untie the horses, considering this. The tailpiece seemed to be that it was Dag’s job—and hers? — to keep the consequences from getting too out of hand. As she scrambled up on Grace, she saw under some pear trees at a little distance Mari sitting on a trestle table swinging her legs, and Massape Crow on the bench beside her. Mari seemed to be talking heatedly, by the way she was waving her arms, and Massape had her head cocked in apparent fascination. Fawn didn’t think she needed groundsense to guess the subject under discussion, even without the curious glances the pair cast their way.