“Sure. This is the camp where Saun and Reela stayed, right?”
The two were fellow patrollers injured in the Glassforge fight, sent down here as the closest place to convalesce. Saun had been Dag’s own partner; Fawn had made friends of a sort with Reela, laid up in the hotel afterwards with a broken leg. “Yes,” Dag answered.
“Do you have friends here? Or k—” She cut short the last word: kin.
“Well, I’m not sure,” he said, passing over her little stammer. “It’s been a while since I was down this way. Thought I’d go check.” Which was not exactly the reason for his detour, but he was reluctant to discuss the real one in front of Tanner. Especially as Dag himself was doubtful of the result. “I’ll find you two after my errand. Might be a while. Stay by Whit, right?”
“Dag, I don’t need my brother to guard me every minute.”
“Who said it was you I thought needs a keeper?”
She dimpled, taking this in; he cast her a return wink, possibly more cheerful-looking than he felt. The wagons turned right onto the downstream road toward Pearl Bend. Dag wheeled Copperhead around and trotted in the opposite direction.
Across a shallow run and over a rise, he came to the camp’s perimeter and let his groundsense ease open just a hair, to present himself to the gate guard, if any. He felt an inquiring double-flick in return, and raised his eyes to spot not one but a pair of Lakewalkers lingering on a couple of stumps flanking the road. An older man was whittling pegs; a morning’s worth lay piled haphazardly at his feet, and Dag’s nostrils flared with the pleasant tang of new shavings. A young woman worked on weaving willow-withy baskets, but a bow and quiver leaned against a rock within easy reach. Patrollers both, on light camp duty.
Dag drew up Copperhead and nodded. “How de’.”
The man stood. “Good day to you”—a slight hesitation, as he looked Dag up and down—“patroller.” An anxious look crossed his face. “Courier, are you?”
“No, sir, just stopping by. I was hoping you could tell me where to find your camp captain, and who’s holding that post these days.”
The young woman frowned at his hook, wrapped with Copperhead’s reins, and he lowered it a trifle. The man directed Dag to look for Amma Osprey in the third tent to the left past the split oak tree, and Dag, not lingering to get tangled in talk, pressed Copperhead on. A last curious ground-flick touched him. Pass, friend.
Both ease and anxiety knotted in him as he rode by the familiar domestic sights of a Lakewalker camp. Tents peeked through trees, the traditional log structures with hide awnings rolled up on their fourth, open sides, mostly looking southwest to the river. Stands of fruit trees, beehives, homely washing on lines. Smoke rising from chimneys, the smells of cooking and preserving. From a distance, a less pleasant whiff of tanning hides. Half a dozen black-and-white speckled chickens squawked and fluttered across Copperhead’s path, and the horse tossed his head and snorted.
Downslope near the shore, a couple of men were building a good-sized narrow boat on a rack, hammering in pegs. Twenty-five feet long, double-prowed, broad in the middle, clearly meant for the river trade—its boards looked mill-sawn. A few of the newer tent-cabins, too, were built of such planks; the farmers at Pearl Bend or Possum Landing must have put in a sawmill on one of the feeder creeks.
Dag spotted patrol headquarters by the array of hitching posts in front, and the lack of washing and cook-smoke. The four-sided cabin had Glassforge glass windows, presently hooked open on what had to be one of the last warm days of the season. Dag dismounted, tied Copperhead, and let his groundsense dart out once more. Two folks inside right now, both ground-closed; a woman’s voice, sharp, drifted out the open windows.
“If we upped and moved the camp and the ferry a mile upriver—better, five miles—we wouldn’t have these blighted clashes.”
“And lose the rest of the business from the straight road to the Bend’s new ferry? We’re hurting already,” returned another woman, with a rougher, warmer voice. Not young.
“Let it go. We don’t need a wagon road for our patrols and pack trains.”
“Amma, three-fourths of the camp’s coin comes from farmers using our ferry. And flows right back to them. Everything from flour to horseshoe nails comes from the Bend goods-sheds these days.”
“As it should not. Proves my point, I’d say.”
A glum silence fell. When it remained unbroken, Dag stepped up onto the wooden porch and knocked, furling his groundsense more tightly around him.
“Is that you, Verel?” the first voice called. “Come on in. When are you going to let those two—ah.” A tough, tall, strongly built older woman, one haunch half-up on a plank table, wheeled as Dag ducked through the door and touched his hand to his temple in polite greeting. He had no trouble identifying her as the camp’s patrol captain, given her riding trousers, worn leather vest, long steel knife at her belt, and harassed look. The cabin held the usual headquarters clutter of strewn gear, with maps and record books stuffed on overflowing shelves. The other woman, of like age but rather plumper and wearing skirts, might be some clan head; she seemed to bear herself with scarcely less authority.
“Now what?” said the camp captain, in a voice of accumulated exasperation. Her lips began to shape the next query.
“Not a courier, ma’am!” Dag hastened to reassure her, and she let the word fall unvoiced, with a relieved nod. “I’m just passing through. M’ name’s Dag Bluefield.”
This won blank looks from both women. Bluefield was not a Lakewalker name, nor had Dag claimed a camp of origin. Before they could pry into this oddity, he hurried on. “I came about a sharing knife. But I could come back later.”
A look of inexplicable enlightenment crossed the camp captain’s face. “Oh, no, if you witnessed anything, I definitely want it now. Take a seat, we’ll be starting soon.” She waved to a bench along the back wall. “Sorry, I thought you were our medicine maker out there.”
They were at some cross-purpose, it seemed. But before Dag could open his mouth to uncross them, the other woman peered out the window and said, “Ah, here they come. Absent gods, what a sick and sorry pair they look.”
“They’re going to be a lot sicker and sorrier when I’m done with ’em.” Amma Osprey ran a stray strand of gray hair, escaped from the braid at her nape, back over her ear, then folded her arms and her lips equally tightly as the door opened.
Two young men limped through. One was shorter, tawny-haired, and sturdy with muscle. But his right hand was bandaged, and his arm rested in a sling. His fair, square face was bruised. His shirt was clean and didn’t quite fit him—borrowed? — but his trousers were spattered with dried blood. He walked decidedly bent over.
The one who followed was taller, brown-haired, maybe a bit older than his companion, though still very young to Dag’s eyes. His face was even more bruised, one eye swollen shut, lower lip twice its proper size. Beneath his torn shirt his ribs were wrapped in cloth strips. Chicken tracks of black stitches marched up two long cuts on his left arm. His knuckles were swollen and scabbed, though he gingerly helped himself along with a stick in his right hand.
Two patrollers who’d lost a fight last night, obviously. To each other? They collected equally cold and silent glowers from the two women as they shuffled into line. The tawny youth made one attempt at a winning smile, wilting swiftly as the scowls deepened. Dag squinted in curiosity. He really ought to excuse himself and go. Instead, he sank back on his bench like a hunter lying up in tall grass, silent and unnoticeable.
Amma Osprey began curtly, “Not the least of your offenses is that I had to pull two of your comrades off their camp leaves this morning to take your places in patrol. You can remember to apologize to them, too, when they get back.”
Dag had done that in his time, cut his camp rest short in order to fill in for a sick or injured or bereaved patroller.