“I don’t do sheep,” said Barr distantly.
“No, only boat bosses,” said Whit, which resulted in a chilly silence for a time. The moonlit woods slid slowly past, silvered and remarkably featureless.
“I’m getting blisters,” Whit complained. “How much farther?”
“Well, we’re looking for a sheep pasture that comes right down to the water,” said Fawn.
“What if the sheep are in the fold for the night?” said Whit. “There are lots of pastures that come down to the water. We’ve been passing ’em for days.”
Fawn was quiet.
“Do you even know which one we’re looking for?” asked Barr.
“Er…well…not really.”
“Fawn!” protested Whit. “It could have been any farm for the last twenty miles—or more! Likely more—stands to reason Wain wouldn’t stop too close, in case that farmer figured out he’d been diddled and came after ’em.”
“I’m not rowing any twenty miles!” said Barr.
The mutiny was unanimous. The skiff put in at the first likely-looking pasture it came to, and Barr and Whit united to heave the bleating cargo overboard. The sheep cantered off a few paces and clustered to glower ungratefully back at their rescuers. Whit yanked Fawn back into the boat and turned it downstream.
“I sure hope they find a smarter owner,” she muttered.
“Yeah, sheep, don’t bother thanking us for saving your lives or anything,” Whit called sarcastically, turning and waving.
“Whit, they’re sheep,” said Fawn. “You can’t expect gratitude. You just…know you did the right thing, is all.”
“Just like f—” Barr began, and abruptly shut up. Fawn shot him a suspicious look. After a moment, he said instead, “They sure did stink. Who’s cleaning up this boat?”
“Not me,” said Whit.
“Somebody’ll have to,” said Barr. “I mean…evidence.”
“I will take care of it,” said Fawn through her teeth.
Lovely moonlight and less lovely silence fell. They came in sight of the Fetch in about a third of the time it had taken them to labor upstream.
“Thank you both,” said Fawn gruffly. “Even if I couldn’t make it right, it seems less wrong now. I couldn’t have done it without your help.”
“I’ll remember that,” said Whit.
“Don’t you two un-sheep-stealers go congratulating each other too soon,” said Barr, with a nod toward the Fetch. Fawn followed his glance and went still to see Dag sitting cross-legged on the roof in the moonlight, gazing upstream.
“Crap,” said Whit.
“Though I’m suddenly glad you’re here, Whit,” muttered Barr. “To prevent misunderstandings and all.” He glanced circumspectly at Fawn.
Fawn thought the greater fear might be perfectly correct understandings, actually. As the skiff eased alongside the flatboat, Dag dropped down to the back deck to catch the painter-rope Fawn tossed up to him.
He sniffed, and inquired dryly, “Nice boat ride?”
“Uh-huh,” said Fawn, staring up in defiance.
“Whit, Barr…you look a mite sheepish, one could say.”
“No, we only smell it,” muttered Whit.
“It wasn’t my doing!” Barr blurted.
Dag’s lips twisted up. “This time, Barr, I believe you.”
He leaned down to give them each a hand up in turn, and oversee the skiff properly tied.
Whit said uneasily, “Are you going to turn us in?”
“Who to? They weren’t my sheep.” He added after a moment, “Or yours.”
Barr breathed stealthy relief, and Dag shepherded Fawn firmly to bed.
He actually kept his face straight until he had a pillow stuffed over it. The chortles that then leaked through had Fawn poking him. “Stop that!”
It took a while till he quieted down.
The Fetch left its mooring soon after dawn, when the Snapping Turtle’s bleary crew were just beginning to search the nearby woods for their escaped mutton. The sweep-men draped on their oars maintained just enough motion to give steering way to the rudder, and sometimes not even that. Even Berry seemed content to drift at the river’s pace. Despite being as cotton-headed from lack of sleep as everyone else was from other excesses, Fawn kept strong tea coming, and as the morning wore on folks slowly recovered.
The river’s pace picked up abruptly around noon, when a great brown flood swept in from the right, and the current grew rolling.
“That’s not the Gray already, is it?” Fawn asked Berry, startled, when she looked out her moving kitchen window to find the shore grown alarmingly distant.
“Nope,” said Berry, in a tone of satisfaction, and took another swig of tea. “That’s the Beargrass River. It swings up through Raintree to Farmer’s Flats. We’re three-fourths of the way from Tripoint to the Confluence now! They must have had heavy storms in Raintree this past week—I haven’t often seen the Beargrass this high.”
“Do boats go on it?” Fawn peered some more.
“Sure. All the way to Farmer’s Flats, which is the head of navigation, pretty much. Which is why the town is where it is, I ’spect. The Beargrass is almost as busy as the Grace.”
Blighted Greenspring had lain on one of the Beargrass’s upper tributaries, as Fawn recalled soberly. Bonemarsh Camp, too. Last summer’s grim campaign against the malice had all played out north of the big town of Farmer’s Flats; the disruption hadn’t reached down here. Dag might thank the absent gods, but Fawn thought the thanks were better due to Dag.
With the addition of the Beargrass, the Grace nearly topped its banks, and in some places overflowed them. Some of the lower-lying islands were drowned already, bare trees sticking up from the water as if growing out of a lake, except that the lake was moving sideways at a fair clip. Fawn sometimes saw animals trapped up the island trees; possums and raccoons, of course, a couple of black bears, and once, excitingly, a catamount, quite close. They passed a wild pig swimming strongly in the current, and the men aboard were barely restrained from trying to hunt it from the boat. Floating wrack either lodged on or broke loose dangerously from towheads, those accumulations of trees and logs at the top ends of the islands that from a distance resembled, the boatmen said, the unruly locks of a fair-haired boy, hence the name Beargrass.
Toward evening, Berry put two men on each sweep to fight the unwieldy Fetch in to shore. As they were tying up in the lee of a bend, a peculiar arrangement floated past in the dusk: two flatboats lashed together side by side. The crew apparently struggled in vain to steer this lumbering rig, because it was slowly spinning in the current.
Out on the back deck, Bo called across the water for them to break up and tie to shore before dark, but the men on the double-boat either didn’t hear or didn’t understand; their return cries were unintelligible.
“Why’d they fix their boats together like that?” asked Fawn curiously, coming out to look.
“I expect because they’re fool Raintree boys who don’t know a thing about the river and have got no business being on it,” said Bo, and spat over the side for emphasis.
“For company, maybe, or not to lose each other in the dark. It likely made ’em feel safer, out on this big river,” said Whit slowly. “Even the Fetch is starting to look pretty small.”
“Do you see why it don’t make ’em safer?” said Berry.
“Oh, I do!” said Fawn excitedly, staring after the receding Raintree flatties.
Berry grinned. “I bet you do. Now wait for Whit.”
Whit squinted into the dusk and said slowly, “They’re trying to move twice the weight with half the oars.”
Fawn nodded vigorously.
“That’s right,” said Berry, straightening in satisfaction. “We may make a riverman of you yet.”
Whit smiled blindingly at her. “I sure hope so.”
She smiled back involuntarily; not her usual wry grin, but something unwitting and almost unwilling. She rubbed her lips and shook her head. “And to top it, they’re running at night. Unless they got themselves their very own Lakewalker aboard, not too bright, I’m afraid.” She leaned on the back rail and stared down the river, her eyes growing grave and gray in the gathering gloom. Fawn barely heard her mutter: “Papa was no fool country boy. So what happened?”