Berry glanced fore and aft to the Fetch’s two exits, and its generous pair of windows. “I see. You boys make those boats yourselves?”
“Not exactly. I bought ’em from a widow woman whose man was killed in that ruckus in north Raintree this summer. Seemed a way to help her out. He’d been in my company, was how it was.” He took another swig and continued, “I scrambled over to our dipping hatch, but it was plain to see it was too small for me. But with the river pouring in, it was plainer it was go through it or be drowned, and my papa always said I was born to be hanged, so I chucked out my good ash spear, stuck my arms through, and yelled for Bearbait and the fellows to grab me and pull with all their might or I was a goner.”
The man with the battered hat—Dag trusted that Bearbait was a nickname—nodded earnestly. “We didn’t so much pull, as just hang on tight and let the boat get yanked off around you. I was mainly thinking how much I didn’t want to go back to your wife and explain how you was drownded, after all that. She being strongly not in favor of this whole scheme in the first place,” he added aside to Fawn, who nodded perfect understanding.
“That little hatch scraped off my shirt and skinned me like a rabbit, but they got me through!” Chicory beamed around at his crew, who grinned back despite their fatigue. “We all scrambled onto the towhead before the second boat went after the first, and spent part of the night clinging to the wrack like wet possums, till it started to break up, too. Then we waded back and found some trees that were right-side-up and not moving. You know, I suppose I should have been glum, having lost my boats and lading and all my trouble, not to mention my clothes and skin, but I felt prime, up in that fine tree. Every once in a while I’d break out chuckling. Couldn’t help it. It felt so good to be breathing air and not river.” He sighed. “I don’t suppose I’ll ever see my poor boats again.”
“You never know,” said Berry. “If they weren’t busted to pieces when they went under the towhead, sometimes they come up again all waterlogged and get picked up downstream by folks. What was your cargo?”
“Barrel staves, mostly, and bear and pig hides. Kegs of bear grease and lard. I don’t care for the staves, but I regret the other. A passel of bears and pigs, those were, and not easily come by.” He glanced at his ash spear, leaning in a corner.
“Your staves would likely be too warped to be anything but firewood, later, and the hides, well, it’ll depend on how long they soak, and if they can be dried again without going moldy. Some of your kegs might make it, if they’re good and tight.”
Chicory brightened at this news; his partner Bearbait looked less enthusiastic.
Fawn finished washing and drying the wounds, then traded places with Dag, who bent in for a close inspection with both eye and ground-sense. Dag reported, “You’re well gouged and scraped, and your joints are wrenched sore, but nothing’s dislocated or broken. Bleed pretty freely last night, did you?”
“He was a sight,” confirmed Bearbait. “I was ready to bust him in the jaw for laughing like that while looking like that.”
“But the bleeding’s mostly stopped on its own, now.” Dag gently worked out a few deep splinters with his ghost hand and tweezers. “The rips are too ragged to make stitching you up worthwhile, I think.” He fingered a hanging ribbon of skin, considered whether to detach it with knife or scissors, then, on impulse, ripped its ground crossways in a slice as thin as paper. The strip fell away into his hand; he pitched it into the fire. “Did that hurt?”
“What?” said Chicory, trying to crane his sore neck to see over his shoulder.
The tiny bit of the Raintree man’s ground in his own felt little different than a normal ground reinforcement; not even as odd as a mosquito or an oat. Dag removed the other two bad strips the same way, trying for as fine a slice as he could. They did not bleed. Better stop here and think about this one, eh? “You’re going to have scars there.”
Chicory snorted indifference. “I’ve done worse to myself.”
Dag didn’t doubt it. “Give me your say-so, and I’ll put a little Lakewalker-style ground reinforcement in the deepest gouges to fight infection, which is the biggest danger left. Then have Fawn put some ointment on and wrap them up so the scabs don’t crack when you move. In a few days, a clean shirt should be enough to protect them while they finish healing.”
Chicory’s brows arched wryly. “If I had a shirt, I could wash it, sure, if I had a bucket. And soap.” He hesitated. “What’s that thing you say you want to put in me?”
Fawn translated, “A touch of Lakewalker magic healing.”
“Oh.” Chicory looked both impressed and alarmed. “That’d be a new start, for sure. All right…” He craned suspiciously as Dag laid in lines of ground, but his lips parted as his hurts eased. “How de’! That’s a strange thing. Never had a Lakewalker offer me anything like that before!”
“I aim to be a medicine maker to farmers, once I learn more of the trade,” Dag explained. “It isn’t anything anyone’s done before.”
“Mighty strange place, this big river,” sighed Chicory.
Plans were made to deliver the boatwrecked men to a town two days down the river, where Chicory hoped to find an old friend who would help them to shoes, clothes, and enough gear to commence walking home. Meanwhile, Berry undertook to watch for signs of their lost boats. The exhausted men slept in piles and didn’t wake again until the Fetch tied to the bank for the night and Fawn had to clear the decks of her kitchen to start supper.
Dag wasn’t sure if he wanted to wrap a cloak of husbandly protection around Fawn, or clutch her to him like a talisman against such a concentration of strange farmers. Just who was supposed to be protecting whom? But with fifteen people crammed aboard the Fetch, privacy—not to mention private conversation—was out of the question.
Dag quickly learned that Chicory’s crew were mainly his friends and neighbors from a small town on a feeder creek to the lower Beargrass, southwest of Farmer’s Flats and so not in the direct path of last summer’s horrors, news both Dag and Fawn took in with relief—his covert, hers warmly expressed. Chicory had acquired his tag of Captain by getting up a troop of local volunteers to go help out when the troubles began, when the malice had grown advanced enough to kidnap and mind-slave Raintree farmers, marching them to attack other settlements in turn. By the looks they exchanged, Barr and Remo were inclined to mock this self-appointed rank; Dag, the more he listened, was not.
Ford Chicory proved to be an excellent tale-teller. He was no blowhard like Boss Wain; his place at the center of his tales was as often as the butt of the joke as the hero, but he had a knack for holding his listeners in thrall either way. After dinner, aware of his audience and perhaps in return for the boat’s hospitality, he even told a creepy ghost story that had both Hawthorn and Hod bug-eyed and half of the crew pretending not to be.
Tales now being as readily exchanged as coins in a dice game, everyone clustered around the hearth as Chicory and his crew learned in turn about Berry’s quest, Dag and Fawn’s West Blue marriage, and—inevitably, Dag supposed—Dag’s place in the campaign against the Raintree malice. Dag did not willingly volunteer his words, but with Fawn, Whit, the crew of the Fetch, and once in a while even Barr and Remo chiming in, he didn’t need to do much more than adjust their Dag-tales for overenthusiasm. As the Raintree men’s picture of him shifted from itinerant medicine maker to ex—patrol captain, they grew warier—Dag could not decide if this was a relief or an annoyance—but Chicory’s attention sharpened.