Arkady chewed his thumb and said little, watching his protege getting turned on this spit, and sometimes spitting back. He studied the faces of the council quorum, and only winced now and then. It was plain that he wished Dag would take a more compromising tone. It was plain to Fawn that Dag wasn’t going to waste such a captive audience.
He sure didn’t sound like he had a mouth full of pebbles tonight.
At length, the circle broke up to seek desserts. And, judging from the bent heads, to exchange franker opinions privately.
Dag murmured to Arkady, “Any objection if Fawn and I slip away early? ”
Arkady pursed his lips. “No, in fact. That would be fine. I need to stay awhile and talk to some folks.”
Dag nodded. Fawn refused to go without thanking Missus Bullrush properly, but once that duty was done, she allowed him to lead her off.
They stopped by patrol headquarters to check on their horses, idling in the paddock there eating New Moon’s fodder since their arrival, then continued down the shore road in the darkening chill.
“So,” Fawn said hesitantly. “What was that all about? ”
Dag scratched his head gently with his hook. “I’m not just sure. We were being inspected, right enough. You’d think they could come to the medicine tent for that.”
“Do you think they’re deciding whether to let us stay for your two years? ”
“Maybe.” He chewed his lip. “Maybe more.”
“Dag Bluefield New Moon Cutoff? ” She shaped the name in her mouth. Camp names didn’t just tell your place of residence. If you bore one, it marked you a member of some greater whole, and even after the better part of a year trailing after Dag, Fawn didn’t know all the subtleties that implied. “Is that… something you would like? ”
“Strange,” he sighed. “At the end of last summer, that could have been the sum of my ambitions. It was exactly what I wanted from Hoharie. Train up as a medicine maker together with you, serve in camp. Let my tired feet rest from patrolling. But Hoharie choked on you, and that was the end of it. I think I’ve made it clear enough to these New Moon folks that we come as partners or not at all-they won’t make her mistake.”
“I wonder what mistake they will make? ”
He snorted. “Hard to say, Spark.” His strong, dry hand found hers, and her cold little fingers stole warmth from it gratefully. “I do know Arkady’s not keen on spending two years of his time training me up as a groundsetter just to have me go off north and treat farmers. If I-we- became members of this camp, we’d have to abide by camp rules and discipline.”
“We? ”
He sucked a fortifying breath through his nose. “Wouldn’t that be something to have done, though? For the first time ever, get a farmer girl accepted as a full-fledged member of a Lakewalker camp? ”
“Would they? ”
“I wouldn’t stay for less. I hope I made that plain.”
Fawn rather thought he had. Her brows scrunched. She felt rattled, and she suspected he did, too. This offer-if it got made-wasn’t anything she’d ever expected or planned on, but then, nothing about her life since she’d met Dag had been anything that she could have imagined back when she’d first fled West Blue. My whole life is an accident. But some of her accidents had been happy far beyond her dreams, and she had surely chosen to put herself in the way of both good and bad, when she’d first set foot to the road. Am I Dag’s greatest accident, too?
At Arkady’s place Dag lit a lantern against the cool gloom, smiled slowly, and observed, “Seems we have the house to ourselves.”
The gold glint in his eye wasn’t only from the lantern light. Fawn dimpled back. “That’s a nice change,” she said agreeably.
Dag had been reticent about offering lovemaking since the patroller boys had returned, only partly due to fatigue from his long training days and, now, occasional draining groundwork under Arkady’s supervision.
The partners laid their bedrolls in the main room, and there was a door to close between, but wooden walls did not much block groundsense.
Tonight Dag and Fawn had a brief gift of privacy, if they could seize it before the beer ran out at the pig roast. They took turns washing up quickly in the sink, then Dag carried the lantern to their end room.
Fawn unrolled their bedding, and helped Dag off with his shirt and arm harness. He returned the favor, folding down her blouse as though it were a flower’s petals; they stood facing on their knees, skin to skin, each leaning into the other for support and heat. They’d made love in many different moods, from merry to mournful; tonight, it seemed to Fawn, there was something almost desperate in Dag’s grip.
“Gods, Spark,” he muttered. “Help me remember who I am.”
She hugged him tight. He released his clutch in favor of a caress, long fingers gliding over her bare back, winding in her hair, and she thought, not for the first time, that with all his touch being channeled through his single hand, he paid it a more reverent attention. And so, as a consequence, did she.
She whispered into his shoulder, “Wherever we are, you can always come home to me.”
He bent his face to her curls, handless arm tightening around her, and breathed her in. It was gently done; she had no call to think of a drowning man drawing air. “Always,” he promised. They sank to their bedroll of residence.
–-
Dag woke slowly in a gray morning light feeling vastly better, and he smiled to remember why. Fawn still slept. He lifted his arm from around her coiled warmth, then rolled over and opened his second eye.
At his face level, half a dozen pairs of beady little eyes stared back at him in unblinking fascination.
“You again!” he groaned at the field mice. “Go on! Shoo!”
Fawn came awake at his voice, sat up on her elbow, and took in their visitors. “Oh, my word. They’re back.”
“I thought you said you’d got rid of them yesterday. Again.”
“I did. Well, I thought I did. I took the box halfway around the lake and dumped them in the woods.”
Dag contemplated these leftovers from his frustrating shielding experiments.
Survivors all; had they been especially determined? They’d have to be, to trek back across half of New Moon Camp. “I’d think a farmer girl like you would have more ruthless ways of getting rid of mice.”
“Well, if they were piddling up my pantry, sure. But the only crime this bunch committed was to fall in love with you. Death seemed too cruel a penalty for that.” Her big brown eyes blinked at him in consideration.
“Beguiled,” he corrected austerely. “I don’t think mice have brains enough to fall in love.”
She dimpled. “I never noticed as it took brains.”
“There is that, Spark.” He creaked to his feet, peered a bit blearily around the room, found his slat box, tipped it on its side in front of the staring mice-whose heads turned in unison to track him-and chivvied them into it. Carrying them out the door onto Arkady’s roofless porch, he poured them over the rail. They fell with only a few faint squeaks, bouncing unharmed in the grass below, and, shocked out of their trance, scampered away. For now. Dag shook his head and trod back inside, where Fawn was sitting up lovely-naked and laughing behind her hand.
“The poor things!”
He grinned and opened himself to her bright ground as if basking in sunlight. Then went still, blinking.
Within her vivid swirl spun a brighter spark yet. He knew it at once, from that heartbreaking almost-month that he and Kauneo…
Fawn had no groundsense. It was his task to track when the brilliant changes in her ground signaled her time of fertility, and switch to alternate forms of pleasuring each other. For all the eight months of their marriage and before, she had trusted him to do so. How had he missed the signals last night? Blight it, he’d known it was almost time…!