Pressure then, stealing her breath, and pain from the pressure, and panic from the loss. Air seemed absorbed through her skin, not her slow gaping mouth, seeping into her lungs and hot busy belly. Where had Dag gone off to now? She needed him, she was sure of it. Something was very wrong…
Time leaked away in the black. Hours? Years?
At last, mumbling sounds returned to her clogged ears, breaking up the worrying too-much-silence that had made her fear she’d been struck deaf. She felt suddenly heavy and dizzy, and only then realized how nothing she’d felt before. Almost, almost… there! Air!
Her eyelids fought apart onto the most welcome of sights: Dag. His eyes were turned their tea color in the graying shadows and flickering firelight, but a few gold flecks still glinted. From their crow-foot corners shimmering lines traced around his cheekbones, like inlaid silver wire beaten into a copper vessel. His cheeks were stubbly, face bruised and haggard, and his dirty iron-black hair stuck up every which way.
For once, he actually looked his age. Still looks good to me…
Her hand struggled upward to touch the silvery wetness as she at last caught her breath. Despite his wild eyes, his grin nearly split his face.
Her fingers traced the rough beard, his stretched lips, bumped over his slightly crooked teeth with the dear familiar chip out of a front one. His kisses found her knuckles, imprinting each one. Her hand slid across his jaw, around his neck, found a grip on his collar, and oh my what had he done to his good cotton shirt she’d made for him? More rips than cloth, she swore.
Kisses renewed, on her forehead, cheekbones, chin, mouth at last.
This is better. She was still stiff and hurting under her collarbone and in the track of the gouges across her shoulder blade from the mud-bat’s claws, but beneath her shirt, Calla’s plasters seemed to be holding, tugging on her tender skin when she moved. She had still been able to carve… they had… wait, what…?
“Dag! There was this huge bat-malice-it flew-but we got it!” She paused, worked her throat to clear the croak. “Whit got it, would you ever believe? And your shields, they must’ve worked! All those poor mice didn’t die in vain…” Her free hand searched her neck for her hair-and-walnut necklace. Best birthday present ever.
“Yes, yes, and yes, Spark.” A fierce hug with this last, which she didn’t quite like as much as usual, because the weight of it brought back her stifling nightmare-had she been asleep? Knocked unconscious?
“I knew you couldn’t be dead-you looked too mad to die, when those awful flying mud-bats were carryin’ you off upside down and backwards.” At her wriggle, his grip finally loosened enough for her to sit up. “Hey, is this evening? It was morning-did I sleep all day? I don’t feel so good. Was I out cold? Why am I all over dirt? My hair…” Her fingers, feeling among the dirt clumps, encountered a long, sticky, cool object that she withdrew from her curls with difficulty. An earthworm, big ol’ nightcrawler. She flung it from her with a heartfelt Eew! “Did Whit put worms in my hair while I was asleep? I’ll get him…” Her fingers searched her scalp in renewed alarm.
Bo’s voice, broken and maundering as if he’d been drinking again-“Sorry, I’m so sorry…” Amazed murmurs joined with Bo’s mumble, and Fawn looked up from the circle of Dag’s arms to find their tender reunion had an audience, crowding up around them: Bo and Hawthorn and Hod, Ash and Finch and Sage, unfamiliar Trace travelers-no, wait, she thought she recognized some of the tea caravan muleteers, nice fellows, if a bit rough around the edges.
Whit shouldered through the mob, crying, “Buried her? Buried her!
What’d you want to go and do a stupid thing like that for?” He knelt and pulled her away from Dag long enough to give her a hard and quite unprecedented brotherly hug. Dag tolerated this briefly, with a weird benign smile, then drew her back.
“Whit,” said Fawn in suspicion, “did you stick that fishin’ worm in my hair? You’d reckon a fellow your age would’ve outgrown such things!”
A muleteer’s voice rose in a quaver. “He raised her! That Lakewalker sorcerer raised her up from the grave!”
“Don’t think about it,” muttered Dag into her now worm-free hair.
“Don’t think about it.” As if to protect her from nightmare visions- hers, or his?
Another muleteer, one of the young ones-what was his name?
Spruce, that was it-went to one knee on their other side, and held out a hand quivering in entreaty. “Mister, Mister Lakewalker Bluefield, sir… would you raise my brother too? He’s younger’n me, it was his first trip, and I surely do dread taking the word of this back to our mama… oh, please!”
Dag stared back in bewilderment, his face as blank as if someone had hit him over the head with a shovel. Only Fawn felt his flinch as some realization slotted in. “Oh. No, you don’t understand. Absent gods. No one is that good a medicine maker. Fawn was never dead in the first place. You blighted fools buried her alive.” His arms trembled, tightened.
“I can’t help your brother. I’m sorry.”
Fawn began to piece it together. She supposed she ought to be horrified, but really, her outrage echoed Whit’s. “You buried me and didn’t even wait for Dag? Bo!”
“We thought for sure he was a goner, too,” Bo said in shaky apology.
“You could tell by my marriage cord he wasn’t! We told you that before!”
“Mebbe one o’ those other Lakewalkers could’ve, but we didn’t have none of them. Nobody thought to ask that girl who rode by, Neeta, she was in such a hurry ’bout that hurt patroller stuck up on the hill.”
Dag gave Bo a sharp glance, but he was distracted by the muleteer pulling on the remains of his sleeve.
“Please, sir, he weren’t but twenty years old, and dead without a mark on him. Just like her…” The muleteer nodded eagerly at Fawn.
Dismay, pity, and horror chased one another across Dag’s face.
“And my friend Bootjack…? ” said another muleteer, joining the first down on one knee. Fawn and Dag were suddenly surrounded by a mob of supplicating men. One tried to reach out to touch her, but his hand fell back, daunted by Dag’s renewed clutch and glare.
“You don’t understand,” Dag repeated, and under his breath: “Oh gods, I’ll have to talk.”
Beleaguered, Dag began a halting explanation of ground, malices, the walnut shields, and his hopes for supplying the defense to more farmers than just his Bluefield tent-kin. Someone gathered up the discarded necklaces and placed them in a pile at his knee; at Fawn’s urging, they were passed around the crowd so that the men might grasp with their hands what they did not quite take in through their ears. Some looked very interested, though the close friends and kin of the dead muleteers plainly wanted a different answer, and kept trying to get it through amending their questions. Bo and Whit and the Alligator Hat boys all testified to the parts they’d seen, which seemed to help; between that and Dag’s obvious exhaustion, the press around them eased from dangerous desperation to mere disappointment. One or two stared at Fawn in a lingering alarm that seemed disproportionate to her small, rumpled self.
Her small, rumpled, filthy, triumphant self. She and Whit and Berry deserved the bow-down of all bow-downs, Fawn thought. So when the argument about walnut shields and raising the dead ran down at last, she clambered up, eager to show Dag the remains of their malice.
The cool spring night spun crookedly around her head as she straightened; she groped for Dag’s arm, which he wrapped around her again, dropping his stick to do so. Only then did she discover what Dag had done to his ankle. His bare right foot was twice its normal size, colored a streaked deep purple that would have looked fine on a petunia but was very wrong for human skin. She led him in a mutual stagger over to show off the decaying traces of the wings-Dag made sure to warn everyone not to touch the poisonous blight of the malice’s remains, and no souvenir taking, either. He plainly didn’t even want to camp so close to it, but the deepening dark and everyone’s utter exhaustion looked to keep them all planted in this clearing till morning.