“Keep the balance,” said Mari firmly. “As we always have. We cannot ever let ourselves become dependent upon outsiders.” Her glance slid over Fawn. “Not us.”
A little silence fell, and Dag finally said, “I’ll take swamps.”
Her nod was a bit too satisfied, and Dag wondered if he’d just made a mistake.
He added after a moment, “But if you let us take along a few horse boys from the stables here to watch the mounts, we won’t have to leave a patroller with the horse lines while we slog.”
Mari frowned, but said at last, reluctantly, “All right. Makes sense for the day-trips, anyway. You’ll start tomorrow.”
Fawn’s brown eyes widened in mild alarm, and Dag realized the source of Mari’s muffled triumph. “Wait,” he said. “Who will look after Miss Bluefield while I’m gone?”
“I can. She won’t be alone. We have four other injured recovering here, and Chato and I will be in and out.”
“I’m sure I’ll be fine, Dag,” Fawn offered, although a faint doubt colored her voice.
“But can you keep her from trying to overdo?” Dag said gruffly. “What if she starts bleeding again? Or gets chilled and throws a fever?”
Even Fawn’s brow wrinkled at that last one. Her lips moved on a voiceless protest, But it’s midsummer.
“Then I’ll be better fit to deal with that than you would,” said Mari, watching him.
Watching him flail, he suspected glumly. He drew back from making more of a show of himself than he already had. He’d had his groundsense closed down tight since they’d hit the outskirts of Glassforge yesterday, but Mari clearly didn’t need to read his ground to draw her own shrewd conclusions, even without the way Fawn glowed like a rock-oil lamp in his presence.
He rolled up his chart and handed it to Mari. “You can have that to tack on the wall downstairs, and we can mark it off as we go. For whatever amusement it will provide folks. If you hint there could be a bow-down when we reach the end, it might go more briskly.”
She nodded affably and withdrew, and Dag put Fawn to work helping him restack the contents of the trunk in rather better order than he’d found it.
As she brought him an armload of stained and tattered logbooks, she asked,
“That’s twice now you’ve talked about planting farmers. What do you mean?”
He sat back on his heels, surprised. “Don’t you know where your family comes from?”
“Sure I do. It’s written down in the family book that goes with the farm accounts. My great-great-great-grandfather”—she paused to check the generations on her fingers, and nodded—“came north to the river ridge from Lumpton with his brother almost two hundred years ago to clear land. A few years later, Great-great-great got married and crossed the western river branch to start our place. Bluefields have been there ever since. That’s why the nearest village is named West Blue.”
“And where were they before Lumpton Market?”
She hesitated. “I’m not sure. Except that it was just Lumpton back then, because Lumpton Crossroads and Upper Lumpton weren’t around yet.”
“Six hundred years ago,” said Dag, “this whole region from the Dead Lake to nearly the southern seacoast was all unpeopled wilderness. Some Lakewalkers from this hinterland went down to the coasts, east and south, where there were some enclaves of folks—your ancestors—surviving. They persuaded several groups to come up here and carve out homes for themselves. The idea was that this area, south of a certain line, had been cleared enough of malices to be safe again.
Which proved to be not quite the case, although it was still much better than it had once been. Promises were exchanged… fortunately, my people still remember what they were. There were two more main plantations, one east at Tripoint and one west around Farmer’s Flats, besides the one south of the Grace at Silver Shoals that most folks around here eventually came from. The homesteaders’
descendants have been slowly spreading out ever since.
“There were two notions about this scheme among the Lakewalkers—still are, in fact. One faction figured that the more eyes we had looking for malice outbreaks, the better. The other figured we were just setting out malice food.
I’ve seen malices develop in both peopled and unpeopled places, and I don’t see much to choose between the horrors, so I don’t get too excited about that argument anymore.”
“So Lakewalker’s were here before farmers,” said Fawn slowly.
“Yes.”
“What was here before Lakewalkers?”
“What, you know nothing?”
“You don’t have to sound so shocked,” she said, obviously stung, and he made a gesture of apology. “I know plenty, I just don’t know what’s true and what’s tall tales and bedtime stories. Once upon a time, there was supposed to have been a chain of lakes, not just the big dead one. With a league of seven beautiful cities around them, commanded by great sorcerer-lords, and a sorcerer king, and princesses and bold warriors and sailors and captains and who knows what all. With tall towers and beautiful gardens and jeweled singing birds and magical animals and holy whatnot, and the gods’ blessings flowing like the fountains, and gods popping in and out of people’s lives in a way that I would find downright unnerving, I’m pretty sure. Oh, and ships on the lakes with silver sails. I think maybe they were plain white cloth sails, and just looked silver in the moonlight, because it stands to reason that much metal would capsize a boat. What I know is the tall tale is where they say some of the cities were five miles across, which is impossible.”
“Actually”—Dag cleared his throat—“that part I know to be true. The ruins of Ogachi Strand are only a few miles out from shore. When I was a young patroller up that way, some friends and I took an outrigger to look at them. On a clear, quiet day you can see down to the tops of stone wreckage along the old shoreline, in places. Ogachi really was five miles across, and more. These were the people who built the straight roads, after all. Which were thousands of miles long, some of them, before they got so broken up.”
Fawn stood up and dusted her skirt, and sat on the edge of his bed, her face tight with thought. “So—where’d they all go? Those builders.”
“Most died. A remnant survived. Their descendants are still here.”
“Where?”
“Here. In this room. You and me.”
She stared at him in real surprise, then looked down at her hands in doubt.
“Me?”
“Lakewalker tales say…” He paused, sorting and suppressing. “That Lakewalkers are descended from some of those sorcerer-lords who got away from the wreck of everything. And farmers are descended from ordinary folks on the far edges of the hinterlands, who somehow survived the original malice wars, the first great one, and the two that came after, that killed the lakes and left the Western Levels.” Also dubbed the Dead Levels, by those who’d skirted them, and Dag could understand why.
“There was more than one war? I never heard that,” she said.
He nodded. “In a sense. Or maybe there’s always only been one. The question you didn’t ask is, where do the malices come from?”
“Out of the ground. They always have. Only”—she hesitated, then went on in a rush—“I suppose you’re going to say, not always, and tell me how they got into the ground in the first place, right?”
“I’m actually a little vague on that myself. What we do know is that all malices are descendants of the first great one. Except not descended like we are, with marriage and birth and the passing of generations. More like some monstrous insect that laid ten thousand eggs that hatch up out of the ground at intervals.”
“I saw that thing,” said Fawn lowly. “I don’t know what it was, but it sure wasn’t a bug.”
He shrugged. “It’s just a way of trying to think about them. I’ve seen a few dozen of them in my life, so far. I could as well say the first was like a mirror that shattered into ten thousand splinters to make ten thousand little mirrors. Malices aren’t material at all, in their inner nature. They just pull matter in from around them to make themselves a house, a shell. They seem to feed on ground itself, really.”