“How did it shatter?”
“It lost the first war. They say.”
“Did the gods help?”
Dag snorted. “Lakewalker legends say the gods abandoned the world when the first malice came. And that they will return when the earth is entirely cleansed of its spawn. If you believe in gods.”
“Do you?”
“I believe they are not here, yes. It’s a faith of sorts.” “Huh.” She rolled up the last maps and tied their strings before handing them to him. He settled them in place and closed the trunk.
He sat with his hand on the latch a moment. “Whatever their part really was,”
he said finally, “I don’t think it was just the sorcerer-lords who built all those towers and laid those roads and sailed those ships. Your ancestors did, too.”
She blinked at this, but what she was thinking, he could not guess.
“And the lords didn’t come from nowhere, or elsewhere, either,” Dag continued tenaciously. “One line of thought says there was just one people, once, and that the sorcerers rose out of them. Except that then they bred up for their skills and senses, and then used their magic to make themselves more magical, and lordly, and powerful, and so grew away from their kin. Which may have been the first mistake.”
She tilted her head, and her lips parted as if to speak, but at that point a pair of footsteps echoed from the hall. Razi stuck his head through the doorframe.
“Ah, Dag, there you are. You should smell this.” He thrust out a small glass bottle and pulled off the leather stopper plugging its neck. “Dirla found this medicine shop up in town that sells the stuff.”
Dirla smiled proudly over his shoulder.
“What is it?” asked Fawn, leaning in and sniffing as the patroller waved the bottle past her. “Oh, pretty! It smells like chamomile and clover flowers.”
“Scented oil,” he answered. “They have seven or eight kinds.”
“What do you use it for?” Fawn asked innocently.
Dag mentally consigned his comrade to the middle of the Dead Levels. “Sore muscles,” he said repressively.
“Well, I suppose you could,” said Razi thoughtfully.
“Scented back rubs,” breathed Dirla in a warm voice. “Mm, nice idea.”
“How useful of you two to stop by,” Dag overrode this before it could grow more interesting still, either to himself, who didn’t hanker after a repeat of the discomforts of his ride from the Horsefords’, or to Fawn, who would undoubtedly ask more questions. “Happens I need this trunk taken back downstairs to the storeroom.” He stood up and pointed. “Lug.”
They grumbled, if lightheartedly, and lugged.
Dag closed the door behind them, shooed Fawn to her own room, and followed.
Wondering if he dared ask just where that shop was located, and if it might be on the way to the harnessmaker’s. Walking the patterns in the marshes west of Glassforge took six days.
Dag chose the closest section first, and so was able to bring the patrol back to the hotel’s comforts that night, and to check on Fawn.
After an increasingly worried search of the premises, he found her shelling peas in the kitchen and making friends with the cooks and scullions. With some relief, he gave over his vision of her as distressed and lonely among condescending Lakewalker strangers although not his fear of her imprudently overtaxing her strength.
For the next section he chose the most distant, of necessity a three-day outing, to get it out of the way. Dag met the complaints of the younger patrollers with a few choice tales of swamp sweeps norm of Farmer’s Flats in late winter, icily gruesome enough to silence all but the most determined grumblers. The patrol was able to leave most of their gear with the horses, but the need for skin protection meant that boots, shirts, and trousers took the brunt of the muck and mire. When they draggled back to Glassforge late the following night, they were greeted by the attendants of the hotel’s pleasant bathhouse, conveniently sited with its own well between the stable and the main building, with a marked lack of joy; the laundresses were growing downright surly at the sight of them.
This time Dag found Fawn waiting up for him, filling the time and her hands by helping to mend hotel linens and coaxing stories from a pair of seamstresses.
He returned the next night to exchange tales with her over a late supper. He held her fascinated with his account of a roughly circular and distinctively flat stretch of marsh some six miles across that he was certain was a former patch of blight, recovering and again supporting life—most of it noxious, not to mention ravenous, but without question thriving. He thought the slaying of that malice must have predated the arrival of farmer settlers in this region by well over a century. She entertained him in turn with a long, involved account of her day’s adventures in the town. Sassa the Horseford brother-in-law, now home again, had stopped by and made good on his promise to show her his glassworks.
They had capped the tour with a visit to his brother’s papermaking shop, and for extras, the back premises of the ink maker’s next door.
“There are more kinds of work to do here than I ever dreamed,” she confided in a tone of thoughtful speculation.
She had also, clearly, overdone; when he escorted her to her door, she was drooping and yawning so hard she could scarcely say good night. He spent a little time persuading her ground against an incipient cold, then checked the healing flesh beneath the ugly malice scabs for necrosis or infection and made her promise to rest on the morrow.
The next day’s pattern walk was truncated for Dag in the early afternoon when one patroller managed to trade up from mere muck and leeches to a willow root tangle, water over his head, and a nest of cottonmouths. Leaving the patrol to Utau, Dag rode back to town supporting the very sick and shaken man in front of him. Dag was not, happily, called upon to do anything unadvised and perilous with their grounds on the way, though he was grimly aware Utau had urged the escort upon him against just that chance. But the snakebit man survived not only the ride, but also being dipped briskly in the bathhouse, dried, and carried up and slung into bed. By that time, Chato and Mari had been found, allowing Dag to turn the responsibility for further remedies over to them.
Some news Mari imparted sent Dag in search of Fawn even before a visit to the bathhouse on his own behalf. The sound of Fawn’s voice raised in, what else, a question, tugged his ear as he was passing down the end stairs, and he about-faced into the second-floor corridor. A door stood open—Saun’s—and he paused outside it as Saun’s voice returned:
“My first impression of him was as one of those grumpy old fellows who never talks except to criticize you. You know the sort?”
“Oh, yes.”
“He rode or walked in the back and never spoke much. The light began to dawn for me when Mari set him at the cap—that’s the patroller in the end or edge position of a grid with no one beyond. We don’t spread out to the limits of our vision, d’you see, but to the limits of our groundsenses. If you and the patrollers to your sides can just sense each other, you know you aren’t missing any malice sign between you. Mari sent him out a mile. That’s more than double the best range of my groundsense.”
Fawn made an encouraging noise.
Saun, suitably rewarded, continued, “Then I got to noticing that whenever Mari wanted something done out of the ordinary way, she’d send him. Or that it was his idea. He didn’t tell tales often, but when he did, they were from all over, I mean everywhere. I’d start to add up all the people and places in my head, and think, How? I’d thought he had no humor, but finally figured out it was just maddening-dry. He didn’t seem like much at first, but he sure accumulated.