I figure if I bring you back to your family claiming to be your protector, it’ll be more convincing if you don’t look like you just lost a drunken brawl.”
Her lips twitched up as she caught his hand and kissed it, but then her fingers drifted to the malice marks on her neck. “Except for these.”
“Don’t pick.”
“They itch. Are they ever going to drop off? The other scabs did already.”
“Soon enough, I judge. It’ll leave these deep bitter-red dents underneath for a time, but they’ll fade almost like other scars. They’ll turn silvery when they’re old.”
“Oh—that long shiny groove on your leg that starts behind your knee and goes around up your thigh—was that a malice-clawing, then?” She had mapped every mark upon him as assiduously as a pattern-grid surveyor, these past days and nights, and demanded annotations for most of them, too.
“Just a touch. I got away, and my linker put his knife in a moment later.”
She turned to hug him around the waist. “I’m glad it didn’t grab any higher,”
she said seriously.
Dag choked a laugh. “Me too, Spark!” They were on the straight road north by noon. They rode slowly, in part for their dual disinclination for their destinations, but mostly because of the dog-breath humidity that had set in after the last rain. The horses plodded beneath a brassy sun. Their riders talked or fell silent with, it seemed to Dag, equal ease. They spent the next afternoon—rainy again—in the loft of the barn at the well-house where they’d first glimpsed each other, picnicking on farm fare and listening to the soothing sounds of the drops on the roof and the horses champing hay below, didn’t notice when the storm stopped, and lingered there overnight.
The next day was brighter and clearer, the hot white haze blown away east, and they reluctantly rode on. On the fifth night of the two-day ride they stopped a short leg from Lumpton Market to camp one last time. Fawn had figured an early start from Lumpton would bring them to West Blue before dark. It was hard for Dag to guess what would happen then, though her slowly unfolding tales of her family had at least given him a better sense of who he would encounter.
They found a campsite by a winding creek, out of view of the road, beneath a scattered stand of leatherpod trees. Later in the fall, the seed-pods would hang down beneath the big spade-shaped leaves like hundreds of leather straps, but now the trees were in full bloom. Spikes stood up from crowns of leaves with dozens of linen-white blossoms the size of egg cups clustered on them, breathing sweet perfume into the evening air. As the moonless night fell, fireflies rose up along the creek and from the meadow beyond it, twinkling in the mist.
Beneath the leatherpod tree, the shadows grew black.
“Wish I could see you better,” Fawn murmured, as they lay down across their combined blankets and commenced a desultory fiddling with each other’s buttons.
No one wanted a blanket atop, in this heat.
“Hm.” Dag sat up on one elbow and smiled in the dark. “Give me a minute, Spark, and I might be able to do something about that.”
“No, don’t put more wood on the fire. ‘S too hot now.”
“Wasn’t going to. Just wait and see. In fact, close your eyes.”
He extended his groundsense to its full range and found no menace for a mile, just the small nesting life of the grass: mice and shrews and rabbits and sleepy meadowlarks; above, a few fluttering bats, and the silent ghostly passage of an owl. He drew his net finer still, filling it with tinier life. Not a bounce, but a persuasion… yes. This still worked. The tree began to throng with his invited visitors, more and more. Beside him, Fawn’s face slowly emerged from the gloom as though rising from deep water.
“Can I open them yet?” she asked, her eyes dutifully scrunched up.
“Just a moment more… yes. Now.”
He kept his eyes on her face as she looked up, so as not to miss the best wonder of all. Her eyes opened, then shot wide; her lips parted in a gasp.
Above them, the leatherpod tree was filled with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of—in Dag’s wide-open perception, slightly bewildered—fireflies, so dense the lighter branches bent with their load. Many of them crawled inside the white blossoms, and when they lit, the clusters of petal cups glowed like pale lanterns. The cool, shadowless radiance bathed them both. Her breath drew in.
“Oh,” she said, rising on one elbow and staring upward. “Oh…”
“Wait. I can do more.” He concentrated, and drew down a lambent swirl of insects to spiral around and land in her dark hair, lighting it like a coronet of candles.
“Dag… !” She gave a wild laugh, half delight, half indignation, her hands rising to gently prod her curls. “You put bugs in my hair!”
“I happen to know you like bugs.”
“I do,” she admitted fairly. “Some kinds, anyhow. But how… ? Did you learn to do this up in the woods of Luthlia, too?”
“No, actually. I learned it in camp, back when my groundsense first came in—I was about twelve, I guess. The children learn it from each other; no adult ever teaches it, but I think most everyone knows how to catch fireflies this way.
We just forget. Grow up and get busy and all. Though I admit, I never collected more than a handful at one time before.”
She was smiling helplessly. “It’s a bit eerie. But I like it. Not sure about the hair—eh! Dag, they’re tickling my ears!”
“Lucky bugs.” He leaned in and blew off the wanderers from the curve of her ear, kissing the tickle away. “You should be crowned with light like the rising moon.”
“Well,” she said, in a gruff little voice, and sniffed. Her gaze traced the bending lantern-flowers above, and returned to his face. “What do you want to go and do a thing like that for anyhow? I’m already as full of joy for you as my body can hold, and there you go and put more in. Downright wasteful, I say.
It’s just going to spill over…” The light shimmered in her swimming eyes.
He pulled her up and across him, and let the warm drops spatter across his chest like summer rain. “Spill on me,” he whispered.
He released her twinkling tiara and let the tiny creatures fly up into the tree again. In the scintillant glow, they made slow love till midnight brought silence and sleep. Lumpton Market was a smaller town than Glassforge, but lively nonetheless. It lay at the confluence of two rocky rivers, which flanked a long shale-and-limestone ridge running northward. Two old straight roads crossed there, and it had surely been the site of a hinterland city when the lords ruled. As it was, much of the new town was made of ancient building blocks mined out of the encroaching woods, and dry-stone walls of both ordinary fieldstone and much less identifiable rubble abounded around both outlying fields and house yards. Now that Dag’s eye was alerted to it, however, he noticed a few newer, finer houses on the outskirts built of brick. The bridges were timber, recent, and wide and sturdy enough for big wagons.
The hostelry familiar and friendly to patrollers for which Dag was aiming lay on the north side of Lumpton, so he and Fawn found themselves in early afternoon riding through the town square, where the day market was in full swing. Fawn turned in her saddle, looking over the booths and carts and tarps as they passed around the edge of the busy scene.
“I have that glass bowl for Mama,” she said. “I wish I had something to bring Aunt Nattie. She hardly ever gets taken along when my parents come down here.”
A
yearly ritual, Dag had been given to understand.
Aunt Nattie was Fawn’s mother’s much older sister, blind since a childhood infection had stolen her sight at age ten. She had come along with Fawn’s mother when she’d married years ago, in some sort of dowry deal. Semi-invalid but not idle, she did all the spinning and weaving for the farm, with extra to sell for cash money sometimes. And was the only member of her family Fawn spoke of without hidden strain in her voice and ground.