Crane turned his head from side to side, frowning. “What the blight did you do to me, anyway? I can’t even feel most of my body. With sense or groundsense.”
“I once saw a fellow fall from a horse,” Dag answered not quite directly, “who broke his neck in about the same place as I broke yours. He lived for some months. We won’t inflict that on you.”
“But you never touched me! You were twenty feet off, over on the bank. It was some sort of evil groundwork you did!”
“It was,” said Dag impassively, not quibbling with the modifier. Remo and Barr looked disturbed. Crane’s startled gaze said, What are you? plain as plain, but he didn’t voice it.
Crane’s utter helplessness had been made clear during his cleanup. He must realize by now he was a dead man talking. Fawn knew how to feign indifference to torments one could not escape, but she’d never before seen real indifference used so. Crane seemed pained to have his mind roused from its sullen retreat.
More silence.
“So,” Dag probed again, “you were a mule-headed rule-breaker, and didn’t care to reform, so Log Hollow threw you out. Maybe a thief.”
“That was a lie!” said Crane. But added after a moment, “Then.”
“Was it?” said Dag mildly. “There was a farmer woman, I heard. Maybe youngsters. What happened to them? When your camp stripped you and booted you out, did you find your way back to her?”
“For a while,” said Crane. “She didn’t much care for what I brought her from hunting, compared to what I’d used to bring from patrol. Then the blighted strumpet died. I gave it all up for nothing!”
“How’d she die?”
“Fever. I was away. Came back to a blighted mess…”
Dag glanced at Fawn, his face set tight, and she touched the thin, drying scab on her neck left from Crane’s knife. Dag had been skin-close to losing her, last night. She’d sometimes worried what might happen to her if Dag were killed; never, she suddenly realized, what would happen to Dag if she died. His first widowing had nearly destroyed him, even with all the support of his kinfolk and familiar world around him. What would it be like with nothing around him?
“And the youngsters?” Dag said. His voice was very level, devoid of judgment. It would have to be, Fawn thought, to keep Crane talking at all. She bit her knuckle, picturing the lost children.
“Foisted them on her sister. She didn’t want half-bloods. We had an argument…then I left. After that I don’t know.”
Fawn suspected that had been an ugly argument. The death of either parent would be a disaster for young children, but the loss of a mother could be lethal for infants, even with near kin or dear friends to take up the burden. Crane had clearly owned no knack for keeping either. Dag did not pursue this, but led on. “Then what?”
“I knocked around Oleana for a while. When I got tired of living in the woods, I’d take what jobs some farmer would give me, or try the dice. Took to thieving when those didn’t play out. It was so easy, with groundsense. I could walk like a ghost right through their shops or houses. I ’specially liked doing places where they’d given me the evil eye and run me off, when I’d asked honest first.”
Remo said, in an outraged voice, “Oh, that’d make it good for the next patrol to go through, to have Lakewalkers suspected of stealing!” Dag waved him to silence. Crane’s lips turned in a mockery of a smile. How old was Crane? Older than Barr or Remo, to be sure, but younger than Dag, Fawn guessed. About halfway between? Remo was looking at Barr the rule-bender in a way that made him shift uncomfortably. Barr glared back at his partner as if to say, I would not have—! But Fawn thought both could see, Yes, how easy.
Crane continued, “One night, some farmer woke up before I was done gathering, and cornered me. I had to shut him up, but I hit him too hard. That’s when I decided to leave Oleana. Took myself down to the river, spent his money on passage on a farmer flatboat. I started to think—maybe if I got someplace far enough away, I could become somebody else. Shed my skin, my name, start over somehow. I was going to decide when I reached the Confluence, whether to go south to Graymouth or maybe north to Luthlia, though I’d no love of snow by then. It’s said they don’t ask too many questions up there, if a patroller can take the cold. But then the fool boat boss put in at the Cavern Tavern, and I met Brewer and his game.”
“What was his game?” Dag’s voice was curiously soft, now. Remo squinted at him in doubt. Crane’s words were flowing as if he’d half-forgotten his listeners, wound up in his tale and his memories. Dag did nothing visible to disrupt the flow; Fawn couldn’t tell if he was doing something invisible to channel it.
“It was how it amused Brewer to restock on bandits when he’d run low,” Crane said. “When he’d taken captives alive, two or more at a time—it worked best with at least four—he’d set them to fight each other, in pairs. If they refused to fight, they’d be slain outright. The second pair almost never refused. If he had more captives, he might make the winners fight each other, too, but anyway, the prize—besides being allowed to live—was to join his gang. He said he could turn most men that way—after they’d killed their friends for him, he’d own their minds.”
Alder, Fawn thought. Was that what had happened to Alder? In that case, what exactly had happened to Buckthorn, and Berry’s papa, and the rest of their crew? She shuddered, realizing Dag wasn’t keeping his voice low just for the menace of it. It was so his words would not carry to the top deck.
“His arithmetic was off, by my reckoning,” Crane continued. “But I was his prize, when I showed up. To turn a Lakewalker to thievery and murder! He thought he was the game-master, he did. I didn’t tell him I was ahead of him down that road.”
A strange brag. If Crane couldn’t be the best, he’d compete for being the baddest? Evidently so.
“I won my rounds, of course. It was too easy. I stayed on a few weeks, learned the trade, persuaded and beguiled a few fellows just to see what would happen. Then I took Brewer’s game to its logical conclusion. From behind. I was never quite sure if he was surprised, or not.”
“Once you’d won, you could have left, surely. However you were guarded before,” Dag said suggestively. “If you could walk past farmers like a ghost, why not bandits?”
“Go where? Farmers still wouldn’t have me, and Lakewalkers…would’ve been able to smell the blood in my ground, by then. So maybe Brewer won after all, eh?”
“Suicide?” said Dag mildly.
Crane stared at him in astonishment. “I didn’t have a bonded knife! Nor any way of getting one, once I was banished. The blighted camp council stripped mine from me along with everything else.” Crane turned his head away. The flow of his talk dried up for several minutes.
Fawn’s face screwed up in the slow realization that Crane—even Crane! — was taken aback at Dag’s suggestion not because he feared self-murder, but because he scorned to so waste a death, with no sharing knife to catch it. His response seemed quite unthinking and altogether sincere. And Remo and Barr looked as though they found nothing odd in this at all. She pounded her fist gently against her forehead. Lakewalkers! They’re all Lakewalkers! All mad.
Dag finally spoke again. “You’ve kept this gang going for a long time, though, as such things go. I can see where you gave the bandits a sort of twisted leadership, which held them to you, but what held you to them?”
Crane jerked his chin—in lieu of the shrug he could no longer make, Fawn supposed. “The coin, the goods, I’d not much use for, but Brewer’s game fascinated me. Besides being mad after money, I think Brewer liked running the cave because it gave him something lower than himself to despise. Me…It was like owning my own private fighting-dog kennel, except with much more interesting animals.
“I hardly had to do a thing, you know? They just arranged themselves around me. Drop any Lakewalker down amongst farmers, that’s what happens. If he doesn’t rise to the top, they’ll blighted shove him up. They want to be ruled by their betters. They’re like she
ep that can’t tell the difference between shepherds and wolves, I swear.”
“So did you make them, or did they make you?” Dag asked quietly.
Crane’s smile stretched. “You are what you eat. Any malice learns that.”
This time, it was Dag’s turn to twitch, and Crane didn’t miss it.
Dag took a long breath, and said, “Remo, give me that knife you found.”
Remo rather reluctantly pulled the sheath cord over his head. Dag weighed the knife in his hand and regarded Crane sternly. “Where’d you come by this? And that boatload of Lakewalker furs?”
Crane twisted his head. “It wasn’t my doing. Just an evil chance. Pair of Lakewalker traders down from Raintree chose to pull in their narrow boat and camp practically in front of the cave. There was no holding the fellows, though I told them they were being blighted fools. I lost six of those idiots in the fight that followed.”
“Did you try the game on the Lakewalkers?”
“They didn’t live long enough.”
Dag touched the knife sheath to his lips in that odd habitual gesture.
“You’re telling me half the truth, I think. This knife was bonded to a woman.”
Crane’s jaw compressed in exasperation. “All right! It was a string-bound couple. They both died the same.”
“You murdered her, and didn’t even let her share?” said Remo.
“She was dead before I got to her. Fought too hard, there was an unlucky blow…At least it saved me a tedious argument with the Drum boys. I figured it’d be a bad idea to let them learn they could play with Lakewalkers.”
A rather sick silence followed this pronouncement.
Crane did not break it. Past hope, past rage, past revenge upon the world. Just waiting. Not waiting for anything, just…waiting. He spoke as if from the lip of a grave he no longer feared but wanted as a tired man wanted his bed.
Dag’s hand folded tightly around the sheath. He asked, “If you had a bonded knife, would you choose to share, or to hang?”
Crane’s look seemed to question his wits. “If I had a bonded knife…!”
“Because I think I could rededicate this one,” said Dag. “To you.”
Barr’s mouth dropped open. “But you’re a patroller!”
“Or a medicine maker,” Remo put in, more doubtfully.
“I said, I think. It would be my first knife making, if it worked.” He added dryly, “And if it didn’t work, leastways no one would complain.”
Crane blinked, squinted, said cautiously, “Do you fancy the justice of it? To put an end to me with that woman’s own knife?”
“No, just the economy. I need a primed knife. I hate walking bare.”
“Dag,” said Remo uneasily, “that knife belongs to somebody. Shouldn’t we try to find the rightful heir? Or at least turn it in at the next camp?”
Dag’s jaw set. “I was thinking of applying river-salvage rules, same as with the rest of the cave’s treasure.”
Barr said, “Should he be allowed to share? His own camp council didn’t think so even back when he carried far fewer crimes in his saddlebags.”
“He’s Crane No-camp now, I’d say. Which makes me his camp captain, by right of might, if nothing else. I guarantee his priming would have no lack of affinity, leastways.”
His glance met Fawn’s startled one; his lids fell, rose. Yes, she thought, Dag would know all about affinity. Barr and Remo were both looking at him with some misgiving after these peculiar statements. Fawn didn’t blame them. An even stranger look lingered in Crane’s face, as if it shocked him to find there was something still in the world for him to want—and it was in his enemy’s hand to give or withhold. Wonder grew in Fawn, winding with her horror. She’d expected Crane to say, Blight you all, and let the malices take the world. Not Yes, I beg for some last share in this.
As if testing his fortune in disbelief, Crane growled blackly, “We made better sport in the cave. Would it give you a thrill, big man, to kill me with your own hand?”
Dag’s gaze flicked down. “I already did. All we’re doing now is debating the funeral arrangements.” He leaned on his hand and pushed himself up with a tired grunt. He was finished with his questions, evidently, although Barr and Remo looked as though they wanted to ask a dozen more. Not necessarily of Crane.
“Captain No-camp?” Crane called as Dag started to turn away.
Dag looked back down.
“Bury my bones.”
Dag hesitated, gave a short nod. “As you will.”
Fawn followed him to the kitchen, where he drew the bone knife from its sheath and hung the cord around his neck. He made no move to hand either back to Remo.
“Scoop up a kettle of river water and put it on the fire for me, Spark. I want to boil this knife clean of its old groundwork before we reach the cave landing.”
After the Fetch moored above the mouth of the bandit cave, Crane was removed on a makeshift litter of blankets stretched between two keelboat poles borrowed from the nearby Snapping Turtle. Heads turned and murmurs rose both from boatmen and roped bandits as he was carried past. He shut his eyes, possibly pretending to be unconscious, an escape of sorts; the only one, Fawn trusted, that he would have. Dag followed, but was seized on almost at once by Bearbait and one of the Raintree hunters, who dragged him off to the cave to look at the hurt men again, or maybe at more hurt men.
Wain’s lieutenant, Saddler, tramped down the stony slope and hailed Berry.
“We found a slew of boats tied up behind that island over there,” he told her, with a wave at the opposite shore, the same level leafless woods that lined most of the river along here, save for the weathered ridge that backed the cave and shaped the Elbow. Only the—relative—narrowness of the channel gave a clue to a river-wise eye that it was an island.
“Wain wanted to know if you could pick out your papa’s. Or name any of the others, for that matter.”
“If the Briar Rose is back there, I suppose I ought to look,” Berry agreed halfheartedly. She glanced at Fawn. “You come with me?”
Fawn nodded. It had to feel to Berry like being taken to look at a body dragged from the river, to see if it was a missing kinsman. You’d want a friend to go with you.
“I’ll come, too…if you want,” Whit offered cautiously.
A silent nod. Berry’s mouth was strained, her eyes gray and flat. It was hard to read gratitude in her face, though Fawn thought some might be hidden there. It was hard to read anything in her face, really.
Saddler and another strong-armed keeler rowed them across in a skiff. Paths threaded between the trees and across the island, wet and squelchy underfoot, as though the river had recently overtopped the banks and left a promise to return. Fawn’s shoes were soaked through before they reached the other side. This channel was narrower, choked with fallen trees and other drifted debris.
Up and down the shore, derelict boats were tied, both keels and flats. A few curious boatmen were poking around in them. Some boats in better condition looked as though they’d been in the process of having their original names scraped away and replaced by new ones, or other identifying marks altered. Others had sprung leaks and settled into the mud. The newest captures were tied at the top end, upstream, and Fawn thought she recognized a couple of the names of the Tripoint boats Cap Cutter had been seeking. Fifteen or so in all—Fawn found herself estimating the sizes of the missing crews, and shivering. And this didn’t even make up the whole, because the bandits had burned some boats, as well. As many died here as at Greenspring. If accumulated secretly over a year or more, and not in a few dreadful days. And there wasn’t even a malice. Malice aplenty, though.
Two flatboats at the far end of the row must have lain here since last fall, for the ice had opened their seams and buckled their boards, and what caulking hadn’t given way in the winter cold had rotted out in the summer heat. They sat low in the water, weathered and ghostly, and even Fawn’s eye could pick out the Rose, second from the last, because it w
as the exact same design as the Fetch.
Berry made her way across a sagging gray board and lowered herself carefully to the decaying deck; Fawn and Whit followed. With a creaking of rusted hinges, Berry pulled open the front hatch and peered into the shadows within. She wrinkled her nose, hiked up her skirts, and stepped down into the cold water. Fawn, deciding her shoes could get no wetter, did the same. Whit saved his trousers and waited in the hatch, watching Berry in worry.
Most of the fittings had been removed, including the glass windows in the gaping frames toward the back of the cabin. Blue daylight filtered through, reflecting off the water to give a drowned glow to the space. A lot of warped barrel staves were still left, half-floating, slowly rotting. Some kegs might once have held salt butter or lard; Fawn wasn’t sure if they’d been broken open by humans or a passing bear. Wildlife had been in here, certainly. Berry waded right through water to her knees, back and forth; twice, she reached down and pulled up unidentifiable trash. It took Fawn a few minutes to realize she was looking for bodies—or skeletons maybe, by this time—and was immeasurably relieved when none were found. Berry climbed up briefly through the kitchen hatch to peer around the back deck, then, still in that same silence, made her way to the bow and onto shore where Saddler waited.
“Anything left?” he asked.
She shook her head. “It’s good for nothing but firewood, now. Half of it’s too waterlogged even for that.”
He nodded, unsurprised. “Wain says you’re to have a share from the cave. Plan is, we mean to fix up what boats here will still float, and take the goods we found piled up down to the Confluence.”
“You’ll see that Cap Cutter gets word of his lost boats and men? I expect you’ll catch up with him about there.”
Would Boss Cutter be wounded in his male pride to learn that the lowly Fetch had destroyed the river bandits, when all the Tripoint Steel’s bristling bravado had missed the mark? No, more likely by the time the tale was carried downriver by the keelers, boastful Boss Wain would feature as its hero. Well, Berry would not begrudge it to him.
Passage tsk-3 Page 36
