Yina nodded confirmation. “Some beautiful bruises, too, if you like purple.”
“Report first, tent-kin reunion next,” Fin cut in, unrolling the map across Barr’s sheeted lap. “Where exactly did you find this sessile—it was a sessile, right?—and how far along was it?”
Barr nodded, and launched into the necessary descriptions: location as exactly as he could describe it, number and ripeness of the mud-men pots, his estimate, pretty shrewd by now, of the probable time till the malice’s first molt. For all his attempts to hew to just the facts, it soon became apparent he hadn’t been riding alone, nor heading for home.
Making up some tarradiddle to send them on their way in temporary ignorance of Lily was possible but pointless, Barr figured. And, blight it, he was proud of how well Lily had done with her first mud-man, leaving aside that little lapse about stay with the horses. Just who his companion and charge had been, and how he’d acquired her, came out necessarily along with the brag.
Bay looked appalled. Fin didn’t look like anything much, which was Fin’s usual expression when he was cogitating. Fin had been on the fence about the use of farmer-patrollers, Barr recalled, not enthusiastic but willing to give the scheme a fair shake. Bay’s response was more personal. Or familial.
“I thought the horse girls just had hold of some garbled gossip!” said Bay. “I’d say Tell me it isn’t so, but I s’ppose I should know you better by now. Farmer women, Barr, you blighted fool! Absent gods, does Amma know?”
“She will soon as she gets time today, I expect.”
“‘Cause she’ll rip you up one side and down the other for that!”
“It was fifteen years ago, Bay. Even Amma will realize it’s a bit late.” And I never did anything like it again was a plea best saved for Amma, Barr figured; that wasn’t Bay’s main concern.
“You know she was groomin’ you for patrol leader. If we ever got you back alive from Luthlia, that is, which by some wonderment it looks like we did. How could you go and mess that chance up?” It wasn’t clear if Bay’s red-faced frustration was on Barr’s behalf, or his own.
“Well, that’s not my first concern anymore.” And I’d be every bit the blight you’ve always thought me if it were. His new preoccupation with Lily was a strange and awkward feeling, as though his skin had been stretched over two people, not one.
“And how d’you think Mama and Dad are going to take this? Mama’s passed the last two years dreading every courier that rode in from the north, afraid you’d be brought back as nothing but the bits of a spent primed knife.”
Stung, Barr returned, “Well, she should ought’a be glad to have me back breathing with a bonus, then!”
“How you rate some half-farmer bastard as a bonus—only you, Barr! Absent gods you haven’t changed. Still a chirping embarrassment to the tent.”
Barr had pulled in his ground tight upon awaking to this delegation, by reflex. So it wasn’t till he glimpsed the movement of faded cloth in the doorway that he realized the debate had another audience. Nightshirt and bare feet, so Lily must have been drawn out of bed by the raised voices. How long had she been standing there listening?
Fin followed his glance, eyes narrowing. “This your farmer… girl, then?”
Uncertainly, Lily sidled into the room, edging nearer to Yina. Yina, with a medicine maker’s acuity, stepped up behind her and put both hands on her shoulders. With this support silently backing her, Lily gulped and said, “Barr, are you, um, all right?” She shot a scowl at Bay.
Barr cleared his throat. “Oh, sure.”
Fin turned toward her; she flinched back, but he only said, “Miss, ah, Mason, is it? I purely would appreciate it if you could give me your tale of the malice sighting yesterday. Not to waste a second eyewitness, since I can get one.”
“This is Fin Kingfisher, Lily,” Yina put in. “It’s going to be his job to lead his patrol out today to put down that malice that you and Barr found.”
“With one of those magic knives?”
“Yes, a patrol always carries a few primed knives, though there are never enough to go around,” said Yina. “So it would help him to know everything you saw.”
“…Everything?”
“About the malice and the mud-men. That’s the only part he needs.”
“I see.” Under Yina’s encouraging grip, Lily swallowed and launched into her account, the same events but differently angled, starting with what had to her been Barr’s inexplicable abandonment of her on the trail with the horses and her growing anxiety. All right, maybe he should have said something more, but he hadn’t wanted to scare her. The blank, it seemed, had just left more room for her imagination to run wild, the opposite of his intention. Barr’s quick, brutal tangle with the mud-man had apparently exceeded her imaginings, oops. Her voice, which had been surprisingly steady under Fin’s gimlet gaze, shook in the memory of that part, her word-picture of Barr staggering around bleeding unnecessarily gruesome, Barr thought. Though certainly vivid. Her description of the sessile malice and its position was clear and accurate, for such a short glimpse, the only thing Fin cross-questioned her about.
“Right,” said Fin, easing back less vulture-like when it was apparent there were no more useful details to be extracted. “I’ll be on my way, then. Barr, welcome home, and, ah… half a mile off the trail, you say?”
“And some change. Up the ravine.”
“Interestin’.” Fin pursed his lips.
“It should be pretty straightforward,” Barr offered, uneasy under this considering gaze. “As such things go.”
“Yeah, but Amma’s stuck me with a tail of her younglings, to give them a chance to see their first malice. It’s going to make for a blighted parade. Bay, you follow on. We won’t be waiting for you.”
“Yes, sir.” Bay nodded at this tacit, if limited, permission to finish their reunion. Barr wasn’t sure if either Foxbrush brother was exactly grateful. With a vague salute to Lily and Yina, Fin strode out, more expressionless than ever.
Barr motioned Lily to his bedside; she approached warily. “Lily, this here’s my older brother, your uncle Bay. So sorry about that.”
“Hey,” Bay objected. He and Lily frowned at each other in matching dismay. Confronted with that direct blue stare, Bay hunched his shoulders in discomfort. Yina made herself unobtrusive, muting her ground to a shadow and leaning against the wall by the door.
Lily raised her chin. “You were yellin’ at Barr.” Her tone of accusation, as though this were an offense, quite charmed Barr. Was she setting out to defend him?
Bay waved this away. “We been yellin’ at him for years. It doesn’t have any effect.”
She blinked in confusion. “Well, it’s… still not nice.”
Was there, beneath her bristle, a hint of real fear? If Barr was her only prop here, she must be wondering how weak a reed she had to rely on.
Bay didn’t answer this, but turned to Barr. Or on Barr. “You know we’re still having to talk young flatties out of wearing pots on their heads when they meet with us? There were a couple down at the ferry just last week.”
“Really?” said Barr, diverted. Yina bit back a smile.
“What?” said Lily, confused by this sudden turn onto camp history.
Bay jerked his head toward his brother. “It was Barr’s most famous tarradiddle, back when he and his partner Remo were raising trouble all around the Riffle. They persuaded a gang of flatboat men hung up waiting for the river to rise that they could protect themselves from Lakewalker magics by wearing iron helmets, like the soldiers in the old broken statues, except nobody had any iron helmets. So they used the nearest things they had to hand. Amma and the ferry boss were so mad at you two. So were the flatties who figured it out.”
Barr remembered that part. Speaking of spectacular bruises. “Well, at least you’d hope it would teach farmers not to believe every lie they hear about Lakewalkers.”
“Not so’s you’d notice,” sighed Bay.
“W
e didn’t know it would get down the whole river!” Barr protested. He made a face. “Or last so long.”
“How long ago was this?” asked Lily.
“Ten… no, thirteen years back,” said Bay. “You’d think you would’ve learned your lesson about joking around, Barr.”
“Well, you told me those scary lies about groundsense making you see ghosts. And that thing about the blood-sucking water monster. ‘Slop, slop, its webbed claws go as it climbs the riverbank, dripping and snuffling for you,’” he quoted in an eerie quaver, waving his hands fin-fashion. “Kept me awake at nights for months.”
“You were twelve,” said Bay, defensively.
“Yes, that was the problem!”
Lily’s lips screwed up. “Just how long have you two been having this argument, anyway?”
“Twenty… years?” Barr worked it out.
“Yeah, we’re probably not going to put it to bed this morning,” allowed Bay.
The new argument, over farmer women and what Barr should not have been doing with them, had died abruptly when Lily’s arrival in the room had been noticed. Bay was not by any means a subtle man—it wasn’t a Foxbrush trait—but Barr had caught that care with a dry appreciation. Seemed his brother wasn’t a complete blight, these days. Least not all the time.
“But Fin’s going to be pissed with me if I don’t catch up before the patrol rides out,” Bay continued. “What you should do this morning, Barr, if you can hobble that far, is to get your tail up to the tent. Nobody there knows you’re back yet, but word’ll get around soon. You might want to get your word in first.” He cast a shrewd glance at Lily.
“Given how garbled camp—or river—gossip can get, I suppose that’s true,” Barr admitted reluctantly. Flatties wearing their cookpots on their heads being only one case in point. “Yeah, go have a nice ride.” He couldn’t resist adding, in a kindly tone, “It’s about time you got a malice kill to your name.”
Bay, grimacing, paused at the door to ask, “How many did you get in Luthlia?”
“With my patrols? Eight.”
“In two years. Absent gods.”
“Plus one sessile all by myself on my way home, that I ran across in north Raintree,” Barr continued cheerily. “So, nine. And the two we took out on the Tripoint Trace that time, comes to eleven. And the one we found yesterday. I guess I’ll make you a present of that one.”
Bay made a rude gesture and took himself off, laughing blackly.
Barr sank back against his bunk’s headboard, his brief amusement evaporating as he took in Lily’s flummoxed expression. He coughed, regretted it, and came up with, “Just how much of that argument did you hear, Lily?”
She shrugged. “I came in when your brother was talking about the gossiping horse girls.”
“Oh.” All the worst of it, then. Ouch.
“Was that true?” Her voice was hunched and small. She was going to master groundshielding in no time, at this rate. “Are you going to be punished because of me?”
“I’ve never been punished for anyone but me, trust me on that. Though I have to say as how not being promoted to patrol leader might actually be a reward. Thankless job. Another job that isn’t mine is camp captain, who’s the one who has to decide such things. That plate is all Amma’s, and I don’t want it, either. I just patrol where and when I’m told all the same. A simple life, but it suits me.”
She frowned at him in suspicion. “Are you tarradiddling me?”
A muffled snort from Yina, which Barr overrode with, “Not much, no. But any decision that’s above my rank is definitely above yours, so it’s a waste of sweat to worry about it.” He eyed her back. “Now what’s churning around in your head?” And her ground.
An uncertain breath. “It’s just… nothing here’s what I expected.”
“Well,” said Barr heartily, hoisting his legs out of the bunk and sitting up, “how dull would that be?” The room only swayed a little. “Now, if Maker Yina here hasn’t hidden our clothes so’s we can’t leave, I suppose we should get dressed and take ourselves over to Tent Foxbrush.”
“It’s no use hiding patrollers’ clothes to keep them in bed,” said Yina. “They’d just crawl off naked. But yes, we’d appreciate that. Patients could start trickling in any time, and I’d be better use putting a ground reinforcement in those stitches than rustling your breakfasts. Verel would be peeved if I let a dirty infection get started. Fetch a walking stick out of the keg, and Quen can bring your saddlebags along in a barrow.”
This brisk program was carried out. Soon enough, they were trudging, or in Barr’s case limping, across the face of the hill toward his family’s tent-cluster. Quen came after, trundling the laden barrow. Barr made sure to point out to Lily the ferry serving the old straight road, just downriver, the barge halfway across with a load of travelers, horses, and a wagon. The clank of the capstan winding and unwinding the cable carried faintly on the damp morning air. The sky to the west was graying out; rain later.
“Camp women run the ferry,” Barr said, “which is the camp’s best source of steady cash. As well as take care of our mounts.” Lily craned her neck to take in the patrol paddocks downslope, dotted with horses. She seemed to ease when she spied Moon, head down cropping grass, evidently unbullied by his new pasture mates.
“There are lots of camp chores Lakewalker women do besides patrol,” Barr went on, invitingly. “Really, everything you’d do on a farm, plus everything folks contribute to support our patrols in the field.”
“Farm?” Lily looked around, plainly puzzled.
“There are fields up over the ridge, and the pastures for the broodmares and the resting mounts.” The kitchen gardens, chicken pens, blossoming fruit and nut trees, and beehives were scattered along the slope around the kin-tents, self-explanatory. “Besides fishing, we also trade with the rivermen, despite some folks disapproving of getting dependent. Sell them things we make better, though the river-town crafters are getting blighted clever these days. The towns are growing.” Malice bait, said some, not without just cause, but that was another argument.
He wasn’t sure what Lily was making of his hints, but she did say, “So it’s not just ridin’ around.”
“Not hardly. Though for all the work, camps don’t ever get much ahead. On the other hand, the world hasn’t got eaten.” Yet. “That dead gray blight you saw yesterday will take decades to heal. Centuries, or maybe never, for the huge old disasters like the Western Levels.”
“Which you’ve seen…”
He wondered what she was picturing now. “Aye.”
Lily frowned at her moving feet. “Is every Lakewalker we meet going to be able to tell how we’re related?”
“Mm, generally. It takes someone with keen groundsense who’s paying attention to work it out exactly.”
And then the Foxbrush kin tents hove into view. A shudder of anticipation, like a starving man scenting a meal, or an exhausted man confronted with a soft bed, shook Barr. He tried to imagine what his home looked like to Lily’s stranger-eyes. A half-circle of log cabins with leather flaps hung across their fronts; a central fire pit; a scattering of seats made from upended cut logs. Pretty crude, compared to her farmhouse in Hackberry Corner. Before it had burned down. But the fruit trees were looking healthy, and he could hear the murmur of his sister’s prized bees in their hives upslope among them. The low smokehouse, leaking an aromatic haze, would be familiar anywhere. Unfamiliar even to his eyes was the add-on at the side of the ever-more-sprawling main tent, its timbers raw and bright. And was that a spanking new pump shed where the old well had been? Ooh.
“Here we are,” Barr announced. Here we go. Barely seeming aware of the gesture, Lily grasped his hand. Her fingers felt small and cold. He returned the grip, faking reassurance, entirely too aware of entirely too much.
Barr drew in a great lungful of Grace River valley air, and bellowed, “Good morning, Tent Foxbrush! You’d better have left us some breakfast!”
* * *
/> The tent flap twitched back, and his eldest sister Shirri stuck her head out, eyes widening and jaw dropping in a gratifying fashion. “Mama!” she shouted over her shoulder. “It’s Barr!”
A maternal shriek from inside was followed in a moment by Kiska Foxbrush herself, pelting past. “It is! Barr! We’ve been waiting and waiting!” Some more anxiously than others, clearly, but even Shirri, leaning on the doorjamb, smiled at him.
His mother’s braided gold hair might have a touch more silver in it, but the strength of her hug was in no wise enfeebled. It wasn’t just for duty that Barr hugged her back, though he did not tease by lifting her off her feet as he’d sometimes done after reaching his full man’s size. Though only because yesterday’s bruises had stiffened up more than his short hobble across camp could amend, ouch. “Hey, hey! When have I never?”
“We thought sure some Luthlian girl would snag you for her tent, and all we could hope for was that she might be a better letter-writer than you.”
The other reasons a tent-child might not come back from an exchange patrol were left unspoken, as one did. “Naw. Luthlian girls are warm, but the winters are way too cold.” Barr mimed a shudder.
Her hand—had it been that gnarled before?—rose to his neck. “What’s this, then? Verel’s sewing, I daresay. That’s never a souvenir from Luthlia.”
“No, that was my welcome-home to Pearl Riffle territory, just yesterday. We ran across a sessile and a mud-man—not a day’s ride north of camp, if you can believe it.”
“So that’s what Bay rode out for this morning,” said Shirri, huffing an astonished laugh. “Your trail luck! I swear you must bait them, Barr!”
He tapped his forehead and bragged, “Groundsense. It’s up to over half a mile now.”
“Aha. I knew you weren’t done growing!” his mama said proudly. She stepped back at last, her gaze and unfurling groundsense swinging to Lily, who’d been watching this welcome wide-eyed. Barr braced himself. “Is this young lady… another souvenir of Luthlia?” his mama began uncertainly. “No…” Her lips thinned in confusion as she took in the details. Kiska was patroller herself, not maker, but he didn’t doubt her perceptions on this score would be as keen as Verel’s.
Knife Children (The Sharing Knife series) Page 10
