By morning, they were both growing frayed. When Fawn next slapped him out of his trance, he just grunted at her, horribly irritated. Bending his aching forehead to the cotton-stuffed mattress, he closed his eyes.
“Why do you keep making him stop?” Cherry Bridger demanded nervously. “If he kept on, couldn’t he fix it for good and all?”
“Because,” Fawn rather snarled, “if Dag gets groundlocked to Spa—to a patient, and the patient dies, Dag could die with him. That’s what happened to Arkady’s apprentice just before Dag.”
“Oh,” said Cherry in a smaller voice. “I didn’t know that.”
“Time you learned. Farmers need to learn more about Lakewalkers so they won’t misunderstand how to handle them. They’re a dreadfully nervy bunch, you know. High-strung.”
Delicately conveying that Dag should be treated carefully; Dag was not ungrateful.
The afternoon was bad. The evening, worse, and Dag began to wonder if coming out with Finch would turn into one of the worst mistakes of his life. But sometime during the night his ten minutes of snatched sleep became twenty, then forty. When Fawn woke him, blinking, after two hours solid, he realized they’d turned some corner. That, and a good farm breakfast, revived him enough to go on.
The lull between bouts lengthening, Sparrow had time, in his restless misery, to grow bored. Dag diverted him with what children’s stories he could remember from his distant youth, or Lakewalker ballads recast into tall tale. He wished Bo were here. The other members of the boy’s family, as they drifted in and out to help, listened along wordlessly. As the next dawn edged toward noon, then night, Dag felt as though he’d been stuck in this room for about a thousand years.
It was somehow decided, not by him, that he needn’t stay by the bedside anymore, but that someone would come get him when more groundwork was wanted, which was now up to three and four hours apart. He was led off to a real bed in another room. With a washstand. And Fawn. It was his first chance to speak with her alone in days—he’d lost track of how many. But shouldn’t he have his wits about him for a talk so important? He was fairly sure that he should. And that he didn’t.
So he let her pull the brightly colored quilt up over them both, hugged her in hard, and slept like a dead man.
11
Fawn awoke tucked up under Dag’s left arm, so early in a misty dawn that the farmhouse was still silent. She was wearing one of his shirts for a nightdress; he was stripped for sleep as usual. She stretched her neck to put her ear to his heartbeat, then glanced up. He was awake, looking down at her.
“Slept out, finally?” she asked.
“Yes, I feel much better now.” His hand traced over her neck, breast, belly, and rested there, spread-fingered. His expression grew curiously tender.
She gave him a sleepy smile. “What?”
“You amaze me,” he whispered. “Every day, you amaze me.”
She cuddled in more firmly. I think I have the better part of that trade. She wondered just how refreshed he found himself this morning, and considered lifting the quilt to check. They’d made do with much less privacy than this back on the Fetch, time to time, muffling early morning giggles in each other’s quick kisses.
But Dag’s face grew serious, and he sighed. Yet he made no move to rise. Talk, then? Or maybe talk first, then…
“Remember the night of the pig roast?”
She kissed his collarbone. “Yes?” she said encouragingly. She stifled worry. Was he finally going to cough up whatever had been putting him off his stride since then? About time.
“I was a little distracted. I was…gods, Dag, stop making excuses for yourself…” His mutter trailed off. He drew breath and began again. “Your fertile time was starting up, and I didn’t catch it. I…we…I made you…you’re pregnant.”
She froze in astonishment. His chest had stilled, not breathing. A wave of shock seemed to rise from her feet through her lungs to the top of her head, and for a moment she wasn’t sure if it was good or bad or just immense, because her whole world was turning inside out. With a squeal of wild joy, she lurched up and kissed him smack on the mouth. “Oh! Oh!”
His squeezed eyes flew wide; he kissed her back, hugged her hard, released her; only then did his chest collapse in a woosh of breath. “Well! That’s a relief. Thought you’d be mad at me, Spark.”
“Is that why you blurted it out so blunt?” She stared, confused and a trifle alarmed. “I admit, this might not’ve been my first pick of time ’n place, but you don’t expect babies to be convenient. Not if you have a lick of sense. Aren’t you happy?”
His arms tightened around her. “Ecstatic. Confounded.” He hesitated. “Taken by surprise.”
“But we’re married. We knew this was bound to happen sometime, that’s what marriage is for. Surprised today, sure, but not…not in general.” Her nose wrinkled. “I suppose it could be like patrolling for malices. They’re what you went out looking for, but it’s still a surprise to find one that day.”
His deep laugh rumbled in his chest, and she was reassured. “Not my first pick of comparisons, Spark!” The laugh faded. “Except for the part about being scared.”
“Scared? When you went out after them again and again? Brave, I’d say!”
He shook his head, his expression growing inward, as if looking into long memory. “No. That wasn’t courage, just a kind of numbness. It was like I’d lost all affinity with the world. Now, though…oh gods, I care so much I can’t hardly breathe.” He dotted kisses all across her face, quick, almost frantic pecks. “And I’m scared spitless.”
About to say, It’ll be fine, Dag!, she paused as the complexities of their present situation began to creep back to her mind. Instead she said, “Babies, once they’re started, come on in their time, not yours. You just have to scramble around as best you can.”
She reached up and set her finger to his lips, stopping whatever he’d been about to say, as her own memory gripped her. The boy who’d fathered her first lost child had feared only for his own threatened comfort. He’d greeted the news of its bare existence with anger, rejection, threats of unforgivable slander.
This astonishing man in bed with her wanted to remake the whole world into a safe cradle for her second. Or leastways turn his heart inside out trying.
She’d a sneaking suspicion wisdom was to be found in some happy medium, but on the whole she preferred Dag’s approach. “You amaze me, too, Dag,” she whispered.
He rolled toward her, folded her in.
She nuzzled his chest hair, then thought of yet another advantage to possessing a Lakewalker spouse. “Hey! Is it a boy or a girl?”
“Too early to tell even for groundsense. It’ll be another few weeks till anyone can be sure.” He drew her upward to kiss her again, then added, “A girl could carry on our tent name.” His attempt at a neutral tone failed to conceal his hopeful interest.
“But if she married a farmer, she’d take her husband’s name,” Fawn felt constrained to point out.
“Any boy who marries our girl will take her name and like it!”
She giggled madly. “You sound so fierce!”
He blushed. “I ’spose I am getting a bit ahead of myself, Spark.”
Truly.
Uncertainty began to nibble away at her first joyful surprise. Because her attempt to picture the birth of this child foundered on the first question, Where? Somewhere between the surety of this morning’s breakfast and the air dream of the child’s future wedding lay a whole lot of today’s-work. And a need, burning as inexorably as an hour-marked candle, to get things settled. Laying in winter supplies on the farm every fall had taught her how to plan ahead, how to make the future happen as it was supposed to. Well…it had shown her one way, she reckoned. It hadn’t taught her how to follow a long-legged Lakewalker husband over half a continent; that, she’d had to learn as she trotted along. And she was still learning. How do we do this? wasn’t to be simply answered, Just like Mama and Papa.
Dag’s hand left off caressing her belly and found a lower spot to admire. She eased her thighs apart to give him room, then hesitated. “I suppose it’s safe to…? Must be, stands to reason. Most folks wouldn’t even know at this point.”
“Yes,” he said firmly. “I asked.”
“Who?”
“Arkady.”
“Oh.” She digested this, as well as she could through the distraction of his sweet tickling. “Does he know that I’m…? Oh. Yeah. ’Course he could tell, if you could.” She blinked. “Wait a minute. Did everyone know but me? Barr and Remo, too? And…” Now she hit him, but it was too late to be convincing.
“Groundsense,” he sighed. “You just deal with it.” He licked down her neck. “You’re smiling.”
She suspected she was grinning like a chipmunk with its cheeks full, actually. “So much for my dignity.”
“Remember,” he breathed, “to take joy.”
She was put in mind of what he’d said when planning their wedding night; that it would stand out sharp and clear when a thousand other nights blurred. So far, he’d been proved right, though they weren’t even up to a thousand days, yet. She opened mind, heart, and body to him as he set about making sure that, along with all her other recollections of this remarkable morning, she would remember that she was beloved.
After they washed up and dressed, Dag went in to give Sparrow another treatment. The boy seemed so much eased that Finch’s unmarried sister, a girl of fifteen, was left to sit with him. Midmorning found Fawn and Dag on their own in the farmhouse kitchen, the rest of the Bridger family having scattered to their relentless farm chores. Fawn rewarmed the pot of grits left out for them, not too stiffly congealed, and fried up ham and eggs to go-with. They were half done with this meal when Dag lifted and turned his head at nothing. It reminded Fawn of the way a cat stared at things no one else could see. Lakewalkers. No wonder they made regular folks uneasy.
“What?” said Fawn.
“Just bumped grounds with Neeta, of all people. What’s she doing here?”
“Looking for us?” Fawn made to scramble up.
“Seemingly. Sit, Spark, she’s still riding in. Finish your breakfast. You need your food.” He gave her a fond smile.
She smiled back. Deep inside her head an excited voice was still crying Babybabybaby, yesnoyes eep! She wanted to jump up and run around madly preparing something, but truly, there was nothing much to do yet, especially here. Except to eat her breakfast. She swallowed the last bite of buttery grits, then followed Dag to the front porch.
Neeta was just cantering into the farmyard, mud splashing from the hooves of her sweating horse, which shook its head as she pulled up, and stood blowing through round, red nostrils. “Dag!” she cried. “Sir! You’re alive!”
Had there been doubt? Dag’s left arm tightened around Fawn’s waist, whether possessively or in warning she wasn’t sure.
“Am I in time?” Neeta added breathlessly. She cast an odd look at Fawn, her blond brows tightening as if in confusion or dismay or…disappointment?
In a rather deliberate drawl, Dag said, “In time for what, Neeta? I expect we could still rustle you up some breakfast.”
She made an impatient swipe of her hand at the levity. “Captain Bullrush can’t be more than an hour behind me, and he’s hopping mad. You have time to get away if you hurry.”
“Away where, and why? I can’t believe Antan Bullrush has mayhem on his mind, on such a fine spring morning.”
“No, no, of course not, but you can still get back to camp. Slip past him. No one need ever know you were here. Oh gods, I should have brought another horse. I can lend you mine if you like, and I can walk home.” She dismounted and climbed the wooden steps as if to present her reins to Dag at once.
Dag stuffed his hand into his pocket. “I should’ve thought folks knew we were out. Didn’t Arkady get my note?”
“Yes, Barr and Remo said. Except they didn’t tell us till the next night, when the rumors were already all over the place.”
An uneasy sigh trickled through Dag’s lips. “So, ah…you want to begin at the beginning, Neeta?” He let a tinge of patrol-captain sternness seep into his tone—deliberately?
Perhaps, for Neeta straightened her shoulders. “Yes, sir. Well. I guess old Arkady wasn’t best pleased when he found you’d gone off—was there a sick farmer?”
“Lockjaw,” said Dag shortly.
Neeta’s mouth made an Oh; she looked briefly daunted, but forged on. “I don’t know what was going through Arkady’s mind, but the next morning when you two didn’t come to the medicine tent, he told Challa he’d given you a day of rest. Except that Nola and Cerie piped up that they’d seen Fawn go off into the woods the day before with some cute farmer boy, and she never came back. Well, Cerie said she wasn’t sure it was like that, but Nola thought it was. And Arkady just snorted.”
“Wasn’t like what?” said Fawn, taken aback.
“That you had eloped with that farmer boy, and Dag had gone chasing after you both.” Neeta’s lips thinned with as much disapproval as if she had discovered it to be true.
Fawn gasped in outrage at the slander. “I never—!”
Dag squeezed her to silence and removed his hand from his pocket, but only to rub it over his face. “Go on.”
“Any gossip that’s all over the medicine tent spreads all over the camp pretty shortly. That night Barr and Remo told me and Tavia about your note, but they made us swear to keep our mouths shut, which I for one was just as happy to do. I still thought it could have been a false trail, if you’d gone off with blood in your eye. I don’t know how the whole garbled mess came to Captain Bullrush’s ear, but next morning he stormed down to the medicine tent to find out what was really going on. He said he wasn’t going to be having some blighted murder ballad play out in his patrol district.
“He was even more livid when he found out the truth, and that Arkady hadn’t warned him. I heard they had the most ferocious argument. They agreed to give you till last night to show up and explain yourself, and then the captain was going to go looking for the answers. Which he is doing this morning. Oh, sir!” Neeta raised a distressed hand toward Dag. “Arkady and I had almost talked the camp into offering you tent rights! I thought you fought so hard for your training—don’t you care about it anymore?”
“More than I can rightly say.”
“Then there has to be some way to salvage this. Can’t you have these farmers swear you were never here?”
Dag wanted, Fawn could see, to slap Neeta with a flat No, and leave it at that. But the habits of too many years spent shaping young patrollers cut in before he could gratify himself. “Useless, Neeta. Antan would have the truth out in no time. I won’t lie. But I’d be glad to grovel, if you think it would help.”
“Oh!” Neeta nearly stamped her foot, Fawn thought; she did clench her fists. “Can’t you please come away?”
“Not yet. One more day of nerve treatments will slice better ’n a week off Sparrow’s recovery, I figure. Have you ever seen lockjaw, Neeta?”
She shook her head, lips tight. “No. But I hear it’s gruesome.”
“You heard right.” Dag straightened and stretched, as if girding himself. “Leave your captain to me, Neeta. It’s come on sooner than I would have liked, but these questions were bound to get laid on the table sometime. Best to have it out and done.”
“Sir, you…you blighted fool, sir!”
“The Bridgers will let you use their barn. Go take care of your horse, patroller.” Dag sighed. “You’ve used him hard this morning.”
“To no good purpose, it looks like,” muttered Neeta savagely. She stalked off the porch and led her blown mount away around the house.
“I could wish Arkady hadn’t taken it into his head to cover for me,” murmured Dag. “I wasn’t expecting that. Did he lie outright? Ah, gods. This is going to be Hickory Lake all over again. I’m so sorry, Spark.”
“I don’t think it’s the same,” said
Fawn sturdily.
“Sure puts me in mind. Blight. If only I’d had more time to earn my place, time to persuade. I thought the scheme of a medicine tent in the farmer’s market was first-rate, or could be made to be, with unbeguilement. Get it set up and running in two years or three, leave it behind as a seed when we did go north again.”
“Planting ideas?” Fawn tested the notion in her mind. “Only works if you’re going to stay and water and weed them. And pick off the caterpillars.”
“Huh.” He dropped a kiss on the top of her head. “It’s never simple, is it, Spark?”
Captain Bullrush bumped Dag’s groundsense within the hour. Dag went out to wait on the top porch step, leaning against the post. Fawn sat at his feet, her face propped in her little fists. Neeta lounged on the steps opposite Fawn, one booted leg outstretched, scowling. The adult Bridgers filtered out onto the porch, too, Papa Bridger and Lark flanking the front door with their arms crossed, Mama Bridger in her rocker failing to knit, Cherry and Finch anxious on the bench beside her.
“I expect Captain Bullrush will be wanting a word or two with me. I’d take it kindly if you folks won’t interrupt his say,” Dag cautioned the Bridgers. “Fawn’s and my place back at New Moon Camp is at stake, here.”
Finch ducked his head at Fawn, his source of many lessons on Lakewalkers over the past four days—though not that one—and said, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know!”
Dag gave him a dry smile over his shoulder. “If you had, would you have done any different?”
Finch glanced up toward the corner bedroom, where his nephew lay peacefully sleeping. “I guess not. Not really.”
“Me neither.”
The little Lakewalker patrol trotted slowly up the lane. The camp captain naturally didn’t ride alone; he’d chosen his age mate Tapp to be his partner for this inquiry. Witness, too, probably. Not surprisingly, Barr and Remo trailed after. They looked relieved to see Dag and Fawn, more confused to see Neeta. The four drew up their mounts in the muddy yard in front of the porch.
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