Dag made sure Rase wasn’t vomiting blood, then set Remo to haul him back to the horses, away from the remains of the malice. Tavia supported Barr, who looked impressively gory—scalp wounds bled like wellsprings—but had suffered no skull cracks. Dag assigned Neeta to ride after the farmers and get them turned around once more. “Tell them we’ll meet by the wagons!”
As the swift hoofbeats of her mount receded, Whit circled the smelly mound piled up in the middle of the road, shaking his head in new amazement. “That thing must have weighed six, eight hundred pounds. Did Fawn’s malice look like that one?” he asked Dag.
“Pretty much. Except the Glassforge malice was more dangerous, not being on the verge of a molt.” The Glassforge malice had also acquired language; this one seemed not to have, which suggested hopefully that it had not yet taken any human victims.
“How do those molts work? You keep talking about them like they was a bad thing.”
Dag shrugged. “You understand how mud-men are made, right? The malice places a live animal in the soil, and alters the creature’s ground to impel its body to grow into a human form.”
“I heard Fawn describe the ones she saw in Raintree. I wouldn’t rightly claim to understand it, but I guess I get the picture.”
“Ground is the underlying truth of the world. The malice turns it into a lie, or at least, into something else, and the matter labors to match it.”
Whit looked much blanker; Dag swiftly gave up on maker theory. “It’s like the malice uses its own body as a mud-pot to grow its new one in. A newer, better, more advanced, usually more human-looking one. Depending on what people or animals the malice has found to consume. Ground-rip, that is. A malice uses those grounds to teach its new body how to grow.”
Whit’s nose wrinkled. “You’re saying the malice gives birth to itself?”
“There’s a reason we call it molting and not birth. When it reaches full size, the malice abandons its old body, which dies around the new one, and the new one, er…fights its way out of the old skin. The new body is usually near as big as the old, so a malice on the verge of a molt is sessile—immobile. It holes up for days or weeks and doesn’t move till the process is complete. They’re pretty helpless at that stage, and easy—well, easier—to slay.”
“What about when it gets more human, like the one you saw in Raintree? That you said was so beautiful?”
“Same process. Messier, I guess. They tend to molt less often as they advance.”
Whit stared at the pile of rubble and scratched his head. “Huh. You wouldn’t want Fawn to see that just now, I reckon.”
Trust Whit to blurt out what was better left unsaid. Dag didn’t know whether to laugh or sigh. “No,” he agreed. “I sure wouldn’t.”
But Whit was already in pursuit of another thought. “So—back when you two met near Glassforge, Fawn did what Rase just did, more or less?”
“Yes. She slew a malice, with a primed sharing knife. Just like that.”
Whit was silent for a very long time. “My little sister,” he finally said. His tone was not especially readable, but Dag thought it might be wonder. Or awe. “Huh.”
Fawn was relieved to camp that night back at the shallow ford where they’d left the wagons, despite the exhausting trek to regain it. Grouse wasn’t the only farmer to grumble about having ridden twelve miles down the road only to ride twelve miles back, just the loudest.
“It was a long day’s work to end up right back where we started. What did we gain?”
“Practice,” said Sumac, without sympathy. “Practice is never wasted.”
Once Fawn had convinced herself of Dag’s uninjured state, she viewed the victorious but battered patrol with what concern she had left over. Whit assured her that Barr yelped far more for Arkady stitching up his head than he had for the mud-man hitting him with the original rock. Remo moved stiffly, and couldn’t raise his right arm higher than his shoulder, but made no complaint. Everyone including Tavia seemed to think the bruise on Tavia’s face was more showy than serious.
Rase, untouched by any blow, was by far the sickest. Fawn gladly shared her dwindling stock of anti-nausea medicine with him, but it was after sunset before he could keep so much as a sip of water down. Dag seemed unalarmed, but made sure the boy stayed in his bedroll. The Lakewalkers all agreed Rase deserved a proper bow-down, a party patroller-style to celebrate his first malice kill, but that it would have to be put off till he was in shape to enjoy it, which Dag said could be as much as a week.
The patrollers collected around the fire after supper to piece together Rase’s spent knife and carefully wrap the shards in a makeshift cloth shroud until it could be returned to New Elm Camp for burial. They didn’t seem grave enough for Fawn to call it a ritual, nor cheery enough to call it a celebration, but Sumac led them in a song Fawn recognized from the bow-down she’d seen back in Glassforge—not with a bone flute this time, just with naked voices. The words turned out to be not about malices or death or sacrifice, but about a garden by a lakeside where two lovers met. It ought to have sounded lyrical, but somehow came out more like a hymn. Fawn could not have said why, but she felt the tune must be very old.
Berry, listening as the verses found their culmination, drew her hickory-wood fiddle from its bag and, despite her healing fingers, took up the melody in winding variations each sweeter than the last. The flickering firelight gleamed off tracks of tears on Rase’s face as he listened from his bedroll, and when she finished, he murmured, “Thank you,” very sincerely. Fawn wondered how close to his great-grandfather the young patroller had been.
Berry lightened the mood with a brisker reel, inspiring Plum to drag her little brother Owlet to the fireside in a valiant attempt to dance. The two held hands and swung arms with more enthusiasm than grace, and Owlet squealed his delight as Plum twirled her skirts. In this warm weather Owlet ran about dressed in a cast-off shirt, as good as a gown on him, and nothing else; below the hem his dimpled knees pumped and his little bare feet tromped the dirt, and even Bo and Dag smiled.
After Berry shook out her hands and put the fiddle away, Bo offered a tale or two, both outrageously unlikely, which led to some reminiscing from the patrollers, the likelihood of which was harder to judge. A few hoarded bottles passed from hand to hand. Arkady’s contribution won the most respect; the one sip that Fawn dared went down like liquid fire. Even Grouse took a swallow of that one.
When the moon rose, Fawn lay in their bedroll and listened to the munching and muffled snorting of the grazing animals, scattered up the creek side. From the way he’d picked at his dinner, she thought Dag shared some of Rase’s queasiness, but she wasn’t sure how it compared with how he’d felt after the Glassforge malice, as she’d been in no condition then to notice. So had Rase’s ground veiling just been unpracticed, or would he grow into a maker someday, too? Dag walked his perimeter patrol very wide; it was a long time before he joined her. They found their familiar positions, legs interlaced beneath the blankets, face-to-face in the silvered dark.
“Was it a hard fight today?” she asked, stroking his furrowed forehead, winding her fingers in the unruly curls of his hair in which no gray strands yet gleamed.
“No. As straightforward as any other sessile, truth to tell.”
“Did Whit’s shield work right?”
“As far as I could tell. Well, I don’t know how long it would have stood up to a serious attempt at ground-ripping, but it resisted mind slaving. If only because it made Whit’s ground so blurry the malice couldn’t figure out what he was. We didn’t give it time to puzzle out the problem.”
“Your patrollers were all right?”
“Oh, yes.”
Fawn said carefully, “I’m not sure they know you think that. You’ve been sort of grim and glum tonight.”
His brows lifted. “The youngsters did very well. Whit, too. He pulled his weight, and they all saw that he did. Won’t any of ’em look at farmers quite the same way again, I daresay.” He was silent
a moment. “It’s the malice bothers me.”
“Why?”
He drew breath, let it out slowly. “I don’t know. It just…niggles. Every malice is akin, yet every one is a little different. Why was it out on the road like that?”
“Maybe it was just changing its lair. Looking for a better place to molt.”
“Possibly.” Dag didn’t sound convinced. “But this one seemed awfully aggressive for a pre-molt. Usually by the time they reach that stage they just lay up and let their mud-men bring them their prey.”
“Maybe…I don’t know. Maybe it ground-ripped some rabid animals?”
“I don’t think it would work like that.” He shook his head, hugging her in close as she turned to fit the curve of his body. “But I’ll say a few good words to the youngsters tomorrow. They earned it.”
The next day dawned clear; the company made a creaky but willing enough start shortly thereafter. Rase had recovered enough to sit his horse, although he had to let Indigo saddle it and two of his comrades help boost him aboard. Four miles up the road came a delay when everyone who hadn’t been on the battlefield got dragged over it by everyone who had for a blow-by-blow description of the fight. Fawn watched from atop Magpie, a trifle worried about the effect any lingering blight might have on her child. She was waiting eagerly for the first flutter of quickening, down there deep in her belly. She had not confessed even to Dag her unfounded conviction that if only she could bring this pregnancy past the point where her first had failed, it would be a sign of hope, like breaking a curse. To encounter a malice just now, bringing back such evil memories, had shaken her more than she’d let on.
But Whit and the patrollers finished babbling about their every bow shot at last, and they moved on.
Late in the morning, they came upon the spot where Dag said the malice must have first turned onto the road, and Dag led a mixed party of patrollers and farmer boys up toward the eastern ridge to search for the lair. Sumac stayed with the wagons to watch over Rase, with Neeta, who had seen lairs in Luthlia, assigned as support. Bo also declined the treat, and Hod as usual stuck by him.
Berry, grinning, leaned across her saddlebow to whisper to Fawn, “I expected Bo to have a worse head than this, come this morning. At midnight last night he was swearin’ to me he’d seen bats the size of turkey vultures flyin’ over the moon.”
“Were they anything like the hoop snakes he told me southern folks used as wagon wheels?” said Fawn. “Or the alligators hitched up in teams to draw racing boats in the swamps? Or the time it rained so hard that he saw catfish swimming up the road overhead, and fellows caught them in their hats?”
“I expect so. This fish wasn’t biting, though.”
Fawn snickered, and kicked Magpie along. She wouldn’t be surprised if Bo had seen vultures; those unburied mud-men corpses stank, and would draw scavengers soon. Did vultures search for carrion by moonlight?
The fire scrub ran on for miles, and Fawn tried to imagine the size of the blaze that had leveled these woods. How fast had the wind whipped the orange wall of death? She was reminded that malices were far from the only great uncaring hazard in the world. Between being burned to death or blighted, she could see little to choose. Yet the fire scars were recovering in years, not decades or centuries, and from the point of view of blackberry brambles and fireweed, might almost be considered a blessing.
Her ruminations grew darker when they stopped for lunch at a stream crossing by what was plainly a burned-out village, destroyed by that same three-years-back fire. The lack of settlers in this valley seemed suddenly explained. She walked among the traces of houses and sheds, blackened char sticking out from the green weeds like bones through skin.
“We could stop right here,” said Grouse, eyeing the bit of flat land along the feeder creek that had doubtless been what first attracted the burned-out folks.
“I’m not stopping in this accursed country,” said Vio sharply. “Monsters and fires and bear-men and who knows what all…” She had to break off to run and rescue her toddler Owlet from a determined attempt to fall headfirst into an old well. As she was snatching him away from death, and he was thrashing mightily in protest, she glanced down and shrieked.
Fawn hurried to her side, as did Sage and everyone else in earshot. The sun overhead lit the well shaft, revealing a mess of bones at the bottom all tangled together. The flesh was gone, but a few scraps of hair and clothing still showed.
“They must have gone down into the water there to try to get away from the flames,” said Sumac, coming over to look, “and suffocated when the fire passed over.”
“Or drowned,” opined Bo, “if they climbed on each other.”
Fawn swallowed and walked quickly away. Several sizes of bones, down there. A family? A couple of families, maybe.
“Wasn’t there anyone left even to bury these?” asked Calla.
“Maybe the survivors decided to let this be their grave,” offered Sage. “Not wanting it for a well anymore.”
After some debate, it was decided to leave the well-grave as it had been found. Fawn had lost her appetite for lunch, and was glad to be gone from the haunted place.
The malice lair expedition dropped down to rejoin them a few miles farther on. Dag had told Arkady he would be sorry if he came along, and the maker looked it, his face clammy with a Rase-like paleness. Sumac hurried to help him, but he just shook his head. The two parties traded fire-village and malice-lair descriptions, equally gruesome, and for once Bo offered no silly tales to top them.
Late in the afternoon, Fawn found herself riding between Dag and Finch at the head of the company. Everyone was starting to keep an eye out for a likely spot to camp for the night. Dag said that they might reach the pass at the head of this long valley late tomorrow. A debate was afoot whether it would be better to rest the animals for a day before or a day after the climb, but Fawn thought most folks were in favor of after. No one much liked this country anymore.
Finch was still full of his first sight of a malice lair. “Never would have believed! Everything dead gray for two hundred paces around. And those pocky holes where the mud-men came out, just like you said, Fawn!”
“Was it very bad?” Fawn asked.
Dag shook his head. “Nothing you haven’t seen, Spark. And less. It still puzzles me.” He turned in his saddle, frowning. “I sure wish we’d seen some other traffic today. Either direction.”
Sumac was riding behind them, along with a recovered but rather quiet Arkady. “That reminds me, Dag,” she remarked. “We should log a report at Laurel Gap Camp. They should have cleaned out that malice before we found it.”
“Writing a patrol report, ah, yes,” said Dag. “That’ll be a good thing for you to teach the youngsters how to do.”
She stuck out her tongue at him.
He grinned unrepentantly, but added, “We can leave it at the courier drop point in Blackwater Mills, when we get there. No need to go out of our way.”
“Though I’d sure like to know where their patrol has got to,” said Sumac.
Dag grimaced. “Aye.” His puzzled gloom returned.
Inspired, Fawn sat up in her saddle. “What if that malice wasn’t attacking us, Dag? What if it was running away from something?”
“What does a malice have to run away from?” asked Finch.
Fawn brightened further. “Patrollers! Maybe we’ll run into those Laurel Gap patrollers up the road a piece.”
“Will they be mad that we poached their malice?” asked Finch. Who hadn’t been there when the malice had been slain any more than Fawn had, but somehow Whit as representative farmer cast a reflected glory on all the boys. Fawn didn’t think it a bad thing.
“After a time,” said Dag, “you learn there’re plenty to go around. We don’t hoard them.”
Sumac said, “Though I trust the Laurel Gap patrol will be embarrassed. In fact, Uncle Dag, I believe I will write that report. Just to make sure of it.”
Dag’s smile flickered, but
faded again. “I shouldn’t think that malice would’ve run from a patrol. In the first place, it was so new-hatched it wouldn’t have known to, and in the second, malices regard us as meals on legs. It’d be like running away from your dinner. We try to make the sharing knives a surprise to them.”
Which gave Fawn a peculiar picture of her next meal leaping up off her plate, grabbing her knife, and attacking her. She shook it from her head. She didn’t want to try to imagine what malices thought; she was afraid she might succeed. Maybe she needed a nap. She glanced up at Dag, and her belly went cold. His face had gone absolutely expressionless, as if he’d just had an idea he really, really didn’t care for. “Not likely…” he breathed.
What isn’t likely, beloved?
The fire blight was at last giving way to patches of never-burned trees. A quarter mile up the road, Fawn could see a clear line where the woods closed back in. Had sudden rain saved it? Or a change of wind direction? The sun’s rim touched the western ridgetop, whose eastern slopes were already in shadow. She squinted at movement near the road at the tree line, doubly dusky.
“I’d vote for the first good stream past the trees for camp tonight,” said Finch, peering too. “Huh. What is that? Turkey vultures have got themselves a party, looks like.”
Half a dozen dark, flapping shapes surrounded a carcass. “A goat?” said Fawn. “A dog?”
“Maybe a fawn?” said Finch, then snickered at her peeved expression.
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