Beguilement (26 page)

It was like to frighten the horses.

Mari’s patrol was slated to ride north and pick up their pattern again where it had been broken off almost two weeks ago by the call for aid. With his patrol’s purse newly topped off by the Glassforgers, Chato planned to continue on his mission to purchase horses from the limestone country south of the Grace. He would be slowed on the first leg by a wagon to carry Saun and Reela, neither quite ready to ride yet; the pair were to finish convalescing at a Lakewalker camp that controlled a ferry crossing down on the river, and be picked up again on the return journey. Both patrols had planned their removals for the crack of noon, a merciful hour. Dag sensed Chato’s moderating influence at work. Mari was perfectly capable of ordering a dawn departure after a bow-down, then concealing her evil hilarity behind a rod-straight face as her bleary troop stumbled out.

Mari was far and away Dag’s favorite relative, but that was a pretty low fence to get over, and he prayed to the absent gods that he might avoid her altogether this morning.

After breakfast Dag helped lug the last of Saun’s gear to the wagon, and turned to find his prayers, as usual, unanswered. Mari stood holding the reins of her horse, staring at him in mute exasperation.

He let his eyebrows rise, trying desperately not to smile. Or worse, chortle.

“What?”

She drew a long breath, but then just let it out. “Besotted fool. There’s no more use trying to talk to you this morning than to those twittering wrens in that elm across the yard. I said my piece. I’ll see you back in camp in a few weeks. Maybe the novelty will have worn off by then, and you’ll have your wits back, I don’t know. You can do your own blighted explaining to Fairbolt, is all I can say.”

Dag’s back straightened. “That I will.”

“Eh!” She turned to gather her reins, but then turned back, seriousness replacing the aggravation in her eyes. “Be careful of yourself in farmer country, Dag.”

He would have preferred a tart dressing-down to this true concern, against which he had no defense. “I’m always careful.”

“Not so’s I ever noticed,” she said dryly. Silently, Dag offered her a leg up, which she accepted with a nod, settling in her saddle with a tired sigh. She was growing thinner, he thought, these last couple of years. He gave her a smile of farewell, but it only made her lean on her pommel and lower her voice to him. “I’ve seen you in a score of moods, including foul. I’ve never before seen you so plain happy. Enough to make an old woman weep, you are… Take care of that little girl, too, then.”

“I plan to.”

“Huh. Do you, now.” She shook her head and clucked her horse forward, and Dag belatedly recalled his last statement to her on the subject of plans.

But he could almost watch himself being displaced in her head with the hundred details a patrol leader on duty must track—as well he remembered. Her gaze turned to sweep over the rest of her charges, checking their gear, their horses, their faces; judging their readiness, finding it enough to go on with. This day.

Again.

Fawn had been helping Reela, apparently one of the several dozen people, or so it seemed to Dag, that Fawn had managed to make friends of in this past week.

The two young women bade each other cheery good-byes, and Fawn popped down off the wagon to come stand with him as he watched his patrol form up and trot out through the gateway. At least as many riders gave a parting wave to her as to him. In a few minutes, Chato’s patrol too mounted up and wheeled out, at a slower pace for the rumbling wagon. Saun waved as enthusiastic a farewell as his injuries permitted. Silence settled in the stable yard.

Dag sighed, caught as usual between relief to be rid of the whole maddening lot of them, and the disconcerting loneliness that always set in when he was parted from his people. He told himself that it made no sense to be shaken by both feelings simultaneously. Anyway, there were more practical reasons to be wary when one was the only Lakewalker in a townful of farmers, and he struggled to wrap his usual guarded courtesy back about himself. Except now with Fawn also inside.

The horse boys disbanded toward the tack room or the back door to the kitchen, walking slowly in the humidity and chatting with each other.

“Your patrollers weren’t so bad,” said Fawn, staring thoughtfully out the gate.

“I didn’t think they’d accept me, but they did.”

“This is patrol. Camp is different,” said Dag absently.

“How?”

“Eh…” Weak platitudes rose to his mind, Time will tell, Don’t borrow trouble.

“You’ll see.” He felt curiously loath to explain to her, on this bright morning, why his personal war on malices wasn’t the sole reason that he volunteered for more extra duty than any other patroller in Hickory Lake Camp. His record had been seventeen straight months in the field without returning there, though he’d had to switch patrols several times to do it.

“Must we leave today, too?” asked Fawn.

Dag came to himself with a start and wrapped his arm around her, snugging her to his hip. “No, in fact. It’s a two-day hard ride to Lumpton from here, but we’ve no need to ride hard. We can make an easy start tomorrow, take it in gentle stages.” Or even later, the seductive thought occurred. “I was wondering if I ought to give my room back to the hotel. Since I’m not really a patroller and all.”

“What? No! That room is yours for as long as you want it, Spark!” Dag said indignantly.

“Um, well, that’s sort of the point, I thought.” She bit her lip, but her eyes, he realized, were sparkling. “I was wondering if I could sleep in with you?

For…

frugality.”

“Of course, frugality! Yes, that’s the thing. You are a thoughtful girl, Spark.”

She cast him a merry smirk. She flashed an entrancing dimple when she smirked, which made his heart melt like a block of butter left in the summer sun. She said, “I’ll go move my things.”

He followed, feeling as utterly scatter-witted as Mari had accused him of being.

He could not, could not run up and down the streets of Glassforge, leaping and shouting to the blue sky and the entire population, She says I make her eyes happy!

He really wanted to, though. They did not leave the next day, for it was raining. Nor the next either, for rain threatened then, too. On the following morning, Dag declared Fawn too sore from the previous night’s successfully concluded bed experiments to ride comfortably, although by midafternoon she was hopping around as happily as a flea and he was limping as the pulled muscle in his back seized up. Which provided the next day’s excuse for lingering, as well. He pictured the conversation with Fairbolt, Why are you late, Dag? Sorry, sir, I crippled myself making passionate love to a farmer girl. Yeah, that’d go over well.

Watching Fawn discover the delights that her own body could provide her was an enchantment to Dag as endlessly beguiling as water lilies. He had to cast his mind far back for comparisons, as he’d made those discoveries at a much younger age. He could indeed remember being a little crazed with it all for a while.

He found he really didn’t need to rack his brains to provide variety in his lovemaking, for she was still overwhelmed by the marvel of repeatability. So he probably hadn’t created anything he couldn’t handle, quite.

Dag also discovered in himself a previously unsuspected weakness for foot rubs.

If ever Fawn wanted to fix him in one place, she didn’t need to hog-tie him with ropes; when her small firm hands worked their way down past his ankles, he slumped like a man poleaxed and just lay there paralyzed, trying not to drool too unattractively into his pillow. In those moments, never getting out of bed again for the rest of his life seemed the very definition of paradise. As long as Spark was in the bed with him.

The short summer nights filled themselves, but Dag was unsettled by how swiftly the long days also slipped by. A gentle ride out for Fawn to try her new mare and riding trousers, with a picnic by the river, turned into an afternoon under a curtaining willow tree that lasted till sundown. Sassa the Horseford kinsman popped up again, and Dag found in Fawn an apparently bottomless appetite for tours of Glassforge crafters. Her endless curiosity and passion for questions was by no means limited to patrollers and sex, flattering as that had been, but seemed to extend to the whole wide world. Sassa’s willing, nay, proud escort and array of family connections guided them through the complex back premises of a brick burner, a silversmith, a saddler, three kinds of mills, a potter—Fawn cast a simple pot under the woman’s enthusiastic tutelage, becoming cheerfully muddied—and a repeat of the visit to Sassa’s own glassworks, because Dag had missed it before on account of being up to his waist in swamp.

Dag at first mustered a mere polite interest—he seldom paid close attention anymore to the details of anything he wasn’t being asked to track and slay—but found himself drawn in along the trail of Fawn’s fascination. With studied and sweating intensity, the glass workers brought together sand and fire and meticulous timing to effect transformations of the very ground of their materials into fragile, frozen brilliance. This is farmer magic, and they don’t even realize it, Dag thought, completely taken by their system of blowing glass into molds to make rapid, reliable replicas. Sassa gave to Fawn a bowl that she had seen being made the other day, now annealed, and she determined to take it home to her mother. Dag was doubtful about getting it to West Blue intact in a saddlebag, but Sassa provided a slat box padded with straw and hope. Which was going to be bulky and awkward; Dag steeled himself to deal with it.

Later, Fawn unpacked the bowl to set on the table beside their bed to catch the evening light. Dag sat on the bed and stared with nearly equal interest at the way the patterns pressed into it made wavering rainbows.

“All things have grounds, except where a malice has drained them,” he commented.

“The grounds of living things are always moving and changing, but even rocks have a sort of low, steady hum. When Sassa made that batch of glass and cast it, it was almost as if its ground came alive, it transformed so. Now it’s become still again, but changed. It’s like it”—his hand reached out as if grasping for the right word—“sings a brighter tune.”

Fawn stood back with her hands on her hips and gave him a slightly frustrated look; as if, for all her questions, he walked in a place she could not follow.

“So,” she said slowly, “if things move their grounds, can pushing on grounds move things?”

Dag blinked in faint shock. Was it chance or keen logic that brought her question so close to the heart of Lakewalker secrets? He hesitated. “That’s the theory,” he said at last. “But would you like to see how a Lakewalker would move the ground in that bowl from one side of the table to the other?”

Her eyes widened. “Show me!” Gravely, he leaned over, reached out with his hand, and shoved the bowl about six inches.

“Dag!” Fawn wailed in exasperation. “I thought you were going to show me magic.”

He grinned briefly, although mostly because he could scarcely look at her and not smile. “Trying to move anything through its ground is like pushing on the short end of a long lever. It’s always easier to do it by hand. Although it’s said…” He hesitated again. “It’s said the old sorcerer-lords linked together in groups to do their greater magics. Like matching grounds for healing, or a lovers’ groundlock, only with some lost difference.”

“Don’t you do that now?”

“No. We are too reduced—maybe our bloodlines were adulterated in the dark times, no one knows. Anyway, it’s forbidden.”

“I mean for your pattern walking.”

“That’s just simple perception. Like the difference between feeling with your hand and pushing with your hand, perhaps.”

“Why is pushing forbidden? Or was that linking up in bunches to push that’s not allowed?”

He should have known that the last remark would elicit more questions.

Throwing one fact to Fawn was like throwing one piece of meat to a pack of starving dogs; it just caused a riot. “Bad experiences,” he replied in a quelling tone. All right, by the pursing of her lips and wrinkling of her brow, quelling wasn’t going to work; try for distraction. “Let me tell you, though, not a patroller up Luthlia way survives the lake country without learning how to bounce mosquitoes through their grounds. Ferocious little pests—they’ll drain you dry, they will.”

“You use magic to repel mosquitoes!” she said, sounding as though she couldn’t decide whether to be impressed or offended. “We just have recipes for horrible stuff to rub on our skins. Once you know what’s in them, you’d almost rather be bit.”

He snickered, then sighed. “They say we are a fallen folk, and I for one believe it. The ancient lords built great cities, ships, and roads, transformed their bodies, sought longevity, and brought the whole world crashing down at the last.

Though I suspect it was a really good run for a while, till then. Me—I bounce mosquitoes. Oh, and I can summon and dismiss my horse, once I get him trained up to it. And help settle another’s hurting body, if I’m lucky. And see the world double, down to the ground. That’s about it for Dag magic, I’m afraid.”

Her eyes lifted to his face. “And kill malices,” she said slowly.

“Aye. That mainly.”

He reached for her, swallowing her next question with a kiss. It took the better part of a week for Dag’s boat anchor of a conscience to drag him out of the clouds and back onto the road. He wished he could just jettison the blighted deadweight. But one morning he turned back from shaving to find Fawn, half-dressed and with her bedroll open on the bed, frowning down at the sharing knife that lay there.

He came and wrapped her in his arms, her bare back to his bare torso.

“It’s time, I guess,” she said.

“I guess so, too.” He sighed. “Not that you couldn’t count my unused camp-time by years, but Mari gave me leave to solve the mystery of that thing, not to linger here in this brick-and-clapboard paradise. The hirelings have been giving me squinty looks for days.”