Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [106]
“I did,” said Fawn defiantly. “Twice.”
Hoharie looked not-best-pleased, but the shrewd and curious look on Mari’s face scarcely changed.
“Did you get a look at Utau, when you passed the patrol?” asked Mari. “We sent him home in Razi’s care.”
“Oh, yes,” said Hoharie. She dismounted and stretched her back. Really, all her party looked as hot and tired and dirty as Fawn felt. So much for Lakewalker conceit about their stamina. “Strangest ground damage I ever saw. I told Utau, six months on the sick list.”
“That long?” Mari looked dismayed.
“Likely less, but that’ll hold Fairbolt off for three, which should be about right.”
They exchanged short laughs of mutual understanding.
Fawn slid off sweaty Grace, who stood head down and flop-eared, liquid eyes reproachful, legs as stiff as Fawn’s own. Saun came out of the grove to Mari’s shoulder, trailed by a couple of other patrollers, both older women. As the women began to confer with Hoharie and Mari, he strode up to Fawn, looking astonished.
“You shouldn’t be out here! Dag would have a fit.”
“Where is Dag?” She craned past him toward the grove. So close. “What’s happened to him?”
Saun ran a hand over his head in a harried swipe. “Which time?”
Not a reassuring answer. “Day before yesterday, about the time Dirla rode in to Hickory Lake. Something happened to Dag then, I know it. I felt it.” Something terrible?
His brows drew down in wonder, but he caught her by the arm as she tried to push past him. “Wait! You can’t close your ground. I don’t know if you’d be drawn in, too—wait!” She wrenched out of his grip and broke into a stumbling run. He pelted after, crying in exasperation, “Blight it, you’re as bad as him!”
Among the trees, a number of people seemed to be collected together in bedrolls under makeshift awnings of blankets and hides, four women under one and four men under another. They lay too still for sleep; not still enough for death. A little way off, another bedroll was partly shaded under a blanket hitched to an ash tree’s limbs. Fawn fell to her knees beside it and stared in shock.
Dag lay faceup under a light blanket. Someone had removed his arm harness and set it atop his saddlebags at the head of the bedroll. Fawn had watched his beloved face in sleep, and knew its shape in all its subtle movements. This was like no sleep she’d ever seen. The copper of his skin seemed tarnished and dull, and his flesh stretched too tightly over his bones. His sunken eyes were ringed with dark half circles. But his bare chest rose and fell; he breathed, he lived.
Saun slid to his knees beside her and grabbed her hands as she reached for Dag. “No!”
“Why not?” said Fawn furiously, yanking futilely against his strong grip. “What’s happened to him?”
Saun began to give her a garbled and guilty-sounding account of his trying to help by slaying mud-men in pots—Fawn gazed in bewilderment toward the boggy shoreline where he pointed—that she could only follow at all because of the prior descriptions of the groundlock she’d heard from Dirla. Of Dag, leaping into the eerie danger to save somebody named Artin, which sounded just like Dag, truly. Of Dag being sucked into the lock, or spell, or whatever this was. Of Dag lying unarousable all these three days gone. Fawn stopped fighting, and Saun, with a stern look at her, let her wrists go; she rubbed them and scowled.
“But I’m not a Lakewalker. I’m a farmer,” said Fawn. “Maybe it wouldn’t work on me.”
“Mari says no more experiments,” said Saun grimly. “They’ve already cost us three patrollers and the captain.”
“But if you don’t…” If you don’t poke at things, how can you find anything out? She sat back on her heels, lips tight. All right: look around first, poke later. Dag’s breathing didn’t seem to be getting worse right away, anyhow.
Mari, meanwhile, had led Hoharie and Othan out to the mud pots, then back through the grove to examine the other captives. Mari was finishing what sounded to Fawn like a more coherent account of events than Saun’s as they came over and knelt on the other side of Dag.