Dacey gutted and dressed the bear and they dragged it back to camp together. At first of the opinion that it wasn’t worth the trouble, Blaine changed her mind late the next morning. She awoke to discover that each move was an adventure in discomfort; the many scrapes on her inner legs and the tender skin inside her elbows were crusty and stiff, and Dacey, in anticipation, had cut out the bear’s sparse spring fat and rendered it. Before Blaine had a chance to make her first complaint, he handed her a little hickory basket full of grease, then busied himself with the dogs so she could minister to the sores high on her thighs. The crude liniment made her smell gamy, but softened her skin so it didn’t crack open with every movement.
With her hurts assuaged, Blaine went to the rocks below their camp where they’d found a slow trickling spring. The chill water sent goosebumps running up her arms and down her back, but left her feeling cleaner, and freshened her eyelids, swollen from all her crying the day before. Willum’s death still hung over her, making her thoughts thick and full of pain, but when she climbed back up, she was ready to see what Dacey had planned for the day.
He didn’t give her a chance to ask. As she entered the camp he looked up from the bear meat he was stripping to dry over the coals — for the dogs, he’d said; bear meat was good eating, but one so stringy as this one, they might as well give mostly to the dogs — and said, “You’re willing, I need you to see Trey today.”
“Me?”
“I think it’d be good to get to know him — and him, you. It’ll be easier to work with him if something sudden comes up. Iff’n you’re still looking to help, that is.”
“Well... ’course I am.” Blaine’s expression took a turn toward wary — not a thing to do with Dacey, for the dogs had circled around her, closing in with hesitation but clear determination. Whimsy finally butted in close, nudging Blaine’s skirt aside so she could sniff and lick a greasy scrape. Blaine pushed her away, not gently. “Quit!”
Dacey made a clicking noise between his teeth, a reminder to the dogs that he was watching. From under the hair that had fallen across his brow, he looked at her, thoughtful. “Just wander over to where we met him yesterday,” he suggested. “Listen to what he’s got to say. But Blaine —” This time he looked full and clear at her, his bright hazel eyes filled with quiet emphasis. “Don’t put yourself out in the open till he shows, and watch him a good bit even then.”
“You said he wasn’t Annekteh.”
“He ain’t. According to him, none o’ the folks have been Taken. But there’s more than one way to control a body, Blaine. He’s much as told us how they’ve been doing it.”
“Willum,” Blaine breathed, a hundred different scenarios of revenge tumbling through her mind.
Dacey nodded and laid another strip of meat on the greenstick drying rack he’d lashed together.
“Don’t be doing anything to get yourself in trouble,” Dacey said, as though he had read her vengeance-filled thoughts of a moment before. “Just listen, come back and tell me what he says.”
Blaine shrugged. “All right.” She rubbed a stray smear of grease into her skin a little more thoroughly. Maybe one of her snares had caught a rabbit. She hoped so, since Dacey seemed to have forgotten about breakfast. With a sigh, she got to her feet.
“And take Blue with you,” Dacey said.
Blaine stopped. Blue, rabbits and briars. No good, as Dacey would say to his dogs. “He’ll just be in the way.”
“Not if you tell him to get out of the way,” Dacey said without missing a beat.
“He won’t listen to me,” Blaine said, and winced at the petulance she heard in her own voice.
“I reckon he will, at that. Call him.”
“Blue,” Blaine said reluctantly. The dog lifted his head from Dacey’s blanket and gave her a surprised look. “Here, Blue.” His tail thumped. He stood, shook off, and trotted over to her.
“Tell him to sit,” Dacey said quietly. Blue cocked an ear at him, but continued to wait, tail gently waving as he stared up into Blaine’s face.
“Sit, Blue.”
The hound watched her, ever wagging his tail, as though she hadn’t spoken at all.
“No, tell him,” Dacey told her, surprising her with the command in his own voice.
All right, then. “Sit!” she said. Blue sat with a thump, watched her a moment, and turned his attention to the itch that plagued him. “He did it,” she said, not quite believing.
“Course he did. He’s got a crush on you, remember. Now, you tell him to stick close — with me, tell ’im — and he’ll stay right with you. Iff’n he goes after something, tell him no good. That ought to keep you out of trouble.”
She gave him a narrowed-eyed look, on the verge of telling him she didn’t need any dog to keep her out of trouble. Then she thought about the bear and simply nodded. “With me, Blue,” she said as she took up the hike to the clearing. The dog followed happily, never straying very far from her and readily responding to her call when he did — that is, as long as she told him instead of merely suggesting the commands.
They walked along the ridge, a distance that seemed longer now that she had an actual goal and wasn’t simply wandering. She even wondered if she’d missed the clearing, and was thinking about turning back when she saw its bright flash. Sunlight, partway down the mountain. Blaine slowed, her hand on Blue’s collar — and her blinder in the other. No point in taking chances, if Trey had talked, or brought Annekteh with him; the blinder would hide her. She stopped and stood there, watching for movement, looking for the grey of the pants that Trey had been wearing. After several moments of nothing, she moved closer and did it all over again.
At last, satisfied that if Trey was hiding she wasn’t going to be able to find him anyway, she moved down into the clearing and chose a seat behind a soft old tree trunk that lay along the hill. Blue sat on the first command, then lowered himself to the ground. Blaine’s hopes of his continued good behavior didn’t last long; he was soon shoving her arm with his big cold nose, courting her attention. “Quit,” she told him, pushing him off, keeping a hand on him so he’d maybe be under the influence of the blinder, too. “Just because you done listened to me don’t give you the right to get familiar.”
With a sigh, the hound put his head on his front paws. They waited — Blaine for some sign of Trey, and Blue for whatever she might want him to do next.
Despite Blaine’s vigil, it was the dog who first raised his head and pointed his nose down the hill. He growled and sniffed the air, then thumped his tail once. “No,” Blaine said, quiet but as firm as she’d ever been with him, stopping him when he would have risen to greet Trey. Now she could hear him, too, making his way up the hill with slow but steady steps.
She watched as snatches of him became visible through the branches and briars, and then as he reached the clearing and stood there, his mediocre features uncertain as he looked around. It was at that moment, as it became clear that he was afflicted with her own malady of ungainliness, and that his knees and elbows didn’t seem to know in which direction to point, that she decided he might be all right. If he’d come to a collected and graceful halt, she knew she wouldn’t have been able to stand him.
She waited for another few minutes and shoved her blinder into her pocket, standing up behind the tree. He noticed her immediately, relief on his face — although his features quickly reverted to their suspicious set. When she was close enough, he said, “I didn’t figure you’d come.”
“I got just as much stake in this as you,” Blaine asserted. “More. I got Willum.”
“That’s true,” Trey admitted, and then they stared at one another.
“Well?” Blaine said when her patience ran out, which, truth be told, didn’t take an excessive amount of time. “You got anything worth telling us?”
“Plenty,” he said in a haughty tone, obviously considering whether or not to impart his wisdom. She waited, and he relented. “Let’s get out of this clearing. It’s a fine place to meet, but it’s a good place to be watched, too.”
“I know. I done the watching,” Blaine reminded him.
Trey gave her a look, and probably would have set on her with some sharp retort, but Blue’s whine cut through the air instead. He’d decided that they weren’t so interesting after all, but he definitely wanted another chance at the rabbits. He looked up at her, face arranged to be its most beseeching — ears down low and pitiful, eyes showing sad white.
“No good, Blue,” Blaine said sharply, envisioning a noisy hound rabbit-bawl in the middle of their clandestine meeting. Blue looked away from her, doggy refusal to accept her words even though he still obeyed them, staying by her side as she led the way to the log.
“He does too listen,” Trey said, dignity lost in the sputter.
“Yeah, he does,” Blaine said guiltlessly, settling down on the damp ground behind the fallen tree. “Now, quit wasting time — said yourself you didn’t have much of it.”
“That’s so.” Trey leaned against the log and studied her openly. “Expected to be dealing with Dacey.”
“Do you want I should go back and tell him you don’t know nothing? Maybe he’ll come hisself, tomorrow. ’Course, maybe he won’t. He don’t want to be seen messing around the hills — they already had him once.”
“So how are you so sure he’s not Taken?” Trey asked, removing his hunting knife from its sheath for the sole purpose of digging little holes in the rotted bark of the tree.
“He’s not. I seen what they did to him.” She paused at the memory of the fear on Dacey’s face, and the way he’d changed when she saw him next...the way he always changed, when he thought of that day. It occurred to her for the very first time that they could have simply Taken him to learn what they wanted, and why hadn’t they? But no, now weren’t the time for such questions, not with Trey watching her face so close. “No, he ain’t one of ’em. That’s for certain-sure.”
He looked at her through the forelock of dull brown hair that had fallen over eyes of an equally indeterminate muddy brown, and offered her nothing.
Blaine thought that if he was in her family, he’d have taken a bath more recently than the obvious several weeks it had been. “Listen here, Trey. Maybe you was expecting Dacey, but I ain’t gonna go running to the Annekteh with whatever you tell me and I ain’t gonna forget it before I get back to him.”
“I can’t believe yer running with him at all! “Trey blurted. “Y’ought to be at home, not leaving your folks to worry an’ taking up with some stranger. It ain’t seemly.”
As if she’d been able to get help when she tried! As if all she’d done hadn’t been worth anything, when here she was, back in the thick of things — not hiding out down south, like would have been safe. Blaine jumped to her feet, her bound-together braids hitting her back with the vehemence of her motion. “You don’t know nothing, you — you squirrel-brained — you jug-eared — you...you coward!” She knew she’d struck home when he lunged to his feet as well, his face red, but she didn’t let up, not with the amount of mad riding her shoulders. “Afraid to tell your business to a girl, that’s what your problem is! Well, I don’t want to hear it, neither — doubtful you got anything worth listening to!”
She stalked a few feet up the hill and turned for another salvo. “And you listen to this! There ain’t nothing unseemly about Dacey Childers! He’s more of a gentleman than you can ever pretend to be —” ’Cause he’ll take me for who I am, an’ trust me to do what I can do — “And I ain’t running around with him like you think!” She gave him another glare for good measure.
“I don’t got much to tell you no ways,” he snapped back. “And I ain’t afraid to tell you nothing. There’s just no use to it, ’cause you can’t pass on what you don’t understand.”
As Blaine began to draw breath for a reply, Trey gestured at her torn up legs and snorted derisively. “Yesterday when I saw you, you was tangled in briars, and now look at you! Your skirt’s all ragged, and your boot’s a mess, and your legs are all tore up. It’s sure you ain’t got a clue how to handle what you’re into, and I ain’t taking any chances.”
Blaine’s pent up breath whooshed out as she searched for the proper words, words to curse him so bad the flies wouldn’t light. Then she realized the truth of it, and drew herself up. “I guess I handled that bear just fine,” she said airily. “I’m alive, and that’s better’n the bear got out of it.”
He didn’t hesitate for a minute. “You yell it to death, then?”
“I stabbed it in the eye and kilt it.” She lifted her chin. “I might be back tomorrow, or I might have more important things to do. Dacey’ll come, then, I reckon. You want his help in this, you better be here.” She turned her back and stalked up the hill, one sharp “With me, Blue!” drawing the hound to her side. It took most of her willpower, but she managed not to check if Trey was watching her leave.
By the time she got back to camp, she wasn’t feeling so self-full. Dacey had trusted her, and she hadn’t taken care of things as needed. But...in some ways, he’d not trusted her. And still wasn’t telling her everything. Why hadn’t the Annekteh Taken him?
It didn’t help that he greeted her with an amiable smile, and that he was fleshing out the bear skin, or the way he heaved it up so she could admire it. “It’ll be a nice pelt when it’s tanned,” he said. “Won’t look near as skinny, then.” And he actually winked at her.
Blaine soberly assessed the thing. “It looked a lot bigger when it was coming for me.”
“That’s usually the way of it,” Dacey agreed, his mouth lingering in a one-cornered grin. He draped the skin back over the fleshing log he’d rigged and worked at it for several minutes before asking, “Did he show?”
Blaine gave a shrug that turned into a reluctant nod. “Didn’t have nothing to say, though.”
“That so?” Dacey lifted his head just for a moment, but it was long enough to make Blaine look away.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s so.”
“Maybe tomorrow,” Dacey said, shifting the skin to work on a new spot, scraping away the bits of flesh and fat left from the skinning. The dogs arranged themselves in a circle around him, their ears cocked high in hope. Even Blaine could smell the fresh pelt, and she was glad that at least its blood no longer hung heavy in the air. Neither her empty stomach nor her sudden mood were prepared to endure the raw smells associated with Dacey’s job.
She moved a little further upwind and leaned against the granite wall of rock that formed one edge of the camp. It reminded her of her rock at home. Home. Willum. Family. This one, too, sat at the top of a hill. Unlike her own familiar perch, it was backed by an accessible, if not inviting peak, of dirt and trees. It beckoned to her, but she turned her back on it.
“Why didn’t they just Take you?” she asked without preamble.
“How’s that?” Dacey responded quizzically, one eyebrow arching in amusement.
Blaine felt her face grow warm. Could have come on to that some better. “When the Annekteh had you at their camp,” she repeated, phrasing her question more carefully, “why didn’t they just Take you? Why’d they fool around with that jimson?”
Dacey scraped steadily at the skin, carefully angling his knife so it wouldn’t cut through the pelt. His shoulders suddenly seemed too stiff to do the job right. “I keep forgetting you saw that.”
“You weren’t of any mind to pay attention to me.”.
“No.” That stiffened him up even further; he waited long enough that she thought he wasn’t going to answer at all. But she knew he was thinking about it by the too-deliberate way he worked, so unlike the casual skill he usually employed. Then he stopped working altogether, and his faraway gaze narrowed. She might as well not have been there, and he might as well have been carved of stone — until he took a sudden, deep breath, and started working again. “I did get one advantage from the seers,” he told her, as though those intervening moments hadn’t happened. “The Annekteh had no effect on them, and they can’t Take me, either. I should’ve told you before.”
Her mouth dropped open, until she caught herself doing it. Spirits, yes, you should have told me!
But no. He’d probably had his reasons. He always seemed to. And then, a buried memory — a word she’d found too jumbled to understand at the time, but had since heard Dacey use...why can’t you be made nekfehr? the Annekteh leader had demanded of Dacey.
The clues had been there. And so was the fact that while Dacey might give her little things to do, he clearly didn’t trust her, not clean through.
“I know it now,” she said finally. And went to climb up on the rock and look out over the mountains.
~~~~~
The timbering went well. Random problems still occurred where they shouldn’t, but no more deaths. No more accidental trappings or poisonings. Nekfehr found himself impressed with the humans’ resourcefulness, their wordless conspiracies. Questioned, Taken, the temporary vessels could only reveal their own minor actions. Yet these people knew each other well enough to make their isolated and insignificant behavior add up to something significant, indeed. One woman needing to gather poke. Another talking about root foods. And not a one of them mentioning the strange poisonous characteristics of the pokeweed. All of them, managing to look elsewhere when a hungry man tried a new food.
No planning, no discussion. No witnessing. And yet...
But such tricks seemed all they were good for. They knew nothing about their lost magics, about the suktah. They had not tended or encouraged new suktah growth. Perhaps the Annekteh had been too efficient in eradicating seer lore. These humans did not even know where the natural suktah groves grew. And surely...surely the groves had returned, after all this time.
With the suktah, the Annketeh could direct their vessels to build nekfehrta, the linking structures. And the nekfehrta, placed at intervals along the trails between established Annekteh colonies and the new lands they intended to conquer, would create the security and freedom the Annekteh needed to achieve expansion unhindered.
The suktah had to be here. Eventually, the Annekteh would find it.
~~~~~
Blaine fretted her way through the rest of the day, half resentment, half worry. Resentment — Dacey didn’t trust her, after all she’d been through with him. And worry — her family. Surely, she thought, it would be all right to creep on over to her own ridge and at least check on them. She had the blinder. The leaves would be out any day now, making it so much easier to hide on the slopes.
If he don’t trust you now, what’ll he do iff’n you risk such a thing?
But if he didn’t trust her, why should she blindly trust him? Why not do what her heart longed to do?
And still she couldn’t bring herself to it, not when she knew he was depending on her even without fully trusting her, and so spent the rest of the day on little nothings — turning the meat on the drying rack, mixing up the last of their corn meal and flour for a mid-day meal, watching Dacey finish work on the bear hide and carefully roll it up while he cooked its brains to mix with the ashes for tanning — though he said something about getting salt to preserve it until he could make a batch of oak tannic.
And why did he spend his time on some dumb old bear skin? Why he wasn’t planning and scouting, and getting ready to make some kind of move?
But she’d learned something from his quiet, and that was to watch, to observe until it might make some sense to her on her own. She finally decided he really had been depending on what Trey might have had to say, and couldn’t act without it. It didn’t make her feel any too good for walking out on the boy. She spent the evening tending to her many scrapes and went to bed while Dacey was still listening to the hounds run trail, Blue panting by her side.
The next morning Blaine rolled off her hemlock bedding before the sun peaked the mountain. Dacey was still asleep on the other side of the shelter, with all five dogs lumped around him. He sprawled on the ground, his legs stuck out from beneath his skewed blanket, his hair tickling over his face in a way that ought to have woken him. Blaine sat against the back of the shelter and drew her knees up to her chin, considering him.
He figured in her dreams these days — only they were not real dreams anymore, just snatches of disjointed moments. Shouting in her ears, the view of a hillside from way up in the trees, standing in the rain outside a trio of young pines — nothing that made any sense to her. Except that every time they showed Dacey, his eyes had that harrowed look. The trying-to-survive, not-certain-of-making-it look.
This morning his face was quiet. Blaine nibbled on a rough fingernail and wondered about him. The way he’d reacted to her question about the jimson had made it clear that the memory still pained him, and yet here he was again, facing the Annekteh, the ones who had done that to him.
Maybe she should warn him about her dreams. She had dreamt about hiding in the dairy, hadn’t she, and hadn’t it happened? She’d had strange dreams about Willum....Willum. And even if these new dreams didn’t hold anything of any sense, anything but bits and pieces...Yes, she should tell him. Standing in the rain, outside a trio of young pines...
No.
She couldn’t.
For Dacey Childers was the one who could help her people, but not if she scared him off — even if he wasn’t so easy to scare; he’d proved that. But he knew the lore; he knew how to deal with the Annekteh. He was the one who had traveled all the way up here on the strength of seeings. Her people knew none of these things, and they needed him. And anyway she’d had dreams all her life, dreams that had never meant anything, that no one ever did anything but scoff at. How much worse, if she scared him off for nothing.
She closed her eyes, rested her forehead down on her knees, and wondered how she’d feel about this moment if Dacey was killed. Then, much as Dacey must have done the previous day after her questions recalled the jimson-fear to his mind, she took a deep breath and put it behind her.
Dacey had not moved when she returned from splashing her face at the spring below the rocks. A real gone-from-the-world sleep. Blaine took the knife from where it lay by the bearskin, and found one of the hickory baskets she’d made the day before. There would be no berries for the picking this early in the season, but maybe she could find some old sumac clusters to spice up their drinking water — or maybe some hemlock. Yes, she definitely had a hankering for hemlock bark tea.
Anything was excuse enough to be gone when Dacey decided it was time to head for the clearing to meet Trey. Blaine paused as she tiptoed past the lean-to, looking again at the relaxed expression on his face. Just like that moment over Lottie’s supper the first time they’d met, she realized anew that despite his self-possessed aura, Dacey was far from her father’s age. She leaned down to straighten his blanket, carefully so as not to wake him. Then, so he’d know she’d be safe, she hissed at Blue. The sleepy hound got to his feet after only three tries and followed her out on the ridge, his tail wagging in its slow, pleased way.
Blaine made sure it was at least noon before she returned to the camp. She had managed to find some sumac after all, and she held forth the basket as a kind of peace offering when Dacey looked up at her.
He said nothing to her, and she saw no accusation in his gaze — yet there was something there that demanded an explanation. Maybe it was just from within herself. Either way, Blaine refused to give in. “He have anything to say today?”
“Plenty,” Dacey said, amusement in his voice and eye. “Most of it about you.”
Blaine set herself and the basket down and began to pick the dried bits of winter-dried leaf out of the berry clusters. “I got plenty to say about him, too, if I was the type to do it.”
“Oh, he weren’t bad-mouthing you, Blaine,” Dacey said, and Blaine looked up to confirm that she had actually heard teasing in his voice. “It was mostly questions he had. Wanted to know if there was really a bear, for one. And he asked how you’d joined up with me, and how far we’d walked, and did you slow me down.”
That one earned a snort from Blaine. “Nosy. And sounds just like my Daddy, who probably still don’t believe I been walking the hills on my own for years, even though I bet Rand’s spilled it by now.”
“He did ask some about Mage, and how he’d got crippled up,” Dacey said.
“Means he’s nosy about everyone, not just me,” Blaine concluded. “How did he get crippled up?”
Dacey ducked his head to hide his smile, though she saw it anyway. Oddly enough, she wasn’t piqued by it. She sort of liked seeing it on him. “He was born that way,” Dacey told her. “With that back hock not bending right. The way I figure it, he has so much heart, it just sort of took it out of the rest of him.”
Hmm. Hard to act snappish after a comment like that. “Didn’t Trey have nothing to say about the Takers?” she asked, drawing herself out of Blue’s way as he came trotting past her from the woods, sticking his head in Dacey’s lap and rubbing his face on Dacey’s legs, groaning in a happy kind of way.
“Some.” Dacey slapped the hound’s sides resoundingly, and then pushed the dog over so he lay with his legs dangling loosely in the air, tilting his head backwards. His lips fell away from his face. He looked utterly ridiculous, and Blaine found herself hiding her own smile. “To be fair to the boy, Blaine, he come up with a lot for only two days. I get the feeling he already knew the answers when I first asked him. Anyway, seems there ain’t any of ’em Taken, not besides some of the strangers, and not even all of them.”
Blaine looked up suspiciously. “I thought only seers could tell.”
“Can’t, not right off. Not if someone’s just come up to you, even if you know ’em. After a few days of watching, you can tell. Them that’s Taken don’t do much thinking and actin on their own, so unless the Annekteh are having ’em do something special, they mostly act like their heads’re up in the clouds.”
Well, that made a certain sort of sense.
“’Sides that, he says they don’t stray from the meeting hall too often. They’re used to plains, not hills, and they get lost too easy. The guard patrols take the same paths each time they go out.” The words were straightforward; his expression was not.
“They don’t sound like they’ll be too hard to handle,” Blaine observed. “The look on your face don’t agree.”
“It’s that one who leads them,” Dacey said, his gaze troubled as he looked over the ridge, the direction in which she’d pointed out the meeting hall. “Nekfehr. Trey had some to say about him, and none of it good. The man’s half-mad, your people think. There’s no telling what the Annekteh can take from the mind of a clever mad man.”
“It don’t matter,” Blaine said, swallowing her revulsion. “He can’t be everywhere. We can out-do the rest of ’em in the woods.”
Dacey didn’t respond right away; his expression was distant, thoughtful. “It’s a mite trickier than that,” he said, absently reaching down to smooth the top of Mage’s head. “For one thing, they keep the kids of the meeting hall during the day — the older ones an’ a few of the mothers watch them while the folks are working. Trey said the men are in the hills, timbering, while the women try to keep up the farms.”
“Then why isn’t he timbering?” Blaine asked accusingly.
“So you’re asking questions too,” Dacey said, and grinned. She scowled back at him. “Trey and a few of the older boys have been told to see to the hunting. And to look out for sassafras groves, which if they’ve found, Trey don’t know of it. They don’t tell each other much, so’s one can’t be Taken and give away everything.”
With the men in the hills, it might be possible to get to them, make plans with them. And the boys...if they were off on their own, hunting, it wouldn’t be too hard to talk with them, either. Yet there also had to be some way to ensure the safety of the little ones. All these possibilities...and no ideas in her head, no matter how hard she looked. “What do we do next?” she asked finally.
“Next,” Dacey said, staring into the trees as his hand stilled on Mage’s head, “I need to have a look around.”
“What do you mean?” But she was afraid she knew just what he meant. He meant leaving her alone at the camp while he went off and flirted with the Annekteh. Again.
Dacey stirred and looked back at her. “Trey’s told me most of what I need to know. But I’m not familiar with your meeting hall and the lay of the land around it. I don’t know how far astray the men are timbering. I got to go have a look.”
“That don’t sound safe to me.”
“’Course it ain’t safe,” Dacey told her. “If it was safe, we’d not be having this conversation at all.”
~~~~~~~~~~