By noon Ysabet had learned that there were several kinds of mud, and Chaska disliked all the ones she selected.
“That one sucks the pole,” she said as Ysabet leaned over the side.
“You told me to try the bank.”
“The bank. Not whatever is pretending to be underneath it.”
The pole came free with a wet noise and nearly struck Chaska in the face. She ducked, caught it, and made them both sit still until the skiff stopped rocking.
Pip clicked from the basket. Ysabet could not blame it.
They had taken the long bend around the fallen willow. Twice Chaska walked along the bank while Lilt followed her, and Ysabet poled alone through the shallower reach. Where the bank ended in a flooded field, Chaska climbed back aboard. The sandray glided ahead from a low rise and waited beyond the field, out of sight for several unhappy minutes.
“She knows the signal?” Ysabet asked.
“She knows me. The signal helps.”
Chaska struck the oar against the gunwale in two spaced knocks and one quick one. From beyond the reeds came a flat slap of water. She relaxed.
Ysabet tried to imagine depending on a companion she could not see, with a stretch of wet ground between them that neither could cross quickly. She had once done it without thinking. That memory arrived with an old pain in her right fingers. She turned her attention to the pole.
They stopped on a gravel tongue where the current split. Chaska checked Lilt’s left-side padding while Ysabet laid out the mouse’s box on dry cloth. The little animal climbed from Pip’s pouch, sniffed the ground, and limped under the box’s half cover. Ysabet put grain near the access strip and a water lid where it could reach without stretching.
Pip inspected a pale stone, bit it, and abandoned it. It accepted the clean clay instead.
“How much?” Chaska asked.
“Less than yesterday. But keeping it down.”
The damaged leg had begun to dry at its narrowest part. Ysabet checked the skin above it for swelling. Pip let her touch there, then pulled its body away. She stopped.
They ate oats thickened with onions, which turned out to require less imagination than Chaska had promised. Lilt accepted a strip of dried fish and looked disappointed when the second belonged to Chaska.
“I was going to share,” she told the ray. “Now I feel manipulated.”
The ray lay very still, displaying no remorse.
Ysabet wrote the morning’s observations while the clay crumbs dried on the spoon. Five weight-bearing legs. Dragging on the left middle. Two eyes clear. Pouch warm. Mouse drinking. No new black growth.
Underneath, after hesitation, she added: Takes longer to stand.
Chaska made her own drawing on the back of an old freight notice. She had marked the fallen willow, the narrow spring outflow, and a bank where the reeds leaned under water despite the wind blowing the other way.
“Current across here,” she said. “A boat might meet it sideways.”
“Will you sell that?”
“If I can get anyone to admit boats go somewhere without goods in them.”
“What about the spring?”
“That too.” Chaska bent over the page. “Don’t look so pleased. It might be a terrible map.”
Later the channel widened and they met a fishing boat headed south. The woman in it warned them that the sluices farther north were being opened after the fire to clear ash from the feeder drains.
“When?” Chaska asked.
“Depends which keeper has sobered up. Don’t sleep below the reed shrine. There’s a high landing above it.”
She offered them two small fish at a price Chaska disputed until the woman threatened to charge for the warning as well. They bought them. The boat smelled of scales and wet baskets long after she had gone.
“Do you know the shrine?” Ysabet asked.
“On the chart.”
“That’s not quite the same.”
“No.”
By evening Ysabet’s left shoulder ached from the unfamiliar stroke. Her right fingers had stiffened around nothing. They changed places, Chaska taking the pole while Ysabet watched the banks for a landing high enough for Lilt.
The shrine appeared where the channel turned east: a low roof above reed screens, an old bell frame with no bell, steps descending into brown water. Smoke rose behind its wall.
Someone had already lit a fire there.
Ysabet looked at Chaska. The courier slid the pole into the shallows and slowed them. Lilt settled on the upper bank, broad body disappearing behind the long grass.
A woman stood beside the ruined bell frame. Gray threaded her hair. Her left arm ended in something pale that caught the last light through it. In her right hand she held a fish on a sharpened stick.
“It’s deep by the lower step,” she called. “Don’t bring your boat against it.”
Chaska set the pole again, farther out. Ysabet moved Pip’s basket away from the side. The woman watched the movement, and the fish trembled at the end of her stick.