She kept her eyes on it as it sailed toward her and, to her own immense surprise, caught it out of the air. She had never in her life caught—. Another mud-man jumped on Dag.
“Stick it in!” he bellowed, going down again. “Stick it in the malice!”
Knives. The pouch had two knives. She pulled one out. It was made of bone. Magic knives? “Which?” she cried frantically.
“Sharp end first! Anywhere!”
The malice was starting to move toward Dag. Feeling as though her head was floating three feet above her body, Fawn thrust the bone knife deeply into the thing’s thigh.
The malice turned back toward her, howling in surprise. The sound split her skull. The malice caught her by the neck, this time, and lifted her up, its hideous face contorting.
“No! No!” screamed Dag. “The other one!”
Her one hand still clutched the pouch; the other was free. She had maybe one second before the malice shook her till her neck snapped, like a kitchen boy killing a chicken. She yanked the spare bone blade out of its sheath and jammed it forward. It skittered over something, maybe a rib, then caught and went in, but only a couple of inches. The blade shattered. Oh no—!
She was falling, falling as if from a great height. The ground struck her a stunning blow. She shoved herself up once more, everything spinning around her.
Before her eyes, the malice was slumping. Bits and pieces sloughed off it like ice blowing from a roof. Its awful, keening voice went up and up and higher still, fading out yet leaving shooting pains in her ears.
And gone. In front of her feet was a pile of sour-smelling yellow dirt. The first knife, the one with the blue haft that hadn’t worked, lay before it. In her ears was silence, unless she’d just gone deaf.
No, for a scuffle began again to her right. She whirled, thinking to snatch up the knife and try to help. Its magic might have failed, but it still had an edge and a point. But the three mud-men still on their feet had stopped trying to tear the patroller apart, and instead were scrambling away, yowling. One bowled her over in its frantic flight, apparently without any destructive intent. This time, she stayed on her hands and knees. Gasping. She had thought her body must run out of shakes in sheer exhaustion, but the supply seemed endless. She had to clench her teeth to keep them from chattering, like someone freezing to death. Her belly cramped.
Dag was sitting on the ground ten feet away with a staggered look on his face, legs every which way, mouth open, gasping for air just as hard as she was. His left sleeve was ripped off, and his handless arm was bleeding from long scratches. He must have taken a blow to his face, for one eye was already tearing and swelling.
Fawn scrabbled around till her hand encountered the other knife hilt, the green one that had splintered in the malice. Where was the malice? “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I broke it.” She was sniveling now, tears and snot running down her lip from her nose. “I’m sorry…”
“What?” Dag looked up dazedly, and began to crawl toward her one-handed in strange slow hops, his left arm curled up protectively to his chest.
Fawn pointed a trembling finger. “I broke your magic knife.”
Dag stared down at the green-wrapped hilt with a disoriented look on his face, as if he was seeing it for the first time. “No… it’s all right… they’re supposed to do that. They break like that when they work. When they teach the malice how to die.”
“What?”
“Malices are immortal. They cannot die. If you tore that body into a hundred bits, the malice’s… self, would just flee away to another hole and reassemble itself. Still knowing everything it had learned in this incarnation, and so twice as dangerous. They cannot die on their own, so you have to share a death with them.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’ll explain more,” he wheezed, “later…” He rolled over on his back, hair sweaty and wild; dilated eyes, the color of sassafras tea in the shadows, looking blankly upwards. “Absent gods. We did it. It’s done. You did it! What a mess. Mari will kill me. Kiss me first, though, I bet. Kiss us both.”
Fawn sat on her knees, bent over her cramps. “Why didn’t the first knife work? What was wrong with it?”
“It wasn’t primed. I’m sorry, I didn’t think. In a hurry. A patroller would have known which was which by touch. Of course you couldn’t tell.” He rolled over on his left side and reached for the blue-hiked knife. “That one’s mine, for me someday.”
His hand touched it and jerked back. “What the… ?” His lips parted, eyes going suddenly intent, and he reached again, gingerly. He drew his hand back more slowly this time, the lunatic exhilaration draining from his face. “That’s strange. That’s very strange.”
“What?” snapped Fawn, pain and bewilderment making her sharp. Her body was beaten, her neck felt half-twisted-off, and her belly kept on knotting in aching waves. “You don’t tell me anything that makes sense, and then I go and do stupid things, and it’s not my fault.”
“Oh, I think this one is. That’s the rule. Credit goes to the one who does, however scrambled the method. Congratulations, Little Spark. You have just saved the world. My patrol will be so pleased.”
She would have thought him ragging her mercilessly, but while his words seemed wild, his level tone was perfectly serious. And his eyes were warm on her, without a hint of… malice.
“Maybe you’re just crazy,” she said gruffly, “and that’s why nothing you say makes sense.”
“No surprise by now if I am,” he said agreeably. With a grunting effort, he rolled over and up onto his knees, hand propping him upright. He opened his jaw as if to stretch his face, as though it had gone numb, and blinked owlishly. “I have to get off this dead dirt. It’s fouling up my groundsense something fierce.”
“Your what?”
“I’ll explain that later”—he sighed—“too. I’ll explain anything you want. You’re owed, Little Spark. You’re owed the world.” He added after a reflective moment, “Many people are. Doesn’t change the matter.”
He started to reach for the unbroken knife again, then paused, his expression growing inward. “Would you do me a favor? Pick that up and carry it along for me. The hilt and the bits of the other, too. It needs proper burying, later on.”
Fawn tried not to look at his stump, which was pink and lumpy and appeared sore. “Of course. Of course. Did they break your hand thing?” She spotted the pouch a few feet away and crawled to get it. She wasn’t sure she could stand up yet either. She collected the broken bits in his torn-off sleeve and slid the intact knife back into its sheath.
He rubbed his left arm. “Afraid so. It isn’t meant to come off that way, by a long shot. Dirla will fix it, she’s good with leather. It won’t be the first time.”
“Is your arm all right?”
He grinned briefly. “It isn’t meant to come off that way either, though that bear-fellow sure tried. Nothing’s broken. It’ll get better with rest.”
He shoved to his feet and stood with legs braced apart, swaying, until he seemed sure he wouldn’t just fall down again. He limped slowly around the cave collecting first his ruined arm contraption, which he wrapped over his shoulder by its leather straps, then, fallen farther away, his big knife. He swiped it on his filthy shirt and resheathed it. He rolled his shoulders and squinted around for a moment, apparently saw nothing else he wanted, and walked back to Fawn.
Her sharpening cramps almost doubled her over when she tried to rise; he gave her a hand up. She stuffed the pouch and rolled sleeve in her shirt. Leaning on each other, they staggered for the light.
“What about the mud-men? Won’t they jump us again?” asked Fawn fearfully as they came out on the path overlooking the dead ravine.
“No. It’s all over for them when their malice dies. They go back to their animal minds—trapped in those made-up human bodies. They usually panic and run. They don’t do too well, after. We kill them for mercy when we can. Otherwise, they die on their own pretty quick. Horrible, real
ly.”
“Oh.”
“The men whose minds the malice has seized, its fog lifts from them, too. They revert.”
“A malice enslaves men, too?”
“When its powers grow more advanced. I think this one might have, for all it was still in its first molt.”
“And they’ll… be freed? Wherever they may be?”
“Sometimes freed. Sometimes go mad. Depends.”
“On what?”
“On what they’ve been doing betimes. They remember, d’you see.”
Fawn wasn’t entirely sure she did. Or wished to.
The air was warm, but the sun was setting through bare branches, as though winter had become untimely mixed with summer. “This day has been ten years long,” Dag sighed. “Got to get me off this bad ground. My horse is too far away to summon. Think we’ll take those.” He pointed to two horses tied to trees near the creek and led her down the zigzag path toward them. “I don’t see any gear. Can you ride bareback?”
“Usually, but right now I feel pretty sick,” Fawn admitted. She was still shaking, and she felt cold and clammy. Her breath drew in as another violent cramp passed through her. That is not good. That is something very wrong. She had thought herself fresh out of fear, a year’s supply used up, but now she was not so sure.
“Huh. Think you’d be all right if I held you in front of me?”
The unpleasant memory of her ride with the bandit this morning—had it only been this morning? Dag was right, this day was a decade—flashed through her mind. Don’t be stupid. Dag is different. Dag, on the whole, was different from any other person she’d ever met in her life. She gulped. “Yeah. I… yeah, probably.”
They arrived at the horses, Fawn stumbling a little. Dag ran his hand over them, humming to himself in a tuneless way, and turned one loose after first filching its rope, shooing it off. It trotted away as if glad to be gone. The other was a neat bay mare with black socks and a white star; he fastened the rope to her halter to make reins and led her to a fallen log. He kept trying to use his left limb to assist, wincing, then remembering, which, among all Fawn’s other hurts, made her heart ache strangely.
“Can you get yourself up, or do you need a boost?”
Fawn stood whitely. “Dag?” she said in a small, scared voice.
His head snapped around at her tone, and tilted attentively. “What?”
“I’m bleeding.”
He walked back to her. “Where? Did they cut you? I didn’t see…”
Fawn swallowed hard, thinking that her face would be scarlet if only it had not been green. In an even smaller voice, she choked out, “Between… between my legs.”
The loopy glee that had underlain his expression ever since the killing of the malice was wiped away as if with a rag. “Oh.” And he did not seem to require a single further word of explanation, which was a good thing, as well as being amazing in a man, because Fawn was out of everything. Words. Courage. Ideas.
He took a deep breath. “We still have to get off this ground. Deathly place. I have to get you, get you someplace else. Away from here. We’ll just go a little faster, is all. You’re going to have to help me with this. Help each other.”
It took two tries and considerable awkwardness, but they both managed to get aboard the bay mare at last, thankfully a placid beast. Fawn sat not astride but sideways across Dag’s lap, legs pressed together, head to his left shoulder, arm around his neck, leaving his right hand free for the reins. He chirped to the horse and started them off at a brisk walk.
“Stay with me, now,” he murmured into her hair. “Do not let go, you hear?”
The world was spinning, but under her ear she could hear a steady heartbeat. She nodded dolefully.
Chapter 5
By the time they arrived at the deserted valley farm, both the back of Fawn’s skirt and the front of Dag’s trousers were soaked in too-bright blood.
“Oh,” said Fawn in a mortified voice, when he’d swung her down from the horse and slid after her. “Oh, I’m sorry.”
Dag raised what he hoped was an admirably calm eyebrow. “What? It’s just blood, Little Spark. I’ve dealt with more blood in my time than you have in your whole bitty body.” Which was where this red tide should be, blast and blight it. I will not panic. He wanted to swing her up in his arms and carry her inside, but he did not trust his strength. He had to keep moving, or his own battered body would start to stiffen. He wrapped his right arm around her shoulders instead, and, leaving the horse to fend for itself, aimed her up the porch steps.
“Why is this happening?” she said, so low and breathy and plaintive he wasn’t sure if it was to him or herself.
He hesitated. Yes, she was young, but surely—“Don’t you know?”
She glanced up at him. The bruise masking the left side of her face was darkening to purple, the gouges scabbing over. “Yes,” she whispered. She steadied her voice by sheer force of will, he thought. “But you seem to know so much. I was hoping you might… have a different answer. Stupid of me.”
“The malice did something to you. Tried to.” Courage failing, he looked away from her gaze to say, “It stole your baby’s ground. It would have used it in its next molt, but we killed it first.” And I was too late to stop it. Five blighted minutes, if he had only been five blighted minutes quicker… Yes, and if he’d only been five blighted seconds quicker, once, he’d still have a left hand, and he’d been down that road and back up it enough times to be thoroughly tired of the scenery. Peace. If he had arrived at the lair very much sooner, he might have missed her entirely.
But what had happened to his spare sharing knife, in that terrible scramble? It had been empty, but now he would swear it was primed, and that should not have happened. Take on your disasters one at a time, old patroller, or you’ll lose your trail. The knife could wait. Fawn could not.
“Then… then it’s too late. To save. Anything.”
“It’s never too late to save something,” he said sternly. “Might not be what you wanted, is all.” Which was certainly something he needed to hear, every day, but was not exactly pertinent to her present need, now was it? He tried again, because he did not think his heart or hers could bear confusion on this point. “She’s gone. You’re not. Your next job is to” survive this night “get better. After that, we’ll see.”
The twilight was failing as they stepped into the gloomy shadows of the farmhouse kitchen, but Dag could see it was a different mess than before.
“This way,” Fawn said. “Don’t step in the jam.”
“Ah, right.”
“There’s some candle stubs around. Up over the hearth, there’s some more. Oh, no, I can’t lie there, I’ll stain the ticks.”
“Looks flat enough to me, Little Spark. I do know you should be lying down. I’m real sure of that.” Her breathing was too rapid and shallow, her skin far too clammy, and her ground had a bad gray tinge that went hand in hand with grave damage, in his unpleasant experience.
“Well… well, find something, then. For in between.”
Now was not, definitely not, the time to argue with female irrationality. “Right.”
He poked up the faint remains of the fire, fed it with some wood chips, and lit two wax stubs, one of which he left on the hearth for her; the other he took with him for a quick exploration. A couple of those chests and wardrobes upstairs had still had things in them, he dimly recalled. A patroller should be resourceful. What did the girl most need? A miscarriage was a natural enough process, even if this one was most unnaturally triggered; women survived them all the time, he was fairly sure. He just wished they had discussed them more, or that he had listened more closely. Lie flat, check, they’d got that far. Make her comfortable? Cruel joke… peace. He supposed she’d be more comfortable cleaned up than filthy; at any rate, he’d always been grateful for that when recovering from a serious injury. What, you can’t fix the real problem, so you’ll fix something else instead? And which of you is this supposed to a
id?
Peace. And a bucket and an unfouled well, with luck.
It took more time than he’d have liked, during which to his swallowed aggravation she insisted on lying on the blighted kitchen floor, but he eventually assembled a clean gownlike garment, rather too large for her, some old mended sheets, an assortment of rags for pads, actual soap, and water. In a moment of ruthless inspiration, he broke through her reticence by persuading her to wash his hand first, as though he needed help.
She still had the shakes, which she seemed to take for residual fear but which he recognized as one with the chilled skin and grayness in her ground, and which he treated by piling on whatever blanket-like cloths he could find, and building up the fire. The last time he’d seen a woman coiled around her belly that hard, a blade had penetrated almost to her spine. He heated a stone, wrapped it in cloth, and gave it to Fawn to clutch to herself, which to his relief seemed finally to help; the shakes faded and her ground lightened. Eventually, she was arranged all tidy and sweet and patient-like, her curl around the stone relaxing as she warmed, blinking up at him in the candlelight as he sat cross-legged beside the tick.
“Did you find any clothes you could use?” she asked. “Though I suppose you’d be lucky to find a fit.”
“Haven’t looked, yet. Got spares in my saddlebags. Which are on my horse. Somewhere. If I’m lucky, my patrol will find him and bring him along sometime. They had better be looking for me by now.”
“If you could find something else to wear, I bet I could wash those tomorrow. I’m sorry that—”
“Little Spark,” he leaned forward, his ragged voice cracking, “do not apologize to me for this.”
She recoiled.
He regained control. “Because, don’t you see, a crying patroller is a very embarrassing sight. M’ face gets all snivelly and snotty. Combine that with this blue eye I’ve got starting, and it’d be like to turn your stomach. And then there’d just be another mess to clean up, and we don’t want that now, do we.” He tweaked her nose, which was on the whole an insane thing to do to a woman who’d just saved the world, but it worked to break her bleak mood; she smiled wanly.