“Agh! Pay no attention to my maunderings, girl,” Mari continued, as Fawn’s stare widened. “I think I’m getting too old. I’m going to go sleep off this blight tonight. It drains your wits as well as your strength, blight does. All despair and death. You get into this mood.” She clambered back to her feet and gazed blearily down over Dag’s supine form at Fawn. “I know you can’t feel the blight direct, but it’s working on you, too. You should take a break off this deathly ground as well.”
Fawn shook her head. “I want to stay here. By Dag.” For whatever time we have left.
Mari shrugged. “Suit yourself, then.” She wandered away into the softening twilight.
Fawn awoke to moonlight filtering down through the ash tree’s bare branches. She lay a moment in her bedroll trying to recapture her dreams, hoping for something usefully prophetic. In ballads, people often had dreams that told them what to do; you were supposed to follow instructions precisely, too, or risk coming to several stanzas of grief. But she remembered no dreams. She doubted they’d reveal anything even if she did.
Farmer dreams. Perhaps if she’d been Lakewalker-born…she scowled at Othan, asleep and snoring faintly on the other side of Hoharie. If anyone were to have any useful uncanny visions, it would more likely be him, blight him.
No, not “blight him.” That wasn’t fair. Reluctantly, she allowed he had courage, as he’d shown this afternoon, and Hoharie would not have favored him out of her other apprentices and brought him along if he didn’t have promise as well. It was merely that Fawn would feel better if he were completely stupid, and not just stupid about farmers. Then he wouldn’t be able to make her doubt herself so much. She sighed and rose to pick her way out to the slit trench at the far edge of the grove.
Returning, she sat up on her blanket and studied Dag. The stippled moonlight made his unmoving face look disturbingly corpse-colored. The dark night-glitter of his eyes, smiling at her, would have redeemed it all, but they remained sunken and shut. He might die, she thought, without her ever seeing their bright daylight gold again. She swallowed the scared lump in her throat. Would they let her touch him after he was dead? I could touch him now. But there was little she could do for him physically that wasn’t already being done more safely by others. Wait on that, then.
Involuted ground reinforcement. She rolled the phrase over in her mind as if tasting it. It clearly meant something quite specific to Hoharie, and doubtless to Dag and Mari as well. And Othan. A ground reinforcement curling up on itself, which didn’t gradually become part of its new owner? She rubbed her arm, and wondered if the ground reinforcement Dag had done on her was involuted or not. If she followed Hoharie’s explanation, it seemed that the involution was a cut-off bit of malice, like her own was a cut-off bit of Dag. Remembering the Glassforge malice, she was glad she and Dag had stopped it before it had developed such far-flung powers.
Her brows bent. Had Hoharie ever seen a malice up as close as Fawn had? Makers seemed to stay back in camp, mostly. So maybe not. Sharing knives might be complicated to make, but they were so simple to use, a farmer child might do so—as Fawn had proven. She smiled now to remember Dag’s wild cry: Sharp end first!
Her thoughts fell like water drops into a still pool.
Sharing knives kill malices.
There’s a bit of leftover malice in Dag and Artin and these other people.
Maybe it just needs an extra dose of mortality to finish cleaning it out…. I have a sharing knife.
She inhaled, shuddering. It wasn’t possible for her to think of something to try that Dag and Mari and Hoharie hadn’t, and already dismissed for some good reason that Fawn was simply too ignorant to know. Was it?
There was a lot of Lakewalker emotion and habit tied up in sharing knives. Sacrificial in every sense, sacred. Not seen as a fit subject for idle fooling around with. She hunched over, wide-awake now.
It didn’t have to be through the heart, did it? That was only for unprimed knives, first collecting their dose of mortality. For discharging the death, anywhere in the malice’s groundworked body would apparently do. She might have stabbed the Glassforge malice in the foot, to the same stunning effect. So where were the, the malice bits lodged in the enspelled Lakewalkers? Pooled or diffuse, they all had to be connected, because to touch any of them triggered the same trap.
Her knife, Dar had said, was of dubious potency and value. No affinity. But it’s the only one I have a right to.
Her eyes turned to Dag. And he’s the only one I have a right to. So.
Swiftly, before her nerve failed her, she rose and, careful not to touch his skin, delicately drew down his blanket. She lifted it past his ribbed chest, his loose breechclout, his long legs, letting it fall again in folds at his feet. His body was all sculpted shadows in the moonlight, too thin. She’d thought she’d started to put some meat on his bones, but it was all used up again by the past weeks of dire strain, and then some.
Not the heart, not the eye—eew!—not the gut. For nonlethal flesh wounds, one was pretty much limited to arms and legs, carefully away from where those big veins and nerves ran down. Under the arm would be bad, she was pretty sure, likewise the back of the knee and the inner thigh. Better the outer thigh, or the arm just below the shoulder. Dag’s strappy arm muscles didn’t seem all that thick, compared to the length of the bone blade hanging around her neck. Thigh, then. She crouched down.
If Hoharie had been conscious, Fawn could have asked her. But then Fawn would still be waiting for the Lakewalker expert to fix things, and likely would not have conceived this desperate notion at all. Now the medicine maker lay entranced with the rest, leaving only Othan in charge. Fawn wouldn’t have asked Othan for a drink in a downpour, nor have expected him to give her one. Still…
Am I about to be stupid again?
Think it through.
This might do nothing, in which case she would have to clean the blood off her knife and explain the ugly hole in her husband tomorrow morning. Envisioning which, she scrambled back to her saddlebags and dug out one of her spare clean ragbags stuffed with cattail fluff, and some cord. There, a good bandage.
This might do what she hoped.
This might do something awful. But something awful was going to happen anyhow. She could not make things worse.
Right, then.
She laid out the makeshift swab, dragged her pouch from around her neck, and pulled out the pale knife. The little delay had sapped her courage. She hunkered by Dag’s left hip a moment, trying to gather it again. She wished she could pray, but the gods, they said, were absent. She had nothing to trust in now but her own wits.
She swallowed a whimper. Dag says you’re smart. If you can’t trust you, trust him.
Sharp end first. Anywhere. She drew back her hand, took careful aim at what she hoped was all nice thick muscle, then plunged the bone knife in till the tip nicked against Dag’s own bone. Still without ever touching him. Dag grunted and jerked in his sleep. She whipped her shaking hand away from the hilt, which stood out from his lean thigh, all indigo blue and ivory in the silver light.
From over her shoulder, Othan’s voice screamed, “What are you doing, you crazy farmer?”
He reached to clamp her shoulders and drag her roughly back from Dag. But not before she saw Dag’s left arm jolt up from his bedroll as though its invisible hand was wrapping itself around the sharing knife’s hilt, and heard the faint, familiar snap of splintering bone blade.
15
H e had floated in an increasingly timeless gray fog, all distinctions fading. It seemed a just consolation that with them faded all fear, want, and pain. But then, inexplicably, something bright and warm troubled his shredding perceptions, as if the north star had torn herself loose from the sky and ventured too near him in naive, luminous, fatal curiosity. Don’t fall, no…stay away, Spark! Longing and horror wrenched him, for to grasp that joy would slay it. Is it my fate to blight all that I love?
But the star fire didn’t touch hi
m. Later, a bolt of new strength shot through him, and for a short time, coherent thought came back. Some other light had fallen into this prison, also known to him…He recognized Hoharie’s intense ground in all its ever-astonishing vigor—so strange that such a spring of strength should dwell in such a slight and unassuming body. But the hope it should have brought him turned to ashes as he took in her anger, horror, and frustration.
I thought sure you’d figure the trick of it from out there, as I could not—I’m the blinder one, I had to look to see it.
And the wailing answer, I had to look to be sure…I had to be certain…oh, Dag, I am so sorry…before the fog blurred all to voiceless sorrow once more.
He raced to make his watch rounds in this brief, stolen respite, to count his company as every captain should. Artin, yes, barely holding on, his ground so drained as to be translucent at the edges; Bryn and Ornig; Mallora; the other Bonemarsh makers. And now Hoharie. He remembered to count himself. Ten, all dying in place. Again he led those who had trusted in him into the boundless dark. At least this time I can’t desert them.
More timelessness. Gray mouths leeched him.
The star fire moved too close again, and he breathed dread like cold mist. But the sky-spark held something else, a faint, familiar chime; her fair light and its wordless song wound together. Their intertwined beauty overthrew his heart. This is surely the magic of the whole wide green world; Lakewalker groundwork has nothing to compare with it…
And then pain and the song pierced him.
He could feel every detail of the roiling ground that stabbed into his thigh: Kauneo’s bone, his own blood of old, the involuted and shaped vessel for mortality that was the gift of the Luthlian knife maker. Spark’s daughter’s death, death without birth, self-making and self-dissolution intermingled in their purest forms.
Too pure. It lay self-contained within the involution, innocent of all taint of desire, motion, and time. It lacks affinity seemed too flat a statement to sum up its aloof stillness. Free of all attachment. Free of all pain.
We give best from abundance. I can share pain.
Flying as never before, he raised his arm by its ground, and his ghost hand—pure ground, piebald with blight and malice spatter—wrapped the hilt and the ground of the hilt. His own old blood gave him entry into the involution; he let his blackened ground trace up its ancient, dried path; catch, hold; and he remembered the night Fawn had woven his wedding cord with bloody fingers, and so drawn her own ground into it. And her wide-open eyes and unguarded offer, later, on another night of ground-weaving, Need blood? As if she would gladly have opened her veins on the spot and poured all that vivid flood into his cupped hands, sparing nothing. As she does now.
Do not waste her gift, old patroller.
His blackened touch seemed a violation, but he twisted the mortal ground between his ghost fingers the way Fawn spun thread. He grinned somewhere inside himself to imagine Dar’s outraged voice, You used a wedding-cord technique on a sharing knife…? The involution uncoiled, giving up its long burden into his hand. Kauneo’s bone cracked joyfully, a sound beneath sound heard not with his ears but in his groundsense, and he knew in that moment that Dar’s theory of how the farmer babe’s death had entered his knife was entirely wrong-headed, but he had no time now to examine it. He held mortality in his hand, and it would not wait.
Within his hand, not upon it; the two were as inextricable as two fibers spun into one strong thread. Affinity. Now, at last, he closed his hand upon the malice’s dark construction.
His ghost hand twisted, stretched, and tore apart as the mortality flowed from him into the gray mouths, along the lines of draining hunger, and he howled without sound in the agony of that wrenching. The malice spatters on his body were ripped out from their patches of blight as if dragged along on a towline, gashing through his ground and out his arm. The dazzling fire raced, consuming its dark path as it traveled. The gray fog-threads of the malice’s involution blazed up in fire all over the grove, leaving a web of red sparks hanging for a moment as if suspended in air. When it reached the mud-men’s dense impelling ground-shapes, they exploded in fiery pinwheels, their aching afterimages spinning in Dag’s groundsense, weighty as whirlpools peeling off a paddle’s trailing edge.
Then—quiet.
Dag had not known that silence could reverberate so; or maybe that was just him. When a long strain was released, the recoil itself could become a new source of pain…No, actually, that was just his body. He’d thought he’d missed his body, back when his mind had been set adrift from it in that ground-fog; now he was not so sure. Its pangs were all suddenly very distinctive indeed. Head, neck, back, arm, haunches all cried out, and his bladder definitely clamored for attention. His body was noisy, cranky, and insistent. But he sought something more urgent.
He pried his eyes open, blinking away the glue and sand that seemed to cement his lids together. He was staring up at bare silvered branches and a night sky washed with moonlight strong enough to cast interlaced shadows. Across the grove, voices were moaning in surprise or crying out in shock. Shouts of alarm transmuted to triumph.
In the blue moonlight and red flare of new wood thrown on a nearby fire, a baffling sight met his gaze. Fawn and Hoharie’s apprentice Othan seemed to be dancing. Or perhaps wrestling. It was hard to be sure. Othan was breathing hard through his nose; Fawn had both hands wrapped around one of his wrists and was swinging from it, dragging his arm down. His boots stamped in an unbalanced circle as he tried to shake her off, cursing.
Dag cleared his throat and said mildly, albeit in a voice as rusty and plaintive as an old gate hinge, “Othan, quit manhandling my wife. Get your own farmer girl.”
The two sprang apart, and Othan gasped, “Sir! I wasn’t—”
What he wasn’t, Dag didn’t hear, because with a sob of joy Fawn threw herself down across his chest and kissed him. He thought his mouth tasted as foul as an old bird’s nest, but strangely, she didn’t seem to mind. His left arm, deadened, wasn’t working. His right weighed far too much, but he hoisted it into the air somehow and, after an uncertain wobble, let it fall across her, fingers clutching contentedly.
He had no idea why or how she was here. It was likely a Fawn-fluke. Her solid wriggling warmth suggested hopefully that she was not a hallucination, not that he was in the best shape to distinguish, just now.
She stopped kissing him long enough to gasp, “Dag, I’m so sorry I had to stab you! I couldn’t think of any other way. Does it hurt bad?”
“Mm?” he said vaguely. He was more numb than in pain, but he became aware of a shivering ache in his left thigh. He tried to raise his head, failed, and stirred his leg instead. An utterly familiar knife haft drifted past his focus. He blinked in bemusement. “A foot higher and I’d have thought you were mad at me, Spark.”
Her helpless laughter wavered into weeping. The drops fell warm across his chest, and he stroked her shuddering shoulder and murmured wordlessly.
After a moment she gulped and raised her face. “You have to let me go.”
“No, I don’t,” he said amiably.
“We have to get those bone fragments dug out of your leg. I didn’t know how far to stick it in, so I pushed it all the way, I’m afraid.”
“Thorough as ever, I see.”
She shrugged out of his weak grip and escaped, but grinned through her tears, so that was likely all right. He eased open his groundsense a fraction, aware of something deeply awry in his own body’s ground just below his perceptions, but managed a head count of the people in the grove before he tightened up again. All alive. Some very weak, but all alive. Someone had flung himself onto a horse bareback and was galloping for the east camp. Othan was diverted from his farmer-wrestling to tend on Hoharie, struggling up out of her bedroll. Dag gave up captaining, lay back with a sigh of boundless fatigue, and let them all do whatever they wanted.
In due course Othan came back with Hoharie’s kit and some lights and commenced some pretty unpl
easant fiddling about down by Dag’s side. Weary Hoharie directed, and Fawn hovered. That the blade should hurt worse coming out than going in made some sense, but not that it should do so more often. Voices muttered, rose and fell. “It’s bleeding so much!” “That’s all right. It’ll wash the wound out a bit. Now the swab.” “Hoharie, do you know what that swab is?” “Othan, think. Of course I do. Very clever, Fawn. Now tie the strips down tight. No peeking under it, unless it soaks through.” “Did he get it all?” “Yes, look—fit the pieces together like a puzzle, and check for missing chips or fragments. All smooth, see?” “Oh, yes!” “Hoharie, it’s like his ground is shredded. Hanging off him in strips. I’ve never felt anything like!” “I saw when it happened. It was spectacular. Get the bleeding stopped, get everyone off this blight and over to the east camp. Get me some food. Then we’ll tackle it.”
The evacuation resembled a torchlight parade, organized by the folks who came pelting over from the east camp, all dressed by guess and riotous with relief. Those freed from the groundlock who could sit a horse were led off two to a mount, holding each other upright, and the rest were carried. Dag was carted eastward feetfirst on a plank; Saun’s face, grinning loonlike, drifted past his gaze in the flickering shadows. Mari’s voice complained loudly about missing the most exciting part. Dag gripped Fawn’s hand for the whole mile and refused to let go.
The east camp didn’t settle down till dawn. Fawn woke again near noon, trapped underneath Dag’s outflung arm. She just lay there for a while, relishing the lovely weight of it and the slow breath ruffling her curls. Eventually, she gently eased out from under, sat up, and looked around. She thought it a measure of Dag’s exhaustion that her motions didn’t wake him the way they usually did.
Their bedroll was sheltered under a sort of half tent of bent saplings splinted together supporting a blanket roof. Half-private. The camp extended along the high side of a little creek, well shaded by green, unblighted trees; maybe twenty or twenty-five patrollers seemed to be moving about, some going for water or out to the horse lines, some tending cook fires, several clustered around bedrolls feeding tired-looking folks who nevertheless were doggedly sitting up.