At length, Dag woke too, then it was her turn to help him prop up his shoulders against his saddlebags. Happily, she fed him. He could both chew and swallow, and not choke; halfway through, he revived enough to start capturing the bits of plunkin or roast deer from her with his right hand and feed himself. His hand still trembled too much to manage his water cup without spilling, though. His left arm, more disturbingly, didn’t move at all, and she suspected the bandage wrapping his left leg disguised even deeper ills than the knife wound. His eyes were bloodshot and squinty, more glazed than bright, but she reveled in their gold glints nonetheless, and the way they smiled at her as though they’d never quit.
In all, Fawn was glad when Hoharie came by, even if she was trailed by Othan. She was accompanied and supported by Mari, whose general air of relief clouded when her eye fell on Dag. The medicine maker looked fatigued, but not nearly as ravaged as Dag, perhaps because her time in the lock had been the shortest. She had all her formidable wits back about her, anyhow.
Othan unwrapped the leg, and Hoharie pronounced his neat stitches that closed the vertical slit to be good tight work, and the redness only to be expected and not a sign of infection yet, and they would do some groundwork later to prevent adhesions. Othan seemed even more relieved at the chance to rewrap the wound with more usual sorts of patroller bandages.
While this was going on, Mari reported: “Before you ask three times, Dag—everyone made it out of the groundlock alive.”
Dag’s eyes squeezed shut in thankfulness. “I was pretty sure. Is Artin going to hold on? His heart took hurt, there, I thought.”
“Yes, but his son has him well in hand. All the Raintree folks could be carried off by their kin as early as tomorrow, at least as far as the next camp. They’ll recover better there than out here in the woods.”
Dag nodded.
“Once they’re away our folks will be getting anxious to see home again, too. Bryn and Ornig are up already, and I don’t think Mallora will be much behind. Young, y’know. I don’t know about you, but I’m right tired of this place. With that hole in your leg it’s plain you’re not walking anywhere. It’s up to Hoharie to say how soon you can ride.”
“Ask me tomorrow,” said Hoharie. “The leg’s not really the worst of it.” “So what about the arm, Hoharie?” Dag asked hesitantly. His voice still sounded like something down in a swamp, croaking. “It’s a bit worryin’, not moving like that. Kind of takes me back to some memories I don’t much care to revisit.”
Hoharie grimaced understanding. “I can see why.” As Othan tied off the new dressing and sat back, she added quietly, “Time to give me a look. You have to open yourself, Dag.”
“Yeah,” he sighed. He didn’t sound at all enthusiastic, Fawn thought. But he lay back against his saddle prop with a faraway look on his face; his lips moved in something deeper than a wince. Mari hissed, Hoharie’s lips pursed, and Othan, who had sewn up bleeding flesh without a visible qualm, looked suddenly ill.
“Well, that’s a bigger mess than Utau, and I thought he was impressive,” allowed Hoharie. “Let me see what I can do with this.”
“You can’t do a ground reinforcement after all you just went through!” Dag objected.
“I have enough oomph left for one,” she replied, her face going intent. “I was saving it for you. Figured…”
Fawn tugged at Mari and whispered urgently, “What’s going on? What do you all sense?” That I can’t.
“The ground down his left side’s all marked up with blight, like big deep bruises,” Mari whispered back. “But those nasty black malice spatters that I felt before seem to be gone now—that’s a real good sign, I reckon. The ground of his left arm, though, is hanging in tatters. Hoharie’s wrapping it all up with a shaped ground reinforcement—ooh, clever—I think she means to help it grow back together easier as it heals.”
Hoharie let out her breath in a long sigh; her back bent. Dag, his expression very inward, stared down at his left arm as it moved in a short jerk. “Better!” he murmured in pleased surprise.
“Time,” said Hoharie, and now she sounded down in that swamp, too. Dag gave her a dry look as if to say, Now who’s overdoing? She ignored it, and continued, “It’ll all come back in time as your ground slowly heals. Slowly, got that, Dag?”
Dag sighed in regret. “Yeah…” His voice fell further. “The ghost hand. It’s gone, isn’t it? For good. Like the other.”
Hoharie said somewhat impatiently, “Gone for a good, to be sure, but not necessarily forever. I know it perturbed you, Dag, but I wish you’d stop thinking of that hand as some morbid magic! It was a ground projection, a simple…well, it was a ground projection, anyway. As your ground heals up from all this blight, it should come back with the rest of it. Last, I imagine, so don’t go fuming and fretting.”
“Oh,” said Dag, looking brighter. Fawn could have hit him for winking at her like that just then, because it almost made her laugh out loud, and she’d never dare explain why to all these stern Lakewalkers.
“Now,” said Hoharie, sitting up and rubbing her forehead with the back of her wrist—Othan, watching her closely, handed her a clean rag, and she repeated the gesture with it and nodded thanks. “It’s my chance to ask a few questions. What I need to know is if a similar act would solve a similar problem. Because I need to write this out for the lore-tent if it does, and maybe pass it along to the other hinterlands, too.”
“I hope there never is a similar problem,” said Mari, “because that would mean another runaway malice like this one, and this one got way too close to being unstoppable. But write it out all the same, sure. You never know.”
“No one can know till it’s tried,” said Dag, “but my own impression was that any primed knife, placed in any of the groundlocked people, would have worked to clean out the malice’s involution. It only needed someone to think of it—and dare.”
“It seems a strange way to spend a sacrifice,” agreed Hoharie. “Still…ten for one.” All the Lakewalkers looked equally pensive, contemplating this mortal arithmetic. “When did you think of it?”
“Pretty nearly as soon as I was trapped in the groundlock. I could see it, then.”
Hoharie’s gaze flicked to Fawn’s left wrist. Fawn, by now inured to being talked past, almost flinched under the suddenly intent stare. “That was also about the time you felt a change in that peculiar ground reinforcement Dag gave you, wasn’t it, Fawn? Did it seem to come with, say, a compulsion?”
Othan sat up straight. “Oh, of course! That would explain how she knew what to do!”
Did it? Fawn’s brows drew down in doubt. “It didn’t seem anything like so clear. I wish it had been.”
“So how did you know?” asked Hoharie patiently. “To use your sharing knife like that?”
“I…” She hesitated, casting her mind back to last night’s desperation. “I figured it.”
“How?”
She struggled to express her complex thoughts simply. A lot of it hadn’t even been in words, just in pictures. “Well, you said. That there were cut-off bits of malice in that groundlock. Sharing knives kill malices. I thought it might just need an extra dose to finish the job.”
“But your knife had no affinity.”
“What?” Fawn stared in confusion.
Dag cleared his throat. His voice went gentle. “Dar was right—about that, anyway. The mortality in your knife was too pure to hold affinity with malices, but I was able to break into its involution and add some. A little extra last-minute making, would you say, Hoharie?”
Hoharie eyed him. “Making? I’m not sure that wasn’t magery, Dag.”
Fawn’s brow wrinkled in distress. “Is that what tore up your ghost hand? Oh, if I had known—!”
“Sh,” soothed Dag. “If you had known, what?”
She stared down at her hands, clutching each other in her lap. After a long pause, she said, “I’d have done it all the same.”
“Good,” he whispered.
“So,” said Othan, clearly struggling with this, “you didn’t really know. You were just guessing.” He nodded in apparent relief. “A real stab in the dark. And in fact, except for Dag saving it all at the last, you were wrong!”
Fawn took a long breath, considering this painful thought. “Sometimes,” she said distantly, with all the dignity she could gather, “it isn’t about having the right answers. It’s about asking the right questions.”
Dag gave a slow blink; his face went curiously still. But then he smiled at her again, in a way that made the knot in her heart unwind, and gave her a considering nod. “Yeah—it was what we in Tent Bluefield call a fluke, Othan,” he murmured, and the warm look he gave Fawn with that made the knot unwind all the way down to her toes.
Later in the afternoon, Saun came back from the woods with a peeled-sapling staff—hickory, he claimed; with that and Saun’s shoulder for support, Dag was able to hobble back and forth to the slit trench. That cured Dag of ambition for any further movement. He was quite content to lie propped in his bedroll, occasionally with Fawn tucked up under his arm, and watch the camp go by, and not talk. He was especially content not to talk. A few inquiring noises were enough to persuade Fawn to ripple on about how she’d arrived so astonishingly here. He felt a trifle guilty about giving her so little tale in return, but she had Saun and Mari to cull for more details, and she did.
The next day the last of the company’s scouts returned, having hooked up with another gaggle of Bonemarsh refugees returning to check on their quick and their dead. With the extra hands on offer, it was decided to move the recovering makers to better shelter that day, and the Raintree cavalcade moved off in midafternoon. The camp fell quiet. At this point, Dag’s remaining patrol realized that the only barrier between them and a ride for home was their convalescent captain. The half dozen patrollers who were capable of giving minor ground reinforcements either volunteered or were volunteered to contribute to his speedier recovery. Dag blithely accepted them all, until his left foot began to twitch, his speech slurred, and he started seeing faint lavender halos around everything, and Hoharie, with some dire muttering about absorption time, blight it, cut off the anxious suppliers.
The miasma of homesickness and restlessness that permeated the air was like a fog; by evening, Dag found it easy to persuade Mari and Codo to split the patrol and send most of them home tomorrow with Hoharie, leaving Dag a suitable smaller group of bodyguards, or nursemaids, to follow on as soon as he was cleared to mount a horse again.
Mari, after a consultation with Hoharie out of Dag’s earshot, appointed herself chief of their number. “Somebody’s got to stand up to you when you get bored and decide to advance Hoharie’s timetable by three days,” she told Dag bluntly, when he offered a reminder of Cattagus. “If we leave you nothing but the children, you’ll ride right over ’em.”
Despite his pains and exhaustion, Dag was wholly satisfied to lie with Fawn that night in their little shelter, as if he’d entered some place of perfect balance where all needs were met and no motion was required. He wasn’t homesick. On the whole, he had no desire at all to think about Hickory Lake and what awaited him there…no. He stopped that slide of thought. Be here. With her.
He petted her, letting her dark hair wind and slide through his fingers, silky delight. In her saddlebags she had brought candles, of all things, of her own making, and had stuck one upright in a holder made from a smooth dented stone she’d found in the stream. He was unaroused and, in his current condition, likely unarousable, but looking at her in this gilded light he was pierced with a pure desire, as if he were gazing at a running foal, or a wheeling hawk, or a radiant, melting sunset. Wonder caught up in flight that no man could possess, except in the eye and impalpable memory. Where time was the final foe, but the long defeat was not now, now, now…
Fawn seemed content to cuddle atop the bedroll and trade kisses, but at length she wriggled up to do off her boots and belt. They would sleep in their clothes like patrollers, but she drew the line at unnecessary lumps. With a thoughtful frown, she pulled her sharing knife cord over her head.
“I reckon I can put this away in my saddlebags, now.” She slid the haft out of its sheath and spilled the three long shards of the broken blade out on the bedroll, lining them up with her finger.
Dag rolled over and up on his elbow to look. “Huh. So, that explains what Othan was doing down there, fishing all those out of me. I wondered.”
“So…now what do we do with it?” Fawn asked.
“A spent knife, if it’s recovered, is usually given back to the kin of the bone’s donor, or if that can’t be done, burned on a little pyre. It’s been twenty years, but…Kauneo should have kin up in Luthlia who remember her. I still have her uncle Kaunear’s bone, too, back home in my trunk—hadn’t quite got round to arranging for it when this Raintree storm blew in on us. I should send them both up to Luthlia in a courier pouch, with a proper letter telling everyone what their sacrifices have bought. That would be best, I think.”
She nodded gravely and extended a finger to gently roll a shard over. “In the end, this did do more than just bring us together, despite what Dar said about the farmer ground being worthless. Because of your making that redeemed it. I’m—not glad, exactly, there’s not much glad about this—satisfied, I think. Dar said—”
He hoisted himself up and stopped her lips with a kiss. “Don’t worry about what Dar says. I don’t.”
“Don’t you?” She frowned. “But—wasn’t he right, about the affinity?”
Dag shrugged. “Well…it would have been strange if he weren’t. Knives are his calling. I’m not at all sure he was right about the other, though.”
“Other?”
“About how your babe’s ground got into my knife.”
Her black eyebrows curved up farther.
He lay back again, raising his hand to hover across from his stump as a man would hold his two hands some judicious distance apart. “It was just a quick impression, you understand, when I was unmaking the knife’s involution and releasing the mortal ground. I couldn’t prove it. It was all gone in the instant, and only I saw. But…there was more than one knife stuck in that malice at that moment back at Glassforge. And there is more than one sort of ground affinity. There was a link, a channel…because the one knife was Kauneo’s marrowbone, see, and the other was her heart’s death. Knives don’t take up souls, if there is such a thing, but each one has a, a flavor of its donor. I expect she died wanting and regretting, well, a lot of things, but I know a child was one. I wouldn’t dare say this to anyone else, but I’ll swear it to you. It wasn’t the malice pushed that ground into Kauneo’s bone. I think it was given shelter.”
Fawn sat back, her lips parting in wonder. Her eyes were huge and dark, winking liquid that reflected the candlelight in shimmers.
He added very quietly, “If it was a gift from the grave, it’s the strangest I ever heard tell of, but…she liked youngsters. She would have saved ’em all, if she could.”
Fawn whispered, “She’s not the only one, seemingly.” And rolled over into his arms, and hugged him tight. Then sat up on her elbow, and said, most seriously, “Tell me more about her.”
And, to his own profound astonishment, he did.
It came in a spate, when it came. To speak easily of Kauneo at last, to repossess such a wealth of memory from the far side of pain, was as beyond all expectation as claiming a stolen treasure returned after years. As miraculous as getting back a missing limb. And his tears, when they fell, seemed not sorrow, but grace.
16
F or the next couple of days Dag seemed willing to rest as instructed, to Fawn’s approval, although she noticed he seemed less fidgety and fretful when she sat by him. Saun had stayed on, with Griff for his partner; Varleen replaced Dirla as Mari’s partner. There were not too many camp chores for Fawn’s hands, everyone having pretty much caught up with their cleaning and mending in the prior days, though she did spend some time out wi
th the younger patrollers working on, or playing with, the horses. Grace hadn’t gone lame, though Fawn thought it had been a near thing. The mare was certainly recovering faster than Dag. Fawn suspected Lakewalkers used their healing magic on their horses; if not officially, certainly on the sly.
On the third day, the heavy heat was pushed on east by a cracking thunderstorm. The tree branches bent and groaned menacingly overhead, and leaves turned inside out and flashed silver. The patrollers ended up combining their tent covers—except for the one hide that blew off into the woods like a mad bat—on Dag and Fawn’s sapling frame, and clustering underneath. The nearby creek rose and ran mud-brown and foam-yellow as the blow subsided into a steady vertical downpour. By unspoken mutual assent, they all eased back and just watched it, passing around odd bits of cold food while their cook-fire pit turned into an opaque gray puddle.
Griff produced a wooden flute and instructed Saun on it for a time. Fawn recognized maybe half of the sprightly tunes. In due course Griff took it back and played a long, eerie duet with the rain, Varleen and Saun supplying muted percussion with sticks and whatever pots they had to hand. Dag and Mari seemed satisfied to listen.
Everyone went back to nibbling. Dag, who had been lying slumped against his saddlebags with his eyes closed, pushed himself slightly more upright, adjusted his left leg, and asked Saun suddenly, “You know the name of that farmer town the malice was supposed to have come up under?”
“Greenspring,” Saun replied absently, craning his neck through the open, leeward side of their shelter to look, in vain, for a break in the clouds.