Dar did not unsheathe it immediately, but sat with it in his lap a moment. He took in a long breath, as though centering himself somehow; half the expression seemed to drop from his face. Since it was mostly the sour, disapproving half, Fawn didn’t altogether mind. What was left seemed distant and emotionless.
Dar’s examination seemed much like that of the other Lakewalkers: cradling the knife, holding it to his lips, but also cheek and forehead, eyes open and closed in turn. He took rather longer about it.
He looked up at last, and in a colorless voice asked Dag to explain, once again, the exact sequence of events in the malice’s cave, with close guesses as to the time each movement had taken. He did not ask anything of Fawn. He sat a little more, then the distant expression went away, and he looked up again.
“So what do you make of it?” asked Dag. “What happened?”
“Dag, you can’t expect me to discuss the inner workings of my craft in front of some farmer.”
“No, I expect you to discuss them—fully—in front of that donor’s mother.”
Dar grimaced, but counterattacked, unexpectedly speaking to Fawn directly for the very first time: “Yes, and how did you get pregnant?”
Did she have to confess the whole stupid episode with Stupid Sunny? She looked up beseechingly at Dag, who shook his head slightly. She gathered her courage and replied coolly, “In the usual way, I believe.”
Dar growled, but did not pursue the matter. Instead, he protested to Dag, “She won’t understand.”
“Then you won’t actually be giving away any secrets, will you? Begin at the beginning. She knows what ground is, for starters.”
“I doubt that,” said Dar sourly.
Dag shifted his splinted hand to touch his marriage cord. “Dar, she made this. The other as well.”
“She couldn’t…” Dar went quiet for a time, brow furrowing. “All right. Flukes happen. But I still think she won’t understand.”
“Try. She might surprise you.” Dag smiled faintly. “You might be a better teacher than you think.”
“All right, all right! All right.” Dar turned his glower on Fawn. “A knife…that is, a dying body that…agh. Go all the way back. Ground is in everything, you understand that?”
Fawn nodded anxiously.
“Living things build up ground and alter its essence. Concentrate it. They are always making, but they are making themselves. Man eats food, the food’s ground doesn’t vanish, it goes into the man and is transformed. When a man—or any living thing—dies, that ground is released. The ground associated with material parts dissipates slowly with the decaying body, but the nonmaterial part, the most complex inner essence, it goes all at once. Are you following this?” he demanded abruptly.
Fawn nodded.
His look said, I don’t think so, but he went on. “Anyway. That’s how living things help a blight recover, by building up ground slowly around the edges and constantly releasing it again. That’s how blight kills, by draining ground away too fast from anything caught away from the edge too long. A malice consumes ground directly, ripping it out of the living like a wolf disemboweling its prey.”
Dag did not wince at this comparison, although he went a little stony. Actually, that was a brief nod of agreement, Fawn decided. She shivered and concentrated on Dar, because she didn’t think he’d respond well to being stopped for questions, at least not by her.
“Sharing knives…” He touched the curve of hers. “The inner surface of a thighbone has a natural affinity for blood, which can be persuaded to grow stronger by the maker shaping the knife. That’s what I do, in addition to…to encouraging it to dwell on its fate. I meet with the pledged heart’s-death donor, and he or she shares their blood into the knife in the making. Because their live blood bears their ground.”
“Oh!” said Fawn in a voice of surprise, then closed her mouth abruptly.
“Oh what?” said Dar in aggravation.
She looked at Dag; he raised an unhelpful eyebrow. “Should I say?” she asked.
“Certainly.”
She glanced sideways at the frowning and—even shirtless—thoroughly intimidating maker. “Maybe you’d better explain, Dag.”
Dag smiled a trifle too ironically at his brother. “Fawn reinvented the technique herself, to persuade her ground into my marriage cord. Took me by surprise. In fact, when I recognized it, I nearly fell off the bench. So I’d say she understands it intimately.”
“You used a knife-making technique on a marriage cord?” Dar sounded aghast.
Dag hitched up his left shoulder. “Worked. The only clue I gave her was to mention—days earlier, in another conversation altogether—that blood held a person’s ground for a while after leaving the body.”
“Fluke,” muttered Dar, though more faintly. Craning anew at the cord. “Yeah, that’s life with Spark. Just one fluke after another. Seems no end to them. You were halfway through explaining a making. Go on.”
Dag, Fawn realized, had been through the process from the donor’s side at least once, if with some maker up in Luthlia and not with Dar. In addition to whatever he had learned from being around his brother, however intermittently.
Dar took a breath and went on. “So at the end of the knife-making, we have a little of the pledged donor’s ground in the knife, and that ground is…well, you could say it’s hungry for the rest. It wants to be reunited with its source. And the other way around. So then we come to the priming itself.” His face was stern, contemplating this, for reasons that had nothing to do with her, Fawn thought.
“When the knife is”—he hesitated, then chose the plain word—“driven into the donor’s heart, killing him, his essential ground begins to break up. At this very point of dissolution, the ground is drawn into the knife. And held there.”
“Why doesn’t it just all dissolve then?” Fawn couldn’t help asking, then mentally kicked herself for interrupting.
“That’s another aspect of my making. If you can fluke it out, good luck to you. I’m not just a bone-carver, you know.” His smile was astringent. “When someone—like Dag, for example—then manages to bring the primed knife up to a malice and plunge it in, the malice, which eats ground and cannot stop doing so, draws in the dissolving ground released by the breaking of the knife. You could say the mortal ground acts as a poison to the malice’s ground, or as a stroke of lightning to a tree, or…well, there are a number of ways to say it, all slightly wrong. But the malice’s ground shares in the dissolution of the mortal ground, and since a malice is made of nothing but ground, all the material elements it is holding in place fall with it.”
Fawn touched the scars on her neck. “That, I’ve seen.”
Dar’s brows drew down. “How close were you, really?”
Fawn held out her arm and squinted. “About half my arm’s length, maybe.” And her arms weren’t all that long.
“Dar,” said Dag gently, “if you haven’t grasped this, I’ll say it again; she drove my primed knife into the Glassforge malice. And I speak from repeated personal experience when I tell you, that’s way, way closer than any sane person would ever want to be to one of those things.”
Dar cleared his throat uncomfortably, staring down at the knife in his lap.
It popped out before she could help herself: “Why can’t you just use dying animals’ grounds to poison malices?”
Dag smiled a little, but Dar scowled in deep offense. Dar said stiffly, “They haven’t the power. Only the ground of a Lakewalker donor will kill a malice.”
“Couldn’t you use a lot of animals?”
“No.”
“Has it been tried?”
Dar frowned harder. “Animals don’t work. Farmers don’t work either.” His lips drew back unkindly. “I’ll leave you to make the connection.”
Fawn set her teeth, beginning to have an inkling about the piglet insult.
Dag gave his brother a grim warning look, but put in, “It’s not just a question of power, although tha
t’s part of it. It’s also a question of affinity.”
“Affinity?” Fawn wrinkled her nose. “Never mind. What happened to my—to Dag’s other knife?” She nodded to it.
Dar sighed, as if he was not quite sure of what he was about to say. “You have to understand, a malice is a mage. It comes out of the ground, sessile and still in its first molt, a more powerful mage than any of us alone will ever be, and just gets stronger after. So. First, this malice snatched the ground of your unborn child.”
Fawn’s spirits darkened in memory. “Yes. Mari said no one had known malices could do that separately. Is that important?” It would be consoling if that horror had at least bought some key bit of knowledge that might help someone later.
Dar shrugged. “It’s not immediately clear to me that it makes any practical difference.”
“Why do malices want babies?”
He held out his hand and turned it over. “It’s the inverse of what the sharing knives share. Children unborn, and to a lesser extent, young, are in the most intense possible period of self-making of the most complex of grounds. Malices building up to a molt—to a major self-making, or self-remaking—seem to crave that food.”
“Couldn’t it steal from pregnant animals?”
Dar raised a brow. “If it wanted to molt into an animal body instead of a human one, perhaps.”
“They can and do,” Dag put in. “The Wolf Ridge malice couldn’t get enough humans, so it partly used wolves as well. I was told by patrollers who were in on the knifing of it that its form was pretty…pretty strange, at the end, and it was well past its first molt.”
Fawn made a disturbed face. So, she noticed, did Dar.
Dar continued, “Anyway. Secondly, you drove Dag’s unprimed knife into the thing.”
Fawn nodded. “Its thigh. He said, anywhere. I didn’t know.”
“Then—leaving that knife in place, right…?”
“Yes. That was when the bogle—the malice—picked me up the second time, by the neck. I thought it was going to shake me apart like a chicken.”
Dar glanced at her scars, and away. “Then you drove in the actual primed knife.”
“I figured I’d better be quick. It broke.” Fawn shivered in the remembered terror, and Dag’s left arm tightened around her. “I thought I’d ruined it. But then the malice dropped me and…and sort of melted. It stank.”
“Simplest explanation,” said Dar crisply. “A person carrying something very valuable to them who trips and falls, tries to fall so as to protect their treasure, even at the cost of hurting themselves. Malice snatches rich ground. Seconds later, before the malice has assimilated or stored that ground, it’s hit with a dose of mortality. In its fall, it blindly tries to shove that ground into a safe spot for it: the unprimed knife. A malice certainly has the power to do so by force and not persuasion. End result, one dissolved malice, one knife with an unintended ground jammed into it.” Dar sucked his lip. “More complicated explanations might be possible, but I haven’t heard anything in your testimony that would require them.”
“Hm,” said Dag. “So will it still work as a sharing knife, or not?”
“The ground in it is…strange. It was caught and bound at a point of most intense self-making and most absolute self-dissolution, simultaneously. But still, only a farmer’s ground after all.” He glanced up sharply. “Unless there’s something about the child no one is telling me. Mixed blood, for example?” His look at his brother was coolly inquiring and not especially respectful.
“It was a farmer child,” Fawn said quietly, looking at the soil. It was bare at the base of the steps, with a few broken hickory husks flattened into the old mud. Dag’s arm tightened silently around her again.
“Then it will have no affinity, and is useless. An unprimed knife that gets contaminated can be boiled clean and rededicated, sometimes, but not this. My recommendation is that you break it to release that worthless farmer ground, burn it—or send the pieces back to Kauneo’s kin with whatever explanation you can concoct that won’t embarrass you—and start over with a new knife.” His voice softened. “I’m sorry, Dag. I know you didn’t carry this for twenty years for such a futile end. But, you know, it happens that way sometimes.”
Fawn looked up at Dar. “I’ll have that back, now,” she said sturdily. She held out her hand.
Dar gave Dag an inquiring look, found no support, and reluctantly handed the sheathed knife back to Fawn.
“A lot of knives never get used,” said Dag, in a would-be casual tone. “I see no special need of rushing to dispose of this one. If it serves no purpose intact, it serves no more destroyed.”
Dar grimaced. “What will you keep it for, then? A wall decoration? A gruesome memento of your little adventure?”
Dag smiled down at Fawn; she wondered what her own face looked like just now. It felt cold. He said, “It had one use, leastways. It brought us together.”
“All the more reason to break it,” said Dar grimly.
Fawn thought back on Dag’s offer of the same act, way back at the Horsefords’ farmhouse. We could have saved a lot of steps. How could two such apparently identical suggestions feel like utter opposites? Trust and untrust. She hoped she could get Dag alone soon, and ask him whether he accepted his brother’s judgment, or only some part of it, or none, or if they should seek another maker. There was no clue in his face. She hid the knife away again in her shirt.
Dag stood and stretched, rolling his shoulders. “It’s about dinnertime, I expect. You want to come watch, Dar, or hide out here?”
Fawn began to wish she and Dag could hide out here. Well—she eyed the bones hung from the eaves swinging in the freshening breeze—maybe not just here. But somewhere.
“Oh, I’ll come,” said Dar, rising to collect his carving knife and the finished bowls and take them inside. “Might as well get it over with.”
“Optimist,” said Dag, stepping aside for him as he trod up the steps.
Fawn caught a glimpse of a tidy workroom, a very orderly bench with carving tools hung above it, and a small fieldstone fireplace in the wall opposite the door. Dar came back out fastening his shirt, entirely insensible of the ease with which his buttons cooperated with his fingers, latched the door, and passed efficiently around the shack closing the shutters.
The green light of the woods was growing somber as scudding dark clouds from the northwest filled the sky above. The staccato pop of falling nuts sounded like Dag’s joints on a bad morning. Fawn clung to Dag’s left arm as they started back up the path. His muscles were tight. She lengthened her steps to match his, and was surprised to find she didn’t have to lengthen them very much.
4
B eyond the clearing with the two tent-cabins, the gray of the lake was darkening, waves starting to spin off white tails of spume. Fawn could hear them slapping the shore beneath the nearby bank, where a stand of cattails bent and hissed in the rising wind. Only a single narrow boat was still in view, with two men paddling like mad for a farther shore. In the slate-colored air to the north, dazzling forks of lightning snaked from sky to earth, their thunder still laggard in arriving. The pearl of the sun, sinking toward Mare Island, disappeared behind a darker cloud even as she watched, turning the light gloomy.
Under the awning of the cabin on the right, a thin, straight, rigid figure in a skirt stood beside their piles of saddles and gear, watching anxiously up the path they were descending. Omba in her riding trousers lurked in the shadows behind, leaning against a support post with her arms crossed.
“What are you going to say?” Fawn whispered urgently to Dag.
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“On what she says. If the rumors have run ahead of me, she’ll have had time to get over being happy I’m alive and move on to other concerns. Depending on who all ’sides Omba got to her with the rumors, she could be pretty well stirred up.”
“You left our gear in plain sight—she’d have to know you’re back even wit
hout Omba.”
“There is that.”
Did he even have a plan? Fawn was beginning to wonder.
As they neared, the woman in the skirt stood bolt upright. Her hands twitched out once, then she planted them firmly on her hips. Cumbia Redwing wore her silvery-gray hair pulled back in the simple mourning knot. Her skin had less of the burnished copper in it than Dag’s—darker, more leathery, more worn—if striking in contrast with the hair. Fawn might have guessed her age as a healthy seventy, though she knew she was two decades beyond that. Her eyes were the clear tea color, narrowing under pinched-in streaks of silver brows as they swept over Fawn; in a better light, Fawn suspected they would be bright gold like Dag’s.
As they came up to the edge of the awning, Cumbia thrust out her chin, and snapped, “Dag Redwing Hickory, I’m speechless!”
Behind them, Dar muttered, “Bet not.” Dag’s brows barely twitched acknowledgment of this.
Proving Dar right, she went on, “Whatever you patrollers do out on the road, the rule is, you don’t bring it home. You can’t be bringing your farmer whore into my tent.”
As if he hadn’t heard her, Dag pulled the shrinking Fawn forward, and said, “Mama, this is my wife, Fawn Bluefield.”
“How de’ do, ma’am.” Fawn dipped her knees, frantically searching amongst the hundred rehearsed speeches in her mind for something to follow. She hadn’t imagined doing this in a thunderstorm. She hadn’t imagined most of this.
Dag forestalled her. Now standing behind her, he slid his hook, carefully turned downward, under her left wrist and elevated it. “See? Wife.” He shrugged his left shoulder to display his own marriage cord.
Cumbia’s eyes widened in horror. “You can’t have—” With a hic-cough of breath, she choked out, “Cut those things.”
“No, ma’am,” said Dag in a weirdly affable tone. Flying, Fawn thought. Off in that other place he went to when things turned deadly sour, when action moved too fast for thought, and he turned it all over to some other part of himself that could keep up. Or not…