Legacy

14

B y sunset, Fawn guessed she had covered about twenty-five miles from Hickory Lake. The hours of interspersed trotting and walking, nursing her mare along in what she hoped was the best balance between speed and endurance, had given her plenty of time to think. Unfortunately, by now her thoughts were mainly variations on Have I taken a wrong turn yet? Fairbolt’s map was not as reassuring as she’d hoped. The Lakewalker notion of roads seemed more Fawn’s idea of trails; their trails, paths; and their paths, wilderness. So she wasn’t altogether sorry when she heard the hoofbeats coming up behind her.

She turned in her saddle. Rounding the dense greenery of the last curve, a husky patroller rode, followed by Hoharie, her apprentice Othan towing a packhorse and a spare mount in a string, and another patroller. Fawn didn’t bother trying to race ahead, but she didn’t halt, either. In a moment, the others cantered up to surround her, and she let Grace drop back to a walk.

“Fawn!” cried Hoharie. “What are you doing out here?”

“Riding my fat horse,” said Fawn shortly. “They told me she needed exercise.”

“Fairbolt didn’t give you permission to come with us.”

“I’m not with you. I’m by myself.”

As Hoharie sucked on her lower lip, eyes narrowed in thought, Othan chimed in. “You have to turn around and go back, farmer girl. You can’t follow us.”

“I’m ahead of you,” Fawn pointed out. She added, “Though you’re welcome to pass. Go on, run along.”

Hoharie glanced back at her two patrollers, now riding side by side at the rear and watching dubiously. “I really can’t spare a man to see you home.”

“Nobody’s asking you to.”

Hoharie drew a deeper breath. “But I will, if you make me.”

Fawn halted her mare and glanced back at the two big, earnest fellows. They would do their duty; that was a bit of a mania, with patrollers. If she let herself get cumbered with either one of that grim pair, he would see her back to Hickory Lake, sure enough, and in no good mood about it, likely. Patrollers had objections to leaving their partners.

Fawn tried one more time. “Hoharie, please let me come with you. I won’t slow you down, I promise.”

“That’s not the problem, Fawn. It’s your own safety. You don’t belong out here.”

I know where I belong, thank you very much. By Dag’s side. Fawn rubbed her left arm and frowned. “I don’t want to cost you your escort. If it’s that unsafe, you might need them yourself.” She let her shoulders slump, her head droop. “All right, Hoharie. I’m sorry. I’ll turn around.” She bit her tongue on any further artistic embellishments. Keep it simple. And short. Lakewalkers read grounds, not thoughts, Dag claimed, and Fawn’s ground had plenty of other reasons to be in a roil besides duplicity.

Hoharie stared at her for a long, uncertain moment, and Fawn held her breath, lest the medicine maker be inspired to detach a guard anyhow. But finally Hoharie nodded. “You’ve come out a long way. If your horse can’t make it back tonight, it should still be safe enough to stop if you get within ten miles of the lake.”

“Grace is doing all right,” Fawn said distantly, and turned away. Although she had to kick the mare back into a walk, as she was much inclined to turn and follow the other horses.

Dag’s groundsense range was a mile; Fawn didn’t think any of Hoharie’s party had a better range, but she let Grace go on for a mile and a bit before halting, just to be safe. She slid down and let her mare browse for a few minutes before leading her back onto the road. In the summer-damp earth, the hoofprints of the Lakewalker horses showed plain even in the failing light. No wrong turns now. Fawn grinned and trailed after them till she could barely see in the shadows, then dismounted again and led Grace off the road to outwait the hours of darkness.

Fawn watered the mare in a nearby stream, then rubbed her down and fed her oats. She washed up herself, swatted mosquitoes, gnawed a plunkin slice, squashed a crawling tick with her knife haft, and rolled up in her blanket. The songs of the small night creatures only made the underlying stillness more profound. It weighed in upon her just how different this desolate darkness was from that of her seemingly equally lonesome trudge through the settled country south of Lumpton Market. These vasty woods did harbor wolves, and bears, and catamounts; she’d seen the skins of all three in the stores back at Hickory Lake. In the aftermath of the malice, mindless mud-men like the one Dag had slain so deftly at the Horsefords’ could also be wandering around out here. She’d hardly given such hazards a thought when she’d camped during the after-wedding trip up to the lake, in woodlands not so very different. But then she’d had Dag by her side. Curling up in his arms each night had seemed like settling into her own private magical fortress. She touched the steel knife he had given her, sheathed at her belt, and sighed.

But by the first gray light of morning, neither she nor Grace had been eaten by catamounts yet. Heartened, Fawn returned to the trail and found Hoharie’s tracks once more. An hour into the ride, she was given pause when the tracks seemed to part from her map, turning off onto a path. But a closer dismounted searching found them coming back and continuing; likely the party had just diverted to a campsite for the night. A pile of recent horse droppings reassured Fawn that she remained the right distance behind. She kicked Grace along, glumly confident that she risked no chance of overtaking Hoharie prematurely. On the other hand, Grace was carrying barely half the weight of those big patrollers’ mounts. Over time that might add up to more of an edge than anyone thought.

Late in the morning Hoharie’s tracks were suddenly confused by those of a much larger cavalcade, going the other way. A patrol, Fawn guessed—Raintree Lakewalkers, or part of Dag’s company heading home? The heavy prints turned off on another trail, and Fawn, frowning, unrolled her map and studied it. They could be diverting to visit a small Lakewalker camp marked a few miles to the south, or they could be patrolling, or who knew? Their passage rendered the trail they’d come down unmistakable, but also left Hoharie’s overlying signs harder to make out in the deeply pocked muddy patches. But at midday, Fawn came to one of the rare timber bridges over a deep-flowing brown river, and was assured of her place on the map once more. From time to time she passed spots where recent deadfalls had been roughly cleared from the road, and she wondered if that was a task patrols undertook as well, when they weren’t in a tearing hurry.

By late afternoon, Grace’s steps were shortening and stiffening, and Fawn’s backside was numb. How did couriers and their horses ever manage such distances at such speed? She dismounted and led the mare up a few of the steeper slopes, insofar as there were any in these parts, fell into resentment at the loss of precious daylight, then finally considered Dirla and ruthlessly cut a switch. This activated Grace again, making Fawn feel equally justified and guilty.

At a close-grown place where the road mud seemed wildly churned, she paused, spooking a couple of turkey vultures and some crows. The former grunted and hissed, reluctantly retreating, and the latter flapped off, yammering complaint. She peeked over the rim of a shallow ravine where the vegetation was trampled down and caught her breath at the sight of half a dozen naked, rotting corpses piled below. She ventured just close enough to be certain they were mud-men and not Lakewalkers, then hastily remounted. She wasn’t sure if the patrol had slain them sometime back, or if Hoharie’s guards had done for them just recently; the stench was no certain clue. The absence of visible catamounts was suddenly not enough to make her feel safe anymore. She pushed along well past sunset mainly because she was now terrified to stop.

In the deep dark that night she rolled up small and scared, sniveling miserable, stupid tears for the lack of Dag. She buried her face in her blanket edge. With none to see her, she supposed she might bawl to her heart’s content, but she really didn’t want to make unnecessary noise. She hoped any predator within ten miles would be too replete with scavenged mud-men to hunt farmer girls and plump, tired horses. She slept badly despite her exhaustion.

She’d figured the last morning would be the worst, and truly, she woke hurting just as much as she’d suspected she would. But it would be a much shorter leg than yesterday, and at the end of it, she would find Dag. Her cord still assured her of this; if anything, her arm throbbed more clearly, if more worrisomely, with each passing mile. Barely an hour into the morning’s ride she found Hoharie’s campsite just off the track, the dirt cast over the campfire ashes still warm. Only the level terrain and Fawn’s switch kept Grace plodding forward into the long afternoon.

As the light flattened toward the west, Fawn rode abruptly out of the humid green of the endless woods into an open landscape metallic with heat. We’re here.

The woods gave way to water meadows, their grasses gone yellow and limp. The sorry shrubs scattered about bore drooping brown leaves, or none. It all looked very sodden and strange. But ahead, she could see a trickle of cook-fire smoke from a stand of skeletal trees along a leaden shoreline. She didn’t need her stolen map anymore, hadn’t for the past two hours; her aching body bleated to her, There, there, he’s over there. Hoharie and her little troop were just dismounting.

As Fawn rode up, Mari came striding out of the trees, waving her arms and crying urgently, “Close your grounds! Close your grounds!”

Hoharie looked startled, but waved acknowledgment and turned to check Othan and the patrollers, who apparently also obeyed. She saw Fawn, who brought Grace to a weary halt just a few paces away, and her face set, but before she could say anything, Mari, coming to her stirrup, continued.

“You’re here sooner than I dared hope! Dirla fetch you?”

“Yes,” said Hoharie.

“Praise the girl. Did you run across the patrol we sent back home?”

“Yes, about a day out of Hickory Lake.”

“Ah, good.” Mari’s eye fell on Fawn, hunched over her saddlebow. “Why’d you bring her?” The tone of the question was not dismissive, but genuinely curious, as though there might be some very good, if obscure, Lakewalkerish reason for Fawn’s presence in Hoharie’s train.

Hoharie grimaced. “I didn’t. She brought herself.”

Fawn tossed her head.

Othan leaned over and hissed at her, “You lied, farmer girl! You promised to turn around!”

“I did,” said Fawn defiantly. “Twice.”

Hoharie looked not-best-pleased, but the shrewd and curious look on Mari’s face scarcely changed.

“Did you get a look at Utau, when you passed the patrol?” asked Mari. “We sent him home in Razi’s care.”

“Oh, yes,” said Hoharie. She dismounted and stretched her back. Really, all her party looked as hot and tired and dirty as Fawn felt. So much for Lakewalker conceit about their stamina. “Strangest ground damage I ever saw. I told Utau, six months on the sick list.”

“That long?” Mari looked dismayed.

“Likely less, but that’ll hold Fairbolt off for three, which should be about right.”

They exchanged short laughs of mutual understanding.

Fawn slid off sweaty Grace, who stood head down and flop-eared, liquid eyes reproachful, legs as stiff as Fawn’s own. Saun came out of the grove to Mari’s shoulder, trailed by a couple of other patrollers, both older women. As the women began to confer with Hoharie and Mari, he strode up to Fawn, looking astonished.

“You shouldn’t be out here! Dag would have a fit.”

“Where is Dag?” She craned past him toward the grove. So close. “What’s happened to him?”

Saun ran a hand over his head in a harried swipe. “Which time?”

Not a reassuring answer. “Day before yesterday, about the time Dirla rode in to Hickory Lake. Something happened to Dag then, I know it. I felt it.” Something terrible?

His brows drew down in wonder, but he caught her by the arm as she tried to push past him. “Wait! You can’t close your ground. I don’t know if you’d be drawn in, too—wait!” She wrenched out of his grip and broke into a stumbling run. He pelted after, crying in exasperation, “Blight it, you’re as bad as him!”

Among the trees, a number of people seemed to be collected together in bedrolls under makeshift awnings of blankets and hides, four women under one and four men under another. They lay too still for sleep; not still enough for death. A little way off, another bedroll was partly shaded under a blanket hitched to an ash tree’s limbs. Fawn fell to her knees beside it and stared in shock.

Dag lay faceup under a light blanket. Someone had removed his arm harness and set it atop his saddlebags at the head of the bedroll. Fawn had watched his beloved face in sleep, and knew its shape in all its subtle movements. This was like no sleep she’d ever seen. The copper of his skin seemed tarnished and dull, and his flesh stretched too tightly over his bones. His sunken eyes were ringed with dark half circles. But his bare chest rose and fell; he breathed, he lived.

Saun slid to his knees beside her and grabbed her hands as she reached for Dag. “No!”

“Why not?” said Fawn furiously, yanking futilely against his strong grip. “What’s happened to him?”

Saun began to give her a garbled and guilty-sounding account of his trying to help by slaying mud-men in pots—Fawn gazed in bewilderment toward the boggy shoreline where he pointed—that she could only follow at all because of the prior descriptions of the groundlock she’d heard from Dirla. Of Dag, leaping into the eerie danger to save somebody named Artin, which sounded just like Dag, truly. Of Dag being sucked into the lock, or spell, or whatever this was. Of Dag lying unarousable all these three days gone. Fawn stopped fighting, and Saun, with a stern look at her, let her wrists go; she rubbed them and scowled.

“But I’m not a Lakewalker. I’m a farmer,” said Fawn. “Maybe it wouldn’t work on me.”

“Mari says no more experiments,” said Saun grimly. “They’ve already cost us three patrollers and the captain.”

“But if you don’t…” If you don’t poke at things, how can you find anything out? She sat back on her heels, lips tight. All right: look around first, poke later. Dag’s breathing didn’t seem to be getting worse right away, anyhow.

Mari, meanwhile, had led Hoharie and Othan out to the mud pots, then back through the grove to examine the other captives. Mari was finishing what sounded to Fawn like a more coherent account of events than Saun’s as they came over and knelt on the other side of Dag. Her tale of Dag’s ground match with Artin’s failing heart had the medicine maker letting out her breath in a faint whistle. Even more frightening to Fawn was Mari’s description of the strange blight left on Dag’s ground from his fight with the malice.

“Huh.” Hoharie scrubbed at her heat-flushed face, smearing road dirt in sweaty streaks, and stared around. “For the love of reason, Mari, what did you drag me here for? In one breath you beg me to break this unholy groundlock, and in the next you insist I don’t dare even open my ground to examine it. You can’t have it both ways.”

“If Dag went into that thing and couldn’t get himself out, I know I couldn’t. I don’t know about you. Hoped you’d have more tricks, Hoharie.” Mari’s voice fell quiet. “I’ve been picking at this knot for days, now, till I’m near cross-eyed crazy. I’m starting to wonder when it will be time to cut our losses. Except…all of those makers’ own bonded knives went missing during the time they were prisoners of the malice. Of the nine people down, only Bryn is carrying an unprimed knife right now. That’s not much to salvage, for the price. And I’m not real sure what would happen to someone locked up like that trying to share, or to her knife—or to the others. We had ill luck with those mud-puppies, that’s certain.”

Saun, now leaning against the barren ash tree with his arms folded, grimaced agreement.

Fawn’s belly shuddered as it finally dawned on her what Mari was talking about. The picture of Mari, or Saun, or Hoharie—likely Mari, it seemed her idea of a leader’s duty—taking those bone knives and methodically driving them through the hearts of her comrades, going down the rows of bedrolls one after another…No, not Dag! Fawn touched the knife beneath her shirt, suddenly fiercely glad that her accident with it back at Glassforge had at least blocked this ghastly possibility.

Hoharie was frowning, but it seemed to Fawn more in sorrow than dissent.

“I will say,” said Mari, “Dag falling into this lock seemed to give everyone in it new strength—for a little while. But the weaker ones are failing again. If we were to add a new patroller every three days, I don’t rightly know how long we could keep them alive—except, of course, the problem would just get bigger and bigger as we strung it out. I’m not volunteerin’, note. And I’m not volunteerin’ you either, Hoharie, so don’t go getting ideas.”

Hoharie rubbed the back of her neck. “I’m going to have to get ideas of some sort. But I’m not going to attempt anything at all tonight. Fatigue distorts judgment.”

Mari nodded approval, and described the camp off the blight to the east where everyone not tending the enspelled apparently retreated to sleep. When she paused, Fawn motioned at Dag and broke in, “Mari—is it really true I can’t touch him?”

Mari said, “It may be. The finding out could be costly.”

Or not, thought Fawn. “I rode all this way.”

Hoharie said, in a sort of weary sympathy, “We told you to stay home, child. There’s nothing for you to do here but grieve.”

“And get in the way,” muttered Othan, almost inaudibly.

“But I can feel Dag. Still!”

Hoharie did not look hopeful, but she rose to her knees, reached across Dag, and took up Fawn’s left arm anyway, probing along it. “Has it changed any lately?”

“The ache feels stronger for being closer, but no clearer,” Fawn admitted. “It’s funny. Dag gave me this for reassurance, but instead it’s made me frantic.”

“Is that you or him that’s frantic?”

“I can’t hardly tell the difference.”

“Huh.” Hoharie let her go and sat back. “This gets us no further that I can see. Yet.” With a pained grunt, she rose to her feet, and everyone else did too.

Fawn held out her hands, palms open, to Mari. “Surely there’s something I can do!”

Mari looked at her and sighed, but at least it was a sigh of understanding. “There’s bedding and catch-rags to be washed.”

Fawn’s hands clenched. “I can do that, sure.” Better: it was a task that would keep her here in the grove, and not exiled a mile away.

“Oh, that’s important. You rode a long way to do laundry, farmer girl,” said Othan, and missed the cool look that the Lakewalker women turned on him. It was no stretch to Fawn to guess who had been doing the washing so far.

Mari said more firmly, “Not that there’s a pile. It’s so hard to get anything into these people, there’s not much coming out. In any case, not tonight, Fawn. You look bushed.”

Fawn admitted it with a short nod. When it was all sorted out, the party’s horses, including Grace, were led off to the east camp by the patrollers, but Fawn managed to keep her bedroll and saddlebags in the grove by Dag. It was driving her half-mad not to be allowed to touch him, but she set about finding other tasks for her hands, helping with the fire and the batches of broths and thin gruel that these experienced women had cooking.

Hoharie commenced a second, more thorough physical examination of all the silent groundlocked folk, an expression of extreme frustration on her face. “I might as well be some farmer bonesetter,” Fawn heard her mutter as she knelt by Dag. The tart thought came to Fawn that really, they might all be better off with one; farmer bonesetters and midwives always had to work by guess and by golly, with indirect clues. They likely grew good at it, over time.

Resolutely, Fawn took on the laundry the following morning as soon as she could rise and move. At least the work abused different muscles than the ones she’d overtaxed the past three days. Riding trousers rolled above her knees, she waded out into the cool water of the marsh towing a makeshift raft of lashed-together deadwood holding the soiled blankets and catch-rags. The water seemed peculiarly clear and odorless, for a marsh, but it was fine for washing. And she could keep an eye on the long lumpy shadow beneath the ash tree that was Dag, and see the silhouettes of the ground-closed helpers moving about the grove.

To her surprise one of the Lakewalker men, not a patroller but a survivor from the ruined village down the shore, came out and joined her in the task, silently taking up the rubbing and scrubbing by her side. He said only, “You’re Dag Redwing’s farmer bride,” not a question but a statement; Fawn could only nod. He had a funny look on his face, drawn and distant, that made Fawn shy of speaking to him, though she murmured thanks as they passed clouts back and forth. He took the main burden of lugging the heavy, wet cloths back to the blighted trees, and, being much taller, of hanging them up on the bare branches after she shook them out. The only other thing he said, rather abruptly as they finished and he turned away, was, “Artin the smith is my father, see.”

Hoharie paced around the grove and squinted, or walked out to a distance and stared, or sat on a stump and drew formless lines on the ground with a stick, scowling. She went methodically through an array of more startling actions, yelling at or slapping the sleepers, pricking them with a pin, stirring up the half-formed mud-men in their pots. Mari and Saun, with difficulty, dissuaded her from killing another one by way of a test. Flushed after her futile exertions, she came and sat cross-legged by Dag’s bedroll, scowling some more.

Fawn sat across from her nibbling on a raw plunkin slice. She wished she could feed Dag—would the taste of genuine Hickory Lake plunkin be like home cooking to him? But even if she could touch him, he could not chew—he could barely swallow water. She supposed she might try cooking and mashing up some of the root and thinning it down for a gruel, disgusting as that sounded. She asked Hoharie quietly, “What do you figure?”

Hoharie shook her head. “This isn’t just a lovers’ groundlock enlarged. Something of the malice must linger in it. Has to be an involuted ground reinforcement of some sort, to survive the malice’s death; what it’s living on is a puzzle. Well, not much of a puzzle; it has to be ground, the mud-men’s or the people’s or both. People’s, most likely.”

“Like…like a tick? Or a belly-worm? Made of ground,” Fawn added, to show she wasn’t confused about that.

Hoharie gave a vague wave that seemed to allow the comparison without exactly approving it. “It has to be worked ground. Malice-worked. Could be—well, it obviously is—quite complex. I still don’t understand the part about it being so anchored in place. Question is, how long can it last? Will it be absorbed like a healing reinforcement? And if so, will it strengthen or slay? Is it just their groundlock paralysis that is weakening these folks, or is there something more eating away at them, inside?”

At Fawn’s faint gasp Hoharie’s eyes flicked up; she glanced from Dag to Fawn, and murmured, “Oh, sorry. Talking to myself, I’m afraid.”

“It’s all right. I want to know everything.”

“So do I, child,” Hoharie sighed. She levered to her feet and wandered off again.

Saun having gone off to the east camp to sleep after taking a night watch, it was Othan who came at noon to feed Dag broth. Fawn watched enviously and critically as he raised Dag’s head into his lap, wincing at every harsh click of spoon on teeth or muffled choke or dribble lost down over Dag’s chin. At least Dag’s face wasn’t rough with stubble; Saun had shaved it just this morning. Fawn had wondered at the effort, since Dag couldn’t feel it—but somehow it did make him look less sick. So maybe the use of it was not for Dag, but for the people who looked so anxiously after him. She had smiled gratefully at Saun, anyhow.

Othan, on the other hand, glowered at her as he worked.

“What?” she finally demanded.

“You’re hovering. Back off, can’t you? Half a mile would do.”

“I’ve a right. He’s my husband.”

“That hasn’t been decided yet.”

Fawn touched her marriage cord. “Dag and I decided it. Quite a ways back down the road.”

“You’ll find out, farmer.” Othan coaxed the last spoonful of broth down his patient’s throat, which moved just enough to swallow, and laid Dag’s head back down on the folded blanket that substituted, poorly, for a pillow. Fawn considered collecting dry grass to stuff it with, later. Othan added, “He was a good patroller. Hoharie says he could be even more. They say you’ve seduced him from his duty and will be the ruination his life if the camp council doesn’t fix things.”

Fawn sat up indignantly. “They say? So let them say it to my face, if they’re not cowards.” And anyhow, I think we sort of seduced each other.

“My uncle who’s a patroller says it, and he’s no coward!”

Fawn gritted her teeth as Othan—safely ground-closed Othan—stroked a strand of sweat-dampened hair back from Dag’s forehead. How dare he act as if he owned Dag, just because he was Lakewalker-born and she wasn’t! The, the stupid boy was just a wet-behind-the-ears apprentice no older than she was. Younger, likely. Her longing to shut Othan up, make him look nohow, was quelled by her sudden realization that he might be a lead into just the sort of camp gossip Dag had so carefully shielded her from. Also—this was half an argument. Just what all had Dag been saying back to Hickory Lake Camp? She recalled the day he’d made that poor plunkin into a porcupine with his bow and her arrows. Her spinning mind settled on, “I’m not a patch on your malices, for ruination.”

“They’re not our malices.”

Fawn smiled blackly. “Oh, yes, they are.” She added after a fuming moment, “And there isn’t any was about it, unless you want to say he was a good patroller, and he now is a really good captain! He took his company right through that awful Raintree malice like a knife through butter, to hear Dirla tell it. Despite being married to a farmer, so there!”

“Despite, yeah,” Othan growled.

Fawn took a grip on her shredding temper as Mari and Hoharie came up. Othan scrambled to his feet, giving over glaring at Fawn in order to look anxiously at the medicine maker. Hoharie looked grim, and Mari grimmer.

“Which one, then?” said Mari.

“Dag,” said Hoharie. “I’ve worked on his ground enough to be most familiar with it, and he’s also the most recent to fall into the lock. If that counts for anything. Othan, good, you’re here,” she continued without a pause. “I’m going to enter this groundlock, and I want you to try to anchor me.”

Othan looked alarmed. “Are you sure, Hoharie?”

“No, but I’ve tried everything else I can think of. And I won’t walk away from this.”

“No, you’re leaving that dirty job to me,” muttered Mari irritably. Hoharie returned her the sort of sharp shrug that indicated a lengthy argument concluded.

Hoharie went on, “I’ll set up a light link to you, Othan, and try for a glimpse inside the groundlock, then pull back. If I can’t disengage, you are to break with me instantly and not try to enter in after me, do you hear?” She caught her apprentice’s gaze and held it sternly. Othan gulped and nodded.

Fawn scrunched back in the litter of dry grass and dead leaves on Dag’s far side, wrapping her arms around her knees and trying to make herself small, so they wouldn’t notice and exclude her.

Hoharie paused, then said, “My knife is in my saddlebags, Mari, if it comes to that.”

“When should it come to it, Hoharie? Don’t leave me with that decision, too.”

“When the weakest start to die, I believe it will throw more strain on the rest. So it will go faster toward the end. That poor maker who died before Dag’s patrol arrived showed that such deaths won’t break the lock; if anything, it may grow more concentrated. I think…once two or more of the nine—no, ten—are down, then start the sharing. And you’ll just have to see what happens next.” She added after a moment, “Start with me, of course.”

“That,” said Mari distantly, “will be my turn to pick.”

Hoharie’s lips thinned. “Mm.”

“I don’t recommend this, Hoharie.”

“I hear you.”

Evidently not, because the medicine maker lowered herself cross-legged by the head of Dag’s bedroll, motioning Othan down beside her. He sat up on his knees. She straightened her spine and shut her eyes for a moment, seeming to center herself. She then took Othan’s hand with her left hand; there apparently followed another moment of invisible-to-Fawn ground adjustments. Without further hesitation, Hoharie’s right hand reached out and touched Dag’s forehead. Fawn thought she saw him grimace in his trance, but it was hard to be sure.

Then Hoharie’s eyes opened wide; with a yank, she pulled her hand from Othan’s and slammed the heel of it into his chest, pushing him over backward. Her eyes rolled up, her face drained of color and expression, and she slumped across Dag.

With a muted wail, Othan scrambled up and dove for her. Mari cursed and caught Othan from behind, wrapping her arms around his torso and trapping his hands. “No!” she yelled in his ear. “Obey her! Close up! Close up, blight you, boy!”

Othan strained against her briefly, then, with a choke of despair, sprawled back in her grip.

“Ten,” snarled Mari. “That’s it, that’s all we’re doing here. Not eleven, you hear?” She shook him.

Othan nodded dully, and she let him free. He leaned on his hands, staring at his unconscious mentor in horror.

“What did you feel?” Mari demanded of him. “Anything?”

He shook his head. “I—nothing useful, I don’t think. It was like I could feel her ground being pulled away from me, into the dark…!” He turned a distraught face to the patrol leader. “I didn’t let go, Mari, I didn’t! She pushed me away!”

“I saw, boy,” sighed Mari. “You did what you could.” Slowly, she stood up, and braced her legs apart and her hands on her hips, staring down at the two enspelled in their heap. “We’ll lay her out with the rest. She’s in there with them now; maybe she can do something different. If this thing was weakening with age, could we tell? If nothing else, she may have bought three more days of time.” Her voice fell to a savage mutter. “Except I don’t want more time. I want this to be over.”

Hoharie’s bedroll was placed under the ash tree close to Dag’s. Othan took up a cross-legged station of guard, or grief, on the opposite side to Fawn, who sat similarly beyond Dag. They didn’t much look at each other.

Toward sunset, Mari came and sat down between the two bedrolls.

“Blight you two,” she said conversationally to the unconscious pair, “for leaving this on me. This is company captain work, not patrol leader work. No fair slithering out of it, Dag my boy.” She looked up and caught Fawn’s eye from where she lay on her side near Dag. Fawn sat up and returned an inquiring look.

“Bryn”—Mari hooked a thumb over her shoulder toward the rank of female sleepers beneath their awning—“will be all of twenty-two next week. If she has a next week. She’s young. Good groundsense range. She might yet grow up to have a passel of youngsters. Hoharie, I’ve known her longer. A medicine maker has valuable skills. She might yet save the lives of a dozen girls like Bryn. So how shall I decide which first? Some choice. Maybe,” she sighed, “maybe it won’t make any difference. I hardly know which way to wish for.

“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.