“I suppose,” Dar sighed, “I’d best see it here, then. Before the real din starts.”
“That’s what I was thinking, too.”
Dar gestured them toward the cabin steps. Fawn sat beside Dag, scrunching up to him for solace, and Dar took a seat near the steps on a broad stump.
“Give Dar the knife,” said Dag. At her troubled look, he dropped a reassuring kiss atop her head, which made Dar’s face screw up as though he was smelling something rank. Fawn frowned but fished the sheath out of her shirt once more. She would have preferred to give it to Dag to hand to his brother, but that wasn’t possible. Reluctantly, she extended it across to Dar, who almost as reluctantly took it.
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?”