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?