But the star fire didn’t touch him. Later, a bolt of new strength shot through him, and for a short time, coherent thought came back. Some other light had fallen into this prison, also known to him…He recognized Hoharie’s intense ground in all its ever-astonishing vigor—so strange that such a spring of strength should dwell in such a slight and unassuming body. But the hope it should have brought him turned to ashes as he took in her anger, horror, and frustration.
I thought sure you’d figure the trick of it from out there, as I could not—I’m the blinder one, I had to look to see it.
And the wailing answer, I had to look to be sure…I had to be certain…oh, Dag, I am so sorry…before the fog blurred all to voiceless sorrow once more.
He raced to make his watch rounds in this brief, stolen respite, to count his company as every captain should. Artin, yes, barely holding on, his ground so drained as to be translucent at the edges; Bryn and Ornig; Mallora; the other Bonemarsh makers. And now Hoharie. He remembered to count himself. Ten, all dying in place. Again he led those who had trusted in him into the boundless dark. At least this time I can’t desert them.
More timelessness. Gray mouths leeched him.
The star fire moved too close again, and he breathed dread like cold mist. But the sky-spark held something else, a faint, familiar chime; her fair light and its wordless song wound together. Their intertwined beauty overthrew his heart. This is surely the magic of the whole wide green world; Lakewalker groundwork has nothing to compare with it…
And then pain and the song pierced him.
He could feel every detail of the roiling ground that stabbed into his thigh: Kauneo’s bone, his own blood of old, the involuted and shaped vessel for mortality that was the gift of the Luthlian knife maker. Spark’s daughter’s death, death without birth, self-making and self-dissolution intermingled in their purest forms.
Too pure. It lay self-contained within the involution, innocent of all taint of desire, motion, and time. It lacks affinity seemed too flat a statement to sum up its aloof stillness. Free of all attachment. Free of all pain.
We give best from abundance. I can share pain.
Flying as never before, he raised his arm by its ground, and his ghost hand—pure ground, piebald with blight and malice spatter—wrapped the hilt and the ground of the hilt. His own old blood gave him entry into the involution; he let his blackened ground trace up its ancient, dried path; catch, hold; and he remembered the night Fawn had woven his wedding cord with bloody fingers, and so drawn her own ground into it. And her wide-open eyes and unguarded offer, later, on another night of ground-weaving, Need blood? As if she would gladly have opened her veins on the spot and poured all that vivid flood into his cupped hands, sparing nothing. As she does now.
Do not waste her gift, old patroller.
His blackened touch seemed a violation, but he twisted the mortal ground between his ghost fingers the way Fawn spun thread. He grinned somewhere inside himself to imagine Dar’s outraged voice, You used a wedding-cord technique on a sharing knife…? The involution uncoiled, giving up its long burden into his hand. Kauneo’s bone cracked joyfully, a sound beneath sound heard not with his ears but in his groundsense, and he knew in that moment that Dar’s theory of how the farmer babe’s death had entered his knife was entirely wrong-headed, but he had no time now to examine it. He held mortality in his hand, and it would not wait.
Within his hand, not upon it; the two were as inextricable as two fibers spun into one strong thread. Affinity. Now, at last, he closed his hand upon the malice’s dark construction.
His ghost hand twisted, stretched, and tore apart as the mortality flowed from him into the gray mouths, along the lines of draining hunger, and he howled without sound in the agony of that wrenching. The malice spatters on his body were ripped out from their patches of blight as if dragged along on a towline, gashing through his ground and out his arm. The dazzling fire raced, consuming its dark path as it traveled. The gray fog-threads of the malice’s involution blazed up in fire all over the grove, leaving a web of red sparks hanging for a moment as if suspended in air. When it reached the mud-men’s dense impelling ground-shapes, they exploded in fiery pinwheels, their aching afterimages spinning in Dag’s groundsense, weighty as whirlpools peeling off a paddle’s trailing edge.
Then—quiet.
Dag had not known that silence could reverberate so; or maybe that was just him. When a long strain was released, the recoil itself could become a new source of pain…No, actually, that was just his body. He’d thought he’d missed his body, back when his mind had been set adrift from it in that ground-fog; now he was not so sure. Its pangs were all suddenly very distinctive indeed. Head, neck, back, arm, haunches all cried out, and his bladder definitely clamored for attention. His body was noisy, cranky, and insistent. But he sought something more urgent.
He pried his eyes open, blinking away the glue and sand that seemed to cement his lids together. He was staring up at bare silvered branches and a night sky washed with moonlight strong enough to cast interlaced shadows. Across the grove, voices were moaning in surprise or crying out in shock. Shouts of alarm transmuted to triumph.
In the blue moonlight and red flare of new wood thrown on a nearby fire, a baffling sight met his gaze. Fawn and Hoharie’s apprentice Othan seemed to be dancing. Or perhaps wrestling. It was hard to be sure. Othan was breathing hard through his nose; Fawn had both hands wrapped around one of his wrists and was swinging from it, dragging his arm down. His boots stamped in an unbalanced circle as he tried to shake her off, cursing.
Dag cleared his throat and said mildly, albeit in a voice as rusty and plaintive as an old gate hinge, “Othan, quit manhandling my wife. Get your own farmer girl.”
The two sprang apart, and Othan gasped, “Sir! I wasn’t—”
What he wasn’t, Dag didn’t hear, because with a sob of joy Fawn threw herself down across his chest and kissed him. He thought his mouth tasted as foul as an old bird’s nest, but strangely, she didn’t seem to mind. His left arm, deadened, wasn’t working. His right weighed far too much, but he hoisted it into the air somehow and, after an uncertain wobble, let it fall across her, fingers clutching contentedly.
He had no idea why or how she was here. It was likely a Fawn-fluke. Her solid wriggling warmth suggested hopefully that she was not a hallucination, not that he was in the best shape to distinguish, just now.
She stopped kissing him long enough to gasp, “Dag, I’m so sorry I had to stab you! I couldn’t think of any other way. Does it hurt bad?”
“Mm?” he said vaguely. He was more numb than in pain, but he became aware of a shivering ache in his left thigh. He tried to raise his head, failed, and stirred his leg instead. An utterly familiar knife haft drifted past his focus. He blinked in bemusement. “A foot higher and I’d have thought you were mad at me, Spark.”
Her helpless laughter wavered into weeping. The drops fell warm across his chest, and he stroked her shuddering shoulder and murmured wordlessly.
After a moment she gulped and raised her face. “You have to let me go.”
“No, I don’t,” he said amiably.
“We have to get those bone fragments dug out of your leg. I didn’t know how far to stick it in, so I pushed it all the way, I’m afraid.”
“Thorough as ever, I see.”
She shrugged out of his weak grip and escaped, but grinned through her tears, so that was likely all right. He eased open his groundsense a fraction, aware of something deeply awry in his own body’s ground just below his perceptions, but managed a head count of the people in the grove before he tightened up again. All alive. Some very weak, but all alive. Someone had flung himself onto a horse bareback and was galloping for the east camp. Othan was diverted from his farmer-wrestling to tend on Hoharie, struggling up out of her bedroll. Dag gave up captaining, lay back with a sigh of boundless fatigue, and let them all do whatever they wanted.