“I hope there never is a similar problem,” said Mari, “because that would mean another runaway malice like this one, and this one got way too close to being unstoppable. But write it out all the same, sure. You never know.”
“No one can know till it’s tried,” said Dag, “but my own impression was that any primed knife, placed in any of the groundlocked people, would have worked to clean out the malice’s involution. It only needed someone to think of it—and dare.”
“It seems a strange way to spend a sacrifice,” agreed Hoharie. “Still…ten for one.” All the Lakewalkers looked equally pensive, contemplating this mortal arithmetic. “When did you think of it?”
“Pretty nearly as soon as I was trapped in the groundlock. I could see it, then.”
Hoharie’s gaze flicked to Fawn’s left wrist. Fawn, by now inured to being talked past, almost flinched under the suddenly intent stare. “That was also about the time you felt a change in that peculiar ground reinforcement Dag gave you, wasn’t it, Fawn? Did it seem to come with, say, a compulsion?”
Othan sat up straight. “Oh, of course! That would explain how she knew what to do!”
Did it? Fawn’s brows drew down in doubt. “It didn’t seem anything like so clear. I wish it had been.”
“So how did you know?” asked Hoharie patiently. “To use your sharing knife like that?”
“I…” She hesitated, casting her mind back to last night’s desperation. “I figured it.”
“How?”
She struggled to express her complex thoughts simply. A lot of it hadn’t even been in words, just in pictures. “Well, you said. That there were cut-off bits of malice in that groundlock. Sharing knives kill malices. I thought it might just need an extra dose to finish the job.”
“But your knife had no affinity.”
“What?” Fawn stared in confusion.
Dag cleared his throat. His voice went gentle. “Dar was right—about that, anyway. The mortality in your knife was too pure to hold affinity with malices, but I was able to break into its involution and add some. A little extra last-minute making, would you say, Hoharie?”
Hoharie eyed him. “Making? I’m not sure that wasn’t magery, Dag.”
Fawn’s brow wrinkled in distress. “Is that what tore up your ghost hand? Oh, if I had known—!”
“Sh,” soothed Dag. “If you had known, what?”
She stared down at her hands, clutching each other in her lap. After a long pause, she said, “I’d have done it all the same.”
“Good,” he whispered.
“So,” said Othan, clearly struggling with this, “you didn’t really know. You were just guessing.” He nodded in apparent relief. “A real stab in the dark. And in fact, except for Dag saving it all at the last, you were wrong!”
Fawn took a long breath, considering this painful thought. “Sometimes,” she said distantly, with all the dignity she could gather, “it isn’t about having the right answers. It’s about asking the right questions.”
Dag gave a slow blink; his face went curiously still. But then he smiled at her again, in a way that made the knot in her heart unwind, and gave her a considering nod. “Yeah—it was what we in Tent Bluefield call a fluke, Othan,” he murmured, and the warm look he gave Fawn with that made the knot unwind all the way down to her toes.
Later in the afternoon, Saun came back from the woods with a peeled-sapling staff—hickory, he claimed; with that and Saun’s shoulder for support, Dag was able to hobble back and forth to the slit trench. That cured Dag of ambition for any further movement. He was quite content to lie propped in his bedroll, occasionally with Fawn tucked up under his arm, and watch the camp go by, and not talk. He was especially content not to talk. A few inquiring noises were enough to persuade Fawn to ripple on about how she’d arrived so astonishingly here. He felt a trifle guilty about giving her so little tale in return, but she had Saun and Mari to cull for more details, and she did.
The next day the last of the company’s scouts returned, having hooked up with another gaggle of Bonemarsh refugees returning to check on their quick and their dead. With the extra hands on offer, it was decided to move the recovering makers to better shelter that day, and the Raintree cavalcade moved off in midafternoon. The camp fell quiet. At this point, Dag’s remaining patrol realized that the only barrier between them and a ride for home was their convalescent captain. The half dozen patrollers who were capable of giving minor ground reinforcements either volunteered or were volunteered to contribute to his speedier recovery. Dag blithely accepted them all, until his left foot began to twitch, his speech slurred, and he started seeing faint lavender halos around everything, and Hoharie, with some dire muttering about absorption time, blight it, cut off the anxious suppliers.
The miasma of homesickness and restlessness that permeated the air was like a fog; by evening, Dag found it easy to persuade Mari and Codo to split the patrol and send most of them home tomorrow with Hoharie, leaving Dag a suitable smaller group of bodyguards, or nursemaids, to follow on as soon as he was cleared to mount a horse again.
Mari, after a consultation with Hoharie out of Dag’s earshot, appointed herself chief of their number. “Somebody’s got to stand up to you when you get bored and decide to advance Hoharie’s timetable by three days,” she told Dag bluntly, when he offered a reminder of Cattagus. “If we leave you nothing but the children, you’ll ride right over ’em.”
Despite his pains and exhaustion, Dag was wholly satisfied to lie with Fawn that night in their little shelter, as if he’d entered some place of perfect balance where all needs were met and no motion was required. He wasn’t homesick. On the whole, he had no desire at all to think about Hickory Lake and what awaited him there…no. He stopped that slide of thought. Be here. With her.
He petted her, letting her dark hair wind and slide through his fingers, silky delight. In her saddlebags she had brought candles, of all things, of her own making, and had stuck one upright in a holder made from a smooth dented stone she’d found in the stream. He was unaroused and, in his current condition, likely unarousable, but looking at her in this gilded light he was pierced with a pure desire, as if he were gazing at a running foal, or a wheeling hawk, or a radiant, melting sunset. Wonder caught up in flight that no man could possess, except in the eye and impalpable memory. Where time was the final foe, but the long defeat was not now, now, now…
Fawn seemed content to cuddle atop the bedroll and trade kisses, but at length she wriggled up to do off her boots and belt. They would sleep in their clothes like patrollers, but she drew the line at unnecessary lumps. With a thoughtful frown, she pulled her sharing knife cord over her head.
“I reckon I can put this away in my saddlebags, now.” She slid the haft out of its sheath and spilled the three long shards of the broken blade out on the bedroll, lining them up with her finger.
Dag rolled over and up on his elbow to look. “Huh. So, that explains what Othan was doing down there, fishing all those out of me. I wondered.”
“So…now what do we do with it?” Fawn asked.
“A spent knife, if it’s recovered, is usually given back to the kin of the bone’s donor, or if that can’t be done, burned on a little pyre. It’s been twenty years, but…Kauneo should have kin up in Luthlia who remember her. I still have her uncle Kaunear’s bone, too, back home in my trunk—hadn’t quite got round to arranging for it when this Raintree storm blew in on us. I should send them both up to Luthlia in a courier pouch, with a proper letter telling everyone what their sacrifices have bought. That would be best, I think.”
She nodded gravely and extended a finger to gently roll a shard over. “In the end, this did do more than just bring us together, despite what Dar said about the farmer ground being worthless. Because of your making that redeemed it. I’m—not glad, exactly, there’s not much glad about this—satisfied, I think. Dar said—”