Dag extended his ghost hand beneath the vivid stream, casting his mind back over the involution he’d known best: the one in his own pledged knife, which he’d watched be made for him by the maker in Luthlia. He had himself unmade it again in Raintree as part of breaking the malice’s deadly groundlock. The involution was the knife maker’s greatest gift, the cupped hands to hold the offered mortality. He folded his ghost hand around a splash of Crane. His current unwelcome affinity with the renegade might well be rendering this easier—add that dark thought to the pack, no time for it now. He let his ground flow into the furrow along the inner edge of the blade, there to join with the knife’s own waiting ground. Let it all set, solidify.
He pulled back, parting from that piece of himself he’d turned into a cup for Crane.
And gasped in astonishment. Ah, blight! I didn’t know it was going to hurt this much! He watched in horrified fascination as his ghost hand tore away from the part of itself caught in the knife. It felt like biting off his own finger. Ye gods, and Dar went through this every time he bonded a knife? Brother, I beg your forgiveness.
If the curl of ground was just right…I either have it now, or I don’t. If I don’t, I can boil the blade again and start over—many a maker’s apprentice has had to do just that, their first few trials. But beneath that was the stronger thought, mule-headed in its certainty: I have it.
He came back, blinking, to the surface world, trembling and cold as if from a deep healing. The bloody knife shook in his tight grip, but it was his left arm that ached, and his ghost hand felt on fire. A quick check found his groundsense down to a hundred paces. Again. I won’t be recovering from this in a day. But the groundwork was over. Everything after this was going to be…he declined to finish the thought, easy. Everything after this was going to be as blighted bizarre as everything before, likely.
Dag swallowed and found his cracked voice. “Now, at this point in a usual knife making, the maker would clean it up and give it to its new owner, to use later on. A good binding can last a lifetime.” By definition. He stuck his hand out rather blindly toward Fawn. She raised her brows at him, pried the knife from his stiffened fingers, and rubbed the spare blood from it with a cloth. Dag wasn’t so sure how good this binding was—it seemed clumsier than his Luthlian knife’s, not as fine. But solid, yes. Possibly overbuilt? Maybe he was only supposed to have, say, bitten off the tip of one finger? But the lifetime this binding waited on would be measured in minutes.
“Primings vary. My father put his knife through his own heart during a dire illness a dozen years ago. My first wife rolled over on hers when she was dying of wounds on a far northern battlefield. Remo had one from an elderly kinswoman who gave up the last precious months of her old age to it”—out of the corner of his eye, Dag saw Remo flinch—“and had to be helped to it by her own daughter. I’ve seen patrollers help each other. You understand, a sharing knife is not normally used as an instrument of execution.” Or as a means of instruction to a pack of farmers, Dag had to admit. “But one way or another, this is something no farmer has ever seen, so pay attention.” He snapped that last to the back of the crowd in his captain’s voice. They jolted upright and attended.
“You’re a blighted madman, you know that?” Crane murmured up to him. He’d kept his face turned half-away from the gawkers on the hill through most of this.
“I have my reasons,” Dag murmured back down. “You might even have understood them once, before you wrecked yourself.”
“Me, they banished. If they have a lick of sense, you they’ll burn alive.”
Ignoring this, Dag sat again, and said, “Open his shirt, Spark.”
Her nimble fingers undid the buttons, folded back the cloth, bared Crane’s chest. Dag wondered if Remo was going to want his shirt back, after. He looked gravely into Crane’s silvery eyes, and received a black-browed scowl in return.
“Ready?” Do you assent? Of all requirements for this making, that was the most profoundly unalterable.
“If you want my dying curse,” growled Crane, “you have it.”
“Figured that.”
“So if my curse is as good as a blessing, is my blessing worth a curse? Blight it, take both. You can sort them out yourself. I’m done.” He turned his face toward the bright river. “Let me out of this hopeless world.” He added after a moment, “Don’t let your blighted hand falter.”
Assent enough.
Dag positioned the tip of the sharing knife under Crane’s rib cage, pausing only long enough to explain softly to Fawn about the correct angle to reach the heart, and how much force to use to reach it in one swift punch without breaking the blade prematurely. Her face was taut, but her eyes were intent. She nodded understanding.
Dag extended his groundsense to be sure of Crane’s heart, gripped the haft, and in an abrupt motion, forced in the blade to its full length.
Crane’s lips shivered and his eyes rolled up, but all Dag’s attention was back at ground level. He froze, still clasping the haft, as the dissolving mortal ground began to flow toward the knife as if sucked into a drain. Would his involution hold it all? Would it close and seal properly…?
Yes.
Dag breathed again. As Crane did not.
He blinked, looked up, looked around. The hillside of watching men had gone really, really quiet.
Dag drew the primed knife from its fleshly sheathing and held it up high. “This Lakewalker”—he declined to use the terms renegade or banished at this point—“has now given his mortality into this knife, to share again, if the chance favors me, with the next malice to cross my path.” Twenty-six Lakewalkers before Crane had trusted Dag not to waste their deaths, and had their trust upheld. Of all the knives and lives that had passed through his hand, this was surely the darkest. Blight, but I came by this one the hard way. He handed the knife to Fawn to clean and slip back into the sheath at his neck, because his hand was still too clumsy with the shakes to manage the task in one try.
“Whether Crane has paid for his crimes, I can’t tell you. This is a separate tally.”
23
Her face carefully held stiff to hide how her stomach shook, Fawn helped Dag rise from Crane’s still body. She had prudently brought along Dag’s hickory stick; with that in his hand and Fawn under his left shoulder, he made his way along the shoreline. At Fawn’s nod of invitation, Berry followed, and Whit came after her. Barr and Remo were left to oversee the disposal of the corpse. The crowd of sobered boatmen, too, broke up and moved into the trees to tend to their next grim chore.
Dag headed not back to the Fetch, but downstream to the next creek and up its rock-strewn banks to the narrow meadow where the bandits had hobbled their horses. Some of the meadow grass was still green, especially along the creek, though most had turned from autumn gold to winter dun, a sort of standing hay. The dozen or so horses grazing there swiveled their ears at the newcomers, then put their heads down once more, except one big brown fellow who whuffled curiously as they passed near. Dag stopped to rub its poll, which made the beast droop its lip and flop its ears foolishly.
“I like horses,” murmured Dag. “They’re so big and bright and simple in their grounds. And best of all right now”—he sighed—“they’re not people. Over there, Spark.” He nodded to a lone cottonwood tree at the meadow’s edge, soaring up to scratch at the sky with its bare branches, and ambled over to sit and lean his head back against the ridged gray bark, closing his eyes. Fawn sat herself beside him. Unusually, he let his left arm lie in her lap, and she stroked it gently, which made his lips move not unlike the horse’s. The whuffling horse followed them in short hops of its hobbled front legs, then lowered its face to nudge him for more rubs, which he reached up and supplied without opening his eyes.