His hand touched it and jerked back. “What the… ?” His lips parted, eyes going suddenly intent, and he reached again, gingerly. He drew his hand back more slowly this time, the lunatic exhilaration draining from his face. “That’s strange. That’s very strange.”
“What?” snapped Fawn, pain and bewilderment making her sharp. Her body was beaten, her neck felt half-twisted-off, and her belly kept on knotting in aching waves. “You don’t tell me anything that makes sense, and then I go and do stupid things, and it’s not my fault.”
“Oh, I think this one is. That’s the rule. Credit goes to the one who does, however scrambled the method. Congratulations, Little Spark. You have just saved the world. My patrol will be so pleased.”
She would have thought him ragging her mercilessly, but while his words seemed wild, his level tone was perfectly serious. And his eyes were warm on her, without a hint of… malice.
“Maybe you’re just crazy,” she said gruffly, “and that’s why nothing you say makes sense.”
“No surprise by now if I am,” he said agreeably. With a grunting effort, he rolled over and up onto his knees, hand propping him upright. He opened his jaw as if to stretch his face, as though it had gone numb, and blinked owlishly.
“I have to get off this dead dirt. It’s fouling up my groundsense something fierce.”
“Your what?”
“I’ll explain that later”—he sighed—“too. I’ll explain anything you want.
You’re owed, Little Spark. You’re owed the world.” He added after a reflective moment,
“Many people are. Doesn’t change the matter.”
He started to reach for the unbroken knife again, then paused, his expression growing inward. “Would you do me a favor? Pick that up and carry it along for me. The hilt and the bits of the other, too. It needs proper burying, later on.”
Fawn tried not to look at his stump, which was pink and lumpy and appeared sore.
“Of course. Of course. Did they break your hand thing?” She spotted the pouch a few feet away and crawled to get it. She wasn’t sure she could stand up yet either. She collected the broken bits in his torn-off sleeve and slid the intact knife back into its sheath.
He rubbed his left arm. “Afraid so. It isn’t meant to come off that way, by a long shot. Dirla will fix it, she’s good with leather. It won’t be the first time.”
“Is your arm all right?”
He grinned briefly. “It isn’t meant to come off that way either, though that bear-fellow sure tried. Nothing’s broken. It’ll get better with rest.”
He shoved to his feet and stood with legs braced apart, swaying, until he seemed sure he wouldn’t just fall down again. He limped slowly around the cave collecting first his ruined arm contraption, which he wrapped over his shoulder by its leather straps, then, fallen farther away, his big knife. He swiped it on his filthy shirt and resheathed it. He rolled his shoulders and squinted around for a moment, apparently saw nothing else he wanted, and walked back to Fawn.
Her sharpening cramps almost doubled her over when she tried to rise; he gave her a hand up. She stuffed the pouch and rolled sleeve in her shirt. Leaning on each other, they staggered for the light.
“What about the mud-men? Won’t they jump us again?” asked Fawn fearfully as they came out on the path overlooking the dead ravine.
“No. It’s all over for them when their malice dies. They go back to their animal minds—trapped in those made-up human bodies. They usually panic and run. They don’t do too well, after. We kill them for mercy when we can. Otherwise, they die on their own pretty quick. Horrible, really.”
“Oh.”
“The men whose minds the malice has seized, its fog lifts from them, too.
They revert.”
“A malice enslaves men, too?”
“When its powers grow more advanced. I think this one might have, for all it was still in its first molt.”
“And they’ll… be freed? Wherever they may be?”
“Sometimes freed. Sometimes go mad. Depends.”
“On what?”
“On what they’ve been doing betimes. They remember, d’you see.”
Fawn wasn’t entirely sure she did. Or wished to.
The air was warm, but the sun was setting through bare branches, as though winter had become untimely mixed with summer. “This day has been ten years long,” Dag sighed. “Got to get me off this bad ground. My horse is too far away to summon. Think we’ll take those.” He pointed to two horses tied to trees near the creek and led her down the zigzag path toward them. “I don’t see any gear.
Can you ride bareback?”
“Usually, but right now I feel pretty sick,” Fawn admitted. She was still shaking, and she felt cold and clammy. Her breath drew in as another violent cramp passed through her. That is not good. That is something very wrong. She had thought herself fresh out of fear, a year’s supply used up, but now she was not so sure.
“Huh. Think you’d be all right if I held you in front of me?”
The unpleasant memory of her ride with the bandit this morning—had it only been this morning? Dag was right, this day was a decade—flashed through her mind.
Don’t be stupid. Dag is different. Dag, on the whole, was different from any other person she’d ever met in her life. She gulped. “Yeah. I… yeah, probably.”
They arrived at the horses, Fawn stumbling a little. Dag ran his hand over them, humming to himself in a tuneless way, and turned one loose after first filching its rope, shooing it off. It trotted away as if glad to be gone. The other was a neat bay mare with black socks and a white star; he fastened the rope to her halter to make reins and led her to a fallen log. He kept trying to use his left limb to assist, wincing, then remembering, which, among all Fawn’s other hurts, made her heart ache strangely.
“Can you get yourself up, or do you need a boost?”
Fawn stood whitely. “Dag?” she said in a small, scared voice.
His head snapped around at her tone, and tilted attentively. “What?”
“I’m bleeding.”
He walked back to her. “Where? Did they cut you? I didn’t see…”
Fawn swallowed hard, thinking that her face would be scarlet if only it had not been green. In an even smaller voice, she choked out, “Between… between my legs.”
The loopy glee that had underlain his expression ever since the killing of the malice was wiped away as if with a rag. “Oh.” And he did not seem to require a single further word of explanation, which was a good thing, as well as being amazing in a man, because Fawn was out of everything. Words. Courage. Ideas.
He took a deep breath. “We still have to get off this ground. Deathly place. have to get you, get you someplace else. Away from here. We’ll just go a little faster, is all. You’re going to have to help me with this. Help each other.”
It took two tries and considerable awkwardness, but they both managed to get aboard the bay mare at last, thankfully a placid beast. Fawn sat not astride but sideways across Dag’s lap, legs pressed together, head to his left shoulder, arm around his neck, leaving his right hand free for the reins. He chirped to the horse and started them off at a brisk walk.
“Stay with me, now,” he murmured into her hair. “Do not let go, you hear?”
The world was spinning, but under her ear she could hear a steady heartbeat.
She nodded dolefully.
Chapter 5
By the time they arrived at the deserted valley farm, both the back of Fawn’s skirt and the front of Dag’s trousers were soaked in too-bright blood.
“Oh,” said Fawn in a mortified voice, when he’d swung her down from the horse and slid after her. “Oh, I’m sorry.”