They went off about their own usual pursuits. Tril drifted in and out from labors in the kitchen, watching but saying little.
After some debate, it was decided Fawn would be the spinner after all; she was certain Nattie would do it better, but Dag was certain that the more making she put into the task with her own hands, the better the faint chance of tangling her ground in the cord would be. She chose to spin on the wheel, a device Dag had never seen in operation before coming here, saying she was better at it than at the drop spindle. Once she’d finally settled and gathered up her materials and her confidence, the task went much more quickly than Dag had expected. At length she triumphantly handed over for Nattie’s inspection two hanks of sturdy if rather hirsute two-ply thread something between yarn and string in texture.
“Nattie could have spun it smoother and more even.” Fawn sighed.
“Mm,” said Nattie, feeling the bundles. She didn’t disagree, but she did say,
“This’ll do.”
“Shall we go on now?” Fawn asked eagerly. Full night had fallen, and they had been working by candlelight for the past hour.
“We’ll be more rested in the morning,” said Dag.
“I’m all right.”
“I’ll be more rested in the morning, Spark. Have some pity on an old patroller, eh?”
“Oh. That’s right. Groundwork drains you pretty dry.” She added after a cautious moment, “Will this be as bad as the bowl?”
“No. This is a lot more natural. Besides, I’ve done this before. Well…
Kauneo’s mother actually did the spinning that time, because neither of us had the skill.
Each of us had to do our own braiding, though, to catch our grounds.”
Fawn sighed. “I’m never going to be able to sleep tonight.”
In fact, she did, although not before Dag had heard through the closed door Nattie telling her to settle, it was worse than sleeping with a bedbug.
Fawn’s soft giggle was his last memory of the night. They met again in the weaving room right after breakfast, as soon as the rest of the family had cleared off. This time, Dag closed the door firmly. They’d set up a backless bench, filched from the porch, so that Fawn could sit astride it with Dag directly behind her. Nattie took a seat in a chair just beyond Fawn’s knee, listening with her head cocked, her weak groundsense trying to strain beyond its normal limit of the reach of her skin. Dag watched while Fawn practiced on some spare string; it was a four-stranded braiding that produced an extremely strong cord, a pattern called by Lakewalkers mint-stem for its square cross section, and by farmers, Dag was bemused to learn, the same.
“We’ll start with my cord,” he told her. “The main thing is, once I catch my ground in the braiding, don’t stop, or the ground-casting will break, and we’ll have to undo it all and start again from the beginning. Which, actually, we can do right enough, but it’s a bit frustrating to get almost to the end and then sneeze.”
She nodded earnestly and finished setting up, knotting the four strands to a simple nail driven into the bench in front of her. She spread out the wound-up balls that kept the loose ends under control, gulped, and said, “All right.
Tell me when to start.”
Dag straightened and slipped his right arm from its sling, scooting up behind her close enough to touch, kissing her ear for encouragement and to make her smile, succeeding perhaps in the first but not the second. He looked over her head and brought both arms around and over hers, letting his hand and hook touch first the fiber, then her fingers, then hover over her hands. His ground, flowing out through his right hand, caught at once in the thick threads.
“Good.
Got it anchored. Begin.”
Her nimble hands began to pull, flip, twist, repeat. The tug as the thin stream from his ground threaded beneath her touch was palpable to him, and he recalled anew how very strange it had felt the first time, in a quiet tent in wooded Luthlia. It was still very strange, if not unpleasant. The room became exceedingly still, and he thought he could almost mark the shift of the light and shadows beyond the windows as the morning sun crept up the eastern sky.
His right arm was shaking and his shoulders aching by the time she had produced a bit over two feet of cord. “Good,” he whispered in her ear. “Enough. Tie off.”
She nodded, tied the locking end knot, and held the strands tight. “Nattie?
Ready?”
Nattie leaned over with the scissors and, guided by Fawn’s touch, cut below the knot. Dag felt the snap-back in his ground, and controlled a gasp.
Fawn straightened and jumped up from the bench. Anxiously, she turned and held out the cord to Dag.
He nodded for her to run it through his fingertips below the increasingly grubby splint wrappings. The sensation was bizarre, like looking at a bit of himself in a distorted mirror, but the anchoring was sound and sweet. “Good! Done! We did it, Spark, Aunt Nattie!”
Fawn smiled like a burst of sunlight and pressed the cord into her aunt’s hands.
Nattie fingered it and smiled too. “My word. Yes. Even I can feel that. Takes me back, it does. Well done, child!”
“And the next?” she said eagerly.
“Catch your breath,” Dag advised. “Walk around, shake out the kinks. The next will be a bit trickier.” The next might well be impossible, he admitted bleakly to himself, but he wasn’t going to tell Spark that; confidence mattered in these subtle things.
“Oh, yes, your poor shoulders must hurt after all that!” she exclaimed, and ran around to climb up on the bench behind him and knead them with her small strong hands, an exercise he could not bring himself to object to, although he did manage not to fall forward onto the bench and melt. He remembered what else those hands could do, then tried not to. He would need his concentration. Two days, now…
“That’s enough, rest your fingers,” he heroically choked out after a bit. He stood up and walked around the room himself, wondering what else he could do, or should do, or hadn’t done, to make the next and most critical task succeed.
He was about to step into the unaccustomed and worrisome territory of things he’d never done before—of things no one had ever done before, to his knowledge.
Not even in ballads.
They sat on the bench again, and Fawn secured the four strands of her own string on the nail. “Ready when you are.”
Dag lowered his face and breathed the scent of her hair, trying to calm himself.
He ran his stiff hand and hook gently down and up her arms a couple of times, trying to pick up some fragment, some opening on the ground he could sense swirling, so alive, beneath her skin. Wait, there was something coming…
“Begin.”
Her hands started moving. After only about three turns, he said, “Wait, no.
Stop. That isn’t your ground, that’s mine again. Sorry, sorry.”
She blew out her breath, straightened her back, wriggled, and undid her work back to the beginning.
Dag sat for a moment with his head bent, eyes closed. His mind picked at the uncomfortable memory of the left-handed groundwork he’d done on the bowl two nights ago. The break in his right arm did weaken his very dominant ground on that side; maybe the left now tried to compensate for the right as the right had long done for the maimed left. This time, he concentrated hard on trying to snag Fawn’s ground from her left hand. He stroked the back of her hand with his hook, pinched with ghostly fingers that were not there, just… there! He had something fastened in, fragile and fine, and it wasn’t him this time. “Go.”
Again, her hands began flying. They were a dozen turns into the braid when he felt the delicate link snap. “Stop.” He sighed. “It’s gone again.”
“Ngh!” Fawn cried in frustration.