Legacy

15

H e had floated in an increasingly timeless gray fog, all distinctions fading. It seemed a just consolation that with them faded all fear, want, and pain. But then, inexplicably, something bright and warm troubled his shredding perceptions, as if the north star had torn herself loose from the sky and ventured too near him in naive, luminous, fatal curiosity. Don’t fall, no…stay away, Spark! Longing and horror wrenched him, for to grasp that joy would slay it. Is it my fate to blight all that I love?

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.

In due course Othan came back with Hoharie’s kit and some lights and commenced some pretty unpleasant fiddling about down by Dag’s side. Weary Hoharie directed, and Fawn hovered. That the blade should hurt worse coming out than going in made some sense, but not that it should do so more often. Voices muttered, rose and fell. “It’s bleeding so much!” “That’s all right. It’ll wash the wound out a bit. Now the swab.” “Hoharie, do you know what that swab is?” “Othan, think. Of course I do. Very clever, Fawn. Now tie the strips down tight. No peeking under it, unless it soaks through.” “Did he get it all?” “Yes, look—fit the pieces together like a puzzle, and check for missing chips or fragments. All smooth, see?” “Oh, yes!” “Hoharie, it’s like his ground is shredded. Hanging off him in strips. I’ve never felt anything like!” “I saw when it happened. It was spectacular. Get the bleeding stopped, get everyone off this blight and over to the east camp. Get me some food. Then we’ll tackle it.”

The evacuation resembled a torchlight parade, organized by the folks who came pelting over from the east camp, all dressed by guess and riotous with relief. Those freed from the groundlock who could sit a horse were led off two to a mount, holding each other upright, and the rest were carried. Dag was carted eastward feetfirst on a plank; Saun’s face, grinning loonlike, drifted past his gaze in the flickering shadows. Mari’s voice complained loudly about missing the most exciting part. Dag gripped Fawn’s hand for the whole mile and refused to let go.

The east camp didn’t settle down till dawn. Fawn woke again near noon, trapped underneath Dag’s outflung arm. She just lay there for a while, relishing the lovely weight of it and the slow breath ruffling her curls. Eventually, she gently eased out from under, sat up, and looked around. She thought it a measure of Dag’s exhaustion that her motions didn’t wake him the way they usually did.

Their bedroll was sheltered under a sort of half tent of bent saplings splinted together supporting a blanket roof. Half-private. The camp extended along the high side of a little creek, well shaded by green, unblighted trees; maybe twenty or twenty-five patrollers seemed to be moving about, some going for water or out to the horse lines, some tending cook fires, several clustered around bedrolls feeding tired-looking folks who nevertheless were doggedly sitting up.

At length, Dag woke too, then it was her turn to help him prop up his shoulders against his saddlebags. Happily, she fed him. He could both chew and swallow, and not choke; halfway through, he revived enough to start capturing the bits of plunkin or roast deer from her with his right hand and feed himself. His hand still trembled too much to manage his water cup without spilling, though. His left arm, more disturbingly, didn’t move at all, and she suspected the bandage wrapping his left leg disguised even deeper ills than the knife wound. His eyes were bloodshot and squinty, more glazed than bright, but she reveled in their gold glints nonetheless, and the way they smiled at her as though they’d never quit.

In all, Fawn was glad when Hoharie came by, even if she was trailed by Othan. She was accompanied and supported by Mari, whose general air of relief clouded when her eye fell on Dag. The medicine maker looked fatigued, but not nearly as ravaged as Dag, perhaps because her time in the lock had been the shortest. She had all her formidable wits back about her, anyhow.

Othan unwrapped the leg, and Hoharie pronounced his neat stitches that closed the vertical slit to be good tight work, and the redness only to be expected and not a sign of infection yet, and they would do some groundwork later to prevent adhesions. Othan seemed even more relieved at the chance to rewrap the wound with more usual sorts of patroller bandages.

While this was going on, Mari reported: “Before you ask three times, Dag—everyone made it out of the groundlock alive.”

Dag’s eyes squeezed shut in thankfulness. “I was pretty sure. Is Artin going to hold on? His heart took hurt, there, I thought.”

“Yes, but his son has him well in hand. All the Raintree folks could be carried off by their kin as early as tomorrow, at least as far as the next camp. They’ll recover better there than out here in the woods.”

Dag nodded.

“Once they’re away our folks will be getting anxious to see home again, too. Bryn and Ornig are up already, and I don’t think Mallora will be much behind. Young, y’know. I don’t know about you, but I’m right tired of this place. With that hole in your leg it’s plain you’re not walking anywhere. It’s up to Hoharie to say how soon you can ride.”

“Ask me tomorrow,” said Hoharie. “The leg’s not really the worst of it.” “So what about the arm, Hoharie?” Dag asked hesitantly. His voice still sounded like something down in a swamp, croaking. “It’s a bit worryin’, not moving like that. Kind of takes me back to some memories I don’t much care to revisit.”

Hoharie grimaced understanding. “I can see why.” As Othan tied off the new dressing and sat back, she added quietly, “Time to give me a look. You have to open yourself, Dag.”

“Yeah,” he sighed. He didn’t sound at all enthusiastic, Fawn thought. But he lay back against his saddle prop with a faraway look on his face; his lips moved in something deeper than a wince. Mari hissed, Hoharie’s lips pursed, and Othan, who had sewn up bleeding flesh without a visible qualm, looked suddenly ill.

“Well, that’s a bigger mess than Utau, and I thought he was impressive,” allowed Hoharie. “Let me see what I can do with this.”

“You can’t do a ground reinforcement after all you just went through!” Dag objected.

“I have enough oomph left for one,” she replied, her face going intent. “I was saving it for you. Figured…”

Fawn tugged at Mari and whispered urgently, “What’s going on? What do you all sense?” That I can’t.

“The ground down his left side’s all marked up with blight, like big deep bruises,” Mari whispered back. “But those nasty black malice spatters that I felt before seem to be gone now—that’s a real good sign, I reckon. The ground of his left arm, though, is hanging in tatters. Hoharie’s wrapping it all up with a shaped ground reinforcement—ooh, clever—I think she means to help it grow back together easier as it heals.”

Hoharie let out her breath in a long sigh; her back bent. Dag, his expression very inward, stared down at his left arm as it moved in a short jerk. “Better!” he murmured in pleased surprise.

“Time,” said Hoharie, and now she sounded down in that swamp, too. Dag gave her a dry look as if to say, Now who’s overdoing? She ignored it, and continued, “It’ll all come back in time as your ground slowly heals. Slowly, got that, Dag?”

Dag sighed in regret. “Yeah…” His voice fell further. “The ghost hand. It’s gone, isn’t it? For good. Like the other.”

Hoharie said somewhat impatiently, “Gone for a good, to be sure, but not necessarily forever. I know it perturbed you, Dag, but I wish you’d stop thinking of that hand as some morbid magic! It was a ground projection, a simple…well, it was a ground projection, anyway. As your ground heals up from all this blight, it should come back with the rest of it. Last, I imagine, so don’t go fuming and fretting.”

“Oh,” said Dag, looking brighter. Fawn could have hit him for winking at her like that just then, because it almost made her laugh out loud, and she’d never dare explain why to all these stern Lakewalkers.

“Now,” said Hoharie, sitting up and rubbing her forehead with the back of her wrist—Othan, watching her closely, handed her a clean rag, and she repeated the gesture with it and nodded thanks. “It’s my chance to ask a few questions. What I need to know is if a similar act would solve a similar problem. Because I need to write this out for the lore-tent if it does, and maybe pass it along to the other hinterlands, too.”

“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—”

He hoisted himself up and stopped her lips with a kiss. “Don’t worry about what Dar says. I don’t.”

“Don’t you?” She frowned. “But—wasn’t he right, about the affinity?”

Dag shrugged. “Well…it would have been strange if he weren’t. Knives are his calling. I’m not at all sure he was right about the other, though.”

“Other?”

“About how your babe’s ground got into my knife.”

Her black eyebrows curved up farther.

He lay back again, raising his hand to hover across from his stump as a man would hold his two hands some judicious distance apart. “It was just a quick impression, you understand, when I was unmaking the knife’s involution and releasing the mortal ground. I couldn’t prove it. It was all gone in the instant, and only I saw. But…there was more than one knife stuck in that malice at that moment back at Glassforge. And there is more than one sort of ground affinity. There was a link, a channel…because the one knife was Kauneo’s marrowbone, see, and the other was her heart’s death. Knives don’t take up souls, if there is such a thing, but each one has a, a flavor of its donor. I expect she died wanting and regretting, well, a lot of things, but I know a child was one. I wouldn’t dare say this to anyone else, but I’ll swear it to you. It wasn’t the malice pushed that ground into Kauneo’s bone. I think it was given shelter.”

Fawn sat back, her lips parting in wonder. Her eyes were huge and dark, winking liquid that reflected the candlelight in shimmers.

He added very quietly, “If it was a gift from the grave, it’s the strangest I ever heard tell of, but…she liked youngsters. She would have saved ’em all, if she could.”

Fawn whispered, “She’s not the only one, seemingly.” And rolled over into his arms, and hugged him tight. Then sat up on her elbow, and said, most seriously, “Tell me more about her.”

And, to his own profound astonishment, he did.

It came in a spate, when it came. To speak easily of Kauneo at last, to repossess such a wealth of memory from the far side of pain, was as beyond all expectation as claiming a stolen treasure returned after years. As miraculous as getting back a missing limb. And his tears, when they fell, seemed not sorrow, but grace.