Legacy

3

F awn turned in her saddle to look as they passed the woodland road they’d come in on, and turned again as the shore road bent out toward a wooden bridge spanning a channel about sixty feet across. The next island spread west, bounding the arm of the lake across from the patroller headquarters. Past the bridge, its farther shoreline curved north and the lake beyond opened out for a square mile. In the distance she could see a few narrow boats being paddled, and another with a small triangular sail. The island reached by the bridge had only a scattering of trees; between them horses and goats and a few sheep grazed, and beneath them more black pigs dozed.

“Mare Island?” Fawn guessed.

“Yep. It and Foal Island, which you can’t see beyond the far end over there”—Dag waved vaguely northwest—“are our main pastures. No need to build fences, you see.”

“I do. Clever. Is there a Stallion Island?”

Dag smiled. “More or less. Most of the studs are kept over on Walnut Island”—he pointed to a low green bump across the open lake patch—“which works fine until one of the fellows gets excited and ambitious and tries to swim across in the night. Then there’s some sorting out to do.”

The shore road swung back into the trees, passing behind the clusters of log buildings along the lake bank. After a scant quarter mile, Dag pulled up Copperhead and frowned at a clearing enclosing just two buildings. The lake glimmered dully beyond in the hot afternoon’s flat light. “Tent Redwing,” Dag said.

“Well”—Fawn took a breath—“this is it, I guess.”

“Not quite. Everyone seems to be out. But leastways we can drop off our saddles and bags and take the horses back to pasture.”

They rode into the clearing. The two buildings were set facing each other at an angle opening toward the lake, both with long sides gaping under deerhide awnings. Other deerhide rolls along the eaves looked as though they could be dropped down to provide more wall at need. Houses and porches seemed to be floored with planks, not dirt, at least. Fawn tried to think simple, not squalid. A stone-lined fire pit lay in the clearing between the two structures—Fawn still could not make herself think of them as tents—in addition to the central fireplaces that could apparently heat both the outer and the enclosed inner chambers. Seats of stumps or sawn-off logs were dotted about; in summer, no doubt almost all work was done outdoors.

She hopped down and helped unsaddle, dealing with the straps and buckles; Dag with his hook hauled the gear from the horses’ backs and dumped it on the plank porch of the house on the right. He scratched the back of his head gently.

“Not sure where Mama’s got off to. Dar’s likely at the bone shack. And if Omba’s not out on Mare Island, it’ll be a first. Dig down in the bottom of my saddlebags, Spark, and find those strings of horseshoes.”

Fawn did so, discovering two bunches of new horseshoes tied together, a dozen each. “My word, no wonder your bags were so heavy! How long have you been carting these around in there?”

“Since we left Glassforge. Present for Omba. Hickory Lake’s a rich camp in some ways, but we have few metals in these parts, except for a little copper-working near Bearsford. All our iron has to be traded for from other camps, mostly around Tripoint. Though we’ve been getting more from farmer sources in the hills beyond Glassforge, lately.” He grinned briefly. “When a certain young exchange patroller from Tripoint walking the hinterlands arrived at Massape Crow and said, That’s far enough, it’s told his bride-gift string of horses came in from back home staggering under loads of iron. It made the Crows rich and Fairbolt famous, back in the day.”

Fawn led Grace to a log seat and climbed up bareback, and Dag hooked her up the horseshoe bundles, which she twisted about each other and laid over her lap. He climbed up on Copperhead in turn, and they went back out to the road and returned to the bridge.

At the far end of the span he dismounted again to unhook a rope loop from the board gate, open it for Fawn, and shut it again behind them. He did not bother remounting, but led them instead toward a long shed that lay a hundred paces or so away. Fawn slid off Grace, managing not to drop the horseshoes, and Dag hooked off both bridles, flopping them over his shoulder. Copperhead scooted away at once, and after a moment’s doubt, Grace followed, soon putting her head down to crop grass.

Of all of his relatives, Dag had talked most freely about his brother’s wife, the Waterstrider sister who’d changed her name for her mother-in-law’s sake. In order of increasing reticence came his grandfather, remembered with nostalgia from scenes of Dag’s youth; Dar, of whom Dag spoke with cool respect; his father, tinged with distance and regret; and, in a pool of silence at the center, his mother. Every conversation Fawn had tried to lead toward her, Dag had led away. About Omba—horse trainer, mare midwife, maker of harness, and, it appeared, farrier—there had been no such problem.

As they rounded the corner of the shed and stepped under its wooden overhang, Fawn had no trouble recognizing Omba, for she came striding out of a door crying, “Dag! Finally!” She was not so thin as Mari, and quite a bit shorter, though still as tall as any man in Fawn’s family; Fawn would have guessed her age at fifty or so, which meant she was likely fifteen years older than that. She was dressed much like a patroller woman, and Fawn finally decided that the trousers were just Lakewalker riding garb, period. Her skin, though tanned and weathered, was paler than Dag’s, and her eyes a pretty silvery blue. Her dark hair, shot with a few white streaks, ran down her back in a single swift plait, without ornament. She caught sight of the sling, planted her hands on her hips, and said, “Absent gods, brother, what have you done to your right arm!” And then, after a momentary pause, “Absent gods, Dag, what have you done to your left arm?”

Dag gave her a nod of greeting, his smile lopsided. “Hello, Omba. Brought you something.” He gestured Fawn forward; she held out the horseshoes.

Omba’s face lit, and she pounced on the prize. “Do I need those!” She came to a dead halt again at the sight of the cord on Fawn’s wrist, and made a choked noise down in her throat. Her gaze rose to Fawn’s face, her eyes widening in something between disbelief and dismay. “You’re a farmer! You’re that farmer!”

For an instant, Fawn wondered if there was some Lakewalker significance to Dag’s tricking Omba into accepting this gift from Fawn’s hands, but she had no time or way to ask. She dipped her knees, and said breathlessly, “Hello, Omba. I’m Fawn. Dag’s wife.” She wasn’t about to make some broader claim such as, I’m your new sister; that would be for Omba to decide.

Omba wheeled toward Dag, her eyebrows climbing. “And what does that make you, Dag Redwing Hickory? Besides head down in the slit trench.”

“Fawn’s husband. Dag Bluefield…To-Be-Determined, at this point.”

Or would the effect instead be to make Dag not Omba’s brother anymore? Lakewalker tent customs continued to confuse Fawn.

“You seen Fairbolt yet?” asked Omba.

“Just came from there. Saw Mari there, too.”

“You told him about this?” She jerked her head toward Fawn.

“Certainly.”

“What did he do to you?”

“Put me on sick list.” Dag wriggled his sling. “That was the To-Be-Determined part, or so I took it.”

Omba blew out her breath in unflattering wonder. But not, Fawn thought, in hostility; she hung on tight to that realization. It did not seem as though Dag had taken her advice to start with the hardest ones first. By later today, not hostile might yet look pretty good.

“What did Mari say to you all, last night?” asked Dag.

“Oh, there was a scene. She came in asking if we’d heard from you, which was a jolt to start, since you were supposed to be with her. Then she said she’d sent you home from Glassforge weeks ago, and everyone was worried you’d been injured, but she said not. Is that right?” She stared at the sling.

“Was at the time. I collected this on the way. Go on.”

“Then she had this wild tale about some cutie farmer girl being mixed up in your latest malice kill”—her eyes went curiously to Fawn—“which I barely believed, but now, hm. And that you’d jumped the cliff with her, which your mama hotly denied the possibility of, while simultaneously yelling at Mari for letting it happen. I kept my mouth shut during that part. Though I did wish you well of it.”

“Thank you,” said Dag blandly.

“Ha. Though I never imagined…anyway. Mari said that you’d gone off with the farmer girl, supposed to deliver her home or something. She was afraid you’d met some mishap at the hands of her kin—she said she was picturing gelding. That must have been some cliff. When Mari and your mama got down to arguing over lapses from twenty-five years back, I slipped out. But Mari took Dar down to the dock after, to talk private. He wouldn’t say what she’d added, except that it was about bone craft, which even your mama knows by now is the sign she’ll get no more from him.”

It seemed Mari was still keeping the tale of the accident to the second sharing knife close. Nor had the term pregnant turned up in relation to Fawn, at least in front of Dag’s mama. Fawn felt suddenly more charitable to Mari.

“Oh, Dag,” sighed Omba. “This is going to top anything you’ve done ever.”

“Look on the bright side. Nothing you can do ever after will top this. The effect might even be retroactive.”

She gave a bemused nod. “I’ll grant you that.” She slung the horseshoes onto some pegs on the nearest post, and held up her hands palm out in a warding gesture. “I think I’ll just stay out of this one altogether if you don’t mind.”

“You’re welcome to try,” said Dag amiably. “We were just over to the tent to drop our things, but it was empty. Where is everyone?”

“Dar went to the shack to work, or hide out. Mari was worried sick for you, and that shook him more than he was willing to let on, I think. She actually said I’m sorry to your mother at one point last night.”

“And Mama?” said Dag.

“Out on raft duty. Rationing plunkins.”

Dag snorted. “I’ll bet.”

“They tried to convince her to stay ashore with her bad back, but she denied the back and went. There will be no vile plunkin ear chucking today.”

Now Fawn was lost. “Rationing plunkins? Is there a shortage?”

“No,” said Dag. “This time of year, they’re worse than in season—they’re in glut.”

Omba grinned. “Dar still waxes bitter about how she’d nurse her supply through the Bearsford camp, like there was some sort of prize for arriving at spring with the most winter store still in hand. And then make you all eat up the old ones before allowing any fresh ones.”

Dag’s lips quirked. “Oh, yeah.”

“Did she ever go through a famine?” Fawn asked. “That makes people funny about food, I hear tell.”

“Not as far as I know,” said Omba.

She’s speaking to me, oh good! Though people wishful to vent about their in-laws would bend the ear of anyone who’d listen, so it might not signify much.

“Not that the choices don’t get a bit narrow for everyone by late winter,” Omba continued. “She’s just like that. Always has been. I still remember the first summer Dar and I were courting, when you grew so tall, Dag. We thought you were going to starve. Half the camp conspired to slip you food on the sly.”

Dag laughed. “I was about ready to wrestle the goats for the splits and the mishaps. Those are feed plunkins,” he added to Fawn aside. “Can’t think why I didn’t. I wouldn’t be so shy nowadays.”

“It is a known fact that patrollers will eat anything.” Omba twitched a speculative eyebrow at Fawn that made her wonder if she ought to blush.

To quell that thought, Fawn asked instead, “Plunkin ear chucking?”

Dag explained, “When the plunkin heads are dredged up out of the lake bottom, they have two to six little cloves growing up the sides, about half the size of my hand. These are broken off and put back down in the mud to become next year’s crop. Plunked in, hence the name. There are always more ears than needed, so the excess gets fed to the goats and pigs. And there are always a lot of youngsters swimming and splashing around the harvesting rafts, and, well, excess plunkin ears make good projectiles, in a reasonably nonlethal sort of way. Especially if you have a good slingshot,” he added in a suddenly warmly reminiscent tone. He paused and cleared his throat. “The grown-ups disapprove of the waste, of course.”

“Well, some do,” said Omba. “Some remember their slingshots. Someone should have given one to your mother when she was a girl, maybe.”

“At her age, she’s not going to change.”

“You’ve made a change.”

Dag shrugged, and asked instead, “How’re Swallow and Darkling?”

Omba’s face brightened. “Wonderful well. That black colt’s going to be fit to go for a stud when he’s grown, I think. He’ll fetch you a good price. Or if you finally want to trade in Snakebrain over there for dog meat, you could ride him yourself. I’d train him up for you. You two’d look mighty fine, patrolling.”

“Mm, thanks, but no. Sometime tomorrow or the next day, soon as I have a chance, I want to pull them out of the herd. I’ll get a packsaddle for Swallow, and Darkling can trot at her heels. Send them down to West Blue with my bride-gifts to Fawn’s mama, which I am fearsome late presenting.”

“Your best horses!” said Omba in dismay.

Dag smiled a slow smile. “Why not? They gave me their best daughter.”

“But I’m their only daughter,” said Fawn.

“Saves argument there, eh?” said Dag.

Omba caught up her braid and rubbed the end. “To farmers! What do they know about Lakewalker horses? What if they try to make Swallow pull a plow? Or cut Darkling? Or…” Her face screwed up, as she evidently pictured even worse farmer misuse of the precious horses.

“My family takes good care of our horses,” said Fawn stiffly. “Of all our animals.”

“They won’t understand,” said Omba.

“I will,” said Dag. He gave her a nod. “See you at dinner. Who’s cookin’?”

“Cumbia. You might want to grab a plunkin off the goats on the way, to fortify yourselves.”

“Thanks, but I guess we’ll survive.” He gestured Fawn away. She gave Omba another knee-dip and smile by way of farewell; the Lakewalker woman just shook her head and returned a sardonic wave. But not hostile, Fawn reminded herself.

As they reached the bridge again, Dag held the gate aside for a girl leading a couple of horses with pannier baskets piled high with plunkins; she gave him a nod of thanks. These plunkins did indeed seem to be mostly broken or weirdly misshapen or with odd discolorations. Fawn glanced back to see her walking along chirping and tossing out plunkins along her path, and a general movement among the goats and pigs toward this feast.

“Lakewalker animals eat plunkins too, do they?”

“Horses and cows and sheep can’t. The pigs and goats chomp them down. So will dogs.”

“I haven’t seen many dogs. I’d think you’d have more, for hunting and such. For hunting malices, even.”

“We don’t keep many. Dogs are more hazard than help on patrol. The malices snap them right up, and they have no defense. Except us, and if you’re trying to bring down a malice, it’d be no use to be distracted trying to protect a dog, especially if it’s turning on you itself.”

As they strolled back along the shore road, Fawn asked curiously, “Was your mother ever a patroller?”

“I think she had the training, way back when. All the youngsters at least get taken out on short trips around the camps. Patrollers are chosen for two things, mainly. General health and strength, and groundsense range. Not everyone can project their groundsense out far enough to be useful on patrol. The lack’s not considered a defect, necessarily; many’s the quite competent maker who can’t reach out much beyond his arm’s length.”

“Is Dar like that?”

“No, his range is almost as long as mine. He’s just even better at what he does with bones. What my mother always wanted, now…” He trailed off.

Volunteering useful information at last? No, evidently not. Fawn sighed and prompted, “Was what?”

“More children. Just didn’t work out that way for her, whether because Father was out on patrol too much, or they were just unlucky, or what, I don’t know. I should have been a girl. That was my immediate next lapse after arriving late. Or been eight other children. Or had eight other children, in a pinch, and not off in Luthlia or someplace, but here at Hickory Camp. My mother had a second chance with Dar and Omba’s children. She kind of commandeered them from Omba to raise; which I gather caused some friction at first, till Omba gave up and went to concentrate on her horses. They’d worked it all out by the time I got back from Luthlia minus the hand, anyway. There’s still just a little…I won’t call it bad feeling, but feeling, there over that.”

Mother-in-law versus daughter-in-law friction was common coin in Fawn’s world; she had no trouble following this. She wondered if Cumbia’s thwarted thirst for daughters would extend itself to a little farmer girl, dragged in off patrol like some awkward souvenir. She had taken in one daughter-in-law, quite against custom, after all. Some hope there?

“Dag,” she said suddenly, “where am I going to live?”

He looked over and raised his eyebrows at her. “With me.”

“Yes, but when you’re gone on patrol?”

Silence. It stretched rather too long.

“Dag?”

He sighed. “We’ll just have to see, Spark.”

They were nearly back to his family tent-cabins when Dag paused at a path leading into the woods. If he was checking anything with his groundsense, Fawn could not tell, but he jerked his chin in a come-along gesture and led right. The high straight boles, mostly hickory, gave a pale green shade in the shadowless light, as though they were walking into some underwater domain. The scrub was scant and low on the flat terrain. Fawn eyed the poison ivy and stuck to the center of the well-trodden path, lined here and there with whitewashed rocks.

About a hundred paces in, they came to a clearing. In the center was a small cabin, a real one with four sides, and, to Fawn’s surprise, glass windows. Even the patrol headquarters had only had parchment stretched on window frames. More disturbingly, human thighbones hung from the eaves, singly or in pairs, swaying gently in the air that soughed in the papery hickory leaves overhead. She tried not to imagine ghostly whispering voices in the branches.

Dag followed her wide gaze. “Those are curing.”

“Those folks look well beyond cure to me,” she muttered, which at least made his lips twitch.

“If Dar’s busy with something, don’t speak till he speaks to us,” Dag warned in a quiet voice. “Actually, the same applies even if it looks like he’s doing nothing.”

Fawn nodded vigorously. Putting the picture together from Dag’s oblique descriptions, she figured Dar was the closest thing to a real Lakewalker necromancer that existed. She could not picture being foolish enough to interrupt him in the midst of some sorcery.

A hickory husk, falling from above, made a clack and a clatter as it hit the shingle roof and rolled off, and Fawn jumped and grabbed Dag’s left arm tightly. He smiled reassuringly and led her around the building. On the narrower south side was a porch shading a wedged-open door. But the man they sought was outside, at the edge of the clearing. Working a simple sapling lathe, so ordinary and unsorcerous-looking as to make Fawn blink.

Dar was shorter and stockier than Dag, a solid middle-aged build, with a more rectangular face and broader jaw. He had his shirt off as he labored; his skin was coppery like Dag’s but not so varied in its sun-burnishing. His dark hair was drawn back in a Lakewalker-style mourning knot, which made Fawn wonder who for, since his wife Omba’s hadn’t been. If there was gray in it, she wasn’t close enough to see. One leg worked the lathe; the rope to the sapling turned a clamp holding a green-wood blank. Both hands held a curved knife and bore it inward, and pale yellow shavings peeled away to join a kicked-about pile below. Two finished bowls sat on a nearby stump. In the shavings pile lay discarded a partially carved, cracked blank, and another finished bowl that looked to Fawn perfectly fine.

His hands most drew her eye: strong and long-fingered like Dag’s, quick and careful. And what a very odd thing it was that it should feel so odd to see them in a pair, working together that way.

He glanced up from his carving. His eyes were a clear bronze-brown. He looked back down, evidently trying to keep working, but after another spin muttered something short under his breath and straightened up with a scowl, allowing the blank to wind down, then unclamped it and dropped it into the shavings pile. He tossed the knife in the general direction of the stump and turned to Dag.

“Sorry to interrupt,” said Dag, nodding to the half bowl. “I was told you wanted to see me immediately.”

“Yes! Dag, where have you been?”

“Been getting here. I had a few delays.” He made the sling-gesture.

For once, it did not divert his interrogator’s eye. Dar’s voice sharpened as his gaze locked on his brother’s left arm. “What fool thing have you gone and done? Or have you finally done something right?” He let his breath out in a hiss as his eyes raked over Fawn. “No. Too much to hope for.” His brow wrinkled as he frowned at her left wrist. “How did you do that?”

“Very well,” said Dag, earning an exasperated look.

Dar walked closer, staring down at Fawn in consternation. “So there really was a farmer-piglet.”

“Actually”—Dag’s voice suddenly went bone dry—“that would be my wife. Missus Fawn Bluefield. Fawn, meet Dar Redwing.”

Fawn attempted a tremulous smile. Her knees felt too weak to dip.

Dar stepped half a pace back. “Ye gods, you’re serious about this!”

Dag’s voice dropped still further. “Deadly.”

They locked eyes for a moment, and Fawn had the maddening sense that some exchange had passed or was passing that, once again, she hadn’t caught, although it had seemed to spin off the rather insulting term piglet. Or, from the heated look in Dag’s eye, very insulting term, although she couldn’t see exactly why; chickie and filly and piglet and all such baby-animal terms being used interchangeably for little endearments, in Fawn’s experience. Perhaps it was the tone of voice that made the difference. Whatever it was, it was Dar who backed down, not apologizing but changing tack: “Fairbolt will explode.”

“I’ve seen Fairbolt. I left him in one piece. Mari, too.”

“You can’t tell me he’s happy about this!”

“I don’t. But neither was he stupid.” Another hint of warning, that? Perhaps, for Dar ceased his protests, although with a frustrated gesture. Dag continued, “Omba says Mari spoke to you alone last night, after the others.”

“Oh, and wasn’t that an uproar. Mama always pictures you dead in a ditch, not that she hasn’t been close to right now and then just by chance, but I don’t expect that of Mari.”

“Did she tell you what happened to my sharing knife?”

“Yes. I didn’t believe half of it.”

“Which half?”

“Well, that would be the problem to decide, now, wouldn’t it?” Dar glanced up. “Did you bring it along?”

“That’s why we came here.”

To Dar’s work shack? Or to Hickory Lake Camp generally? The meaning seemed open.

“You seen Mama yet?”

“That will be next.”

“I suppose,” Dar sighed, “I’d best see it here, then. Before the real din starts.”

“That’s what I was thinking, too.”

Dar gestured them toward the cabin steps. Fawn sat beside Dag, scrunching up to him for solace, and Dar took a seat near the steps on a broad stump.

“Give Dar the knife,” said Dag. At her troubled look, he dropped a reassuring kiss atop her head, which made Dar’s face screw up as though he was smelling something rank. Fawn frowned but fished the sheath out of her shirt once more. She would have preferred to give it to Dag to hand to his brother, but that wasn’t possible. Reluctantly, she extended it across to Dar, who almost as reluctantly took it.

Dar did not unsheathe it immediately, but sat with it in his lap a moment. He took in a long breath, as though centering himself somehow; half the expression seemed to drop from his face. Since it was mostly the sour, disapproving half, Fawn didn’t altogether mind. What was left seemed distant and emotionless.

Dar’s examination seemed much like that of the other Lakewalkers: cradling the knife, holding it to his lips, but also cheek and forehead, eyes open and closed in turn. He took rather longer about it.

He looked up at last, and in a colorless voice asked Dag to explain, once again, the exact sequence of events in the malice’s cave, with close guesses as to the time each movement had taken. He did not ask anything of Fawn. He sat a little more, then the distant expression went away, and he looked up again.

“So what do you make of it?” asked Dag. “What happened?”

“Dag, you can’t expect me to discuss the inner workings of my craft in front of some farmer.”

“No, I expect you to discuss them—fully—in front of that donor’s mother.”

Dar grimaced, but counterattacked, unexpectedly speaking to Fawn directly for the very first time: “Yes, and how did you get pregnant?”

Did she have to confess the whole stupid episode with Stupid Sunny? She looked up beseechingly at Dag, who shook his head slightly. She gathered her courage and replied coolly, “In the usual way, I believe.”

Dar growled, but did not pursue the matter. Instead, he protested to Dag, “She won’t understand.”

“Then you won’t actually be giving away any secrets, will you? Begin at the beginning. She knows what ground is, for starters.”

“I doubt that,” said Dar sourly.

Dag shifted his splinted hand to touch his marriage cord. “Dar, she made this. The other as well.”

“She couldn’t…” Dar went quiet for a time, brow furrowing. “All right. Flukes happen. But I still think she won’t understand.”

“Try. She might surprise you.” Dag smiled faintly. “You might be a better teacher than you think.”

“All right, all right! All right.” Dar turned his glower on Fawn. “A knife…that is, a dying body that…agh. Go all the way back. Ground is in everything, you understand that?”

Fawn nodded anxiously.

“Living things build up ground and alter its essence. Concentrate it. They are always making, but they are making themselves. Man eats food, the food’s ground doesn’t vanish, it goes into the man and is transformed. When a man—or any living thing—dies, that ground is released. The ground associated with material parts dissipates slowly with the decaying body, but the nonmaterial part, the most complex inner essence, it goes all at once. Are you following this?” he demanded abruptly.

Fawn nodded.

His look said, I don’t think so, but he went on. “Anyway. That’s how living things help a blight recover, by building up ground slowly around the edges and constantly releasing it again. That’s how blight kills, by draining ground away too fast from anything caught away from the edge too long. A malice consumes ground directly, ripping it out of the living like a wolf disemboweling its prey.”

Dag did not wince at this comparison, although he went a little stony. Actually, that was a brief nod of agreement, Fawn decided. She shivered and concentrated on Dar, because she didn’t think he’d respond well to being stopped for questions, at least not by her.

“Sharing knives…” He touched the curve of hers. “The inner surface of a thighbone has a natural affinity for blood, which can be persuaded to grow stronger by the maker shaping the knife. That’s what I do, in addition to…to encouraging it to dwell on its fate. I meet with the pledged heart’s-death donor, and he or she shares their blood into the knife in the making. Because their live blood bears their ground.”

“Oh!” said Fawn in a voice of surprise, then closed her mouth abruptly.

“Oh what?” said Dar in aggravation.

She looked at Dag; he raised an unhelpful eyebrow. “Should I say?” she asked.

“Certainly.”

She glanced sideways at the frowning and—even shirtless—thoroughly intimidating maker. “Maybe you’d better explain, Dag.”

Dag smiled a trifle too ironically at his brother. “Fawn reinvented the technique herself, to persuade her ground into my marriage cord. Took me by surprise. In fact, when I recognized it, I nearly fell off the bench. So I’d say she understands it intimately.”

“You used a knife-making technique on a marriage cord?” Dar sounded aghast.

Dag hitched up his left shoulder. “Worked. The only clue I gave her was to mention—days earlier, in another conversation altogether—that blood held a person’s ground for a while after leaving the body.”

“Fluke,” muttered Dar, though more faintly. Craning anew at the cord. “Yeah, that’s life with Spark. Just one fluke after another. Seems no end to them. You were halfway through explaining a making. Go on.”

Dag, Fawn realized, had been through the process from the donor’s side at least once, if with some maker up in Luthlia and not with Dar. In addition to whatever he had learned from being around his brother, however intermittently.

Dar took a breath and went on. “So at the end of the knife-making, we have a little of the pledged donor’s ground in the knife, and that ground is…well, you could say it’s hungry for the rest. It wants to be reunited with its source. And the other way around. So then we come to the priming itself.” His face was stern, contemplating this, for reasons that had nothing to do with her, Fawn thought.

“When the knife is”—he hesitated, then chose the plain word—“driven into the donor’s heart, killing him, his essential ground begins to break up. At this very point of dissolution, the ground is drawn into the knife. And held there.”

“Why doesn’t it just all dissolve then?” Fawn couldn’t help asking, then mentally kicked herself for interrupting.

“That’s another aspect of my making. If you can fluke it out, good luck to you. I’m not just a bone-carver, you know.” His smile was astringent. “When someone—like Dag, for example—then manages to bring the primed knife up to a malice and plunge it in, the malice, which eats ground and cannot stop doing so, draws in the dissolving ground released by the breaking of the knife. You could say the mortal ground acts as a poison to the malice’s ground, or as a stroke of lightning to a tree, or…well, there are a number of ways to say it, all slightly wrong. But the malice’s ground shares in the dissolution of the mortal ground, and since a malice is made of nothing but ground, all the material elements it is holding in place fall with it.”

Fawn touched the scars on her neck. “That, I’ve seen.”

Dar’s brows drew down. “How close were you, really?”

Fawn held out her arm and squinted. “About half my arm’s length, maybe.” And her arms weren’t all that long.

“Dar,” said Dag gently, “if you haven’t grasped this, I’ll say it again; she drove my primed knife into the Glassforge malice. And I speak from repeated personal experience when I tell you, that’s way, way closer than any sane person would ever want to be to one of those things.”

Dar cleared his throat uncomfortably, staring down at the knife in his lap.

It popped out before she could help herself: “Why can’t you just use dying animals’ grounds to poison malices?”

Dag smiled a little, but Dar scowled in deep offense. Dar said stiffly, “They haven’t the power. Only the ground of a Lakewalker donor will kill a malice.”

“Couldn’t you use a lot of animals?”

“No.”

“Has it been tried?”

Dar frowned harder. “Animals don’t work. Farmers don’t work either.” His lips drew back unkindly. “I’ll leave you to make the connection.”

Fawn set her teeth, beginning to have an inkling about the piglet insult.

Dag gave his brother a grim warning look, but put in, “It’s not just a question of power, although that’s part of it. It’s also a question of affinity.”

“Affinity?” Fawn wrinkled her nose. “Never mind. What happened to my—to Dag’s other knife?” She nodded to it.

Dar sighed, as if he was not quite sure of what he was about to say. “You have to understand, a malice is a mage. It comes out of the ground, sessile and still in its first molt, a more powerful mage than any of us alone will ever be, and just gets stronger after. So. First, this malice snatched the ground of your unborn child.”

Fawn’s spirits darkened in memory. “Yes. Mari said no one had known malices could do that separately. Is that important?” It would be consoling if that horror had at least bought some key bit of knowledge that might help someone later.

Dar shrugged. “It’s not immediately clear to me that it makes any practical difference.”

“Why do malices want babies?”

He held out his hand and turned it over. “It’s the inverse of what the sharing knives share. Children unborn, and to a lesser extent, young, are in the most intense possible period of self-making of the most complex of grounds. Malices building up to a molt—to a major self-making, or self-remaking—seem to crave that food.”

“Couldn’t it steal from pregnant animals?”

Dar raised a brow. “If it wanted to molt into an animal body instead of a human one, perhaps.”

“They can and do,” Dag put in. “The Wolf Ridge malice couldn’t get enough humans, so it partly used wolves as well. I was told by patrollers who were in on the knifing of it that its form was pretty…pretty strange, at the end, and it was well past its first molt.”

Fawn made a disturbed face. So, she noticed, did Dar.

Dar continued, “Anyway. Secondly, you drove Dag’s unprimed knife into the thing.”

Fawn nodded. “Its thigh. He said, anywhere. I didn’t know.”

“Then—leaving that knife in place, right…?”

“Yes. That was when the bogle—the malice—picked me up the second time, by the neck. I thought it was going to shake me apart like a chicken.”

Dar glanced at her scars, and away. “Then you drove in the actual primed knife.”

“I figured I’d better be quick. It broke.” Fawn shivered in the remembered terror, and Dag’s left arm tightened around her. “I thought I’d ruined it. But then the malice dropped me and…and sort of melted. It stank.”

“Simplest explanation,” said Dar crisply. “A person carrying something very valuable to them who trips and falls, tries to fall so as to protect their treasure, even at the cost of hurting themselves. Malice snatches rich ground. Seconds later, before the malice has assimilated or stored that ground, it’s hit with a dose of mortality. In its fall, it blindly tries to shove that ground into a safe spot for it: the unprimed knife. A malice certainly has the power to do so by force and not persuasion. End result, one dissolved malice, one knife with an unintended ground jammed into it.” Dar sucked his lip. “More complicated explanations might be possible, but I haven’t heard anything in your testimony that would require them.”

“Hm,” said Dag. “So will it still work as a sharing knife, or not?”

“The ground in it is…strange. It was caught and bound at a point of most intense self-making and most absolute self-dissolution, simultaneously. But still, only a farmer’s ground after all.” He glanced up sharply. “Unless there’s something about the child no one is telling me. Mixed blood, for example?” His look at his brother was coolly inquiring and not especially respectful.

“It was a farmer child,” Fawn said quietly, looking at the soil. It was bare at the base of the steps, with a few broken hickory husks flattened into the old mud. Dag’s arm tightened silently around her again.

“Then it will have no affinity, and is useless. An unprimed knife that gets contaminated can be boiled clean and rededicated, sometimes, but not this. My recommendation is that you break it to release that worthless farmer ground, burn it—or send the pieces back to Kauneo’s kin with whatever explanation you can concoct that won’t embarrass you—and start over with a new knife.” His voice softened. “I’m sorry, Dag. I know you didn’t carry this for twenty years for such a futile end. But, you know, it happens that way sometimes.”

Fawn looked up at Dar. “I’ll have that back, now,” she said sturdily. She held out her hand.

Dar gave Dag an inquiring look, found no support, and reluctantly handed the sheathed knife back to Fawn.

“A lot of knives never get used,” said Dag, in a would-be casual tone. “I see no special need of rushing to dispose of this one. If it serves no purpose intact, it serves no more destroyed.”

Dar grimaced. “What will you keep it for, then? A wall decoration? A gruesome memento of your little adventure?”

Dag smiled down at Fawn; she wondered what her own face looked like just now. It felt cold. He said, “It had one use, leastways. It brought us together.”

“All the more reason to break it,” said Dar grimly.

Fawn thought back on Dag’s offer of the same act, way back at the Horsefords’ farmhouse. We could have saved a lot of steps. How could two such apparently identical suggestions feel like utter opposites? Trust and untrust. She hoped she could get Dag alone soon, and ask him whether he accepted his brother’s judgment, or only some part of it, or none, or if they should seek another maker. There was no clue in his face. She hid the knife away again in her shirt.

Dag stood and stretched, rolling his shoulders. “It’s about dinnertime, I expect. You want to come watch, Dar, or hide out here?”

Fawn began to wish she and Dag could hide out here. Well—she eyed the bones hung from the eaves swinging in the freshening breeze—maybe not just here. But somewhere.

“Oh, I’ll come,” said Dar, rising to collect his carving knife and the finished bowls and take them inside. “Might as well get it over with.”

“Optimist,” said Dag, stepping aside for him as he trod up the steps.

Fawn caught a glimpse of a tidy workroom, a very orderly bench with carving tools hung above it, and a small fieldstone fireplace in the wall opposite the door. Dar came back out fastening his shirt, entirely insensible of the ease with which his buttons cooperated with his fingers, latched the door, and passed efficiently around the shack closing the shutters.

The green light of the woods was growing somber as scudding dark clouds from the northwest filled the sky above. The staccato pop of falling nuts sounded like Dag’s joints on a bad morning. Fawn clung to Dag’s left arm as they started back up the path. His muscles were tight. She lengthened her steps to match his, and was surprised to find she didn’t have to lengthen them very much.