“In a hurry, are you?” Sower inquired mildly, and while Dag did not at first catch his covert glance at Fawn’s belly, she did, and stiffened.
“Unfortunately, I have duties waiting at home,” Dag put in quellingly, letting his wrist cuff rest on her shoulder. Actually, aside from averting panic by beating Mari back to camp, till this blighted arm healed he was going to be just as useless at Hickory Lake as he was here at West Blue. It hardly mattered at which spot he sat around grinding his teeth in frustration, although West Blue at least had more novelty. But the disturbing mystery of the sharing knife was an itch at the back of his mind, well buried under the new distractions yet never fading altogether.
Three people jerked away from the Sowers’ front window and pretended to have been walking up the street when Dag, Fawn, and her parents made their way out the front door. Across the street, a couple of young women clutched each other and bent their heads together, giggling. A group of young men loitering in front of the alehouse undraped themselves from the wall and went back inside, two of them hastily.
“Wasn’t that Sunny Sawman just went into Millerson’s?” Sorrel said, squinting.
“Wasn’t that Reed with him?” said Fawn, in a more curious tone.
“So that’s where Reed got off to this morning!” said Tril indignantly. “I’ll skin that boy.”
“Sawman’s place is the second farm south of the village,” Fawn informed Dag in an undervoice.
He nodded understanding. It would make the West Blue alehouse a convenient haunt, not that it wasn’t a gathering place for the whole community, by the descriptions Dag had garnered. Sunny must realize that his secrets had been kept, or his standing with the Bluefield twins would be very different by now; if not grateful, the relief might at least render him circumspect. So, were any of those loiterers the friends Sunny had threatened to persuade to help slander Fawn? Or had that been an empty threat, and Fawn had merely fallen for the lie? No telling now. The boys were unlikely to cast slurs on her in her brother’s presence, surely.
They all climbed back into the cart, and Sorrel, clucking, backed his horse and turned the vehicle around. He slapped the reins against the horse’s rump, and it obligingly broke into a trot. West Blue fell behind.
Three days. There was no particular reason that simple phrase should make his stomach feel as though it wanted to flip over, Dag thought, but… three days.
After the noon dinner, Dag dismissed the obscurities of farmer customs from his mind for a time in favor of his own. He and Fawn went out together on a gathering trip around the farm.
“What are we looking for, really?” she asked him, as he led off first toward the old barn below the house.
“There’s no set recipe. Spinnable things with some personal meaning to help catch our grounds upon. A person’s own hair is always good, but mine’s not long enough to use pure, and a few more hooks never hurt. The horsehair will give length and strength, I figure. It’s often used, and not just for wedding cords.”
In the cool shade of the barn, Fawn culled two collections of long sturdy hairs from the tails and manes of Grace and Copperhead. Dag hung on the stall partition, eyes half-shut, gently reminding Copperhead of their agreement that the gelding would treat Fawn with the tender concern of a mare for her foal or become wolf-bait. Horses did not reason by consequences so much as by associations, and the rangy chestnut had fewer wits than many, but by dint of repeated groundwork Dag had at length put this idea across. Copperhead nickered and nuzzled and lipped at Fawn, endured having hairs pulled out while scarcely flinching, ate apple slices from her hand without nipping, and eyed Dag warily.
There were no water lilies to be had on the Bluefield acres, and Dag was uncertain that their stems would yield up flax the way the ones at Hickory Lake did anyway, but to his delight they discovered a cattail-crowded drainage ditch up beyond the high fields that sheltered some red-winged blackbird nests. He held Fawn’s shoes on his hook and murmured encouragement, grinning at her expression of revulsion and determination, as she waded out in the muck and gathered some goodly handfuls of both cattail fluff and feathers. After that, they tramped all around the margins and crossed and recrossed the fallow fields. It was not the season for milkweed silk, as the redolent flowers were just blooming, and the stems were useless, but at length they discovered a few dried brown sticks lingering from last fall whose pods hadn’t broken open, and Dag pronounced the catch sufficient.
They took it all back to Nattie’s weaving room, where Fawn stripped feathers and picked out milkweed seeds, and Nattie set out her own chosen mix of fibers: linen for strength, a bit of precious purchased cotton brought from south of the Grace River for softness and something she called catch, nettle flax for shine, all dyed dark with walnut stain. Fawn bit her lip and undertook the hair trimming, taking special care with Dag, not so much to avoid stabbing him with the scissors, he eventually realized, as to be sure his head wouldn’t look like a scarecrow’s on the day after tomorrow. She set up a small mirror to cautiously clip out some of her own curly strands. Dag sat quietly, enjoying watching her contort, counting the hours backward to when they’d last been able to lie together, and forward to the next chance. Three days…
Under her aunt’s close supervision Fawn then mixed the ingredients in two baskets until Nattie, plunging her arms in and feeling while frowning judiciously in a way that had Fawn holding her breath, pronounced them ready for the next step. Shaping such a disparate mass of fibers into the long rolls for spinning could only be done by the gentlest carding and a lot of handwork, and even Fawn’s willing fingers looked to be tiring by the end.
They went on to the spinning itself after supper. The male members of the family had some dim idea that the three were up to some outlandish Lakewalker project to please Dag, but they were well trained not to intrude upon Nattie’s domain, and Dag doubted they suspected magic, so subtle and invisible a one as this was. 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.
“Sh, now. We almost had something, there.”
She unknotted, and hitched her shoulders, and rubbed the back of her head against his chest; he could almost feel her scowl, although from this angle of view he could only see her hair and nose. And then he could feel it when her scowl turned thoughtful.
“What?” he said.
“You said. You said, people put their hair in the cords because it was once part of their ground, and so it was easy to pick up again, to hitch on to. Because it was once part of their body, right? Your living body makes its ground.”
“Right…”
“You also once said, one night when I was asking you all about ground, that people’s blood stays alive for a little while even after it leaves their bodies, right?”
“What are you,” he began uneasily, but was cut off when she abruptly seized his hook hand and drew it around close in front of her. He felt pressure and a jerk, then another, through his arm harness. “Wait, stop, Spark, what are you—” He leaned forward and saw to his horror that she’d gouged open the pads of both of her index fingers on the not especially sharp point of the hook. She squeezed each hand with the other in turn to make the blood drip, and took up the strands again.
“Try again,” she said in an utterly determined little growl. “Come on, quick, before the bleeding stops. Try.”
He could not spurn a demand so astonishing. With a fierceness that almost matched hers, he ran his hands, real and ghostly, down her arms once more. This time, her ground fairly leaped out into the bloodsmeared string, anchoring firmly. “Go,” he whispered. And her hands began to twist and flip and pull.
“You are scaring the piss out of me, Spark, but it’s working. Don’t stop.”
She nodded. And didn’t stop. She finished her cord, of about the length of the one they’d done for him, just about the time her fingers ceased bleeding. “Nattie, I’m ready for you.”
Nattie leaned in and snipped below the end knot. Dag felt it as Fawn’s ground snapped back the way his had.
“Perfect,” he assured her. “Absent gods, it’s fine.”
“Was it?” She twisted around to look up at him, her face tight. “I couldn’t feel anything. I couldn’t feel anything any of the times. Really?”
“It was… you were…” He groped for the right words. “That was smart, Spark. That was beyond smart. That was brilliant.”
The tightness turned to a blaze of glory, shining in her eyes. “Really?”
“I would not have made that mental leap.”
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“Well, of course you wouldn’t have.” She sniffed. “You’d have gone all protective or tried to argue with me.”
He gave her a hug, and a shake, and felt a strange new sympathy for her parents and their mixed reaction to her homecoming that first night. “You’re probably right.”
“I am certainly right.” She gave a more Spark-like giggle.
He sat back, releasing her, and slipped his aching splinted arm back into its sling. “For pity’s sake, go wash your fingers at once. With strong soap and plenty of it. You don’t know where that hook has been.”
“Everywhere, hasn’t it?” She shot a merry grin over her shoulder, stroked her cord once more, and danced out to the kitchen.
Nattie leaned over and picked up the new cord from the bench, running it thoughtfully through her fingers.
“I didn’t know she was going to do that,” Dag apologized weakly.
“You never do, with her,” Nattie said. “She’ll be keeping you alert, I expect, patroller. Maybe more than you bargained for. Funny thing is, you think you know what you’re doing.”
“I used to.” He sighed. “Though that may have been because I was only doing the same things over and over.”
Spark returned from the kitchen, towing her mother to see their finished work. Dag trusted Fawn wouldn’t mention the last wrinkle about the blood. Tril and Nattie handed the cords back and forth; Tril gave one a tug, nodding thoughtfully at its strength. She squared her shoulders and dug in her apron pocket.
“Nattie, do you remember that necklace Mama had with the six real gold beads, one for every child, that broke that time the cart went over in the snow, and she never found all the bits and never had it fixed?”
“Oh, yes,” said her sister.
“The piece came to me, and I never did anything with it either. It’s been in the back of a drawer for years and years. I thought you might could use the beads to finish off the end knots of these cords of Fawn’s.”