Fawn shook her head. “Curse?”
“His choice, what to have written on his bone. You can order the makers to put any personal message you want that will fit. Some people write love notes to their knife-heirs. Or really bad jokes, sometimes. Up to them. Two notes, actually. One side for the donor of the bone, the other for the donor of the heart’s death, which is put on after the knife is primed. If there’s a chance.”
Fawn imagined that bone blade she’d held being slowly shoved into a dying patroller woman’s heart, maybe someone like Mari, by… who had done it? Dag? Twenty years seemed terribly long ago—could he really be as old as, say, forty?
“The deaths we share with the malices,” said Dag quietly, “are our own, and no others’.”
“Why?” whispered Fawn, shaken.
“Because that’s what works. How it works. Because we can, and no one else can. Because it is our legacy. Because if a malice, every malice, is not killed when it emerges, it just keeps growing. And growing. And getting stronger and smarter and harder to get at. And if there is ever one we can’t get, it will grow till the whole world is gray dust, and then it, too, will die. When I said you’d saved the world yesterday, Spark, I was not joking. That malice could have been the one.”
Fawn lay back, clutching her sheets to her breast, taking this in. It was a lot to take in. If she had not seen the malice up close—the rock-dust scent of its foul breath still seemed to linger in her nostrils—she was not sure she could have understood fully. I still don’t understand. But oh, I do believe.
“We just have to hope,” Dag sighed, “that we run out of malices before we run out of Lakewalkers.”
He held the sheath-pouch down on his thigh with his stump and pulled out the blue-hilted knife. He cradled it thoughtfully for a moment, then, with a look of concentration, touched it to his lips, closing his eyes. His face set in disturbed lines. He laid the knife down exactly between himself and Fawn, and drew back his hand.
“This brings us to yesterday.”
“I jabbed that knife into the malice’s thigh,” said Fawn, “but nothing happened.”
“No. Something happened, because this knife was not primed, and now it is.”
Fawn’s face screwed up. “Did it suck out the malice’s mortality, then? Or immortality? No, that makes no sense.”
“No. What I think”—he looked up from under wary brows—“mind you, I’m not sure yet, I need to talk with some folks—but what I think is, the malice had just stolen your baby’s ground, and the knife stole it back. Not soul, don’t you go imagining trapped souls again—just her mortality.” He added under his breath, “A death without a birth, very strange.”
Fawn’s lips moved, but no sound came out.
“So here we sit,” he went on. “The body of this knife belongs to me, because Kauneo willed me her bones. But by our rules, the priming in this knife, its mortality, belongs to you, because you are its next of kin. Because your unborn child, of course, could not will it herself. Here things get really… get even more mixed up, because usually no one is allowed to will and give their priming till they are adult enough to have their groundsense come in fully, about fourteen or fifteen, and older is stronger. And anyway, this was a farmer child. Yet no death but mine should have been able to prime this knife. This is a… this is a right mess, is what it is, actually.”
Though still shaken by her sudden miscarriage, Fawn had thought all decisions about her personal disaster were behind her, and had been wearily grateful that no more were to be faced. It was a kind of relief, curled within the grief. Not so, it seemed. “Could you use it to kill another malice?” Some redemption, in all this chain of sorrows?
“I would want to take it to my camp’s best maker, first. See what he has to say. I’m just a patroller. I am out of my experience and reckoning, here. It’s a strange knife, could do something unknown. Maybe unwanted. Or not work at all, and as you have seen, to get right up to a malice and then have your tools fail makes a bit of a problem.”
“What should we do? What can we do?”
He gave a rough nod. “On the one hand, we could destroy it.”
“But won’t that waste… ?”
“Two sacrifices? Yes. It wouldn’t be my first pick. But if you speak it, Spark, I will break it now in front of you, and it will be over.” He laid his hand over the hilt, his face a mask but his eyes searching hers.
Her breath caught. “No—no, don’t do that. Yet, anyhow.” And on the other hand, there is no other hand. She wondered if his sense of humor was gruesome enough to have had exactly that thought as well. She suspected so.
She gulped and continued, “But your people—will they care what some farmer girl thinks?”
“In this matter, yes.” He rolled his shoulders, as though they ached. “If it’s all right with you, then, I’ll speak of this first with Mari, my patrol leader, see what notions she has. After that, we’ll think again.”
“Of course,” she said faintly. He means it, that I should have a say in this.
“I would take it kindly if you would take charge of it till then.”
“Of course.”
He nodded and handed her the leather pouch, leaving her to resheathe the knife. The linen bag, however, he picked up to put with his arm contraption. His joints crackled and popped as he stood up and stretched, and he winced. Fawn sank back down on the tick and stole a closer look at the bone blade. The faint, flowing lines burned brown into the bone’s pale surface read: Dag. My heart walks with yours. Till the end, Kauneo.
The Lakewalker woman must have written this directive some time before she died, Fawn realized. Fawn imagined her sitting in a Lakewalker tent, tall and graceful like the other patroller women she’d glimpsed; writing tablet balanced on the very thigh that she must have known would come to bear the words, if things went ill. Had she pictured this knife, made from her marrow? Pictured Dag using it someday to drink his own heart’s blood in turn? But she could not ever, Fawn thought, have pictured a feckless young farmer girl fumbling it into this strange confusion, a lifetime—at any rate, Fawn’s lifetime—later.
Brow furrowed, Fawn slipped the sharing knife out of sight again in its sheath.
Chapter 6
To Dag’s approval, Fawn dozed off again after lunch. Good, let her sleep and make up her blood loss. He’d had enough practice to translate the gore on the dressings to a guess as to the amount. When he mentally doubled the volume to make up for the fact that she was about half the size of most men he’d nursed, he was very thankful that the bleeding had plainly slowed.
He came in from checking on the bay mare, now idling about in the front pasture he’d repaired by pulling rails from the fence opposite, to find Fawn awake and sitting up against the back kitchen wall. Her face was drawn and quiet, and she pulled bored fingers through her curls, which were abundant, if tangled.
She peered up at him. “Do you own a comb?”
He ran his hand through his hair. “Does it look that bad?”
Her smile was too ghostly for his taste, though the quip was worth no more. “Not for you. For me. I usually keep my hair tied up, or it gets in an awful mess. Like now.”
“I have one in my saddlebag,” he offered wryly. “I think. It sifts to the bottom. Haven’t seen it in about a month.”
“That, I do believe.” Her eyes crinkled just a little, then sobered again. “Why don’t you wear your hair fancy like the other patrollers?”
He shrugged. “There are a lot of things I can do one-handed. Braiding hair isn’t one of them.”
“Couldn’t someone do it for you?”
He twitched. “Doesn’t work if no one’s there. Besides, I need enough other favors.”
She looked puzzled. “Is the supply so limited?”
He blinked at the thought. Was it? Shrewd question. He wondered if his passion for proving himself capable and without need of aid, so earnestly undertaken after his maiming, was something a man might outgrow. Old hab
its die hard. “Maybe not. I’ll look around upstairs, see what I can find.” He added over his shoulder, “Lie flat, you.” She slid back down obediently, though she made a face.
He returned with a wooden comb found behind an upended chest. It was gap-toothed as an old man, but it served, he found by experiment. She was sitting up again, the cloth-wrapped hot stone laid aside, another promising sign.
“Here, Spark; catch.” He tossed the comb to her, and studied her as she jerked up her hand in surprise and had it bounce off her fingers.
She looked up at him in sudden curiosity. “Why did you call Watch! when you threw the knife pouch at me?”
Quick, she is. “Old patroller training trick. For the girls—and some others—who come in claiming they can’t catch things. It’s usually because they’re trying too hard. The hand follows the eye if the mind doesn’t trip it. If I yell at them to catch the ball, or whatever, they fumble, because that’s the picture they have in their heads. If I yell at them to count the spins, it goes right to their hand while they’re not attending. And they think I’m a marvel.” He grinned, and she smiled shyly back. “I didn’t know if you had played throwing games with those brothers of yours or not, so I took the safe bet. In case it was the only one we got.”
Her smile became a grimace. “Just the throwing game where they tossed me into the pond. Which wasn’t so funny in winter.” She eyed the comb curiously, then started in on the end of one tangle.
Her hair was springy and silky and the color of midnight, and Dag couldn’t help thinking how soft it would feel to his touch. Another reason to wish for two hands. The smell of it, so close last night, returned to his memory. And perhaps he had better go check on that horse again.
In the late afternoon, Fawn complained for the first time of being hot, which Dag seemed to take as a good sign. He claimed he was sweltering, set up a padded seat out on the shaded porch floor, and permitted her up just long enough to walk out to it. She settled down with her back against the house wall, staring out into the bright summer light. The green fields, and the darker greens of the woods, seemed deceptively peaceful; the horse grazed at the far end of the pasture, The burned outbuilding had stopped smoldering. Clothing, hers and his from yesterday, lay damply over the fence rail in the sun, and Fawn wondered when Dag had laundered it. Dag lowered himself to her left, stretched out his legs, leaned his head back, and sighed as the faint breeze caressed them.
“I don’t know what’s keeping my patrol,” he remarked after a time, opening his eyes again to stare down the lane. “It’s not like Mari to get lost in the woods. If they don’t show soon, I’ll have to try and bury those poor dogs myself. They’re getting pretty ripe.”
“Dogs?”
He made an apologetic gesture. “The farm dogs. Found ‘em out behind the barn yesterday. The only animals that weren’t carried off, seemingly. I think they died defending their people. Figured they ought to be buried nice, maybe up in the woods where it’s shady. Dogs ought to like that.”
Fawn bit her lip, wondering why this made her suddenly want to burst into tears when she had not cried for her own child.
He glanced down at her, his expression growing diffident. “Among Lakewalker women, a loss like yours would be a private grief, but she would not be so alone. She’d maybe have her man, closest friends, or kin around her. Instead, you’re stuck with me. If you”—he ducked his head nervously—“need to weep, be sure that I wouldn’t mistake it for any lack of strength or courage on your part.”
Fawn shook her head, lips tight and miserable. “Should I weep?”
“Don’t know. I don’t know farmer women.”
“It’s not about being a farmer.” She held out her hand, which clenched. “It’s about being stupid.”
After a moment, he said in a very neutral tone, “You use that word a lot. Makes me wonder who used to whip you with it.”
“Lots of people. Because I was.” She lowered her gaze to her lap, where her hands now twisted the loose fabric of her gown. “It’s funny I can tell you this. I suppose it’s because I never saw you before, or will again.” The man was carrying out her revolting blood clots, after all. Before yesterday, the very thought would have slain her with embarrassment. She remembered the fight in the cave, the bear-man… the deathly breath of the malice. What was a mere stupid story, compared to that?
His silence this time took on an easy, listening quality. Unhurried. She felt she might fill it in her own good time. Out in the fields, a few early-summer insects sang in the weeds.
In a lower voice she said, “I didn’t mean to have a child. I wanted, wanted, something else. And then I was so scared and mad.”
Seeming to feel his way as cautiously as a hunter in the woods, he said, “Farmer customs aren’t like ours. We hear pretty lurid songs and tales about them. Your family—did they cast you out?” He scowled; Fawn was not sure why.
She shook her head harder. “No. They’d have taken care of me and the child, if they’d been put to it. I didn’t tell them. I ran away.”
He glanced at her in surprise. “From a place of safety? I don’t understand.”
“Well, I didn’t think the road would be this dangerous. That woman from Glassforge made it, after all. It seemed like an even trade, me for her.”
He pursed his lips and stared off down the lane to ask, even more quietly, “Were you forced?”
“No!” She blew out her breath. “I can clear Stupid Sunny of that, at least. I wanted—to tell the truth, I asked him.”
His brows went up a little, although a tension eased out of his shoulders. “Is there a problem with this, among farmers? It seems quite the thing to me. The woman invites the man to her tent. Except I suppose you don’t have tents.”
“I could have wished for a tent. A bed. Something. It was at his sister’s wedding, and we ended up out in the field behind the barn in the dark, hiding in the new wheat, which I thought could have stood to be taller. I hoped it might be romantic and wild. Instead, it was all mosquitoes and hurry and dodging his drunken friends. It hurt, which I expected, but not unbearably. I’d just thought there would be… more to it. I got what I asked for but not what I wanted.”
He rubbed his lips thoughtfully. “What did you want?”
She took a breath, thinking. As opposed to flailing, which was maybe what she had been doing back home. “I think… I wanted to know. It—what a man and a woman do—was like some kind of wall between me and being a grown-up woman, even though I was plenty old.”
“How old is plenty old?” He cocked his head curiously at her.
“Twenty,” she said defiantly.
“Oh,” he said, and though he managed to keep the amusement out of his voice, his gold eyes glinted a bit.
She would have been annoyed, but the glint was too pretty to complain about, and then there were the crow’s-feet, which framed the glint so perfectly. She waved her hands in defeat and went on, “It was like a big secret everyone knew but me. I was tired of being the youngest, and littlest, and always the child.” She sighed. “We were a bit drunk, too.”
She added after a morose silence, “He did say a girl couldn’t be got with child the first time.”
Dag’s eyebrows climbed higher. “And you believed this? A country girl?”
“I said I was stupid about it. I thought maybe people were different than heifers. I thought maybe Sunny knew more than me. He could hardly know less. It’s not as if anyone talked about it. To me, I mean.” She added after a moment, “And… I’d had such a hard time nerving myself up to it, I didn’t want to stop.”
He scratched his head. “Well, among my people, we try not to be crude in front of the young ones, but we have to instruct and be instructed. Because of the hazards of tangling our grounds. Which young couples still do. There’s nothing so embarrassing as having to be rescued from an unintended groundlock by your friends, or worse, her kin.” At Fawn’s baffled look, he added, “It’s a bit like a trance. You get wound
up in each other and forget to get up, go eat, report for duty… after a couple of hours—or days—the body’s needs break you out. But that’s pretty uncomfortable. Dangerous in an unsafe place to be so unaware of your surroundings for that long, too.”
It was her turn to say, “Oh,” rather blankly. She glanced up at him. “Did you ever… ?”
“Once. When I was very young.” His lips twitched. “Around twenty. It’s not something most people let happen twice. We look out for each other, try not to let the first learning kill anyone.”
A couple of days? I think I had a couple of minutes… She shook her head, not sure if she believed this tale. Or understood it, for that matter. “Well, that—what Sunny said then—wasn’t what made me so mad. Maybe he didn’t know either. Even getting with child didn’t make me mad, just scared. So I went to Sunny, because I reckoned he had a right to know. Besides, I thought he liked me, or maybe even loved me.”
Dag started to say something, but then at her last statement stopped himself, looking taken aback, and just waved her to continue. “This has to have happened to other farmer women. What do your folk usually do?”
Fawn shrugged. “Usually, people get married. In kind of a hurry. Her folks and his folks get together and put a good face on it, and things just go on. I mean, if no one is married already. If he’s already married, or if she is, I guess things get uglier. But I didn’t think… I mean, I had nerved myself up for the one, I figured I could nerve myself up for the other.