The moon rode high, lighting their way. Such as it was. Their line of seventeen people began to snake up the steepening slope. Neeta and Remo, ahead, scouted paths by eye and groundsense, breaking the trail and dodging dead ends and drop-offs. Sumac, tense and wary, brought up the rear. Fawn trudged just ahead of her.
As Fawn bent and climbed, the sharing knife swung and bounced on the end of its cord, and she tucked it inside her shirt, below the walnut pendant. That didn’t stop the distraction. The sweat between her breasts made the cord slippery, and the sheath rubbed against her belly, bringing to mind her other burden. So welcome—till now, when all her fears seemed doubled. Her pregnancy had drained away a freedom to take risks that she’d scarcely been conscious of before. Lakewalker customs of knife sacrifice were so careful about binding and assent. Her own state seemed a strange inversion, binding her not to death but to life. When she’d lain with her husband she’d made an irrevocable choice, and she could not now go back on it.
She rubbed her marriage cord. Where is Dag? Prisoner, injured, escaped? Was he struggling to get back to her, just as she was going away from him? The thought hurt her heart, thumping hard and fast in her chest.
Fawn spared a glance upward to find the company strung in a zigzag across an exposed patch—whether burned over in the recent fire or always barren, she could not tell in this milky light. Across the weedy slope, a shadow rippled, like a wavelet on water. Then another. Fawn blinked rapidly, wondering if she was passing out from the breathless climb. Then she realized what she was seeing, and spun around, looking up toward the high blue face of the moon. Across it, another shadow fluttered, and stars winked in and out.
“They’re back!” she gasped. Mud-bats, a dozen of them. Of course they could fly at night.
Sumac followed her gaze. Rasped, “Blight.” Raised her face and bellowed up the incline, “Archers, alert! Everyone, close up under that outcrop! Grouse, give that blighted boar spear to someone who can swing it”—Grouse had mainly been using it for a walking stick, poling his shaking legs up the hill—“trade with Ash, take back your youngster!” At the shouting and scrambling, Plum began to cry again.
People abandoned the path and started to climb for the twenty-five-foot-high face of stone, silver gray in the pale light, that promised some protection. Hod and Hawthorn shouldered under Bo and boosted him upward. Sage grabbed Calla, who grabbed Indigo, and they chained over the rugged rises. Remo, Neeta, and Whit slid down toward Sumac, bows brandished.
Out of the sky, disturbingly quiet, a vast shape descended and settled upon the outcrop overlooking them. It had twice the wingspan of the other mud-bats. It stretched out its arms to the sides like black sails, and folded them in again. A whiff of its unmistakable scent, a dry cellar smell, rocked Fawn back in realization.
That’s not a mud-bat. Oh gods, oh gods…
The malice turned its dark, chiseled, elegant face upon them. Great eyes glimmered in the moonlight, and pointed ears twitched against its faintly ridged skull. Soft, batlike fur covered its body; its legs, anchored by clawed feet, were longer and more manlike than those of the mud-bats. The weight of its gaze fell like a war hammer.
Fawn had seen the Glassforge malice face-to-face, an early molt, ugly as mud. The Wolf War malice was said to have acquired a strange man-wolf form before its end. The Raintree malice had been breathtakingly beautiful, Dag had told her, a tall warrior shape of surpassing glamour. This malice, too, had its own appalling beauty. Fawn stared upward, entranced with terror.
Sumac, frozen beside her, made a weird little noise that might have wanted to be swearing, but was squeezed thin by awe. She found her voice only to whimper, “It flies…”
But her words broke both of them out of their shock. Fawn was already scrambling in her shirt as Sumac hissed, “The knife, give me the knife!” As Fawn fumbled it into her hands, Sumac’s legs bunched to launch her up the slope, angling around the rock face.
Three bows lifted, aimed uselessly at the commanding figure staring down over them in cool curiosity. Remo was so shaken that he almost tried to shoot it anyway, but at the last moment turned and found a circling mud-bat instead. His arrow tore through a wing; the creature shrieked and fluttered sideways. A few more mud-bats darted near and banked away, not so much seeking to grab prey off the hillside, Fawn thought, as to drive it before them toward their master. The spread-out company’s dash in all directions changed to a drawing-in.
Fawn saw it coming before Neeta and Remo did. Ash, upslope, turned and raised the boar spear. Took aim, but not at the malice or the mud-bats.
“Remo, duck!” Fawn screamed.
The heavy, steel-tipped pole hissed downslope. Remo dodged barely in time; the point grazed his shoulder instead of lodging in his throat. The spear clattered to a stop against some rocks below. At least Ash had thrown away his weapon, temporarily. He looked confused, blinking and shaking his head. Finch, Sage, and Indigo drew up beside him. Only Calla tried to back off, jerking like a balking horse, but ended up falling to her knees.
Above, Sumac burst onto the outcrop. The malice merely spread its wings and fell forward, sliding away as she swung wildly. Two buffeting flaps and it rose, wheeling upward once more. Sumac pitched over the edge, breaking her own plummet with skin-tearing grabs at bushes clinging to cracks in the rock face. The bone knife spun from her hand, rising futilely after the malice and arcing outward. Fawn gasped and tried to move beneath it—if that bone breaks on the stones—with a crackle of twigs, the knife came down in a buckthorn bush. Fawn raced to retrieve it. Whit, after a moment’s hesitation, followed after her, crossbow swinging in his grip as he ran.
Sumac landed in a shower of leaves, rolled downward past the farmer boys, found her feet, and kept on going, braking from handhold to scrubby handhold. Sage, looking puzzled, knelt and picked up a rock, and threw it after her. Finch and Indigo, after a moment, followed in clumsy imitation. Hod and Hawthorn turned back to join them.
“Hawthorn, no!” screamed Berry in dismay as he, too, scooped up a missile, launching it with rather better aim. It clipped Remo’s ear.
Neeta’s bow wavered around to point at the farmers.
“No!” yelled Sumac, breathless, still scrambling wildly downward. “We can’t fight them! Cut and run!” Remo had half fallen; Sumac pulled him up, stared around, spotted Fawn scrabbling through the buckthorn after the knife. Tried to make for her.
A line of mud-bats went for Sumac, one after another, and she broke the other way, ducking through the scant shelter of the scrub. All the mud-bats circled to concentrate upon the three Lakewalkers, who retreated southward.
“Berry, over here!” yelled Whit. Berry’s white face turned, saw him; she gave up yanking at Hawthorn’s arm just barely in time to evade Ash and Sage closing in on her, and bounded down the hillside toward them. Whit caught her as she almost plunged past, the walnut pendant bouncing on her collarbone.
“The malice.” Fawn, scratched bloody, clutched the knife to her heaving chest. “The malice has taken everybody’s minds.” She stared at her brother and sister-in-law, gaping back in horror. “Except ours…” In the moon-washed dark the mud-bats whirled; their master soared above them, so close, so out of reach. “Sumac’s right. It’s time to run.”
“But—Hawthorn,” choked Berry, looking back as Fawn turned north toward the nearest trees. “Bo…”
“We can’t help them now,” Fawn gasped over her shoulder as Whit grabbed Berry and dragged her along. “They’d turn on us, too. Best hope is to all stay alive till the local Lakewalkers arrive and bring down the malice.” Would the local patrol be expecting this? Did they even know about the night-sky terror that had burst upon the Trace? What if the rest of the company was made to be soldiers against them? Unlike Sumac and their own Lakewalkers, the Laurel Gap patrollers wouldn’t see the farmers as captured friends, only as dangerous enemies. Tears tracked down Fawn’s face at the vision, but she bit her lip and dodged onward. The ground came up like blows
under her fleeing feet, and whipping strands of her hair caught in her open mouth. Running beside her, Berry looked just as wind-wild.
They stumbled into the shelter of the trees and looked back. The Lakewakers had vanished on the south side of the clear space, a couple of hundred paces away, but Fawn thought she could mark them by the mud-bats dipping and swooping above the trees over there. The malice appeared to be following them. The rest of their company stood in a bewildered huddle, temporarily undirected by their new master.
“Keep running,” said Whit, shouldering his crossbow to free both hands for their next burst—or rather, one hand to fight through the undergrowth, the other to clutch Berry’s in a death grip that she returned. Fawn longed for a hand to grip as well—just one’s all I need—but Dag seemed as beyond her reach right now as the moon overhead. She swallowed, nodded. The three of them toiled north along the mountainside.
Dag peered into the night. This rock ledge above their overhang offered a broad vantage, down over the tops of the trees. The angle gave him a dizzy shudder, and he ventured no closer to the edge. The moon was full enough to infuse the whole valley with a blue glow, but it wasn’t bright enough for him to see clearly at a distance, even without the rising mist. The widest cast of Dag’s groundsense wouldn’t make out what was happening eight or ten miles off, nor did sound carry that far. But beneath that saddle in the far ridge, he thought evil specks whirled. Unless his eyes were full of floaters, like that time Copperhead had thrown him…but by the ugly quaver in his belly, he thought not. The mud-bats were abroad, and had found new prey. Fawn and the company? Some other hapless Trace travelers?
The faint hum of Spark’s live ground in his marriage cord was no reassurance. Because if it stopped, it would already be too late…
He clenched his teeth and hand and snarled helplessly. Even if he were to ruthlessly abandon Pakko and Owlet to each other—and he was feeling pretty ruthless right now—it would take him four, five, six hours to limp from here to there. Whatever was happening would be long over, or moved elsewhere, and he’d be wrecked, wholly crippled instead of just half. Was Tavia seeing any of this? She might have crossed the river by now, but if she was under the trees—and she should be—her view would be worse blocked than his.
His every heartstring twanged go. What was left of his wits said, stay.
I’m going to go mad before this night is done.
Fawn sat panting on the dirt floor of their crevice. A tiny patch of moonlight lay at her knees like a rivulet of spilled milk; she and Whit and Berry edged back from it, as if the moon were a malicious eye that might stare in and see them cowering.
“You think this is enough?” Whit wheezed, staring around; Fawn could just see the gleam of his eyes in the shadows.
They’d run maybe two miles north, angling downward mainly for speed’s sake, before Fawn realized they would run out of rocks if they descended farther, and started looking instead for a bolt hole. “Groundsense doesn’t go through thick stone,” she said. But malice groundsense was in every way stronger than Lakewalkers’…Fawn tried for optimism, because the alternative was a panic they could ill afford. “I expect Sumac tucked Arkady and Barr and all up somewhere a lot like this. And I don’t think she’d take chances with Arkady.”
Whit breathed reluctant agreement with that, relaxing slightly. Berry nodded, her blond hair a glimmer in the gloom.
Fawn traced the two cords around her throat; her hand clenched on her birthday walnut in its hair net. “They worked! Do you realize, Dag’s ground shields worked!” At least long enough for them to run away from a malice distracted by other events. Long enough to live to tell the tale? “We got away!”
“The others didn’t.” Berry’s voice was flat—not with censure, Fawn thought, but just to keep steady.
Whit scrubbed his face. “Why didn’t that malice just ground-rip everyone right then?”
“It was chasing after the patrollers,” said Berry. “I reckon it’s circled back by now.” Her voice quavered at this last.
“Maybe not,” said Fawn slowly. “That malice you fellows brought down the other day was a lot like my malice at Glassforge, a lumpy first-molt. This one seems more like the one Dag saw in Raintree, advanced, except mainly eating bats instead of people, so it’s advanced…oddly. It was so crisp and fine and fresh-looking. If it just lately had a molt, maybe it’s only now able to fly and get around. It might not be looking to start another molt right off, especially as that would weigh it down so’s it couldn’t fly anymore. Maybe it might want to, like, save its prey till it’s ready for more.”
“Like a spider?” said Berry. Fawn could hear her grimace.
Fawn frowned, trying to think it through. “If it’s mostly been eating bats, it might not be too bright yet.” Bats didn’t keep larders, as far as she knew. Would the malice think like a bat, or like a person? A mad person. She brightened. “But it can’t get too far away from its mind slaves. Remember what Ford Chicory said back in Raintree, how he and his fellows would ride in and raid the malice’s army, catch folks and bring them back out of range, and then they’d get their wits back? I think this malice will want to gather all its captives in one place, except then it’ll be stuck—if it flies too far away from ’em, they’ll all come to their senses and escape.”
“Think it’ll try to march everyone to its lair?” asked Whit, puzzling it out, too.
“Maybe. Though this one doesn’t seem tied to its lair anymore.”
“Now what do we do?” asked Berry. “If I had six good feet of water under my hull, I’d take on anything, but I barely know this dry-foot country. Should we try to get back to Arkady?”
Whit shook his head. “We’d not be that much safer, and we’d be all exposed trying to get there.”
Fawn thought of the pale flash of bone knife, spinning through the air in Sumac’s last, futile effort, and let her hand curl around its sheath. “Whit, you got any of those crossbow bolts left?”
“Just three.”
“Give me one.”
Whit rustled around, extracted a bolt from the short quiver, and handed it across. It glinted in the strip of moonlight. Fawn held it, traced it, tested its balance, fingered the feather vanes. Drew the bone knife, compared length, diameter, heft.
Whit saw her drift at once. “Um…if that worked, wouldn’t Lakewalkers already have invented sharing arrows? Sharing spears, for that matter?”
Fawn shook her head. “Actually, Dag says patrollers do fix their sharing knives to spear hafts sometimes, in the field, but not often. In the close quarters of a woods or a cave, a spear’s not much more use than a knife, and they all are right terrified of anything that risks breakage.”
“Like poor Remo,” Berry agreed. “So cut up when he broke one by accident that he ran away from home.”
“Yep,” said Fawn. “It’s not just a handy sharp point on the end of a stick. It’s someone’s life. Death. Hopes. And it has to be the right shape to carry around with you for years, and something you could drive into your own heart even if you were caught out dying by yourself. A primed knife can be made into a spear easy enough, but I think a patroller would faint dead away if you suggested a sharing arrow. Think of a miss hitting a tree or a cave wall hard.”
“Mm,” said Whit. “Your grandfather’s ghost would haunt you forever, I expect.”
“Now this”—Fawn held up the knife—“would just tumble and be useless if you tried to shoot it from your crossbow. But if I put vanes on it and balance it, I think it might fly straight. Enough. For a short ways.” She touched Whit’s bolt, showing where she meant to scavenge the vanes.
“How would you make it balance?”
“I’d need to carve away some of the bone.”
Whit made a choking noise.
“Won’t that destroy it?” asked Berry doubtfully.
Fawn stared down at the length of carved bone, turning it in the moon patch. “I watched Dag bond and prime this knife. The groundwork he did see
med mainly concentrated on what used to be the bone’s inner surface. The end is just carved this shape to be handy for a grip. If I pare it down…See, if it doesn’t break, it’s not broken.”
“Huh?” said Berry.
“It’s made to bust open from inside by the groundwork when it comes in contact with a malice. If it doesn’t crack apart while I’m fooling with it, that means the priming is still sound.” But Fawn ruined her confident-sounding claim by adding, “I think.”
“And just who,” said Whit warily, “do you picture doing this shooting?”
“It would have to be you.”
A fraught silence. From two directions.
“You’ve had way more practice ’n me,” Fawn forged on, “and besides, my shoulder’s hurt.” Hot and aching from the mud-bat’s clawing. She would deal with that later. “Best to be as close as we can get, in case you only get one shot. But all the bone bolt has to do is fly more or less straight and hit anywhere, and go a little ways into the malice’s fake skin. I didn’t shove Dag’s old primed knife point more’n an inch into the Glassforge malice”—she suppressed a shudder of memory—“and it worked just fine.”
“That’s taking an awful risk with our only primed knife,” said Whit.
“Yes, but if we sit hiding out here with it, it’s just as useless as if it’s busted. Better to try something fast. Before the malice flies somewhere out of reach. Before it starts snacking on our folks. Everything I’ve learned about malices says it’s better to get them sooner than later. Like putting out a fire.”
Into the continuing silence Fawn added desperately, “And if it fails, well, it was only Crane.”
“That,” said Berry, after a cool pause, “is a real good point.”
Whit sighed, partly agreement, and partly…well.
They would shortly lose what little light they had as the moon advanced over the ridge. Fawn held the bolt in the patch of moonlight and picked apart the threads winding the vanes, laying the feathers out carefully, one, two, three. She then drew her steel knife from her belt. One of Dag’s earliest gifts to her; he’d insisted she wear it at all times, and kept it razor-sharp for her.