Glassforge. Was she still going to Glassforge, when the reason for her flight had been so abruptly removed? Her life had been turned upside down one too many times lately, too fast, for her to be sure of much just now. She turned to the wall and clutched her stone—by the heat, he’d renewed it again while she’d slept—tighter to her aching, emptying womb.
In the past weeks, she had experienced her child as fear, desperation, shame, exhaustion, and vomiting. She had not yet felt the fabled quickening, although she had gone to sleep nightly waiting intently for that sign. It was disquieting to think that this chance-met man, with his strange Lakewalker senses, had gained a more direct perception of the brief life of her child than she had.
The thought hurt, but pressing the rag-wrapped stone to her forehead didn’t help.
She rolled back over and her eye fell on Dag’s knife pouch, set aside last night near the head of her feather mattress. The intact knife with the blue hilt was still in its sheath where she’d shoved it. The other—green hilt and bone fragments—seemed to have been rewrapped in a bit of scavenged cloth, ends tied in one of Dag’s clumsy one-handed knots. The fine linen, though wrinkled and ripped and probably from the mending basket, had embroidery on it, once-treasured guest-day work.
She looked up to see him watching her examine them, his face gone expressionless again.
“You said you’d tell me about these, too,” she said. “I don’t guess it was just any bit of bone that killed an immortal malice.”
“No. Indeed. The sharing knives are by far the most complex of our… tools.
Hard and costly to make.”
“I suppose you’ll tell me they aren’t really magic, again.”
He sighed, rose, came over, and sat down cross-legged beside her. He took the pouch thoughtfully in his hand.
“They’re human bone, aren’t they,” she added more quietly, watching him.
“Yes,” he said a little distantly. His gaze swung back to her. “Understand, patrollers have had trouble with farmers before over sharing knives.
Misunderstandings. We’ve learned not to discuss them. You have earned… there are reasons... you must be told. I can only ask that you don’t talk about it with anyone, after.”
“Anyone at all?” she puzzled.
He made a little jerk of his fingers. “Lakewalkers all know. I mean outsiders.
Farmers. Although in this case… well, we’ll get to that.”
Roundaboutly, it seemed. She frowned at this uncharacteristic loss of straightforwardness on his part. “All right.”
He took a breath, straightening his spine a trifle. “Not just any human bones.
Our own, Lakewalker bones. Not farmer bones, and most especially not kidnapped farmer children’s bones, all right? Adult. Have to be, for the length and strength. You’d think people would—well. Thighbones, usually, and sometimes upper arms. It makes our funeral practices something outsiders are not invited to. Some of the most aggravating rumors have been started around stray glimpses…
we are not cannibals, rest assured!”
“I actually hadn’t heard that one.”
“You might, if you’re around long enough.”
She had seen hogs and cows butchered; she could imagine. Her mind leaped ahead to picture Dag’s long legs—no.
“Some mess is unavoidable, but it’s all done respectfully, with ceremony, because we all know it could be our turn later. Not everyone donates their bones; it would be more than needed, and some aren’t suitable. Too old or young, too thin or fragile. I mean to give mine, if I die young enough.”
The thought made an odd knot in her belly that had nothing to do with her cramping. “Oh.”
“But that’s just the body of the knife, the first half of the making. The other half, the thing that makes it possible to share death with a malice, is the priming.” The quick would-be-reassuring smile with this did not reach his eyes.
“We prime it with a death. A donated death, one of our own. In the making, the knife is bonded, matched to the intended primer, so they are very personal, d’you see.”
Fawn pushed herself up, increasingly riveted and increasingly disturbed. “Go on.”
“When you’re a Lakewalker who means to give your death to a knife and you’re close to dying—wounded in the field beyond hope of recovery, or dying at home of natural causes, you—or more often your comrade or kin—take the sharing knife and insert it into your heart.”
Fawn’s lips parted. “But…”
“Yes, it kills us. That’s the whole point.”
“Are you saying people’s souls go into those knives?”
“Not souls, ah! Knew you’d ask that.” He swiped his hand through his hair.
“That’s another farmer rumor. Makes so much trouble… Even our groundsense doesn’t tell us where people’s souls go after their deaths, but I promise you it’s not into the knives. Just their dying ground. Their mortality.” He started to add, “Lakewalker god-stories say the gods have… well, never mind that now.”
Now, there was a rumor she had heard. “People say you don’t believe in the gods.”
“No, Little Spark. Somewhat the reverse. But that doesn’t enter into this.
That knife”—he pointed to the blue hilt—“is my own, grounded to me. I had it made special. The bone for it was willed to me by a woman named Kauneo, who was slain in a bad malice war up northwest of the Dead Lake. Twenty years ago. We were way late spotting it, and it had grown very powerful. The malice hadn’t found many people to use out in that wilderness, but it had found wolves, and… well. The other knife, which you used yesterday, that was her primed knife, grounded to her. Her heart’s death was in it. The bone of it was from an uncle of hers—I never met him, but he was a legendary patroller up that way in his day, fellow named Kaunear. You probably didn’t have time to notice it, but his name and his curse on malices were burned on the blade.”
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.”