“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.” “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.”