As he wasn’t sneaking up on a malice’s lair, here, Dag forced himself to leave his ground partly open. So he hadn’t yet mounted the porch steps when a woman emerged to stare down at him. She looked alarmingly like a younger version of Dag’s aunt Mari, lean and shrewd of eye.
Her brown hair was drawn back in the usual mourning knot that makers wore while working, but her soberly cut skirt and jacket were embroidered with recognizable dogwood flowers. The stern air common to knife makers hung about her, yet her look was not that of an offended recluse-Dag thought of Dar-but of open curiosity.
“Maker Vayve? M’ name’s Dag Bluefield.” He left off the No-Camp part. “May I trouble you with a question about a knife? ”
“Oh, would you be Arkady Waterbirch’s prodigy? I’ve heard of you. Step on up.” Her roofed porch had hospitable seats, with stuffed cushions; the woven wicker creaked as Dag lowered himself. She took the next seat, half around a low plank table.
Dag wondered at her description of him. He’d certainly done nothing prodigious here. He dragged the cord Fawn had fashioned over his head, held the leather sheath to the table with his hook, and drew out the plain bone blade. “Some weeks back, up on the Grace River, I was called upon to rededicate and bond-and prime-a sharing knife. Under emergency conditions, more or less.”
“You were traveling with those two young patrollers who smoked out a nest of river bandits, I heard. All Oleana men, aren’t you? You’re a fair way from home.”
Dag decided not to pursue just what Barr and Remo had been saying about themselves, and him. We drifted downriver till we ran into bandits could easily be misconstrued as We were sent downriver to destroy bandits, dodging awkward questions about how the partners had come to be trailing Dag.
Leaving out the preamble of Raintree, Dag gave much the same truncated account of Crane and his death to Maker Vayve as he had to Arkady. As he spoke, her grim frown deepened.
“A sharing knife,” she said, “is made as an instrument of sacrifice and redemption-not of criminal execution.”
“This one was all three, in its way. Crane paid far less than he owed, but all that he had. I’m not asking you to judge the morality of its making, ma’am. Just its workmanship. First knife I ever made, see. Will it kill a malice? ”
“The gossip I heard wasn’t clear if you were a patroller or a medicine maker.” Politely, she left out the renegade/deserter/banished/or-justplain- mad part. “How did you know how to make any knife at all? ”
“My older brother is senior knife maker back at Hickory Lake Camp in Oleana. I’ve been around the craft quite a bit, time to time.”
Her brows twitched up in some doubt. “If lurking underfoot was all it took to create talent, I’d have better luck with my apprentices.” But she picked up the knife and opened her ground to examine it, holding it to her lips and forehead in turn, eyes closed and open. Dag watched anxiously.
She laid it gently back on the table. “Your involution is about four times stronger than it needs to be, but it’s sound and shows no sign of leakage. I see no reason it wouldn’t break open properly when exposed to the disruption of a malice. I grant it seems an unusually dark, unhappy knife, but primed knives are seldom chirping merry.”
“Crane was as close to a mad dog in human form as makes no nevermind, but he wasn’t stupid. I think he liked the irony of tying this around my neck,” Dag admitted. But it seemed this knife was safe to lend; he would do so.
A damp breeze, almost warm, set the bones to faintly clinking along the eaves. Reminded of another concern, he asked, “Do you chance to have any spare blanks? My brother usually did. There were always more bones than hearts.”
“Why do you ask? ” she returned.
“I’m without a bonded knife myself just now. My old one was… lost. Been meaning to replace it when I found the chance. I should like to make it for myself, under better supervision-if you’d be willing, ma’am.”
“It seems you’re a trifle past an apprentice’s test piece.” She nodded at the knife on the table. “Do you mean to take up the craft? I don’t know that I’d dare steal you from Arkady.”
“No, ma’am. I just want more confidence, if I ever have to face such an emergency again.”
“Confidence? Nerve, I’d call it.” She regarded him with a warring mixture of curiosity and disapproval. “That murdered woman’s bonded knife belonged to someone, and it wasn’t you. And you took it without a second thought, as nearly as I can tell.”
“I had thoughts in plenty, ma’am. It was time I lacked.”
She shrugged. “This not being an emergency, you would have to ask for the donation from the tent-kin.”
“No bones were left in your care for the general need? Or by the kinless? ”
Her expression and her ground both went a little opaque. “Not at present.”
In other words, this dodgy Oleana fellow was going to have to do his own begging. Perhaps he could, later, if he made more of a place for himself here.
Vayve glanced up. Climbing the path to her shack were the two patroller girls Dag had met that first day at the gate. The leggy blonde was half veiled and not happy about something. They looked up in surprise to see Dag, and he furled himself a little more, slipping Crane’s knife back into its sheath, and into his shirt. Both partners’ eyes followed it.
“Hello, Tavia, Neeta,” said the maker cordially. “What brings you up here? ”
“Oh, Vayve!” said Neeta, her voice distressed. “Something terrible’s happened to my primed knife-well, it was going to be my primed knife. My father had promised it to me when I came back from Luthlia, but this morning when we went to take it from the chest-well, look!”
She mounted the steps, slid the knife she was clutching from its sheath, and laid it on the table in front of the maker. The dry bone blade was cracked, split up half its length. Traces of tattered groundwork still clung to it, but its involution and the death it had contained were gone.
“He swears it was fine when he last put it away, and nobody dropped it-what happened to it? Vayve, can you fix it? ”
“Oh, dear,” said Vayve, picking up the knife. “Just how old was this, Neeta? It’s not of my making.”
“I’m not exactly sure. My father carried it when he was younger, and his uncle before him. Did we do something wrong-should we have oiled it, or, or…? ”
The maker turned the blade, studying the split. “No, that wouldn’t have made any difference. It was simply too old, Neeta. The groundwork on knives doesn’t last forever, you know.”
“I was going to take it on patrol tomorrow!”
The patrol Barr and Remo were joining-so, the reasons for their urgency to volunteer were revealed, one blond, one red-haired. Dag didn’t think he allowed his amusement to show in his face, but Tavia, watching him inquisitively, returned an uncertain half smile.
“Isn’t there anything you can do?” Neeta went on. “Was my tentkin’s sacrifice just wasted, then? Thrown into the air? ”
Dag had been through this scene before, with distraught younger patrollers. He said gently, “If that knife was carried on patrol for many years, it wasn’t wasted, even if it was never used on a malice. It upheld us all the same.”
Neeta shot him a Who the blight are you to say? look. “But I might have taken this one to Luthlia instead of the one grandmother gave me, and used it last year on that sessile my patrol found. And then we’d still have had the other.”
Most young patrollers who exchanged north of the Dead Lake took primed knives from home along; it was something of a customary fee for their training. Dag himself had carried primed knives to Luthlia that way twice, early in his long tally. About half the patrollers returned, ready to take up expanded duties. None of the knives did. A steady stream of sacrifice, flowing northward.