Her brows bent. Had Hoharie ever seen a malice up as close as Fawn had? Makers seemed to stay back in camp, mostly. So maybe not. Sharing knives might be complicated to make, but they were so simple to use, a farmer child might do so—as Fawn had proven. She smiled now to remember Dag’s wild cry: Sharp end first!
Her thoughts fell like water drops into a still pool.
Sharing knives kill malices.
There’s a bit of leftover malice in Dag and Artin and these other people.
Maybe it just needs an extra dose of mortality to finish cleaning it out…. I have a sharing knife.
She inhaled, shuddering. It wasn’t possible for her to think of something to try that Dag and Mari and Hoharie hadn’t, and already dismissed for some good reason that Fawn was simply too ignorant to know. Was it?
There was a lot of Lakewalker emotion and habit tied up in sharing knives. Sacrificial in every sense, sacred. Not seen as a fit subject for idle fooling around with. She hunched over, wide-awake now.
It didn’t have to be through the heart, did it? That was only for unprimed knives, first collecting their dose of mortality. For discharging the death, anywhere in the malice’s groundworked body would apparently do. She might have stabbed the Glassforge malice in the foot, to the same stunning effect. So where were the, the malice bits lodged in the enspelled Lakewalkers? Pooled or diffuse, they all had to be connected, because to touch any of them triggered the same trap.
Her knife, Dar had said, was of dubious potency and value. No affinity. But it’s the only one I have a right to.
Her eyes turned to Dag. And he’s the only one I have a right to. So.
Swiftly, before her nerve failed her, she rose and, careful not to touch his skin, delicately drew down his blanket. She lifted it past his ribbed chest, his loose breechclout, his long legs, letting it fall again in folds at his feet. His body was all sculpted shadows in the moonlight, too thin. She’d thought she’d started to put some meat on his bones, but it was all used up again by the past weeks of dire strain, and then some.
Not the heart, not the eye—eew! — not the gut. For nonlethal flesh wounds, one was pretty much limited to arms and legs, carefully away from where those big veins and nerves ran down. Under the arm would be bad, she was pretty sure, likewise the back of the knee and the inner thigh. Better the outer thigh, or the arm just below the shoulder. Dag’s strappy arm muscles didn’t seem all that thick, compared to the length of the bone blade hanging around her neck. Thigh, then. She crouched down.
If Hoharie had been conscious, Fawn could have asked her. But then Fawn would still be waiting for the Lakewalker expert to fix things, and likely would not have conceived this desperate notion at all. Now the medicine maker lay entranced with the rest, leaving only Othan in charge. Fawn wouldn’t have asked Othan for a drink in a downpour, nor have expected him to give her one. Still…
Am I about to be stupid again?
Think it through.
This might do nothing, in which case she would have to clean the blood off her knife and explain the ugly hole in her husband tomorrow morning. Envisioning which, she scrambled back to her saddlebags and dug out one of her spare clean ragbags stuffed with cattail fluff, and some cord. There, a good bandage.
This might do what she hoped.
This might do something awful. But something awful was going to happen anyhow. She could not make things worse.
Right, then.
She laid out the makeshift swab, dragged her pouch from around her neck, and pulled out the pale knife. The little delay had sapped her courage. She hunkered by Dag’s left hip a moment, trying to gather it again. She wished she could pray, but the gods, they said, were absent. She had nothing to trust in now but her own wits.
She swallowed a whimper. Dag says you’re smart. If you can’t trust you, trust him.
Sharp end first. Anywhere. She drew back her hand, took careful aim at what she hoped was all nice thick muscle, then plunged the bone knife in till the tip nicked against Dag’s own bone. Still without ever touching him. Dag grunted and jerked in his sleep. She whipped her shaking hand away from the hilt, which stood out from his lean thigh, all indigo blue and ivory in the silver light.
From over her shoulder, Othan’s voice screamed, “What are you doing, you crazy farmer?”
He reached to clamp her shoulders and drag her roughly back from Dag. But not before she saw Dag’s left arm jolt up from his bedroll as though its invisible hand was wrapping itself around the sharing knife’s hilt, and heard the faint, familiar snap of splintering bone blade.
15
H e had floated in an increasingly timeless gray fog, all distinctions fading. It seemed a just consolation that with them faded all fear, want, and pain. But then, inexplicably, something bright and warm troubled his shredding perceptions, as if the north star had torn herself loose from the sky and ventured too near him in naive, luminous, fatal curiosity. Don’t fall, no…stay away, Spark! Longing and horror wrenched him, for to grasp that joy would slay it. Is it my fate to blight all that I love?
But the star fire didn’t touch him. Later, a bolt of new strength shot through him, and for a short time, coherent thought came back. Some other light had fallen into this prison, also known to him…He recognized Hoharie’s intense ground in all its ever-astonishing vigor—so strange that such a spring of strength should dwell in such a slight and unassuming body. But the hope it should have brought him turned to ashes as he took in her anger, horror, and frustration.
I thought sure you’d figure the trick of it from out there, as I could not—I’m the blinder one, I had to look to see it.
And the wailing answer, I had to look to be sure…I had to be certain…oh, Dag, I am so sorry…before the fog blurred all to voiceless sorrow once more.
He raced to make his watch rounds in this brief, stolen respite, to count his company as every captain should. Artin, yes, barely holding on, his ground so drained as to be translucent at the edges; Bryn and Ornig; Mallora; the other Bonemarsh makers. And now Hoharie. He remembered to count himself. Ten, all dying in place. Again he led those who had trusted in him into the boundless dark. At least this time I can’t desert them.
More timelessness. Gray mouths leeched him.
The star fire moved too close again, and he breathed dread like cold mist. But the sky-spark held something else, a faint, familiar chime; her fair light and its wordless song wound together. Their intertwined beauty overthrew his heart. This is surely the magic of the whole wide green world; Lakewalker groundwork has nothing to compare with it…
And then pain and the song pierced him.
He could feel every detail of the roiling ground that stabbed into his thigh: Kauneo’s bone, his own blood of old, the involuted and shaped vessel for mortality that was the gift of the Luthlian knife maker. Spark’s daughter’s death, death without birth, self-making and self-dissolution intermingled in their purest forms.
Too pure. It lay self-contained within the involution, innocent of all taint of desire, motion, and time. It lacks affinity seemed too flat a statement to sum up its aloof stillness. Free of all attachment. Free of all pain.
We give best from abundance. I can share pain.
Flying as never before, he raised his arm by its ground, and his ghost hand—pure ground, piebald with blight and malice spatter—wrapped the hilt and the ground of the hilt. His own old blood gave him entry into the involution; he let his blackened ground trace up its ancient, dried path; catch, hold; and he remembered the night Fawn had woven his wedding cord with bloody fingers, and so drawn her own ground into it. And her wide-open eyes and unguarded offer, later, on another night of ground-weaving, Need blood? As if she would gladly have opened her veins on the spot and poured all that vivid flood into his cupped hands, sparing nothing. As she does now.