Do not waste her gift, old patroller.
His blackened touch seemed a violation, but he twisted the mortal ground between his ghost fingers the way Fawn spun thread. He grinned somewhere inside himself to imagine Dar’s outraged voice, You used a wedding-cord technique on a sharing knife…? The involution uncoiled, giving up its long burden into his hand. Kauneo’s bone cracked joyfully, a sound beneath sound heard not with his ears but in his groundsense, and he knew in that moment that Dar’s theory of how the farmer babe’s death had entered his knife was entirely wrong-headed, but he had no time now to examine it. He held mortality in his hand, and it would not wait.
Within his hand, not upon it; the two were as inextricable as two fibers spun into one strong thread. Affinity. Now, at last, he closed his hand upon the malice’s dark construction.
His ghost hand twisted, stretched, and tore apart as the mortality flowed from him into the gray mouths, along the lines of draining hunger, and he howled without sound in the agony of that wrenching. The malice spatters on his body were ripped out from their patches of blight as if dragged along on a towline, gashing through his ground and out his arm. The dazzling fire raced, consuming its dark path as it traveled. The gray fog-threads of the malice’s involution blazed up in fire all over the grove, leaving a web of red sparks hanging for a moment as if suspended in air. When it reached the mud-men’s dense impelling ground-shapes, they exploded in fiery pinwheels, their aching afterimages spinning in Dag’s groundsense, weighty as whirlpools peeling off a paddle’s trailing edge.
Then—quiet.
Dag had not known that silence could reverberate so; or maybe that was just him. When a long strain was released, the recoil itself could become a new source of pain…No, actually, that was just his body. He’d thought he’d missed his body, back when his mind had been set adrift from it in that ground-fog; now he was not so sure. Its pangs were all suddenly very distinctive indeed. Head, neck, back, arm, haunches all cried out, and his bladder definitely clamored for attention. His body was noisy, cranky, and insistent. But he sought something more urgent.
He pried his eyes open, blinking away the glue and sand that seemed to cement his lids together. He was staring up at bare silvered branches and a night sky washed with moonlight strong enough to cast interlaced shadows. Across the grove, voices were moaning in surprise or crying out in shock. Shouts of alarm transmuted to triumph.
In the blue moonlight and red flare of new wood thrown on a nearby fire, a baffling sight met his gaze. Fawn and Hoharie’s apprentice Othan seemed to be dancing. Or perhaps wrestling. It was hard to be sure. Othan was breathing hard through his nose; Fawn had both hands wrapped around one of his wrists and was swinging from it, dragging his arm down. His boots stamped in an unbalanced circle as he tried to shake her off, cursing.
Dag cleared his throat and said mildly, albeit in a voice as rusty and plaintive as an old gate hinge, “Othan, quit manhandling my wife. Get your own farmer girl.”
The two sprang apart, and Othan gasped, “Sir! I wasn’t—”
What he wasn’t, Dag didn’t hear, because with a sob of joy Fawn threw herself down across his chest and kissed him. He thought his mouth tasted as foul as an old bird’s nest, but strangely, she didn’t seem to mind. His left arm, deadened, wasn’t working. His right weighed far too much, but he hoisted it into the air somehow and, after an uncertain wobble, let it fall across her, fingers clutching contentedly.
He had no idea why or how she was here. It was likely a Fawn-fluke. Her solid wriggling warmth suggested hopefully that she was not a hallucination, not that he was in the best shape to distinguish, just now.
She stopped kissing him long enough to gasp, “Dag, I’m so sorry I had to stab you! I couldn’t think of any other way. Does it hurt bad?”
“Mm?” he said vaguely. He was more numb than in pain, but he became aware of a shivering ache in his left thigh. He tried to raise his head, failed, and stirred his leg instead. An utterly familiar knife haft drifted past his focus. He blinked in bemusement. “A foot higher and I’d have thought you were mad at me, Spark.”
Her helpless laughter wavered into weeping. The drops fell warm across his chest, and he stroked her shuddering shoulder and murmured wordlessly.
After a moment she gulped and raised her face. “You have to let me go.”
“No, I don’t,” he said amiably.
“We have to get those bone fragments dug out of your leg. I didn’t know how far to stick it in, so I pushed it all the way, I’m afraid.”
“Thorough as ever, I see.”
She shrugged out of his weak grip and escaped, but grinned through her tears, so that was likely all right. He eased open his groundsense a fraction, aware of something deeply awry in his own body’s ground just below his perceptions, but managed a head count of the people in the grove before he tightened up again. All alive. Some very weak, but all alive. Someone had flung himself onto a horse bareback and was galloping for the east camp. Othan was diverted from his farmer-wrestling to tend on Hoharie, struggling up out of her bedroll. Dag gave up captaining, lay back with a sigh of boundless fatigue, and let them all do whatever they wanted.
In due course Othan came back with Hoharie’s kit and some lights and commenced some pretty unpleasant fiddling about down by Dag’s side. Weary Hoharie directed, and Fawn hovered. That the blade should hurt worse coming out than going in made some sense, but not that it should do so more often. Voices muttered, rose and fell. “It’s bleeding so much!” “That’s all right. It’ll wash the wound out a bit. Now the swab.” “Hoharie, do you know what that swab is?” “Othan, think. Of course I do. Very clever, Fawn. Now tie the strips down tight. No peeking under it, unless it soaks through.” “Did he get it all?” “Yes, look—fit the pieces together like a puzzle, and check for missing chips or fragments. All smooth, see?” “Oh, yes!” “Hoharie, it’s like his ground is shredded. Hanging off him in strips. I’ve never felt anything like!” “I saw when it happened. It was spectacular. Get the bleeding stopped, get everyone off this blight and over to the east camp. Get me some food. Then we’ll tackle it.”
The evacuation resembled a torchlight parade, organized by the folks who came pelting over from the east camp, all dressed by guess and riotous with relief. Those freed from the groundlock who could sit a horse were led off two to a mount, holding each other upright, and the rest were carried. Dag was carted eastward feetfirst on a plank; Saun’s face, grinning loonlike, drifted past his gaze in the flickering shadows. Mari’s voice complained loudly about missing the most exciting part. Dag gripped Fawn’s hand for the whole mile and refused to let go.
The east camp didn’t settle down till dawn. Fawn woke again near noon, trapped underneath Dag’s outflung arm. She just lay there for a while, relishing the lovely weight of it and the slow breath ruffling her curls. Eventually, she gently eased out from under, sat up, and looked around. She thought it a measure of Dag’s exhaustion that her motions didn’t wake him the way they usually did.
Their bedroll was sheltered under a sort of half tent of bent saplings splinted together supporting a blanket roof. Half-private. The camp extended along the high side of a little creek, well shaded by green, unblighted trees; maybe twenty or twenty-five patrollers seemed to be moving about, some going for water or out to the horse lines, some tending cook fires, several clustered around bedrolls feeding tired-looking folks who nevertheless were doggedly sitting up.