She nodded and waved Whit on in her wake. He looked a trifle confused as he pressed his sturdy horse up next to hers. As Warp and Weft fell into a well-matched pace, he asked, “What was that all about?”
“Being on blight makes Lakewalkers sick. Well, it makes anybody sick, but I was afraid it would send Dag into an awful relapse like after Greenspring. Glory be that he saw the sense of waiting for us.”
Whit glanced around. “But everything is drying up and dying back right now. How do you spot blight in winter? How is it that you’re supposed to tell this here blight from…oh.”
They reined in at the lip of the ravine. They must be very near to what had been Dag’s vantage, that day. The cave was a deep hollow halfway up the ravine’s far side, with a long outcrop of rock shielding the opening almost like a wall. The ravine itself was a dusty gray, devoid of vegetation but for a few skeletal tree trunks. The glimmering creek flowing through in an S-curve was the only movement, the only source of sound. No birds, no insects, no small rustles in the dead weeds. Even the breeze seemed stilled. The peculiar dry cellar-odor of malice habitation wafted faintly up to Fawn, and she swallowed, feeling sickened despite the sun on her back.
“That is the weirdest color I ever did see,” Whit allowed slowly. “It’s not hardly a color at all. Dag was right. It doesn’t look like…anything.”
Fawn nodded, glad Whit seemed to have his wits with him today, because she didn’t think she could have borne stupid jokes right now. “Dag thinks that malice came up from the ground and hatched out right here. Malices all seem to start out pretty much the same, but then they change depending on what they eat. Ground-snatch, that is. If they catch a lot of people, they get to looking more human, but there was one up in Luthlia that mostly ate wolves, that they say grew pretty strange. Dag thinks the first human this one caught must have been a road bandit, hiding out up here, because after it grew its mud-men and caught more folks, it made them all be its bandit gang, at first.” Though some of the men might not have been as mind-slaved as all that, which was in its way an even more disturbing notion. “The bandits who kidnapped me off the road brought me here. Dag was tracking them, and saw.” From here, Dag would certainly have had a clear view of the mud-men carting her in like a sack of stolen grain. “He went in after them—after me—all by himself. No time to wait for his patrol. It wasn’t good odds. But he tossed me his sharing knife, and I managed to get it in the malice. And the malice…” She swallowed again. “Melted. I guess you could say. Malices are immortal, the Lakewalkers claim, but the sharing knives kill them. Kill them in their ground.”
“What are sharing knives, anyhow? Dag keeps mentioning them and then stopping.”
“Yes, well. There are reasons. Lakewalkers make them. Out of Lakewalker bones.”
“So it’s true they rob graves!”
“No! They’re not stolen. Dag—any Lakewalker would get mighty offended to hear you say that. People will their thighbones to their kin to be, be, like, harvested after they die. It’s part of the funeral. Then a Lakewalker knife maker—Dag’s brother Dar is one—cleans and carves and shapes the bone into a knife. They don’t use sharing knives for any other purpose than killing malices.”
“So that’s what you stuck in the malice? Whose thighbone was it, d’you know? Does Dag?”
Fawn supposed gruesome interest was better than none. “Yes, but it’s more complicated than that. Carving the bone itself is only the first step. Then the knife has to be primed. With…with a heart’s death.” She took a breath, not looking at Whit. “That’s the hardest part. Each knife, when it’s made, is bonded to its Lakewalker owner. Someone who has volunteered to share—to donate his or her own death to the knife. When such Lakewalkers think they’re dying, either old and sick or hurt mortal bad, they, they put the knife through their own hearts and capture their deaths. Which are trapped in the knives. So every primed knife costs two Lakewalker lives, one for the bone and the other for the heart’s priming. Ownership is…you can’t buy such a knife. It can only be given to you.”
She glanced up to see Whit squinting and frowning. He said slowly, “So, it’s sort of like…a human sacrifice stuck in a canning jar and preserved, to take out and use later?”
Fawn thought of the long rows of wax-sealed glass jars she and Mama had filled and sealed and set in the pantry only last week. The domestic comparison was apt, but, oh dear. “Pretty much. But I’m not sure you should say that to Dag. Lakewalkers keep their knives private and treat ’em as sacred. It’s their kin, you see. And their grief. But that’s what sharing knives share. Deaths.”
Whit blinked some more, then frowned across the ravine and said, “How far back does that cave go?”
“It’s not deep.”
“Can we go in?”
Fawn wrinkled her nose. “I guess so, if we don’t stay long.”
Whit glanced down the steep drop, nodded, and slid off and tied his horse to a tree. Fawn did the same and followed him in a scramble down the slope. Black shale cracked and slid under her feet. Even the clay dirt in the gully-washes, which should have been dull brown, had that same drained gray tinge. Whit picked his way across the stream on stones, not looking back till he reached the cave mouth, when he turned around to watch her puffing and lagging after him. “Keep up, Runt.”
She was shivering inside too much to growl at the old taunt. She labored up beside him, and the dry, sour malice-smell of the cave hit her full-face. How long till the rains and snows wash this clean? Horridly blithe, he strolled into the shadow of the overhang.
“What a great place to camp this would be! It really looks like it should be a bandit hideout.” He kicked at a broken old keg, part of a scattering of trash no one had bothered to cart away. “So where were you two, exactly? Where was this malice? How far did Dag have to throw his knife? He must not have known you then. It was a wonder you caught it.”
“Here…” Simplify. “The malice picked me up by my neck.” She fingered the dented scars. Here. Here, right here, the malice ripped the ground from my unborn child, poor half-wanted waif, here she died, here Dag was nearly torn apart by howling man-beasts, here I struck, right here the malice screamed and stank and shattered, here sacrifice tangled with sacrifice, here I miscarried, here I hurt, here I started bleeding… “I have to get out of here,” Fawn said aloud. She could not see clearly. She was shaking so badly she could scarcely breathe. There is no simple to be had, here.
“Hey, are you all right?” Whit called as she stumbled out into the air again. There wasn’t enough light in the wide green world to make that cave anything but a pit of darkness, to make her anything but stupid, stupid, stupid… She became aware she was weeping, not sobs, but weird dry gulps.
Whit, trotting after her, said, “Is the blight making you sick? Here, maybe I…I better take you back to Dag, all right?”
She nodded, trying and failing to steady her breathing, which seemed to stagger and stick. She tried to swallow between gulps of air, but her throat was too tight. Whit put a tentative, anxious arm around her waist and half-supported, half-hustled her back down and across the creek. She slipped and put one foot ankle-deep in the stream, gasping at the chill wet, which at least got some more air into her. By the time they reached the ravine’s top and Whit boosted her back up into her saddle, she was only wheezing. Her cheeks were wet, her nose beslimed; she dragged an arm fiercely across her face, and coughed.
When they reached the place where they’d sent Dag back, she looked up through the silver blur to see Copperhead cantering up the trail toward them. Dag pulled up with a jerk that made the gelding shake his head and snort. A black scowl, a brutal voice the like of which she’d never heard before from Dag’s mouth, demanded of Whit, “What did you do to her?”
“Nothing!” said Whit, alarmed. “I didn’t do nothing! She was nattering on about, about this and that, and then all of a sudden she took a fit o’ the vapors! I thought it might be the blight, though I didn’t feel anything like. Here, you take her!”