“It was throwing you off the deep end of the dock, but I’m glad you were here today. We don’t often beat those odds,” said Arkady.
He didn’t, Dag noticed, accuse him of inelegant inefficiency this round. “Will Tawa live? ”
“If infection doesn’t set in. I’ll send everyone who can give ground reinforcements down to her tent in turns over the next couple of days.”
He added after a moment, “You kept your head well, patroller. Usually my apprentices get wobbly, first time we have to open up someone with knives.”
“I expect I’m older than your usual apprentice.” Dag hesitated. “And I’ve opened up folks with knives before, but never to save their lives.”
“Ah.” Arkady sipped.
Dag shared a swallow from his cup with Fawn, and thought about the other complications of childbearing Arkady had described to him.
The placenta tearing away from the womb wall prematurely, hiding lethal bleeding till too late; babies turned the wrong way ’round pinching off their own cords; a child too large to pass its mother’s pelvis. Without groundwork, farmer midwives sometimes had to break such a child inside its mother and draw it out dead. Even with groundwork that was sometimes the only way. “How do you make such choices? When it’s one life or the other?” Dag wondered if Arkady understood his question was practical, not despairing.
Arkady shook his head. “Best chance, usually. It varies, and often you can’t know till it’s right up on you.” He hesitated. “There is one other you should know about. And it’s not a choice.
“Sometimes-very rarely, fortunately-the placenta doesn’t implant in the womb at all, but roots in that little tube that runs from the sparkling organ down to it. A child can’t live or be born from there. Instead it grows till it rips the mother apart from the inside, and she dies of the bleeding and rotting. The pain is dreadful, and the fear. It’s not a quick death, nor a merciful one. What you must do if confronted with one of these is to immediately strip the life-ground from the conception.
You don’t let the mother or kin argue with you. You may be able to coax the material fragments down into the womb to be flushed out in her next monthly, though often by the time you see it, the tube is ruptured already, and all you can do is lay in ground reinforcements and hope the body will clean up the mess itself.”
“Ground-rip,” said Dag through dry lips. “Like a malice.” Like what the Glassforge malice had done to Fawn’s child; by her set face, he saw she realized this too.
“Ground-strip,” said Arkady, “like a groundsetter. In forty years I’ve only seen this three times, and thank the absent gods that the first time I was with my own mentor, who talked me through it. I could not have done it else.”
“So that ground… would end up in me.”
“Just like your experiments with food, I’m afraid, yes. It’s quickly absorbed.” But not, it seemed, quickly forgotten, judging by the bleak shadows rippling through Arkady’s bright ground.
Dag took a swallow of tea against his rising gorge. Fawn pried the cup from his fingers and took one herself, possibly for the same reason.
“I’ve never been sure,” said Arkady, “if I wanted to pray I’d never encounter one of those again, or pray that the next woman would at least encounter me. In time.”
Dag had always known that senior medicine makers kept secrets of their craft not discussed with outsiders. He was beginning to see why. “I always thought medicine making would be less harrowing than patrolling.”
“Today was happy.” Arkady finished his tea and grunted to his feet.
“Hold on to that.”
Dag followed suit. For the first time, he wondered why the brilliant Arkady was wifeless. Since he’d arrived at New Moon, he’d been too blighted busy to notice that inexplicable absence. He would ask Challa, he decided. Some other time. Because there were certain possible answers he wasn’t up to hearing, just now.
–-
Two nights later Dag sat with Arkady at the round table and armwrestled himself. Or at least, tested his right-side ground projection against his left. The left side always won, which was a bit boring. He glanced at Fawn, sitting by the fire and spinning up a bag of cotton she’d acquired at the farmer’s market, and thought he could devise a better practice drill and go to bed early with her at the same time, very efficient.
Arkady cleared his throat as the projections failed under Dag’s inattention. But before Dag could recover himself, a knock sounded at the door. Arkady nodded, and Dag rose to answer it.
Two people, his half-furled groundsense told him. But without urgency, unlike most night knocks for Arkady. He opened the door to find, to his surprise, Tawa Killdeer’s husband and sister.
“How de’, folks! Come on in.”
The sister shook her head. “We can’t stay. But the Killdeer tent wanted you to have this, Dag.” She thrust a long narrow bundle wrapped in hemmed cloth into his hand. “We heard you were in want of one.”
Heard from who? Dag felt through the wrapping and knew the contents at once.
“Tawa’s great-uncle left it to the tent a year or so back,” explained the husband. “He was an exchange patroller to the north, back in his youth.”
“Well-thank you!” It was hardly a gift he could refuse, even if he’d wanted to. Which he did not. A diffident smile turned his lips. “Thank your tent, and Tawa.”
“We will.” New father and new aunt walked away into the chilly night, happy, unbereaved.
Yes, thought Dag, his hand closing on the gift.
He brought the bundle to the table and unwrapped it in the lantern light. Fawn came to his shoulder, smiling at his smile. As the human thighbone was revealed, her smile faded. Dag ran his hand along the smooth length: clean, dried, cured, and ready to carve into a knife blank. Strong, too; bones donated by the very old were often too fragile to carve. Someone had scratched the donor’s name and tent-name into the far end with a pin. That part of the bone would be cut away when the tip was shaped to a malice-killing point. Dag would burn the name on the finished blade’s side, he decided, so that it would not be lost to memory.
In a distant and somewhat strained voice, Fawn said, “You going to make that up into a knife? ”
“Yes. Maker Vayve as much as said if I could get a bone she’d help me.” Which was not a lesson to be scorned-in either direction.
“And bond to it? ”
“Yes.” He stroked the smooth surface. “It’s an honorable gifting. It feels right, see. For something that intimate, you want it to feel right.”
Crane’s bones, for example, buried with him on the banks of the Grace, would have felt… well, Dag wasn’t just sure what they’d have felt like to a stranger, but they would have given him the horrors.
Fawn bit her lip, drew breath. “I know that’s a thing you wanted, and I can’t say nay to it. But… promise me you’ll not prime that thing while I’m still aboveground and breathing!”
“I’m not likely to, Spark.” But after she… That doesn’t bear thinking about. In the natural course of events, it was likely they’d both grow old together.
“I was just remembering that horrid ballad.”
“Which horrid ballad? ”
“The one about the two patrollers.”
That still didn’t narrow the choices much, but he realized which one she meant-a dramatic tale in which two partners, separated from their patrol, found a dangerous malice. Neither carried a primed knife, but both bore bonded ones. The argument over which self-sacrificing loon was to share on the spot and which was to carry the news back to the grieving widow or betrothed, depending, had taken three heartwrenching stanzas. It was a popular song in the north; people danced to it. Not that similar events had never happened in real life, but Dag suspected the circumstances were not so tidy.
“It was just a song,” he protested.