And if it really was the last time, well, he still had his bonded knife slung around his neck, didn’t he? Formerly when he was in desperate straits that thought had calmed and heartened him, in a bleak sort of way. Not tonight. I want Fawn, I want our baby, I want, I want… I want life. Years and decades and heaping plattersful more of life. It was not too much to ask. “For pity’s sake,” he whispered.
He tried to compose himself enough to muster a persuasion, or more than one, unfit for groundwork of any kind though he was in this distraction. But then he saw the hesitation in Sage’s face, and waited, one heartbeat, two, three.
“Maybe it’ll settle him down,” Sage said.
Dag quelled a howl of agreement, Yes, yes! Made his voice humble, mollified. “It’s all I want. Please.”
Bo’s brow wrinkled. Finch’s mouth twisted in doubt.
Ash, whose size had made him the victim of every cry of Need some help liftin’, here! since they’d left Alligator Hat, sighed, and said sadly, “All right. I’ll dig.”
–-
There was only the one shovel, belonging to the muleteer who’d belted Dag with it, and who gave it up dubiously. But even with the three southern boys to take it in turns, it would be agonizing minutes before they uncovered the hopes they had so prematurely buried. More frantic urging to Be careful! would do nothing but re-convince them that Dag was mad. Since he was terrified that they might yet stop short, and he couldn’t watch without screaming, he took himself across the clearing to see Whit and Berry, limping so stiffly that even Bo hurried to put a helping hand under his elbow. Dag did not protest.
His Bluefield tent-kin were laid out together on a thin blanket, just at the edge of the circle of firelight. Hawthorn crouched by his big sister and brother-in-law, looking forlorn; he shuffled back as Dag approached.
Berry, muzzy and weak, levered herself up onto one elbow.
Dag knelt awkwardly by her side. From this distance, now that he’d settled a bit, he could at last see what was going on. The pair had not, as he had first thought, been partially ripped by the malice, a crippling unpleasantness of which Dag had firsthand experience. Or… not exactly.
But their shields had closed down so tightly under the impact of the malice’s attempt to do so that their grounds were actually partially withdrawn from their bodies, drained from their extremities into quivering, defensive balls.
Dag huffed in astonishment and fascination, and reached to grasp Berry’s walnut pendant and pull it over her head. She whimpered in protest.
“No, it’s all right. It’s done its work.” Not only done, but nearly drained. The thinning groundwork was close to failure. In a few more hours, it would likely have fallen apart, freeing her ground from its shell, leaving her exhausted but alive. As he coaxed its cord from her hair, the deep connection pulled reluctantly apart in sheets like maple syrup just turning to sugar, and her ground flooded back out into its normal form, congruent with her skin.
Berry took a ragged breath, raising her hands to clutch her head.
“Oh.” She struggled to sit up. “What was that? Oh, Dag, what a night we’ve had! Whit-” She turned urgently to her unconscious young husband.
“Just a moment.” Dag half crawled around them. He stole a moment to study the effect of the other walnut shield. It, too, had held against the malice’s attempt at ground-ripping, but was clamped even more tightly. And was very close to failure. Whit wasn’t going to be his friskiest after it released, but his abused ground would recover in a few days.
I trust. Dag drew Whit’s braided cord over his head in turn, and felt the link shear apart.
Whit groaned, and mumbled, “I feel awful. Bo, what did I drink? ”
His gluey eyes peeled open to stare without comprehension up at Dag.
Blinked. Came abruptly to awareness. “Dag! You’re here! The malice- Fawn-she carved up your knife, put feathers on it-”
“We got the malice, Whit!” Berry told him.
“Did we…? Yes, I remember. Its wings blew off, wildest thing- Dag, your shields! They must have worked!” Whit felt all down his body as if surprised to find it still attached to his head.
“Yes, though it seems they still need some refinin’. You just rest, patroller boy. You’ve done your job.”
Whit settled back, pleased. “Hey, I did, didn’t I? Heh. Wait’ll Barr and Remo hear about this!”
And a great many others besides. Two dozen people had witnessed Fawn’s farmer patrol shoot down the terrifying malice. Dag suspected that this was one tale he wouldn’t have to labor to get across to folks. It would fly on wings.
Whit’s and Berry’s voices tumbled over each other to tell him the story of the past rough night, of all they’d done from the time they’d been driven away from the mind-captured company till their dawn ambush of the bat-malice. Dag barely listened, his groundsense straining toward the grave. If Fawn’s shield failed before she was unearthed, releasing her ground back into a body buried alive… That certainly would have happened, Dag thought, sometime before tomorrow morning.
Absent gods, and he’d almost let Arkady talk him into spending the night on the mountain. Don’t scream, don’t scream.
At the mound, the boys had stopped digging with the shovel and were leaning in, reaching down with their arms. Working something stiff and small up out of the soil. Dag found his stick and pushed to his feet again, turning hastily away from Whit’s urging that he go look for the fallen wings, and Berry’s woozy, belated query of, Hey, where’s Fawn?
Dag fell to his knees beside the opened pit in time to receive his wife in his arms, Ash’s face looming in sympathetic sorrow. She was every bit as stiff and cool as a real corpse, he had to allow the farmer boys that much. Her powerful shield had drawn her ground in deeply, centered on head, spine, chest, and especially belly. There’d been no shroud to wrap her in-she’d been buried in her shirt and shoes and riding trousers-but absent gods be thanked, someone had donated an old handkerchief to spread across her face. It lay dimpled and moist across her mouth and nostrils, which at least were not packed and blocked with dirt. He pulled the cloth away. Her face was set, her lips much too pale, but not the drained lavender yellow of a corpse’s. Her closed eyes were undamaged, the lids traced with the pale violet lines of her veins beneath the delicate skin, her black lashes lying in a curving fan above her cheekbones.
His hand shaking so much he could hardly get a grip, Dag found the walnut and drew it over her head. Its cord caught in her dark curling hair, thick with dirt clumps, and he had to stop a moment lest he tear away strands of her hair, too, in his terror. Gently, gently… the bond sheeted apart the way Whit’s and Berry’s had, and he flung the walnut from him with enough force to make it bounce halfway across the clearing.
Her rigidity changed under his hand to a shuddering stretch. He bent his head and kissed her forehead, cheekbones, all over her face, but not her mouth, for she needed that to take a sudden breath, then another, and another, long gulps of air. Color flooded back into her face, and his world. The lashes fluttered faintly…
–-
There had been voices in the darkness, distant, as though heard from the other side of time.
The poor little thing!
Oh, the pity of it…
It’s almost a blessing, that he’s gone first.
Yeah, he wouldn’t of took this well…
She’d wondered, in muzzy indignation before the voices faded out of hearing, where were her congratulations?