On a bright day that breathed promise of an early southern spring, Fawn helped Nola and Cerie, the herb master’s apprentices, pack up a handcart to take to the New Moon Camp farmer’s market. The three young women dragged their load around through the sapling gate and down over the hill to the clearing where the horses had been watered that first day. The tree branches were still bare against the cool blue sky, but the buds swelled red, and a few low weeds winked green in the flattened and brownish grass.
It was at last made plain to Fawn why the medicine tent’s kitchen was always so busy. After concocting enough remedies for the needs of the camp, the herb master and his helpers produced yet more for the local trade. Some medicines were not so different from what Fawn’s mama and aunt Nattie compounded, but Maker Levan himself did groundwork on others that made them much more effective and-he seemed to think this an important point-uniform. Unlike the cureall nostrums Fawn had seen hawked in the Drowntown market, which Dag claimed were mostly spirits-you might still be sick, but you’d be too drunk to care, Barr had quipped-the Lakewalkers made limited claims for their medicines. Dewormers for people, horses, cattle, and sheep; effective remedies for bog ague and hookworm, neither plague to be found in West Blue but common here, especially in the long, hot summers; a bitter pain powder from willow bark and poppy just like the northern one Fawn had seen Dag use when his arm had been broken; a tincture of foxglove for bad hearts; a gray powder much trusted by the locals to sprinkle on wounds to fight infection.
In the clearing, a number of Lakewalkers unrolled awnings from under the eaves of the shelter and set up trestle tables beneath them.
Today they offered mostly handwork of a sort Fawn had seen before: fine leathers that would not rot, nearly unbreakable rope and cord, a small but choice selection from the camp blacksmith-tools that would not rust, blades that would hold their edge. Fawn helped the two apprentices lay out the medicine tent’s offerings fetchingly on their table, then they all settled down on upended logs to await their customers.
It wasn’t long. As the sun marked noon, a few farmers began to trickle in to the clearing, some driving rumbling carts or wagons, some with packhorses or mules. It would be a slow day, Nola informed Fawn; the market was busier in the summer, when the roads were better. Most people here on both sides seemed to already know their business, as well as one another’s names, and deals were struck quickly and efficiently, as when two cartloads of fat grain sacks were traded for several kegs of animal dewormer and some sets of unbreakable traces.
A well-sprung wagon drawn by a pretty team of four matched palomino horses swung into the clearing, and five people climbed down: a very well-dressed farmer with streaks of gray in his hair, a maidservant shepherding a small boy, a horseboy, who went immediately to unhitch and rub down the animals, and what had to be the graying man’s wife.
She was half a head taller than he, but equally well dressed, in a traveling skirt, close-fitting jacket, and fine boots, with her sandy hair coiled up in tidy braids. She strode without hesitation to one of the armed patrollers lurking around the edge of the clearing, and spoke to him. After a moment he nodded, if a trifle reluctantly, and trotted away up the road.
“Look! She’s back,” muttered Nola.
“I see,” murmured Cerie.
The little boy grabbed his father’s hand and towed him around the shelter to see the fascinating contents of all the tables. The tall woman glanced over the array and walked straight to the medicine table. Fawn sat up and blinked as she drew closer. Despite her farmer dress, the woman had the fine-boned features and bright silvery-blue eyes of a fullblooded Lakewalker.
She looked down at Fawn, on the other side of the table, with quite as much surprise as Fawn looked up at her.
“Absent gods,” she said, in an amused alto voice. “Is New Moon taking in farmers now? Wonders and marvels!”
“No, ma’am,” said Fawn, raising her chin. She almost touched her temple the way Dag did; then, afraid it might be mistaken for some sort of mockery, gripped her hands in her lap. “I’m just visiting. My husband’s a Lakewalker from Oleana, though, studying groundsetting with Maker Arkady for a stretch.”
“Really!”
Uncertain what the woman’s exclamation meant, Fawn just smiled in what she hoped seemed a friendly way. Then the woman’s eye fell on the cord peeking from Fawn’s left jacket cuff, and her breath drew in.
She leaned forward abruptly, reaching out, then caught herself, straightened, and motioned more politely. “May I see that? That’s a real wedding braid, isn’t it? ”
Fawn pushed back her cuff and laid her arm out on the table. “Yes, ma’am. Dag and I made them for each other back in Oleana.”
The little boy came galloping around the side of the shelter and, suddenly shy, clutched his mother’s skirts and stared at Fawn. The man strolled after, putting his arm possessively around the woman’s waist.
A brief stillness flashed in the woman’s face that hinted at groundsense extended. “How? ” she asked, sounding amazed.
“Dag wove his ground into his in the usual way for Lakewalkers. When we came to mine, we found that my ground would follow my live blood into my braid as I plaited it, and Dag could make it stick.”
“Blood! I never thought of that…”
The man was watching his wife’s profile warily. She glanced sideways at him, raised her chin, and said distinctly, “It doesn’t matter. I don’t need it.” Fawn wasn’t sure what emotion warmed his eyes- pride? relief? In any case, the woman selected some pain powder, some ague remedy, and half their stock of the anti-nausea syrup highly recommended, Fawn had learned, for morning sickness. She paid for it all with good Graymouth coin from a heavy purse, and she and her husband and son returned to the wagon, where the maidservant was setting out a picnic lunch.
“Who was that woman? ” Fawn asked her companions. “She looked like a Lakewalker-is she from here? ”
“She was,” said Nola in a disapproving tone. “She was a patroller, but about ten years back she ran off to marry-if you can call it that-that farmer following her.”
“They say he owns several mills in Moss River City,” Cerie added, nodding toward the wagon, “and built her a house overlooking the river three floors high, with flower gardens that go all the way down to the water.”
“Was she banished? ”
“She should have been,” said Nola. “But her tent didn’t ask it of the camp council.”
“Banishing deserters is a joke,” sighed Cerie. “Hardly any of them come back, so all it means is that their tent-kin can’t speak to them or visit them out there in farmer country. If their kin chase after them and drag them back here, they mostly just leave again at the first chance. And hardly anybody wants to hunt them down and hang them. Some claim if anyone’s that disaffected, it’s better to let them go, before they spread their mood around the camp.”
“Are there very many who leave? ”
Cerie shrugged. “Not really. Maybe a dozen a year? ”
Compared to the Unheard of! at Hickory Lake, that seemed like a lot to Fawn. And if the outward leak was like that at every camp in the south, it would add up. That peeled pole barrier at the camp gate only worked in one direction, it seemed.
In a while, three Lakewalkers appeared from the rutted road, an older woman and two sandy-haired adults. They sat down to the picnic with the Moss River family, speaking quietly. Once, the older woman stood up on her knees and measured the little boy against her shoulder, and said something that made him laugh, and once, the Lakewalker woman in farmer dress put her hand to her belly and gestured, which won strained smiles from the others. At length, the family packed up, made sober farewells, and drove off. The older woman turned her head to watch them out of sight, then the three vanished up the road again.
Fawn’s companions were looking impatiently at the shifting sun and their dwindling stocks of medicines and customers when a light cart drove up to the shelter, drawn by a rather winded mare. As she dropped her head to crop the scant grass, a young man jumped down and fetched out some slat crates. He glanced around, then carried them up to the medicine table and went back for two more. Fawn peeked over to see they were jammed with a jumble of glass jars and bottles packed in clean straw.
Almost as winded as his horse, the fellow set down the last boxes and said, “I’m not too late? Good! I don’t have much coin, but figure what these are worth to you.”
Cerie and Nola actually looked pleased by the offered barter-good glass containers were always in demand in the medicine tent-and circled the table to kneel down and inventory the boxes. The young man’s stare lit on Fawn, and he looked taken aback. “Well, hello there! You’re no Lakewalker!”
“No, sir.” The sir was a trifle flattering, but there was no harm in it.
She recited her well-worn speech, repeated to nearly every buyer they’d had today: “But I’m married to one. My husband is a Lakewalker from Oleana learning medicine making here.”
“Go on! You don’t look old enough to be married to anyone!”
Fawn tried not to glower at a paying customer. She supposed she’d know herself a woman grown when that remark began to be gratifying and not just annoying. “I’m nineteen. People just think I’m younger on account as I’m so short.” She sat up straight, so he could see she was much too curvy to be a child.
“Nineteen!” he repeated. “Oh.” He looked about nineteen himself, fresh-faced, with brown hair and bright blue eyes. He had a wiry build like Whit, but was, of course, taller. “I guess your, um… husband must be pretty important, to get you into the camp. They don’t usually let farmers past their gates here, you know.”
Fawn shrugged. “New Moon hasn’t taken us on as members or anything. We’re just visiting. Dag found me a job here when I ran out of stuff to spin and got to pining for home. He used to be a patroller up Oleana way, but now he feels a calling to be a medicine maker. To farmers,” she added proudly. “No one’s done that before.”
His mouth opened in surprise. “But that’s not possible! Farmers are supposed to go crazy if Lakewalkers use their sorcery on ’em.”
A surprisingly accurate comment, but maybe he was a near neighbor and so less ill-informed than most.
“Dag thinks he’s cracked beguilement, figured out how to make that not happen.” She added honestly, “He’s still working out whether or not it’ll do something bad to the Lakewalker. He’s just a beginner as far as medicine making goes. But he figures, if he can make it work… His notion is that Oleana farmers need to learn a lot more about Lakewalkers, on account as we have so many more malice-blight bogle- outbreaks up our way, and it’s dangerous for folks to remain so ignorant. He figures healing would give him a straight road to teaching people.”
“Are there really-are the bogles really bad, up that way? ”
“No, because the Oleana patrol keeps ’em down, but their job could stand to be made easier.”
The young man rubbed his mouth. “A couple of my friends keep talking about walking the Trace, maybe moving up to Oleana. Is it true there’s free land there, just for the taking? ”
“Well, you got to register your claim with whatever village clerk is closest, and then clear the trees and rocks and pull the stumps. There’s land for the back-busting working of it, yes. Two of my brothers are homesteading that way, right up on the edge of the great woods the Lakewalkers still hold. My oldest brother’ll get our papa’s farm, of course.”
“Yeah, mine, too,” sighed the young man. He added after a moment, “My name’s Finch Bridger, by the way. My parents’ place is about ten miles that way.” He pointed roughly southeast.
“I’m Fawn Bluefield,” returned Fawn.
“How de’!” He stuck out a friendly, work-hardened hand; Fawn shook it and smiled back. He added after a moment, “Aren’t the winters tough in Oleana? ”
“Nothing like so bad as north of the Dead Lake, Dag says. You prepare for it. Lay in your food and fodder and firewood, make warm clothes.”
“Is there snow? ”
“Of course.”
“I’ve never seen snow here but once, and it was gone by noon. In these parts, we mostly just have cold rain, instead.”
“We have some nice quiet times in winter. And it’s fun to have the sleigh out. Papa puts bells on the harnesses.” An unexpected spasm of homesickness shot through Fawn at the recollection.
“Huh,” Finch said, evidently trying to picture this. “That sounds nice.”
Nola and Cerie finished their count and came back around the table, and Finch dug in his pockets to lay out a few supplemental coins. “Let me know how far this goes… I need this, and this… and I can’t leave without this, or I’ll be skinned.”
He took up all their remaining stock of anti-nausea medicine. Fawn raised her eyebrows. “You don’t look old enough to be married, either.”
“Huh? Oh.” He blushed. “That’s for my sister-in-law. She’s increasing, again, and she’s so sick she can barely hold her head up. That’s why I was let off chores to drive over here today.”
“Well, that nice syrup’s bound to help her keep her food down and get her strength back. It doesn’t even taste bad, for medicine.” Fawn sure wished she’d had some, back when. She banished the bleak memory.
Her own child had been lost to her before becoming much more than a sick stomach and a social disaster; she had no call to picture her as a bright-eyed little girl the size of that Lakewalker woman’s half-blood child.
The Bridger boy packed his medicines carefully on his cart, then made two trips to a table on the other side of the shelter, lugging half a dozen bulging sacks like overstuffed pillowcases. Fawn didn’t see what he’d acquired in return, but he circled back to her table with a similar sack, scantly filled. He thrust it at her. “Here. You can have this.”
Fawn peeked in to find several pounds of washed cotton. “What else do you need? I don’t know how to value this.” She glanced to Nola for help.
“Nothing. It’s a present.”
“For me? ” said Fawn, surprised.
He nodded jerkily.
“I can’t take this off you!”
“It was leftover. No point in hauling it back home again.”
“Well… thanks!”
He nodded again. “Well. Um. It was nice talking to you, Fawn Bluefield. I sure hope everything works out for you. When are you starting back north? ”
“I don’t hardly know, yet. It all depends on Dag.”
“Um. Oh. Sure.” He hovered uncertainly, as if wanting to say more, but then glanced at the sun, smiled at her again, and tore himself away.
At the end of another half hour, the last farmer bought the last item left on their table, a jar of purple ointment meant for cuts on horses’ knees, and rode off. All three girls helped the remaining Lakewalkers take down the trestles and roll up the awnings. Cerie and Nola were cheerful at having a good haul of coin to show for the day, as well as the valued glass. They trundled the handcart, reloaded with all their barter, back up the rutted road. Fawn glanced back over her shoulder at the tidied clearing, thinking, This place isn’t quite what it looked at first glance.
Was anywhere? She remembered the little river below the West Blue farm in winter. All hard, rigid ice, seeming utterly still-but with water running underneath secretly eroding its strength until, one day, it all cracked and washed away in ragged lumps. How close were these southern Lakewalker camps to cracking apart like that? It was an unsettling notion.
–-
Dag was watching Fawn unpack the day’s lunch basket on the round table when the distant clanging of a bell echoed through the quiet noon.
Arkady shot to his feet, dropping his bread and cheese, though he managed one gulp of hot tea before saying to Dag, “Come on.” And, after a fractional hesitation, “You, too, Fawn.”
They sprinted up the road to the medicine tent. Arkady fell to a rapid gasping walk as they found themselves crowding up behind a makeshift litter being maneuvered through the door. He grabbed Dag’s arm.
“I thought I’d have at least another week to drill you,” he muttered.
“Never mind, you’ll do. Come along, do exactly what I tell you, and don’t hesitate. Drop that hook, it’ll just get in the way.”
“What about my contaminated ground? ”
“For the next half hour, we have more urgent worries.”
Dag rolled up his sleeve and worked on his buckles, following after.
He’d recognized the pregnant woman on the litter and her tent-kin carrying it almost as fast as Arkady had, because he’d visited her daily in Arkady’s wake.
Somewhat to Dag’s discomfiture, Arkady had dragged him along to every childbirth in New Moon Cutoff Camp since his arrival. As a terrified young patroller, Dag had once delivered a child on the Great North Road under the direction of its irate but fortunately experienced mother, so he was long past mere embarrassment, but he still felt an intruder in these women’s tents. Two births had progressed quite normally, and Dag had been given no tasks but to sit quietly, listen to Arkady instruct him, and try not to loom. In the third, the child had to be shifted into better position inside its mother’s body, which Arkady accomplished with a combination of handwork, groundwork, and, Dag was almost certain, lecturing it.
It was all a much more complicated process than Dag had imagined.
What, did you think women were stuffed with straw in there? Arkady had inquired tartly. And gone on to explain that about once a year, all the medicine makers’ apprentices in the area were assembled to witness a human dissection, when someone gifted their body to the purpose, at which all the shifting, sparkling ground the young makers directly perceived was mapped to the secret physical structures that generated it.
Arkady promised, or threatened, to make sure Dag observed the next such demonstration. But today Dag would glimpse inside a body still alive. Maybe.
Tawa Killdeer’s complication horrified Dag. The mysterious, nourishing placenta had grown across the mouth of her womb, instead of up a side as it was supposed to. Her labor must rip apart the supporting organ long before the child could emerge to breathe; without aid, the result would be a dead blue infant and a mother swiftly bleeding to death. The proposed treatment was drastic: to cut the child directly from its mother’s belly. The chance of saving the child this way was good; the mother, poor; without groundwork, impossible. But Dag now realized why Arkady had pushed him so hard learning to control blood flow in their practice sessions.
Tawa’s kin, Challa, and Arkady all helped shift the pregnant woman up onto the waist-high bed in the bright far room. Challa was already washing her straining belly with grain spirits as her sister pulled off her clothing. A wad of cloth between her legs was bright with blood.
She didn’t have a bonded sharing knife with her, nor did any of her kin carry one. A northern woman would have…
“Here, Dag,” snapped Arkady. “Open yourself. Down and in.” He grabbed Dag’s left arm and positioned it over Tawa’s lower belly. The room tilted away; before Dag shut his eyes to concentrate on Tawa’s ground, he had one glimpse of her pale face, her set jaw stifling outcry.
Her sister held one white-knuckled hand, her frightened husband the other, and Challa’s boy coaxed her clenching teeth apart to insert a leather strap for her to bite. The last time Dag had seen a look like that was on the face of a fellow patroller closing on a malice. Staring down death, eyes defiantly wide open.
Arkady’s voice in his ear: “Placenta’s parting too soon and bleeding underneath. Let your left-side ground projection sink down and in. Spread it as far as you can. Hold pressure just like stopping any other bleeding wound, but you’re working from the inside out. Good…”
Dag shaped his ghost hand like a broad lily pad, pressing against the inside of Tawa’s womb. His right-side projection as well, from the opposite direction, providing counterpressure. The flow of blood between her legs slowed to a trickle. From the corner of one eye, barely open, he saw Challa lean in, the flash of a sharp knife, felt as well as saw flesh part.
Two cuts, one of the abdominal wall, a second of the womb itself. Arkady worked across from her, following the blade with his ground-hands, stemming bleeding. Dag caught a glimpse of a tiny, slick purple body sliding out from the cut feetfirst, the flash of the infant’s distressed but alive ground. Other hands took it from Challa. Choking noises, a thin wail.
“One down, one to go,” Arkady muttered.
Tawa’s pain and fear flooded Dag’s ground, which he had matched to hers as closely as a man’s could match a woman’s. He thought of the look on her face and endured. He’d soaked up the like before, in roughand- ready treatment of patroller injuries on the trail. The sister and husband also partitioned the load of pain and stress, the sharing rendering it more bearable to Tawa; the senior makers had mastered the trick of closing grounds to pain but not to the person, and worked on steadily.
Dag hoped the pair was watching out for potential group groundlock.
The sharing wasn’t bearable to everyone. The two herb master’s apprentices had been holding down Tawa’s ankles. One was now headdown in the corner, sobbing, fighting black faintness, her ground snapped shut; her place had been taken over by a dogged-looking Fawn.
She grinned back at the glint of his eye, scared, determined-confident in him. Dag remembered to breathe.
“Now,” Arkady murmured in Dag’s ear, “you have to let go the placenta without letting go the pressure, so we can get it out of there and close up. Let your projection slip down through the tissues… a little tug on the cord, oh good, we have it all… that’s right… hold…”
Arkady and Challa together closed the inner cut, he weaving tissues back together in a fragile splice, she setting strong reinforcements. Then the abdominal wall, the support here applied physically, with curved needle and stitches. More washing of the wrinkled, flaccid belly with grain spirits, then dry cloths and dressings. Tawa’s chest heaved, tears of pain dripped down her temples, but her eyes flashed and she nodded weakly as her sister displayed a blanket-wrapped and red-faced little girl to her. Her husband was weeping unashamed, overwhelmed. You blighted should be, Dag thought, not disapprovingly.
A small eternity passed before Arkady murmured in Dag’s ear again: “Ease up gradually, let’s see where we are. The vessels in the womb wall should close on their own at this stage-it’s their good trick. Ah. Yes. It looks like they’re behaving…”
Slowly, Dag withdrew his ghost hands. The broad, natural wound left by the placenta within Tawa was raw but only oozing slightly. She stifled a cry as his breaking ground-match returned her pain to her. He backed away, and the kinswomen closed in to take care of the rest of the cleanup.
Dag blinked, aware again of his shivering body, cold as clay. Fawn appeared under his shoulder. They made it through the room’s other door and out onto the bright porch before he bent over the rail and heaved. The sun, strangely, still seemed to be at noon. Dag felt as though it ought to be sunset.
Arkady came out and handed him a cup of hot tea with a hand that shook slightly. “Here.”
Dag clutched it and sipped gratefully. Arkady lowered himself to a seat against the wall, warmed by the nearly springlike sun, and Dag sat beside him, with Fawn on folded knees at Dag’s other side.
“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.
Her mouth set mulishly. “Promise me anyway.”
“I promise, Spark.” He kissed those lips to soften them.
After, she drew back to search his eyes, then nodded. “You’d best believe it.”