“Couldn’t you use a lot of animals?”

“No.”

“Has it been tried?”

Dar frowned harder. “Animals don’t work. Farmers don’t work either.” His lips drew back unkindly. “I’ll leave you to make the connection.”

Fawn set her teeth, beginning to have an inkling about the piglet insult.

Dag gave his brother a grim warning look, but put in, “It’s not just a question of power, although that’s part of it. It’s also a question of affinity.”

“Affinity?” Fawn wrinkled her nose. “Never mind. What happened to my—to Dag’s other knife?” She nodded to it.

Dar sighed, as if he was not quite sure of what he was about to say. “You have to understand, a malice is a mage. It comes out of the ground, sessile and still in its first molt, a more powerful mage than any of us alone will ever be, and just gets stronger after. So. First, this malice snatched the ground of your unborn child.”

Fawn’s spirits darkened in memory. “Yes. Mari said no one had known malices could do that separately. Is that important?” It would be consoling if that horror had at least bought some key bit of knowledge that might help someone later.

Dar shrugged. “It’s not immediately clear to me that it makes any practical difference.”

“Why do malices want babies?”

He held out his hand and turned it over. “It’s the inverse of what the sharing knives share. Children unborn, and to a lesser extent, young, are in the most intense possible period of self-making of the most complex of grounds. Malices building up to a molt—to a major self-making, or self-remaking—seem to crave that food.”

“Couldn’t it steal from pregnant animals?”

Dar raised a brow. “If it wanted to molt into an animal body instead of a human one, perhaps.”

“They can and do,” Dag put in. “The Wolf Ridge malice couldn’t get enough humans, so it partly used wolves as well. I was told by patrollers who were in on the knifing of it that its form was pretty…pretty strange, at the end, and it was well past its first molt.”

Fawn made a disturbed face. So, she noticed, did Dar.

Dar continued, “Anyway. Secondly, you drove Dag’s unprimed knife into the thing.”

Fawn nodded. “Its thigh. He said, anywhere. I didn’t know.”

“Then—leaving that knife in place, right…?”

“Yes. That was when the bogle—the malice—picked me up the second time, by the neck. I thought it was going to shake me apart like a chicken.”

Dar glanced at her scars, and away. “Then you drove in the actual primed knife.”

“I figured I’d better be quick. It broke.” Fawn shivered in the remembered terror, and Dag’s left arm tightened around her. “I thought I’d ruined it. But then the malice dropped me and…and sort of melted. It stank.”

“Simplest explanation,” said Dar crisply. “A person carrying something very valuable to them who trips and falls, tries to fall so as to protect their treasure, even at the cost of hurting themselves. Malice snatches rich ground. Seconds later, before the malice has assimilated or stored that ground, it’s hit with a dose of mortality. In its fall, it blindly tries to shove that ground into a safe spot for it: the unprimed knife. A malice certainly has the power to do so by force and not persuasion. End result, one dissolved malice, one knife with an unintended ground jammed into it.” Dar sucked his lip. “More complicated explanations might be possible, but I haven’t heard anything in your testimony that would require them.”

“Hm,” said Dag. “So will it still work as a sharing knife, or not?”

“The ground in it is…strange. It was caught and bound at a point of most intense self-making and most absolute self-dissolution, simultaneously. But still, only a farmer’s ground after all.” He glanced up sharply. “Unless there’s something about the child no one is telling me. Mixed blood, for example?” His look at his brother was coolly inquiring and not especially respectful.

“It was a farmer child,” Fawn said quietly, looking at the soil. It was bare at the base of the steps, with a few broken hickory husks flattened into the old mud. Dag’s arm tightened silently around her again.

“Then it will have no affinity, and is useless. An unprimed knife that gets contaminated can be boiled clean and rededicated, sometimes, but not this. My recommendation is that you break it to release that worthless farmer ground, burn it—or send the pieces back to Kauneo’s kin with whatever explanation you can concoct that won’t embarrass you—and start over with a new knife.” His voice softened. “I’m sorry, Dag. I know you didn’t carry this for twenty years for such a futile end. But, you know, it happens that way sometimes.”

Fawn looked up at Dar. “I’ll have that back, now,” she said sturdily. She held out her hand.

Dar gave Dag an inquiring look, found no support, and reluctantly handed the sheathed knife back to Fawn.

“A lot of knives never get used,” said Dag, in a would-be casual tone. “I see no special need of rushing to dispose of this one. If it serves no purpose intact, it serves no more destroyed.”

Dar grimaced. “What will you keep it for, then? A wall decoration? A gruesome memento of your little adventure?”

Dag smiled down at Fawn; she wondered what her own face looked like just now. It felt cold. He said, “It had one use, leastways. It brought us together.”

“All the more reason to break it,” said Dar grimly.

Fawn thought back on Dag’s offer of the same act, way back at the Horsefords’ farmhouse. We could have saved a lot of steps. How could two such apparently identical suggestions feel like utter opposites? Trust and untrust. She hoped she could get Dag alone soon, and ask him whether he accepted his brother’s judgment, or only some part of it, or none, or if they should seek another maker. There was no clue in his face. She hid the knife away again in her shirt.

Dag stood and stretched, rolling his shoulders. “It’s about dinnertime, I expect. You want to come watch, Dar, or hide out here?”

Fawn began to wish she and Dag could hide out here. Well—she eyed the bones hung from the eaves swinging in the freshening breeze—maybe not just here. But somewhere.

“Oh, I’ll come,” said Dar, rising to collect his carving knife and the finished bowls and take them inside. “Might as well get it over with.”

“Optimist,” said Dag, stepping aside for him as he trod up the steps.

Fawn caught a glimpse of a tidy workroom, a very orderly bench with carving tools hung above it, and a small fieldstone fireplace in the wall opposite the door. Dar came back out fastening his shirt, entirely insensible of the ease with which his buttons cooperated with his fingers, latched the door, and passed efficiently around the shack closing the shutters.

The green light of the woods was growing somber as scudding dark clouds from the northwest filled the sky above. The staccato pop of falling nuts sounded like Dag’s joints on a bad morning. Fawn clung to Dag’s left arm as they started back up the path. His muscles were tight. She lengthened her steps to match his, and was surprised to find she didn’t have to lengthen them very much.