“A spent knife, if it’s recovered, is usually given back to the kin of the bone’s donor, or if that can’t be done, burned on a little pyre. It’s been twenty years, but…Kauneo should have kin up in Luthlia who remember her. I still have her uncle Kaunear’s bone, too, back home in my trunk—hadn’t quite got round to arranging for it when this Raintree storm blew in on us. I should send them both up to Luthlia in a courier pouch, with a proper letter telling everyone what their sacrifices have bought. That would be best, I think.”

She nodded gravely and extended a finger to gently roll a shard over. “In the end, this did do more than just bring us together, despite what Dar said about the farmer ground being worthless. Because of your making that redeemed it. I’m—not glad, exactly, there’s not much glad about this—satisfied, I think. Dar said—”

He hoisted himself up and stopped her lips with a kiss. “Don’t worry about what Dar says. I don’t.”

“Don’t you?” She frowned. “But—wasn’t he right, about the affinity?”

Dag shrugged. “Well…it would have been strange if he weren’t. Knives are his calling. I’m not at all sure he was right about the other, though.”

“Other?”

“About how your babe’s ground got into my knife.”

Her black eyebrows curved up farther.

He lay back again, raising his hand to hover across from his stump as a man would hold his two hands some judicious distance apart. “It was just a quick impression, you understand, when I was unmaking the knife’s involution and releasing the mortal ground. I couldn’t prove it. It was all gone in the instant, and only I saw. But…there was more than one knife stuck in that malice at that moment back at Glassforge. And there is more than one sort of ground affinity. There was a link, a channel…because the one knife was Kauneo’s marrowbone, see, and the other was her heart’s death. Knives don’t take up souls, if there is such a thing, but each one has a, a flavor of its donor. I expect she died wanting and regretting, well, a lot of things, but I know a child was one. I wouldn’t dare say this to anyone else, but I’ll swear it to you. It wasn’t the malice pushed that ground into Kauneo’s bone. I think it was given shelter.”

Fawn sat back, her lips parting in wonder. Her eyes were huge and dark, winking liquid that reflected the candlelight in shimmers.

He added very quietly, “If it was a gift from the grave, it’s the strangest I ever heard tell of, but…she liked youngsters. She would have saved ’em all, if she could.”

Fawn whispered, “She’s not the only one, seemingly.” And rolled over into his arms, and hugged him tight. Then sat up on her elbow, and said, most seriously, “Tell me more about her.”

And, to his own profound astonishment, he did.

It came in a spate, when it came. To speak easily of Kauneo at last, to repossess such a wealth of memory from the far side of pain, was as beyond all expectation as claiming a stolen treasure returned after years. As miraculous as getting back a missing limb. And his tears, when they fell, seemed not sorrow, but grace.

16

F or the next couple of days Dag seemed willing to rest as instructed, to Fawn’s approval, although she noticed he seemed less fidgety and fretful when she sat by him. Saun had stayed on, with Griff for his partner; Varleen replaced Dirla as Mari’s partner. There were not too many camp chores for Fawn’s hands, everyone having pretty much caught up with their cleaning and mending in the prior days, though she did spend some time out with the younger patrollers working on, or playing with, the horses. Grace hadn’t gone lame, though Fawn thought it had been a near thing. The mare was certainly recovering faster than Dag. Fawn suspected Lakewalkers used their healing magic on their horses; if not officially, certainly on the sly.

On the third day, the heavy heat was pushed on east by a cracking thunderstorm. The tree branches bent and groaned menacingly overhead, and leaves turned inside out and flashed silver. The patrollers ended up combining their tent covers—except for the one hide that blew off into the woods like a mad bat—on Dag and Fawn’s sapling frame, and clustering underneath. The nearby creek rose and ran mud-brown and foam-yellow as the blow subsided into a steady vertical downpour. By unspoken mutual assent, they all eased back and just watched it, passing around odd bits of cold food while their cook-fire pit turned into an opaque gray puddle.

Griff produced a wooden flute and instructed Saun on it for a time. Fawn recognized maybe half of the sprightly tunes. In due course Griff took it back and played a long, eerie duet with the rain, Varleen and Saun supplying muted percussion with sticks and whatever pots they had to hand. Dag and Mari seemed satisfied to listen.

Everyone went back to nibbling. Dag, who had been lying slumped against his saddlebags with his eyes closed, pushed himself slightly more upright, adjusted his left leg, and asked Saun suddenly, “You know the name of that farmer town the malice was supposed to have come up under?”

“Greenspring,” Saun replied absently, craning his neck through the open, leeward side of their shelter to look, in vain, for a break in the clouds.

“Do you know where it is? Ever been there?”

“Yeah, couple of times. It’s about twenty-five miles northwest of Bonemarsh.” He sat back on his saddlecloth and gestured vaguely at the opposite shelter wall.

Dag pursed his lips. “That must be, what, pretty nearly fifty miles above the old cleared line?”

“Nearly.”

“How was it ever let get started, up so far? It wasn’t there in my day.”

Saun shrugged. “Some settlement’s been there for as long as I’ve been alive. Three roads meet, and a river. There were a couple of mills, if I remember rightly. Sawmill first. Later, when there got to be more farms around it, they built one for grain. Blacksmith, forge, more. We’d stopped in at the blacksmith a few times, though they weren’t too friendly to patrollers.”

“Why not?” asked Fawn, willing to be indignant on Saun’s behalf.

“Old history. First few times farmers tried to settle up there, the Raintree patrollers ran them off, but they snuck back. Worse than pulling stumps, to try and get farmers off cleared land. On account of all the stumps they had to pull to clear it, I guess. There finally got to be so many of them, and so stubborn, it would have taken bloodshed to shift ’em, and folks gave up and let ’em stay on.”

Dag frowned.

Saun pulled his knees up and wrapped his arms around them in the damp chill. “Fellow up there once told me Lakewalkers were just greedy, to keep such prime farming country for a hunting reserve. That his people could win more food from it with a plow than we ever could with bows and traps.”

“What we hunt, they could not eat,” growled Mari.

“That’s the same fellow who told me blight bogles were a fright story made up by Lakewalkers to keep farmers off,” Saun added a bit grimly. “You wonder where he is now.”

Griff and Varleen shook their heads. Fawn bit her lip.

Dag wound a finger in his hair, pulling gently on a strand. He was overdue for another cut, Fawn thought, unless he meant to grow it out like his comrades. “I want to look at the place before we head home.”

Griff’s brow furrowed. “That’d be a good three days out of our way, Dag.”

“Maybe only two, if we jog up and catch the northern road again.” He added after a moment, “We could leave here two days early and be home on schedule all the same.”

Mari gave him a fishy look. “Thought it was about time for you to start gettin’ resty. Hoharie said, seven days off it for that leg. We all heard her.”

“Come on, you know she padded that.”

Mari did not exactly deny this, but she did say, “And why would you want to, anyway? You know what blight looks like, without having to go look at more. It’s all the same. That’s what makes it blight.”