patroller boys followed suit; the very dirty water was dumped down a drain, where it gurgled through a wooden pipe leading outside. It was all as handy as a well-furbished farm kitchen, and as hard to shift. Fawn fancied she could almost hear Dag thinking, Sessile! and not in a tone of approval.
They sat five around the table and watched while Arkady poured out tea into fired clay mugs, and offered a pitcher of honey. Fawn sipped the sweet brew gratefully, wondering who was supposed to start, and if it would be up to her. To her relief, Arkady began.
“So-ex-patroller-how have you come to me? New Moon Cutoff seems a long way from Oleana.” He took a swallow and settled back, watching Dag narrowly.
It was a-deliberately?-broadly worded question. Dag looked somewhat desperately at Fawn. “Where to begin, Spark? ” he asked.
She bit her lip. “The beginning? Which would be Glassforge, I guess.”
“That far back? All of it? You sure? ”
“If we don’t explain how your knife got primed at Glassforge, you won’t be able to explain what you did with it at Bonemarsh, and Hoharie herself said she thought that was magery.”
Arkady’s eyes widened slightly at the word. “Who is Hoharie? ”
“Hickory Lake’s chief medicine maker,” Dag explained.
“Ah.” Arkady went still, taking this in. “Do go on.”
“How about if I start? ” said Fawn. Their tale had to convince the groundsetter to take Dag seriously, despite Dag’s running off to mix with farmers. Because if they could be let into the camp on this man’s bare word, they could surely be thrown out the same way. Plain and true.
Nothing else would do. Just as well; Fawn didn’t think she could tell fancy lies to that penetrating coppery stare.
“It was coming on strawberry season last summer in Oleana, and I was going to Glassforge to look for work on account of-” She took a breath for courage. The intimate parts of this tale would be new to Barr and Remo, too; it was almost harder to speak it in front of them than this shiny stranger. “On account of as I’d got pregnant with a farm boy who didn’t care to marry me, and I didn’t care to stay around and deal with what my life would be at home once it came out. So, the road. Dag’s patrol was called down there to help search for a malice that was running a bandit gang in the hills. A couple of the bandits-a mud-man and a beguiled fellow-snatched me off the road because I was pregnant, it seems.”
Remo’s eyes widened, and Barr blinked, but both kept their mouths shut tight. Arkady’s hand touched his lips. “So it’s true that malices need pregnant women for their molts? ”
“Yes,” said Dag. “Though they’ll also use pregnant animals if they can’t get humans. It’s not actually the women they crave, it’s the fastgrowing ground of the youngsters they bear, and the, the template of bearing. To teach them how, see. I arrived… almost in time. There was this cave. The malice ripped the ground from Fawn’s child about the time I hit its mud-man guards. I was carrying a pouch with two sharing knives in it, one primed and one bonded to me. I tossed the pouch to Fawn, who was closer, and she put both knives in the malice, one after the other.”
“Wrong one first,” confessed Fawn. “The unprimed one. I didn’t know.”
“You couldn’t have,” Dag assured her. He stared rather fiercely at Arkady, who in fact showed no signs of wanting to criticize this.
“It had me by the neck at the time, which is where these came from,” Fawn went on, touching the deep red dents marring the sides of her throat, four on one side and one on the other.
“So that’s what those are!” said Arkady, startled into leaning forward and peering. He drew his hand back before actually touching her. “I didn’t think to find blight scars on a farmer. Those are the freshest I’ve ever seen. That sort of ground injury doesn’t often come our way down here.”
Barr leaned back, his brow wrinkling; belatedly figuring out just how close to a malice Fawn had come, she thought. If I have malice fingerprints on me, the malice couldn’t have been more than an arm’s length off, you know.
“Count yourselves lucky,” said Dag dryly. With this start, he seemed willing to take up the tale. “In any case, my bonded knife ended up primed with the ground of Fawn’s child. Hickory Lake’s chief knife maker and I each have different ideas as to why, but they don’t matter now. Anyway, on the way to take the knife to my camp and see about the puzzle, we stopped at West Blue-Fawn’s kinfolk have a farm just up that river valley-I thought they’d want to know she was still alive. We were married there. Twice over, once by farmer customs and once by ours. Here. Roll up your sleeve, Spark.”
He shrugged awkwardly out of his jacket and rolled up his own left sleeve, revealing the arm harness that held his wrist cap in place, and above it, his wedding cord that Fawn had braided. He normally kept his sleeve rolled down in front of strangers, but Fawn supposed this maker, like a farmer midwife, had to see what was going on in order to do his work, so you just had to get past the shyness. Almost as reluctantly, Fawn pushed up her left cuff to reveal her cord that Dag had braided.
Dag hitched his shoulder forward. “Does your groundsense say these are valid cords? ” he asked. Growled, more like.
“Yes,” said Arkady cautiously. Fawn sighed with relief.
“Thank you for your honesty, sir.” Dag sat back with a satisfied nod.
“We had some blighted stupid argumentation about that at Hickory Lake, later.”
Arkady cleared his throat. “Your tent-kin did not welcome your new bride, I take it? ” Your very young bride, Fawn fancied his glance at her added, but he had the prudence not to say it aloud.
“Your aunt Mari and uncle Cattagus were pretty nice to me, I thought,” said Fawn, in what defense she could muster of Dag’s home.
“Wait, Dag, you left out the glass bowl. That has to be important. It was the first time your ghost hand came out.” She turned to Arkady. “That’s what Dag called it at first, because it spooked him something awful, but Hoharie said it was a ground projection. You’d better tell that part, Dag, because to me it just looked like magic.”
“There was this glass bowl.” Dag waved his hand. “Back at West Blue, just before we were wed. It meant a lot to Fawn-she’d brought it back from Glassforge as a gift for her mama. My tent-mother, now. It fell and broke.”
“Three big pieces and about a hundred shards,” Fawn added in support. “All over the parlor floor.” She was grateful that he left out the surrounding family uproar. Angry as she sometimes was with her kin, she would not have wanted to see them held up as fools before this Arkady.
“I…” Dag made a gesture with his hook. “This came out, and I sort of swirled the glass all back together through its ground. I’d seen bowls like it being made back in Glassforge, you see. Its ground had a hum to it…” His lips shaped, but did not blow, a note.
Arkady, Barr, and Remo were all staring at his hook-no, not the hook, Fawn realized. At the invisible, elusive ground projection that took the place of his lost left hand. Which she would never see, but could sometimes-she suppressed a smile-feel. Dag eased back, as did the other three Lakewalkers, and she guessed he’d let the projection go in again.
“First I heard about that bowl,” muttered Barr to Remo. “Ye gods. Did you know about it?” Remo shook his head and motioned his partner to shush.
“Before things came to the point at Hickory Lake,” Dag went on, “there was that big malice outbreak over in Raintree. Did you hear much about it, way down here? ”
“A little,” said Arkady. “I confess, the patrollers here follow the news from the north more closely than I do. There always seems to be some excitement going on, up your way.”
“Raintree malice was more than that. It promised to be every bit as bad as the Wolf War in Luthlia twenty years back. Worse, because it was fixing to tear across thickly settled farmer country. Malice food on a platter.”
Arkady shrugged. “But you were from Oleana-you said? ”
Dag’s lips thinned. Fawn put in quickly, “Raintree sent out riders for help. Hickory Lake’s sort of next door, being in the far northwest of the hinterland. Fairbolt Crow-camp captain at Hickory Lake-chose Dag to be company captain of the force they sent out. Explain about groundripping the malice, Dag.”
Dag drew breath and twisted his left arm, turning his hook. Ghost hand displayed again, or just referred to?
