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.”
8
Fawn returned late one evening from the medicine tent along with Dag and Arkady-there had been another child with an intractable fever-to find the dinner basket left by their door with a letter propped up on it.
Arkady read the inscription and raised his brows. “For you,” he said, handing it to Fawn. “Courier must have brought it by.”
Surprised, she made out her name and Dag’s, and Arkady’s Place, New Moon Cutoff Camp, in Whit’s crabbed handwriting. Whit was a reluctant correspondent; any letter from him had to be important. She took it to the round table while Arkady stoked the fire for his endless tea. Dag set down the basket, lit the brace of table candles, then came to her shoulder, looking concerned. “Anything wrong? ”
“No, not really,” she reported, tilting the paper to catch the flickering light. Whit’s scrawl was actually legible, in a painful sort of way.
“Whit says Berry found a buyer for the Fetch who wants it for a houseboat.”
The Fetch had been much better built than most makeshift crafts launched from the upper Grace feeder creeks by venturesome Oleana hill boys. Berry would be happy that her papa’s last boat wouldn’t be broken up for timber, or worse, firewood. Daisy-goat was slated to be sold with her floating home, alas. “He also says Berry’s found them all work with a keeler boss she trusts, heading upriver soon to catch the last of the winter fall. All on the same boat-Whit and Bo and Hod for hands, Hawthorn for boat boy, and her for the fiddler.” Berry had been holding out for just such a collection of berths, though exactly when she would find it had still been up in the air when Dag and Fawn had left Graymouth. Whit had talked idly about the whole crew joining the long-planned overland ride up the Trace, but the money would be much better this way. “Whit says if we want to change our minds, we should meet them in Graymouth before the end of the week, and if not, to write and let him know when to look for us back at Clearcreek.”
“Ah,” said Dag.
She glanced up at him. “I better write back soon, or the letter might not reach him before they shove off. So… what are we doing, Dag? When we started out for New Moon, I thought we might be here a few days, but it’s already been more ’n a month.”
Dag delayed answer by going to the sink to wash his hand before dinner, a ritual Arkady insisted upon with more than maternal firmness.
Fawn followed suit. They laid out the contents of the basket, and Arkady brought over the tea, before Dag
