Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [111]
“Bryn”—Mari hooked a thumb over her shoulder toward the rank of female sleepers beneath their awning—“will be all of twenty-two next week. If she has a next week. She’s young. Good groundsense range. She might yet grow up to have a passel of youngsters. Hoharie, I’ve known her longer. A medicine maker has valuable skills. She might yet save the lives of a dozen girls like Bryn. So how shall I decide which first? Some choice. Maybe,” she sighed, “maybe it won’t make any difference. I hardly know which way to wish for.
“Agh! Pay no attention to my maunderings, girl,” Mari continued, as Fawn’s stare widened. “I think I’m getting too old. I’m going to go sleep off this blight tonight. It drains your wits as well as your strength, blight does. All despair and death. You get into this mood.” She clambered back to her feet and gazed blearily down over Dag’s supine form at Fawn. “I know you can’t feel the blight direct, but it’s working on you, too. You should take a break off this deathly ground as well.”
Fawn shook her head. “I want to stay here. By Dag.” For whatever time we have left.
Mari shrugged. “Suit yourself, then.” She wandered away into the softening twilight.
Fawn awoke to moonlight filtering down through the ash tree’s bare branches. She lay a moment in her bedroll trying to recapture her dreams, hoping for something usefully prophetic. In ballads, people often had dreams that told them what to do; you were supposed to follow instructions precisely, too, or risk coming to several stanzas of grief. But she remembered no dreams. She doubted they’d reveal anything even if she did.
Farmer dreams. Perhaps if she’d been Lakewalker-born…she scowled at Othan, asleep and snoring faintly on the other side of Hoharie. If anyone were to have any useful uncanny visions, it would more likely be him, blight him.
No, not “blight him.” That wasn’t fair. Reluctantly, she allowed he had courage, as he’d shown this afternoon, and Hoharie would not have favored him out of her other apprentices and brought him along if he didn’t have promise as well. It was merely that Fawn would feel better if he were completely stupid, and not just stupid about farmers. Then he wouldn’t be able to make her doubt herself so much. She sighed and rose to pick her way out to the slit trench at the far edge of the grove.
Returning, she sat up on her blanket and studied Dag. The stippled moonlight made his unmoving face look disturbingly corpse-colored. The dark night-glitter of his eyes, smiling at her, would have redeemed it all, but they remained sunken and shut. He might die, she thought, without her ever seeing their bright daylight gold again. She swallowed the scared lump in her throat. Would they let her touch him after he was dead? I could touch him now. But there was little she could do for him physically that wasn’t already being done more safely by others. Wait on that, then.
Involuted ground reinforcement. She rolled the phrase over in her mind as if tasting it. It clearly meant something quite specific to Hoharie, and doubtless to Dag and Mari as well. And Othan. A ground reinforcement curling up on itself, which didn’t gradually become part of its new owner? She rubbed her arm, and wondered if the ground reinforcement Dag had done on her was involuted or not. If she followed Hoharie’s explanation, it seemed that the involution was a cut-off bit of malice, like her own was a cut-off bit of Dag. Remembering the Glassforge malice, she was glad she and Dag had stopped it before it had developed such far-flung powers.
Her brows bent. Had Hoharie ever seen a malice up as close as Fawn had? Makers seemed to stay back in camp, mostly. So maybe not. Sharing knives might be complicated to make, but they were so simple to use, a farmer child might do so—as Fawn had proven. She smiled now to remember Dag’s wild cry: Sharp end first!
Her thoughts fell like water drops into a still pool.
Sharing knives kill malices.
There’s a bit of