Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [112]
Maybe it just needs an extra dose of mortality to finish cleaning it out…. I have a sharing knife.
She inhaled, shuddering. It wasn’t possible for her to think of something to try that Dag and Mari and Hoharie hadn’t, and already dismissed for some good reason that Fawn was simply too ignorant to know. Was it?
There was a lot of Lakewalker emotion and habit tied up in sharing knives. Sacrificial in every sense, sacred. Not seen as a fit subject for idle fooling around with. She hunched over, wide-awake now.
It didn’t have to be through the heart, did it? That was only for unprimed knives, first collecting their dose of mortality. For discharging the death, anywhere in the malice’s groundworked body would apparently do. She might have stabbed the Glassforge malice in the foot, to the same stunning effect. So where were the, the malice bits lodged in the enspelled Lakewalkers? Pooled or diffuse, they all had to be connected, because to touch any of them triggered the same trap.
Her knife, Dar had said, was of dubious potency and value. No affinity. But it’s the only one I have a right to.
Her eyes turned to Dag. And he’s the only one I have a right to. So.
Swiftly, before her nerve failed her, she rose and, careful not to touch his skin, delicately drew down his blanket. She lifted it past his ribbed chest, his loose breechclout, his long legs, letting it fall again in folds at his feet. His body was all sculpted shadows in the moonlight, too thin. She’d thought she’d started to put some meat on his bones, but it was all used up again by the past weeks of dire strain, and then some.
Not the heart, not the eye—eew!—not the gut. For nonlethal flesh wounds, one was pretty much limited to arms and legs, carefully away from where those big veins and nerves ran down. Under the arm would be bad, she was pretty sure, likewise the back of the knee and the inner thigh. Better the outer thigh, or the arm just below the shoulder. Dag’s strappy arm muscles didn’t seem all that thick, compared to the length of the bone blade hanging around her neck. Thigh, then. She crouched down.
If Hoharie had been conscious, Fawn could have asked her. But then Fawn would still be waiting for the Lakewalker expert to fix things, and likely would not have conceived this desperate notion at all. Now the medicine maker lay entranced with the rest, leaving only Othan in charge. Fawn wouldn’t have asked Othan for a drink in a downpour, nor have expected him to give her one. Still…
Am I about to be stupid again?
Think it through.
This might do nothing, in which case she would have to clean the blood off her knife and explain the ugly hole in her husband tomorrow morning. Envisioning which, she scrambled back to her saddlebags and dug out one of her spare clean ragbags stuffed with cattail fluff, and some cord. There, a good bandage.
This might do what she hoped.
This might do something awful. But something awful was going to happen anyhow. She could not make things worse.
Right, then.
She laid out the makeshift swab, dragged her pouch from around her neck, and pulled out the pale knife. The little delay had sapped her courage. She hunkered by Dag’s left hip a moment, trying to gather it again. She wished she could pray, but the gods, they said, were absent. She had nothing to trust in now but her own wits.
She swallowed a whimper. Dag says you’re smart. If you can’t trust you, trust him.
Sharp end first. Anywhere. She drew back her hand, took careful aim at what she hoped was all nice thick muscle, then plunged the bone knife in till the tip nicked against Dag’s own bone. Still without ever touching him. Dag grunted and jerked in his sleep. She whipped her shaking hand away from the hilt, which stood out from his lean thigh, all indigo blue and ivory in the silver light.
From over her shoulder, Othan’s voice screamed, “What are you doing, you crazy farmer?”
He reached to clamp her shoulders and drag her roughly back from Dag. But not before she saw Dag’s left arm jolt up from his bedroll