Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [114]
Within his hand, not upon it; the two were as inextricable as two fibers spun into one strong thread. Affinity. Now, at last, he closed his hand upon the malice’s dark construction.
His ghost hand twisted, stretched, and tore apart as the mortality flowed from him into the gray mouths, along the lines of draining hunger, and he howled without sound in the agony of that wrenching. The malice spatters on his body were ripped out from their patches of blight as if dragged along on a towline, gashing through his ground and out his arm. The dazzling fire raced, consuming its dark path as it traveled. The gray fog-threads of the malice’s involution blazed up in fire all over the grove, leaving a web of red sparks hanging for a moment as if suspended in air. When it reached the mud-men’s dense impelling ground-shapes, they exploded in fiery pinwheels, their aching afterimages spinning in Dag’s groundsense, weighty as whirlpools peeling off a paddle’s trailing edge.
Then—quiet.
Dag had not known that silence could reverberate so; or maybe that was just him. When a long strain was released, the recoil itself could become a new source of pain…No, actually, that was just his body. He’d thought he’d missed his body, back when his mind had been set adrift from it in that ground-fog; now he was not so sure. Its pangs were all suddenly very distinctive indeed. Head, neck, back, arm, haunches all cried out, and his bladder definitely clamored for attention. His body was noisy, cranky, and insistent. But he sought something more urgent.
He pried his eyes open, blinking away the glue and sand that seemed to cement his lids together. He was staring up at bare silvered branches and a night sky washed with moonlight strong enough to cast interlaced shadows. Across the grove, voices were moaning in surprise or crying out in shock. Shouts of alarm transmuted to triumph.
In the blue moonlight and red flare of new wood thrown on a nearby fire, a baffling sight met his gaze. Fawn and Hoharie’s apprentice Othan seemed to be dancing. Or perhaps wrestling. It was hard to be sure. Othan was breathing hard through his nose; Fawn had both hands wrapped around one of his wrists and was swinging from it, dragging his arm down. His boots stamped in an unbalanced circle as he tried to shake her off, cursing.
Dag cleared his throat and said mildly, albeit in a voice as rusty and plaintive as an old gate hinge, “Othan, quit manhandling my wife. Get your own farmer girl.”
The two sprang apart, and Othan gasped, “Sir! I wasn’t—”
What he wasn’t, Dag didn’t hear, because with a sob of joy Fawn threw herself down across his chest and kissed him. He thought his mouth tasted as foul as an old bird’s nest, but strangely, she didn’t seem to mind. His left arm, deadened, wasn’t working. His right weighed far too much, but he hoisted it into the air somehow and, after an uncertain wobble, let it fall across her, fingers clutching contentedly.
He had no idea why or how she was here. It was likely a Fawn-fluke. Her solid wriggling warmth suggested hopefully that she was not a hallucination, not that he was in the best shape to distinguish, just now.
She stopped kissing him long enough to gasp, “Dag, I’m so sorry I had to stab you! I couldn’t think of any other way. Does it hurt bad?”
“Mm?” he said vaguely. He was more numb than in pain, but he became aware of a shivering ache in his left thigh. He tried to raise his head, failed, and stirred his leg instead. An utterly familiar knife haft drifted past his focus. He blinked in bemusement. “A foot higher and I’d have thought you were mad at me, Spark.”
Her helpless laughter wavered into weeping. The drops fell warm across his chest, and he stroked her shuddering shoulder and murmured wordlessly.
After a moment she gulped and raised her face. “You have to let me go.”
“No, I don’t,” he said amiably.
“We have to get those bone fragments dug out of your leg. I didn’t know how far to stick it in, so