Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [117]
“Now,” said Hoharie, sitting up and rubbing her forehead with the back of her wrist—Othan, watching her closely, handed her a clean rag, and she repeated the gesture with it and nodded thanks. “It’s my chance to ask a few questions. What I need to know is if a similar act would solve a similar problem. Because I need to write this out for the lore-tent if it does, and maybe pass it along to the other hinterlands, too.”
“I hope there never is a similar problem,” said Mari, “because that would mean another runaway malice like this one, and this one got way too close to being unstoppable. But write it out all the same, sure. You never know.”
“No one can know till it’s tried,” said Dag, “but my own impression was that any primed knife, placed in any of the groundlocked people, would have worked to clean out the malice’s involution. It only needed someone to think of it—and dare.”
“It seems a strange way to spend a sacrifice,” agreed Hoharie. “Still…ten for one.” All the Lakewalkers looked equally pensive, contemplating this mortal arithmetic. “When did you think of it?”
“Pretty nearly as soon as I was trapped in the groundlock. I could see it, then.”
Hoharie’s gaze flicked to Fawn’s left wrist. Fawn, by now inured to being talked past, almost flinched under the suddenly intent stare. “That was also about the time you felt a change in that peculiar ground reinforcement Dag gave you, wasn’t it, Fawn? Did it seem to come with, say, a compulsion?”
Othan sat up straight. “Oh, of course! That would explain how she knew what to do!”
Did it? Fawn’s brows drew down in doubt. “It didn’t seem anything like so clear. I wish it had been.”
“So how did you know?” asked Hoharie patiently. “To use your sharing knife like that?”
“I…” She hesitated, casting her mind back to last night’s desperation. “I figured it.”
“How?”
She struggled to express her complex thoughts simply. A lot of it hadn’t even been in words, just in pictures. “Well, you said. That there were cut-off bits of malice in that groundlock. Sharing knives kill malices. I thought it might just need an extra dose to finish the job.”
“But your knife had no affinity.”
“What?” Fawn stared in confusion.
Dag cleared his throat. His voice went gentle. “Dar was right—about that, anyway. The mortality in your knife was too pure to hold affinity with malices, but I was able to break into its involution and add some. A little extra last-minute making, would you say, Hoharie?”
Hoharie eyed him. “Making? I’m not sure that wasn’t magery, Dag.”
Fawn’s brow wrinkled in distress. “Is that what tore up your ghost hand? Oh, if I had known—!”
“Sh,” soothed Dag. “If you had known, what?”
She stared down at her hands, clutching each other in her lap. After a long pause, she said, “I’d have done it all the same.”
“Good,” he whispered.
“So,” said Othan, clearly struggling with this, “you didn’t really know. You were just guessing.” He nodded in apparent relief. “A real stab in the dark. And in fact, except for Dag saving it all at the last, you were wrong!”
Fawn took a long breath, considering this painful thought. “Sometimes,” she said distantly, with all the dignity she could gather, “it isn’t about having the right answers. It’s about asking the right questions.”
Dag gave a slow blink; his face went curiously still. But then he smiled at her again, in a way that made the knot in her heart unwind, and gave her a considering nod. “Yeah—it was what we in Tent Bluefield call a fluke, Othan,” he murmured, and the warm look he gave Fawn with that made the knot unwind all the way down to her toes.
Later in the afternoon, Saun came back from the woods with a peeled-sapling staff—hickory, he claimed; with that and Saun’s shoulder for support, Dag was able to hobble back and forth to the slit trench. That cured Dag of ambition for any further movement. He was quite content to lie propped in his bedroll, occasionally with Fawn tucked up under his arm, and watch the camp go by, and not talk. He was especially content not to talk. A few inquiring noises