Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [167]
“Primings vary. My father put his knife through his own heart during a dire illness a dozen years ago. My first wife rolled over on hers when she was dying of wounds on a far northern battlefield. Remo had one from an elderly kinswoman who gave up the last precious months of her old age to it”—out of the corner of his eye, Dag saw Remo flinch—“and had to be helped to it by her own daughter. I’ve seen patrollers help each other. You understand, a sharing knife is not normally used as an instrument of execution.” Or as a means of instruction to a pack of farmers, Dag had to admit. “But one way or another, this is something no farmer has ever seen, so pay attention.” He snapped that last to the back of the crowd in his captain’s voice. They jolted upright and attended.
“You’re a blighted madman, you know that?” Crane murmured up to him. He’d kept his face turned half-away from the gawkers on the hill through most of this.
“I have my reasons,” Dag murmured back down. “You might even have understood them once, before you wrecked yourself.”
“Me, they banished. If they have a lick of sense, you they’ll burn alive.”
Ignoring this, Dag sat again, and said, “Open his shirt, Spark.”
Her nimble fingers undid the buttons, folded back the cloth, bared Crane’s chest. Dag wondered if Remo was going to want his shirt back, after. He looked gravely into Crane’s silvery eyes, and received a black-browed scowl in return.
“Ready?” Do you assent? Of all requirements for this making, that was the most profoundly unalterable.
“If you want my dying curse,” growled Crane, “you have it.”
“Figured that.”
“So if my curse is as good as a blessing, is my blessing worth a curse? Blight it, take both. You can sort them out yourself. I’m done.” He turned his face toward the bright river. “Let me out of this hopeless world.” He added after a moment, “Don’t let your blighted hand falter.”
Assent enough.
Dag positioned the tip of the sharing knife under Crane’s rib cage, pausing only long enough to explain softly to Fawn about the correct angle to reach the heart, and how much force to use to reach it in one swift punch without breaking the blade prematurely. Her face was taut, but her eyes were intent. She nodded understanding.
Dag extended his groundsense to be sure of Crane’s heart, gripped the haft, and in an abrupt motion, forced in the blade to its full length.
Crane’s lips shivered and his eyes rolled up, but all Dag’s attention was back at ground level. He froze, still clasping the haft, as the dissolving mortal ground began to flow toward the knife as if sucked into a drain. Would his involution hold it all? Would it close and seal properly…?
Yes.
Dag breathed again. As Crane did not.
He blinked, looked up, looked around. The hillside of watching men had gone really, really quiet.
Dag drew the primed knife from its fleshly sheathing and held it up high. “This Lakewalker”—he declined to use the terms renegade or banished at this point—“has now given his mortality into this knife, to share again, if the chance favors me, with the next malice to cross my path.” Twenty-six Lakewalkers before Crane had trusted Dag not to waste their deaths, and had their trust upheld. Of all the knives and lives that had passed through his hand, this was surely the darkest. Blight, but I came by this one the hard way. He handed the knife to Fawn to clean and slip back into the sheath at his neck, because his hand was still too clumsy with the shakes to manage the task in one try.
“Whether Crane has paid for his crimes, I can’t tell you. This is a separate tally.”
23
Her face carefully held stiff to hide how her stomach shook, Fawn helped Dag rise from Crane’s still body. She had prudently brought along Dag’s hickory stick; with that in his hand and