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Hoharie shook her head again. You re asking me to tell you what something
looks like from a glimpse in a piece of broken mirror held around a corner. In
the dark. Am I looking at all of it, or just a fragment? Does it correspond to
anything? She turned to Fawn. What hurts, exactly?
Fawn stretched and clenched her fingers. My left hand, mostly. Up the arm it
fades. Except I feel a little shivery all over.
Fairbolt muttered, But Dag hasn t got a& His face screwed up, and he
scowled in a confusion briefly greater than Fawn s.
It s& how shall I put this, said Hoharie in some reluctance. If the rest of
his ground is as stressed as the bit I feel, his body must be in a pretty bad
way.
How bad,how ? snapped Fairbolt. Which made Fawn rather glad, because she
was much too frightened to yell at the medicine maker herself.
Hoharie opened her hands in a wide, frustrated shrug. Well, not quite enough
to kill him, evidently.
Fairbolt bared his teeth at her, but then sat back in a glum slump. If I get
any sleep at all tonight, Hoharie, it won t be your doing.
Fawn leaned forward and stared at her hand. I was kind of hoping you would
tell me I was a stupid little farmer girl imagining things. Everybody else
used to, but now that I want it& She looked up, and added uneasily, Dag s
not going to get in some kind of trouble for this making, is he?
Well, if when he gets back I guaranteeI ll be asking him a few questions,
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said Hoharie fervently. But they won t have anything to do with this argument
before the camp council.
It was all my fault, truly, said Fawn. Dar made me afraid to tell. But I
thought I thought Fairbolt had a need and a right to know, on account of the
company.
Fairbolt pulled himself together, and said gravely, Thank you, Fawn. You did
the right thing. If you feel any changes in this, please tell me or Hoharie,
will you?
Fawn nodded earnestly. So what do we do now?
What we generally have to do, farmer girl, Fairbolt sighed. We wait.
13
Dag woke well after dark, to roll his aching body up, pull on his boots
without lacing them, and stagger to the slit trench. The night air was chill
and dank, but the two patrollers on duty had kept the campfire burning with a
cheery orange glow. One waved to Dag as he wandered past, and Dag returned the
silent salute. The scene looked deceptively peaceful, as though they watched
over comrades merely sleeping.
After relieving himself, Dag considered more sleep. His bone-deep grinding
fatigue of earlier seemed scarcely improved. The marsh remained silent this
hour should have been raucous with frogs, insects, and night birds and eerily
odorless. Either the reek of its normal life or the stench of death should
have saturated this foggy air. Well, the rot would come in time, a week or a
month or six or next spring. Which, while it would doubtless smell repulsive
enough to gag anyone for a mile downwind, would be a first sign of life
beginning its repair of the blight rot had a lively ground of its own.
Dag stared at the grove, the campfire seeming like a lantern among the trees,
remembering his patrol s first approach& only yesterday? If this was after
midnight he glanced at the wheel of the stars he could call it two days ago,
though that seemed scarcely more reasonable. Frowning thoughtfully, he counted
a careful two hundred paces away from the grove and found a stump to sit upon.
He stretched out his aching legs. If he had opened his groundsense at this
distance before without triggering the trap, presumably he might do it again.
He hissed in surprise as he eased his veil apart for the first time in
days.Cramping, Mari had described his closure, and that seemed barely adequate
to describe this shaking agony. Normally, he paid as little attention to his
own ground as he did to his body, the two conflating seamlessly. Meaning to
examine the groundlocked makers, Dag instead found his inner senses wrenched
onto himself.
In the ground of his right arm a faint heat lingered, last vestiges of the
healing reinforcement snatched from, or gifted by, Hoharie s apprentice. Over
time such a reinforcement was slowly absorbed, converted from the donor s
ground into that of the recipient s, not unlike the way his food became Dag.
Even this trace would be gone altogether in a few more weeks. In the ground of
his left arm&
His ghost hand was not there at the moment. The ground of his arm was
spattered with a dozen dark spots, black craters seeming like holes burned in
a cloth from scattered sparks. A few more throbbed on his neck and down his
left side. Surrounding them in gray rings were minute patches of blight. This
wasn t just fading reverberation from a malice-handling like Utau s, though
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that echoed in him too. The spots were the residue, he realized, of the ground
he d ripped from the malice in that desperate night-fight. It was like nothing
he d ever seen before, yet immediately recognizable.Strangely familiar seemed
the perfect summation, actually.
But then, he d never before met up with anyone crazed enough to try to
ground-rip a malice. Maybe he was seeing why it was not a recommended
technique? Injury or healing to a living body injured or healed its ground in
turn; ground-ripping or prolonged exposure to blight killed a body through its
ravaged ground. What was this peculiar infestation doing to his body now?
Nothing good, he suspected. With this map to guide him, he could trace deep
aches in his flesh that centered over the splotches, if barely distinguishable
from his present general malaise. Pain marked damage, normally. What kind of
damage?
So& was the pulsating grayness slowly being absorbed by Dag s ground, or& or
was the blight spreading? He swallowed and stared, but could sense no
discernible change.
Stands to reason,he could almost hear Spark say. How would a smart little
farmer girl analyze this? What were the possibilities?
Well, his ground could be slowly repairing itself, as in any other wound. Or
his ground might be unable to repair itself until the sources of injury were
removed, the way an arrow had to be extracted before the flesh around it could
start to knit. Sometimes, if more rarely, flesh knitted around a fragment that
could not be removed. Sometimes it closed but festered. Or& was the blight
spreading out faster than his ground could repair it? In which case&
In which case, I m looking at my death wound.A mortality flowing as slowly as
honey in winter, as inexorably as time.
Spark, no, how long do we ?
In a spasm of inspiration, he tried to call up his ghost hand to grip a
splotch, tear it out, dump it in the soil, anywhere was it possible to
ground-ripyourself ? but his odd power remained elusive. He then massaged
around a spot on his left ribs with his right hand, willing its ground to
reach in, but found it as impossible as to will flesh to penetrate flesh. The
effort made his side twinge, however.
An even more horrific possibility occurred to him then. The fragments of the
first great malice-king, it was said, grew into the plague of the world. What
if each of these fragments had the same potential?Could I turn into a malice?
Or malice food?
Dag bent his head and huffed through his open mouth, his hand clutching his
hair.Oh, absent gods, do you hate me that much? Or he might split into a dozen
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