“It’s just not right. I mean, at the very least you should ask Hawthorn’s permission, and I can’t see you explaining all this to Hawthorn!”

“I can’t even explain it all to myself,” Dag sighed. “Very well.” He scooped up the pile of grain and raised his palm to his own lips.

“No!” Fawn clapped her hand to her mouth to muffle her shriek.

Dag raised his brows at her. “You can’t say I don’t have the right.”

Fawn bounced up and down in dismay, lips pressed tight. And finally blurted, “Try it on the raccoon, then.”

He tilted his head ironically at her and offered the grain to the kit. The kit seemed only mildly interested—spoiled, Fawn thought, by the tastier fodder that everyone aboard slipped to it—but at Dag’s urging and, she suspected, sorcerous persuasion, it did nibble down a spoonful or so of the grains, whiskers twitching. When Dag let it go, it toddled off, apparently unaffected, or at least it didn’t drop over dead on the spot. Dag tossed the remaining handful of dead seeds over the side, wiped his palm on his shirt, and picked off a few raccoon hairs. His eye fell on the chicken coop. “Food, huh,” he said in a distant tone. “I wonder what would happen if I tried to ground-rip a chicken? Next time you mean to serve up a chicken dinner, Spark, let me know.”

Fawn mentally took chicken off her menu plans for the indefinite future. “I don’t know, Dag. The idea of you ripping seed grains doesn’t bother me a bit. But if you could rip a chicken, could you—” she broke off.

He eyed her, not failing to follow. “Ground-rip a person? In full malice mode? I don’t know. A person’s bigger. I begin to suspect I could rip up a person’s ground, at least. And yes, the idea does trouble me, thank you very much.”

Fawn scrubbed her mouth with the back of her hand. “You can rip up a person’s body and ground with your war knife, and you have. Would this truly be different?”

“I don’t know yet,” sighed Dag. “Spark, I really do not know.” He folded her in to him then, leaning his forehead against hers. “I’ve been wondering for some time if I’ve stumbled across some craft secrets of senior medicine makers. Now you have me wondering if it’s secrets of the senior knife makers, instead. They’re even more close-mouthed about their work, and it may be with good reason. Because…”

“Because?” she prompted, when he didn’t go on.

“Because I can’t be the only person with these abilities. Unless I truly have been malice-corrupted, somehow. I wish I had someone to…”

“Someone to ask?” Alas, not Remo; a nice young patroller, but no maker.

Dag shook his head. “Someone safe to ask.”

“Urgh.” She didn’t fail to follow, either.

“Hoharie might be, but she’s back at Hickory Lake. She saw me—I don’t think I told you about this…”

Fawn rolled her eyes. “More purple halos? Yes?”

“Sorry. At the time, I didn’t know what to make of it, so I didn’t talk about it. But when her apprentice Othan was trying to give a ground reinforcement to my broken arm, he couldn’t get in. I ended up sort of…ripping it from him as he was trying to give it. Hoharie was right there, watching.”

“And?”

“And her only reaction was to try to recruit me for a medicine maker. On the spot. Till I pointed out my little problem with fine hand-work.” He waved his stump. “Later, she came up with the idea of partnering me with Othan’s brother, for my spare hands. If she’d offered to partner me with you, I might have taken her up on it, and we’d still be there instead of here. But she shied off from that suggestion.”

Fawn couldn’t decide if that would have been good or not, so only tilted her head, I hear you. But she pounced quickly on the important point. “That was well before you ground-ripped the malice in Raintree, right?”

“Yes…?”

“So these new abilities”—she leaned back and gripped his left arm—“can’t be some sort of malice-contagion you picked up then, because you developed them before. I don’t think you’re turning into a malice.” Or you would be more scary, instead of just more aggravating. “If that’s what’s worrying you.”

From the play of expression on his face—first dismay, then relief—she realized she’d just spoken his most secret fear. And that, once dragged out into open air, it shrank hearteningly. “It…was a passing thought, I admit.” He ducked his head, then smiled crookedly and held her closer. “So if I turned into a malice, would you still love me?”

“If you really turned into a malice, you’d just eat me, and the question wouldn’t arise,” she said a bit tartly.

“That’s how we’d know, I suppose,” he allowed.

“You’d know, anyhow.” She thought about it. “Or maybe you wouldn’t. You’d be too stuck inside your own torment to even see mine.”

“Ah. Yes. You did look one straight in the eye, that time.” His fingers brushed the scars on her neck, not to say I forgot so much as I should have realized. His eyes darkened with his own memories. “From what I’ve seen of the inside of a malice, you’re right. You have an uncomfortably acute way of looking at things sometimes, Spark.”

Fawn just shook her head. This conversation was spiraling into the dark, or at least into the creepy, in a way that suggested it was time for bed, because no further good could come of it tonight. She picked up the lantern and led the way.

Dag was reassured early the next morning of the health of the raccoon kit, as it woke him by nosing curiously in his ear. It also conveniently left a scat on the end of their blankets, not for the first time, as the creature seemed to have a partiality for their bed-nook. Dag took the pellet outside to the goat pen in the gray light to squash open with a stick. He would not have been surprised to find that the ripped grains had passed through whole, or even some odder effect, but they appeared to have been digested normally, with no sign of blood or blight to the kit’s gut. So it seemed he could leave a trail of sterile seeds in his wake and do the world no harm. Though he was still deeply suspicious of their reuse as feed; perhaps he would buy his own chicken at the next stop to test them upon in a more methodical way. And put Fawn in charge of it, as he was by no means sure of his ability to keep a chicken alive in the first place, and he wouldn’t want to make a mistake, here.

He leaned on the boat rail and watched the sky lighten from steel to silver to gold in a pure autumn sunrise, color seeping into the low hills lining the mist-shrouded river. It looked to be another brisk blue day like yesterday, which did not bode well for getting the Fetch off the sand bar. But a day of rest would be welcome. Perhaps he and Fawn could take a two-person picnic to the other end of the island. He extended his groundsense to check the chances of privacy, assuming they could successfully lose Whit, Hod, Remo, Hawthorn, and the raccoon. The island was a good two miles long, rich in natural ground, free of blight-sign, and, he found, unpeopled.

His breath drew in sharply, and he tested that range again, turning slowly. To both ends of the island, yes; he could clearly sense the head and tail where the stolidity of land met the melting motion of water. He cast his inner senses up along the farther hills, taking in the trees settling down root-deep for their winter sleep; drying, dying plants with bright seed-sparks armored in burrs; a multitude of small creatures burrowing, nesting, nosing through the brush, flitting from branch to branch; the slower lumbering of a family of black bears in the shadow of a ravine. It’s back. It’s all back, my full range! If only he were still at Hickory Lake, he could go out on patrol again.

He could hear the rattle of Fawn starting breakfast, and her voice scolding the kit out from underfoot and Hawthorn out of his bunk to take charge of it. His mouth quirked in the sure realization that if he were given, right this minute, the unfettered choice of whether to go back or go on—he’d go on. Smiling, he ducked inside and made his way to the back deck to wash up.