Slate’s brows flicked up. “That alone?” he inquired, in a very leading tone. Quick to scent a bargain, these Silver Shoals fellows. Greenup, too, looked intrigued, as if mentally recalculating something.

Dag added hastily, as the other Lakewalkers stirred, “I don’t speak for Barr and Remo, who also put their lives in the balance for this last night—as some of you may yet remember. This is just for me.”

“Oh, sure,” said Slate brightly. “Give the patroller his knife, if that’s all he wants.”

“And its priming. Its priming,” Dag went on, “for any of you who don’t realize what I’m talking about—although when this day is over I swear you will understand it through and through—will be Crane’s mortality. Crane’s heart’s death, which he will pledge to it.”

Faces screwed up around the circle in deep misgiving.

Breaking the silence, Bearbait drew breath. “The other patrollers can make their claims as may be, but give that medicine maker whatever due-share he asks, I say.”

Boss Slate, perhaps reminded of his crewman with the cut throat, shrugged in discomfort. “Well…I guess it’s all right. Maybe. I do say that Lakewalker bandit should die first, though. Where all those fellows he tricked can see it.”

“That’ll be a lifelong lesson to ’em,” Barr muttered. At least a few around the circle quirked their lips in some slight sympathy to his exasperation.

“Briefly, aye,” Dag agreed wearily. Ye gods. But it wasn’t the bandits he wanted to take the lesson. It was the boatmen. And everyone else. Because tales of this day’s doings would go up and down the river as fast as a boat could travel. They would inevitably end up garbled. But Dag swore that they wouldn’t start out that way, not if he could help it. So you’d better get this right, old patroller.

Dag returned to the Fetch, trying to remember everything he’d seen Dar do to prepare himself for his knife-bindings. Sharing knife makers generally, he reflected, were sheltered in the center of most camps, in the most protected and private of spaces. In the very heart of Lakewalker life. He would be turning that heart inside out.

He told his shadows Barr and Remo to go find something to do for half an hour, because any hint less broad would not have been taken, and led Fawn out onto the back deck as the nearest they could manage for a scrap of privacy. There, he explained what he meant to try.

She merely nodded. “Anything Dar can do, I ’spect you can do better.”

He wasn’t sure if all that confidence was well-placed, but he had to admit, it was warming. He gripped her strong little hand in his. “The groundwork will be up to me, but the thing is, some parts of the task are going to need two hands. Bleeding Crane, mainly, to bring his ground into the knife blank when I set up the involution. Much like the way you led your ground into my marriage cord back when we wove them. I would—could—ask Remo or Barr to help me, except that I’d really prefer to keep them clear of this task. In case there’s trouble about it later.”

Her brow wrinkled. “Why should there be?”

“Because I’m not just making a knife. I plan to make it a demonstration of Lakewalker groundwork for every boatman here who I can get to look and listen.” He added after a moment, “You could leave before I actually, um, prime the knife. You wouldn’t need to watch that part.”

“Ah,” she breathed. She looked up to catch his gaze square. “But, you know, it’s not impossible, if I’m to be a true Lakewalker’s kinswoman, that such a task might fall to me someday. It would be the worst thing to botch I can imagine. Don’t you think I’d better watch and learn how it’s done right?”

He swallowed, nodded, folded her in tight. “Yes,” he whispered. “That, too.”

At length, he let her go, and she went into the kitchen to fix him a meal with no meat, because he did remember Dar ate no flesh before a binding. When he came in after carefully washing up, she set before him a dish of potatoes, apples, and onions fried up in salt butter, took a little for herself, and passed the remainder on to Hod and Hawthorn, who would be staying in to keep watch on Bo. In an attempt to spare Dag, Remo had given a ground reinforcement to Hawthorn’s swollen nose, for the pain and bruising; Dag would release the trace of beguilement later, he decided, when he had the chance to set it properly.

As Dag scraped up his last bite, Fawn set down a cup beside his right elbow. He looked over in surprise to find it piled with oats.

“There you go. You sit there and ground-rip those till my hair turns purple, you hear?”

“Um?”

She sat quietly beside him, her back to the room. “Because it seems to me that when you take in something vile that you can’t hack up, next best thing for it is to take in something bland, to cushion it.”

“Ah. You, um…realized I ground-ripped Crane.”

“Pretty much straight off, yeah. So now there’s a bit of him in you, isn’t there? Till you break him down, at least.”

“Does that…bother you?”

“I think it bothers you. A lot.”

“True, Spark,” he sighed. He took her hand and pressed the back of it briefly to his forehead. “Stay near me through this. It helps me remember who I am and what I am about, when things get too confusing.”

He took up oat grains and rolled them between his fingers, tossing the ripped ones onto his dirty plate, until, indeed, the outlines of things started to look preternaturally sharp and strange.

If there was anything more he ought to do in preparation, well, he didn’t know what it was. After a moment of consideration he unbuckled his arm harness, set it aside, and rolled down his sleeve, buttoning the empty cuff so it wouldn’t flap. He adjusted the knife sheath on his chest, clasped Fawn’s hand, and rose.

Dag had the litter-carriers position Crane in the middle of the scree just a few paces from the shore, heart-side toward the river, so that the sixty or so boatmen could sit or stand on the slope that rose toward the cave and all hear and get a clear view. Whit, Wain, and two other keelers set down the litter and retrieved Wain’s poles, and Whit retreated to one side to wait with Berry. Remo and Barr sat a little way off on the other, at a deliberate distance chosen by Dag to mark them as witnesses, not participants. Dag folded a blanket for his knees and Fawn’s on Crane’s far side, where they would not block the boatmen’s view. She knelt and looked up at him expectantly.

The boatmen crunched around on the rocks of the incline, finding positions, hunkering or sitting or standing. None crowded all that close. The half dozen or so of the Snapping Turtle’s keelers who’d heard his talk on Lakewalker groundwork back at Pearl Riffle were amongst those toward the front, staring with interest. At least this afternoon they were all stone-sober. So.

Dag stood up, raised his voice to carry to the edge of the crowd, and began—again: “First I have to explain about ground, and Lakewalker groundsense. Ground is in everything, underlies everything, live or inert, but live ground is brightest. You all have ground in you, but you don’t sense it…” He’d made this explanation so many times down this valley that it felt as smoothed as stones in a streambed. Some here had heard earlier versions, but it never hurt to hammer it in again. How many hundreds of times had he repeated himself explaining patrol techniques to each year’s new crop of young patrollers?

Ground. Groundsense. Malices…That last caught any attention still drifting loose. The youngsters took it for tale, their elders who’d seen blight for an eye-opener; the Raintree men who’d brushed up against the malice war nodded and exchanged murmurs, both amongst themselves and with their curious neighbors.

Crane was staring—glaring—up at Dag with eyes gone wide with disbelief. Dag hadn’t asked Crane’s permission to make him the material of this demonstration, but he felt no qualms. If Crane hadn’t lost his choice with that first murdered farmer back in Oleana, he’d done so a hundred times since. His disordered life had done the wide green world a great deal of harm. Let his death do it some scrap of good.