Then one afternoon the wind swung around to the south, the clouds broke up, and the air grew downright warm. Berry relented enough to tie up the Fetch during a spectacular sunset in the immense western sky and declare an evening of rest. After a string of nights handing out hasty meals to the off-watch crew to eat while crowding around the hearth, Fawn celebrated by fixing a bang-up sit-down supper, with everyone squeezed together around the table for once, even Bo, though she made sure his food was soft.

The meal was eaten with appetite enough, but in uncharacteristic and rather weary silence. After a glance around at the long faces, Fawn swallowed her last bite of fried potato and declared, “Well, this is no good. You’re all looking as glum as a chorus of frogs with no pond. We should do something after the dishes to ginger folks up. How about archery lessons? Everybody liked those. We still have plenty of lanterns in stock. And there’s hardly any wind tonight.”

Hawthorn and Hod looked interested, but Whit scrubbed his hand over his face and said, “Naw. I don’t think that would be so much fun anymore.”

Dag’s eyelids had been drooping in a combination of fatigue and food-induced mellowness; at this, they flicked open. He watched Whit, but did not at once speak.

Fawn glanced at Dag, then badgered, “Why not?”

Whit shrugged, made a face, and seemed about to fall into hunched silence, but then got out, “It feels funny to be making a game out of it, after I shot a man.”

“Big Drum?” said Berry. “Whit, we’re right glad you shot Big Drum.”

“No, not him.” Whit made a frustrated waving-away gesture. “Besides, I didn’t kill Big Drum; that fellow who cut off his head later did that. It was the other one. The first one.”

“What first one?” Fawn asked carefully.

“It was the night before, at the cave. Some fellows ran out trying to get away, which was exactly why Dag put us bowmen where he did, I guess. I was so scared and excited, I couldn’t hardly see what I was doing, but…my first shot, my very first shot ever, went right through this bandit’s eye. Killed him outright.”

Fawn winced and murmured Eew. Hawthorn, unhelpfully, made a very impressed Ooh.

Whit waved again. “It wasn’t the eye thing that bothered me. Well, it did, but that wasn’t…” He drew air through his nostrils, and tried, “It was too easy.”

Bo rubbed his rough chin in some sympathy, but rumbled, “Whit, some men need killin’.”

Berry put in perhaps more shrewdly, “It doesn’t need to be catching.”

“It’s not that, exactly,” said Whit, his brows drawing in.

Dag spoke for the first time, so unexpectedly that Fawn gave a little jump. “No, but you’re not the same person, after. It changes you in your ground, and that’s a fact. Whit, Barr, and Remo all crossed that line for the first time that night at the cave, and there’s no stepping back over it. You have to go on from where you are.”

“I suppose you did the same, once,” said Remo diffidently. “So long ago you don’t remember, likely.”

“Oh, I remember,” said Dag.

Nods all around the table at this received wisdom.

Dag set his tankard down so hard his drink slopped out. “Absent gods, do you people have to swallow down every blighted thing I say? Don’t you ever choke?”

Fawn’s eyes widened, and hers were not the only ones; surprised heads turned toward Dag all around the table. Hod flinched.

“What the blight’s bit you?” said Barr. Saving Fawn the trouble of composing a more tactful question to the same effect.

Dag drummed his fingers, grimaced, blurted: “I killed Crane by ground-ripping a thin little slice out of his spinal cord. That’s how I dropped him on the deck. From twenty feet away, mind you. Remember that mosquito back in Lumpton Market, Whit? Just like that. But inside his body, same as I do healing groundwork.”

“Oh,” said Whit, his eyes growing big. “I, um, didn’t realize you could do that.”

“I realized. Even back then.” Dag’s glance darted around the table.

“It was too easy.”

Fawn recalled, then, where she’d heard that exact phrase before, if in a different tone of voice, and it wasn’t just now from Whit: Crane’s confession. But Whit hadn’t been there for that. His echo of the renegade’s words was accidental. Dag’s isn’t, she thought. Did Barr and Remo catch the twisted meanings, too? Do I?

“That was what you did to Crane? Ground-ripped him?” said Barr blankly.

“I didn’t know any person could do that,” said Remo, more warily. “I thought only malices…?”

“It’s a very weak version of the same thing, yes. I have reason to believe it’s an advanced maker’s skill as well, or some variant, but since it’s come out—come back—in me I haven’t had a chance to find a maker skilled enough to ask. You can easily defend against it by closing your grounds, which is why I had to wait for a moment when Crane opened his. It only worked because I took him by surprise.”

“Oh,” said Barr, relaxing. “That’s all right, then.”

“For some of us here,” said Dag dryly.

Whit, at least, looked as though he caught the full implications; his mouth went round. Whatever was Dag about, to plop out this admission here, now, in this company? Was it for Whit’s sake, or his own?

Fawn sat up straight. “Dag, this is morbid. You aren’t no more going to turn into a malice, or even into Crane, than Whit is going to turn into Little Drum. For that matter, I made that arrow Whit shot in that fellow’s eye, with my own hands, as strong and straight and sharp as Cattagus could teach me. And I made it for killin’—whatever needed killin’—because I figured it would be down to either the other fellow or Dag at that point, and I knew which I wanted it to be. Same goes for my brother, if you’ve any doubt.” She drew breath. “A knife, an arrow, ground-ripping, they’re all just different tools. You can kill a man with a hammer, for pity’s sake.”

The farmerly alarm around the table faded as folks digested this thought. Dag said nothing, though his tension eased; he cast Fawn that odd little salute of his, and a slow nod. Had he never thought of ground-ripping as a tool, before? Or only as some uncanny magical menace? Fawn loved him beyond breath, but there was no doubt his tendency to Lakewalkerish gloom could be awfully exasperating, some days.

Dag said, “So you see, Whit, if there’s an answer to your trouble, I haven’t found it yet either. As for the bow lessons, though I do enjoy them very much, they were never a game for me, not even when I was a tadpole Hawthorn’s size. They’re earnest training for earnest business.” He blinked and added, “Same as ground-veiling drills, come to think, which we’ve also neglected for the past week. I’ll see you two out on the deck tomorrow morning.” He tilted his head at Barr and Remo, who did not argue.

Dag went on, “I won’t invite you out to play a game, Whit—and Hod and Hawthorn, and the rest of you—but I will invite you out to continue your training. Because—as you’ve seen—you never know when you’ll need a skill, and more lives than your own may depend on it.”

“My papa used”—Berry’s breath caught, broke free again—“used to say, Nothing worth doing is fun all the time. But it’s still worth doing all the time.”

Whit gave her a crooked smile, and nodded.

The archery lessons commenced by lantern light as soon as the dishes were washed up. Fawn was pleased to see the company’s mood lift, with all the exercise and interplay and stretching of legs running up and down the riverbank, which had been her whole purpose for the proposition in the first place. So that part was all right.

She was more worried for Dag, as he wrapped himself around her and fell into exhausted slumber that night. They hadn’t made love since before the cave. If Fawn hadn’t watched Dag convalescing after Raintree, she might have feared it meant some dwindling of his affection, but she was clear this was only profound fatigue. Yet this time he hadn’t been physically injured, or blighted, or ground-ripped. He had put out ground reinforcements—and unimaginably more complex healing efforts—till he couldn’t stand up, though, and the tally of the strange ground he’d taken in, directly or as part of unbeguiling, was daunting. Skink, Chicory, Bo, Hawthorn, who knew how many boatmen; most of all, that big wedge of Crane.