Fawn crunched valiantly and tried to picture a young, impatient Dag sitting out on a raft, mostly undressed, coppery skin gleaming in the sun, grouchily tickling plunkin ears, one after another after another. She had to smile. With two hands, scarless and unmarred. Her smile faded.

“They say the old high lords of the lake league made wonderful magical plants, and animals too,” Dag said thoughtfully. “Not many seemed to have survived the disasters. Plunkins have tricky growing conditions. Not too deep, not too shallow, mud bottoms. They won’t take in those deep, clear, rocky-bottomed lakes east or north. Makes them a regional, er, delicacy. And, of course, they need Lakewalkers, year after year after year. Makes me wonder how far back this camp goes, really.”

Fawn considered the continuity of plunkins. When all their world was falling apart around them, some Lakewalker ancestors must have kept the crop going. For hope? For habit? For sheer stubbornness? Eyeing Dag, she was inclined to bet on stubbornness.

They burned the rinds on the fire, and Fawn set the spare half aside for breakfast. Outside, the green dark of the storm had given way to the blue dark of night, and the rain had slowed to a steady drizzle. Dag hooked their bedrolls closer together.

Fawn felt her knife sheath shift between her breasts as she crawled across to sit again on her blanket, and reached up to touch it. “Do you think Dar was telling the truth about the knife?”

Dag leaned back against his saddlebags, damp bare feet to the fire, and frowned thoughtfully. “I think everything Dar said was truth. As far as it went.”

“So…what does that mean? Do you think he was holding something back?”

“Not sure. It’s not that…I’d say, the knife is a problem he wants to have go away, not explore.”

“If he’s as good a knife maker as you say, I’d think he’d be more curious.”

Dag shrugged. “Folks are at first. Like Saun the Sheep, or me at Saun’s age—it’s all new and exciting. But then it becomes the same task over and over, and the new becomes rare. Whether you then find novelty to be exciting or something to resent…Thing, is, Dar has spent thirty and more years, all day most every day, making weapons for his relatives and best friends to go kill themselves with. Whatever Dar is doing that lets him go on, I’m not inclined to fool with it.”

“Maybe we should ask after a younger knife maker, then.” Fawn shoved her own saddlebags around, trying for a more comfortable prop, and lay down next to Dag. “So…what did he—and you—mean when you said the ground had to have affinity? You used that word two or three times, like it meant something special.”

“Ah. Hm.” Dag rubbed his nose with his hook. His features were outlined in the orange glow from the fire, lapped by the light with the rest of him falling into shadow. The walls of the shack seemed to recede into a fathomless darkness. “Well, simply that malice ground takes up Lakewalker mortality readily, as the ground of bone takes up that of blood.”

Fawn frowned. “You have to figure, bones take up blood because they were once both together.”

“That’s right.”

“So…” She suddenly wasn’t sure she liked where this was going. “So…?”

“Legend would have it—legend is just like they say, only more dried up, you know?”

She nodded cautiously.

“In fact, no one alive now knows for sure. Those who knew died in the knowing, one, two thousand years ago. Chronicles were lost, time was lost—was it two centuries or five or ten that dropped out, how many generations disappeared in the dark?”

“They kept the plunkins going, anyhow.”

His lips curved briefly. “There is that.”

“So what is this thing that’s known or not known?”

“Well, there is more than one version of how malices came into the world. We know they didn’t used to be here.”

“You’ve seen, what, twenty-seven of them? Up close? I don’t want to know what other people say. What do you believe?”

He sighed. “They say is all I have to go on, for most of it. They say the old lords of the lake league worked great magics in great groups. They combined up under the mastery of the high king. One king, the last king, greater and more cunning than any before, at the apex of the greatest array of mages ever assembled, reached beyond the bounds of the world for…something. Some say immortality. Some say power. The king stories mostly assume evil intent because of evil results—if there is punishment, there must have been a crime. They blame pride and selfishness, or whatever vice they’re especially miffed with. I’m not so sure. Maybe he was attempting to capture some imagined good to share, and it all went horribly wrong.

“You know I said the old lords used their magic to alter plants, animals, and themselves. And their children.” He tapped his temple with the backside of his hook, and Fawn realized he thought his eye color was a relic of those efforts. “Extended life, improved groundsense and ability to move the world through its ground.” He glanced, briefly and uneasily, at his left arm held up, and she knew he was thinking about his ghost hand again. He let it drop again to his side. “We Lakewalkers, we think, are the descendants of lesser hinterland lords—what must the great ones have been like?

“Anyway. In their attempt to enhance themselves, the high lords drew in something from outside the world. God, demon, other. If they’d kidnapped a god, it would explain why the gods shun us. And the king combined with it, or it with him. And became something that was neither. Vast, distorted, powerful, insane, and consuming ground instead of…of whatever they’d intended.”

“Wait, are you saying your own king became the first malice?” Fawn rolled up on her elbow to stare in astonishment.

Dag tilted his head in doubt. “He became something. Some lords fell under his power—legend says—and some broke away. A war of matter and magic followed, which sank the lakes and left the Dead Lake and the Western Levels. Whether the malice-king’s enemies discovered how to destroy him, or it was another accident, any who knew died in the finding out. Someone back then must have discovered how to share mortality. It must have been a great sharing, is all I can say. Our malices came from some cataclysmic ground transformation when he, or it, was at last destroyed, and blew up into those ten thousand—or however many—shards or seeds or eggs. But that’s what we think the malices are all trying to do, clumsily, when they come out of the ground. Become kings again.

“Hence—to return roundabout to your original question—affinity. Malices take up Lakewalker mortality because they are, or were, partly us.”

Along the eaves, bones clanked in a breath of night wind. Fawn found herself trying to shrink under her blankets, which had crept, during this reciting, from her feet to her waist to her nose. This was worse than any tall tale her brothers had ever tormented her with. “Are you saying all those malices are your relatives?”

He lay back and, infuriatingly, laughed. “Don’t you just hate those family squabbles? Absent gods.” The chuckles died down before she got up the nerve to poke him in reproof. “Collateral ancestors at most, Spark. But I suggest you not share that insight around. Some folks are like to be offended.”

What have I married into, really? The revelations dismayed her. She thought back to her malice’s tormented, merciless eyes. They might have been tea-brown, with a certain now-familiar iridescence.

He let out the last of his black humor in a sigh. “If not relatives, they are certainly our legacy. Our joint inheritance. Not sure what my share is.” His hook drifted up to touch his heart. “One, I reckon.”

A chill shook Fawn at this vision of his mortal fate. “And you all so proud. Riding by us like lords.” And yet Lakewalkers lived, at home, in worse poverty than most farmers, unless the Bearsford camp was any more elaborate than this. She was beginning to suspect not. Noble grandeur was sadly lacking all around. Squalid scramble seemed a more apt description.