“That’s… astonishing,” said Arkady. Fawn’s first fear, that Arkady would toss them out before they got their tale half told, eased. Beneath his quelling reserve, she thought he was growing quite engrossed. He likes the parts about groundwork.

Dag nodded shortly. “This was a very advanced malice, the most fully developed I’ve ever seen.”

“And ah… how many have you seen? ”

Dag shrugged. “I lost count years back. That I’ve slain with a knife in my own hand, twenty-six or so. That’s counting the sessiles, which I do. Anyway, back at Bonemarsh-I stupidly tried to match grounds to steady the heartbeat of a dying maker in the array. And I got sucked in, too. Which is how I found out about the involution-I saw it from the inside. And after that the story has to go to Fawn, because the next few days were all a gray fog for me.”

Fawn decided on a simplified version. “I came to Bonemarsh with Hoharie, because Dag had sent back for her help with this horrible groundlock thing. None of the Lakewalkers seemed to know what to do about it, which made me about half crazy, watching and waiting. Then Hoharie tried some experiment-I never did find out what, though I think she suspected about the involution.”

“She did.” Dag nodded.

“Anyhow, then she was drawn in, and Mari, who was in charge by then, said, no more experiments. But that night, I thought of one more. If an involution is a cut-off piece of a maker or a malice, which it seems to be, maybe this leftover piece of malice just needed a separate dose of mortality in order to destroy it. So I took my sharing knife”-she gulped in memory-“and stuck it in Dag’s leg. Because when I slew the malice back in Glassforge, he’d said I could stick it in anywhere.”

Dag smiled, and murmured, “Sharp end first.” Fawn smiled back.

“I think it worked to give it into Dag’s ghost hand, the way his arm jerked up, but he’ll have to tell that part,” Fawn concluded.

Dag frowned and scratched his head. “Strangest experience I ever did have. We all know what it feels like to have a body and no ground, from being youngsters before our groundsense comes in, or in veiling. While I was slaved in the malice’s groundlock, it seemed like I was my ground-but not my body. I felt the knife come into me, and I knew it at once-it had been bonded to me, and still had affinity with my blood. But Fawn’s child’s ground lacked affinity with the malice-very strange and pure, it was-so there was no resonance, no, no… calling, to break open the knife’s involution and release the dying ground.

So I broke open the involution myself, and added some affinity from my ghost hand. It was like unmaking a knife, all backward. It tore up my ghost hand something fierce, but it destroyed the malice’s groundwork, and cleaned out those poison spatters as well. Fawn’s sacrifice-well, with that little extra groundwork from me-got all ten of us out of the lock alive.” He blinked at Arkady, who was staring with his hand before his parted lips as if to stifle an exclamation, and added apologetically, “It wasn’t like I saw it, and figured it out, and did it. It was more like I saw it, and did it, and figured it all out much later.”

Remo said, in downright peeved tones, “You never told me about all that, Dag! You only told me about Greenspring!”

“Greenspring was the important part, seemed to me.”

Fawn shivered in memory; Dag, grimacing, reached across the table to briefly grip her shoulder as he might console a young patroller.

Arkady took his hand from his mouth and said, “So what was Greenspring?”

Dag sighed. “When I’d recovered enough to ride, we all went home by way of the blighted farmer village that malice had emerged under. When we arrived, we found some folks had come back and were having a mass burial of those who hadn’t got out. Which was about half, of a thousand people. That first feast was the secret of how that malice had grown so quick, so strong.”

He shared a look of understanding with Fawn, who picked up the thread: “They’d finished planting the grown-ups, mostly women and old folks, and were just starting on the children.” She took a breath, measured Arkady, and dared to say, “I’m told New Moon Camp lost a youngster a couple of months back. There were-how many children, in the row in front of that trench, Dag?” Laid out all stiff and wan, there had seemed no end to them.

“One hundred sixty-two,” Dag said flatly.

“The ground-ripping had kept them from rotting in the heat,” explained Fawn, and swallowed hard. Pale ice-children. “It didn’t help as much as you’d think.”

Arkady shut his ground just then, Fawn thought; he went something more than expressionless, at any rate.

“It took me some thinking, after,” said Dag. “How Greenspring was let to happen, and what could keep it from happening again. It’s an Oleana problem; in the south there’s nearly no malices, and in the far north there’s nearly no farmers. Where there’s both…” He held up hand and hook, but was frustrated in a gesture of interlacing fingers;

Fawn thought everyone could imagine it, though. “It was plain something needed done, and it was plainer no one was doing it. And that we were running out of time to wait for someone smarter than me to try to figure out what. That’s why I broke with my kin and camp and quit the patrol. They thought it was over Fawn, and it was, but it was Fawn led me to Greenspring. Roundaboutly.” Dag gave a sharp nod, and fell silent.

“I… see,” said Arkady slowly.

He glanced toward his front door; annoyance flashed across his face, but then shifted to a shrewder look. He rose and was halfway to it when a knock sounded. Sticking his head out, Arkady exchanged murmurs with his caller; Fawn caught a glimpse of a middle-aged woman, who craned her neck in turn, but did not enter. Arkady turned back holding a large basket covered with a cloth, which he thumped down upon the table. “Some lunch all around would be as well just now, I think.”

Fawn, Remo, and Barr all jumped up to help Arkady set out tools and plates; Dag sat more wearily, and let them. The break from the tension was welcomed by everyone, Fawn suspected, even Arkady. The basket yielded a big lidded clay pot full of a thick stew, two kinds of bread wrapped in cloths, and, almost to Fawn’s greater astonishment than this farmer-style fare, what were identifiably a couple of plunkins, spheres half the size of her head with brown husks. Cut open, they revealed a solid fruit both redder in color and sweeter than the plunkin she’d encountered at Hickory Lake.

“Why don’t you have this kind up north, Dag? ” she asked around a mouthful.

“Longer growing season, I think,” he answered, also around a mouthful. Judging from the munching, all the northern Lakewalkers at the table plainly thought it was a treat. Arkady explained that these were grown in the shallow ends of the crescent lake.

Arkady did not pursue his interrogation while they ate-thinking, or did he just have medical notions about guarding digestion? Nor did Dag volunteer anything further. The boys, Fawn thought, wouldn’t have dared to say boo. But Arkady wouldn’t be feeding us this good if he wasn’t at least thinking of keeping us, would he? Or maybe he just reckoned wild patrollers, like wild animals, could be tamed with vittles.

Finally growing replete, Fawn thought to ask Arkady, “Where did all this food come from? Who should we thank? ”

He looked a trifle surprised at the question. “My neighboring tents take it in turns to send over my lunches and suppers. Breakfasts I do for myself. Tea, usually.”

“Are you sick? ” she asked diffidently.

His brows went up. “No.”

He busied himself making another pot of tea while Fawn and Remo repacked the basket and set it outside the front door at Arkady’s direction.

He washed his hands again, sat, poured, frowned at Dag. Dag frowned back.