“Hello, Tavia, Neeta,” said the maker cordially. “What brings you up here? ”

“Oh, Vayve!” said Neeta, her voice distressed. “Something terrible’s happened to my primed knife-well, it was going to be my primed knife. My father had promised it to me when I came back from Luthlia, but this morning when we went to take it from the chest-well, look!”

She mounted the steps, slid the knife she was clutching from its sheath, and laid it on the table in front of the maker. The dry bone blade was cracked, split up half its length. Traces of tattered groundwork still clung to it, but its involution and the death it had contained were gone.

“He swears it was fine when he last put it away, and nobody dropped it-what happened to it? Vayve, can you fix it? ”

“Oh, dear,” said Vayve, picking up the knife. “Just how old was this, Neeta? It’s not of my making.”

“I’m not exactly sure. My father carried it when he was younger, and his uncle before him. Did we do something wrong-should we have oiled it, or, or…? ”

The maker turned the blade, studying the split. “No, that wouldn’t have made any difference. It was simply too old, Neeta. The groundwork on knives doesn’t last forever, you know.”

“I was going to take it on patrol tomorrow!”

The patrol Barr and Remo were joining-so, the reasons for their urgency to volunteer were revealed, one blond, one red-haired. Dag didn’t think he allowed his amusement to show in his face, but Tavia, watching him inquisitively, returned an uncertain half smile.

“Isn’t there anything you can do?” Neeta went on. “Was my tentkin’s sacrifice just wasted, then? Thrown into the air? ”

Dag had been through this scene before, with distraught younger patrollers. He said gently, “If that knife was carried on patrol for many years, it wasn’t wasted, even if it was never used on a malice. It upheld us all the same.”

Neeta shot him a Who the blight are you to say? look. “But I might have taken this one to Luthlia instead of the one grandmother gave me, and used it last year on that sessile my patrol found. And then we’d still have had the other.”

Most young patrollers who exchanged north of the Dead Lake took primed knives from home along; it was something of a customary fee for their training. Dag himself had carried primed knives to Luthlia that way twice, early in his long tally. About half the patrollers returned, ready to take up expanded duties. None of the knives did. A steady stream of sacrifice, flowing northward.

“You can’t know that,” soothed Vayve. “I believe that knife you took with you was quite old as well, wasn’t it? Their fates might simply have been reversed.”

“Then maybe I should have taken both.” But Neeta’s hands unclenched, and she sighed. She added wryly, “I just don’t know when I’ll have a chance at another, is all. All of my tent-kin are disgustingly healthy.”

Patroller humor, but Tavia put in more seriously, “No one ever wants to share around here. Nobody in my tent will give me a primed knife because nobody even has one. Mama won’t even give me permission to bond to a blank! She says I’m much too young. Neeta claims that in Luthlia, they say if you’re old enough to patrol, you’re old enough to pledge!”

In Oleana, too. Dag thought of his patroller cousin who’d shared at age nineteen. Much too young. Both sides in this argument seemed right to Dag, which wrung his brain a bit. Or maybe it was his heart.

Bestirring himself to give the young patroller’s mind a more hopeful turn, Dag inquired, “So, will you be patrol leader tomorrow? ”

“Not yet,” Neeta said glumly, then added, “But our camp captain promised me the next place to open up.”

“How many patrols does New Moon Cutoff field? ”

“Eight, when we’re at full strength.” She frowned at him. “You’re a funny fellow. Those Oleana boys say you’re obsessed with farmers.”

“You should stop by Arkady’s place and talk with my wife Fawn,” said Dag, driven to dryness by her tone. “You could compare malice kills. She slew one, too, did Barr or Remo tell you that? Up near Glassforge.”

And it wasn’t a mere sessile.

Her nose wrinkled. “It sounded pretty garbled. You had to lend her your knife, didn’t you? ”

Dag tilted his head. “We’re all lent our knives, in the end.”

“But she can never share in return.”

And glad I am of it. But even that was only half true. The strange tale of Fawn’s lost babe was nothing he wanted to repeat here, if the boys had actually had the wit to keep it close. “Many Lakewalkers never share, either-weren’t you just now complaining of that? ”

Dag had, he realized, an audience of three, far from warm, but bemused enough by this upcountry stranger to not bolt. Neeta had taken the last seat, Tavia leaned comfortably against one of the porch posts, and Vayve seemed in no hurry to return to whatever task he’d interrupted. He swallowed, and swung abruptly into what he’d come to think of as the ballad of Greenspring, much as he’d explained it to Arkady, and to dozens before him. Dag’s words were growing all too smooth-polished with use, but, he hoped, not so glib as to fail to carry the weight of his horror. By the time he came to his description of the children’s burial trench, his listeners’ eyes were dark with pity, though their mouths stayed tight.

“Your answer’s simple enough, it seems to me,” said Neeta, when he at last ran down. “Chase all your farmers back south of the Grace. Not that we want them.”

“You ever try to run a farmer off his land? There’s nothing simple about it,” said Dag.

“That part’s too true,” said Vayve. “A hundred years back, New Moon folks still used to change camps, winter and summer. Then it got so that if you left your land for a season, you’d come back to find it cleared, plowed, and planted. We finally had to hold our territory by sitting on it, dividing tents between here and Moss River. And send folks from the camp council down to Graymouth and get lines drawn on pieces of farmer paper to say we owned it! Absurd!”

“The cost to us of teaching farmers is nothing to the cost everyone will pay if we don’t,” said Dag stubbornly.

“In your north country, maybe,” said Tavia.

“Everywhere. We have to begin where we are, with whatever piece we have in front of us. Never miss a chance to befriend and teach- there’s a task anyone can start.”

Vayve made a little gesture at Dag’s upper arm, the wedding cord beneath his jacket sleeve unconcealed from her groundsense. She said dryly, “I’d say you took befriending a bit far, Oleana man.”

Not nearly far enough, yet. Dag sighed, rose, touched his brow politely.

“I’ll check back about those bone blanks. Good day, ma’am. Patrollers.”

–-

Over the next week Dag grew increasingly absorbed by the work in the medicine tent. Not that he hadn’t been in and out of the hands of the makers plenty before, but this shift in his angle of view, looking down the throats of such varied problems, made a bigger difference than he’d have guessed. As a patroller, he’d never visited the medicine tent except as a last resort; now, as part of that last resort, he found himself not only understanding, but actually reciting, that annoying maker chant of Why didn’t you come in sooner?

A half-dozen folks a day turned up with minor ailments or injuries, although once a man was carried in with a broken leg, and a day later, more interesting and much more difficult, an aged woman with a broken hip. Still more delicate was a woman with an ugly tumor in her breast, which Arkady was treating daily by pinching off its blood supply, tiny vessel by tiny vessel. His explanation of why he didn’t try to destroy it by ground-ripping gave Dag chills-tumor ground could be nearly as toxic as malice spatter, it appeared. Arkady began taking Dag with him on his daily round of tent visits, too, although Dag was uncertain how he’d earned this advancement, since though he might fetch, carry, or hold, he was still not allowed to do even the simplest groundwork.