“So, don’t sell them for a trivial price.” Dag glanced at his knife on the workbench, its plain lines echoing the bone from which it had just emerged, then over at another blank Vayve had in progress, hung on the wall. The carving on that blade was elaborate. Later, it might be decorated with shell inlay or colored stones, the hilt wrapped with patterned leather. Some designs were exclusive to certain tents or camps, proclaiming the knife’s origin to the educated eye; you could always tell southern work at a glance, that way. Great pains and pride went into the makings. In the north, Dag thought, it was mostly just pain. There’s your spare time, Vayve. Don’t you see it?

Fawn put in, “Dag started off with the notion of shielding just me, and only then thought of farmers generally. But I reckon such shields might work to protect Lakewalker youngsters, too. Like the nineteen lost at Bonemarsh. Because it wasn’t only Greenspring hit with that sorrow. Stands to reason.”

Vayve fell suddenly silent.

So did Dag, blinking. Of course. Of course…! The intractable problem of how to persuade Lakewalker makers to be interested in this wild notion of his evaporated with startling suddenness, right before Dag’s eyes. Vayve’s ground roiled with new thought.

Why hadn’t he taken his idea that one step further? Aside from the fact that his head had been stuffed so full of new things these past months it felt like bursting, and he was so dizzy with it all he didn’t know if he was coming or going. Maybe it was for the same reason no Lakewalkers had taken any step-they already had a solution to the problem, or thought they did. A young Lakewalker’s tent-kin or patrol mentors were all intent on teaching ground veiling. Why tackle a problem sideways in chancy experiments that could cost lives when you already had a time-proven system?

Dag took an unsteady breath and went on: “I was thinking that an involution might either be expanded into, or anchor, some sort of slippery shield that a malice couldn’t get a grip on. At least for long enough for the farmer-or youngster-to run away. If an involution can hold a dying ground, why not a living one? ”

Vayve’s brows climbed. “But a knife’s involution breaks when it’s brought in contact with a malice.”

Dag ducked his head. “But it doesn’t break from the outside. It breaks from the inside, from the affinity of the dying ground with the malice nearby. It’s a sort of a vibration. I didn’t realize that, for all the twenty-six knives that had passed through my hand to their ends, till I held one that had no affinity with a malice.”

Dag took a long breath, and began the explanation, again, of how his former bonded knife had become charged with the death of Fawn’s unborn child at Glassforge, and the tale of its final fate in Raintree. Vayve asked far more, and more detailed, questions about the events than Arkady had. She proved especially fascinated with his account of the malice’s mud-man magery as seen from the inside.

Dag explained, “I recognized it as an involution of a sort, too, but huge, and so complex-anchored in the array of groundlocked makers the malice had slaved together. It didn’t just sit there passive like a knife’s involution. It was living off the makers, in a sense. It was the first I realized that magery is an alive thing.

“I’m not sure just where a ground shield would get such aliveness, though. And it couldn’t be working all the time, or it would wear out too quick. I’m thinking it would need to come awake only when challenged, the way a knife only breaks when it actually enters a malice.”

“Well,” said Vayve slowly, “there would be four possible sources of ground in that moment. The involution itself, the person being shielded, the immediate surroundings, or the malice itself.”

Dag frowned. “I don’t see how you could put enough strength into an involution to last more ’n a moment, if it came alive like the magery I saw in Raintree.”

“It would be clever if you could pull it from the malice itself,” mused Vayve. “Like grabbing an attacker’s arm and pulling him off balance.”

“More like grabbing an attacker’s arm and pulling it off,” said Dag, “but no. You don’t want malice ground getting in you or on you. It’s a deadly poison. Blight itself.”

“The surroundings could be anything. No way to anticipate them,” said Vayve. “That leaves the person being shielded.”

“That seems… circular,” said Dag, trying to picture this.

“If the malice’s touch spurred your shield to going,” said Fawn, “how would you rein it in? ”

Dag frowned. “I expect it would run down on its own pretty quick.”

“If it was using up a person’s ground to live, wouldn’t that be sort of fatal? ”

“Um…” said Dag, scratching the back of his head.

They debated involutions and groundwork for upwards of an hour, till the light falling through the open door of the work shack and Dag’s grumbling stomach reminded him that their dinner basket had likely arrived at Arkady’s place. They had not solved any of the problems, but Dag’s unsettlement felt curiously heartening. Maybe he’d only stepped back or sideways, and not ahead, but at least he hadn’t been dancing alone. Fawn was right. Makers need other makers. Like Dag’s knife-maker brother Dar, Vayve had plainly been doing the same task over and over in the same way for a long time; unlike Dar, her mind hadn’t set solid.

“Come around again if you think of anything else,” she told Dag with a friendly smile as he and Fawn made their way down her porch steps.

He smiled back. “You too.”

–-

The breeze whispered from the south. The slanting sun burned through the damp air with surprising strength. Fawn could just picture the full spring that would come on in not many weeks more, when the fat buds and shy shoots all unfurled. In any case, it was warm enough this afternoon to sit outside on Arkady’s roofless porch overlooking the lake.

Seated on the bench pushed up to the plank table, she crouched over her task, her tongue caught between her teeth, tracing with her curved steel cutter around Dag’s new bonded knife laid upon a leather scrap.

The southern Lakewalkers made their knife sheaths of elaborate tooled leather, inlaid sometimes with silver or even gold, but this one would be plain, in the northern style. Simple and fierce, like her thoughts. She tried to make it her best work, like holding yourself up stiff and straight in pride before the eyes of an enemy.

Arkady wandered out of the house with a mug of tea in his hand, peered for a moment over her shoulder, then drifted to the porch rail, leaning on it to gaze down over the slope. Thirty paces below, Dag sat cross-legged on the stubby dock, his back to the house, bent over his own task.

“What is he doing down there?” Arkady muttered querulously.

“What does he have in those sacks? ”

“A bag of nuts,” replied Fawn, not looking up from the cut she was finishing, “and a box of mice. And a glass jar.”

“Mice!”

“He’s not ground-ripping them!” she added hastily as Arkady straightened up. “He promised me he’d be careful about that.” She’d walked down to observe Dag’s progress a short while ago. She’d brought him the nuts and the jar, but made him catch his own mice. There were limits to wifely support. Although the sight of several mice marching out of the nearby woods in a ragged line and jumping into the box under Dag’s direction had been a memory to treasure. “He says he’s about to give up trying to make a shield for the whole body, like that groundworked leather coat he once had that he claimed would turn arrows. The idea sort of worked, but then the mice couldn’t run or breathe.”

Forcing a second trip to the woods for more mice, earlier, and silencing Fawn’s doubts about the enterprise. Dag could make lots of little trials quickly this way, work through the mistakes and dead ends. And scale up to, say, her later on. Much later on. “He’s gone back to just trying for ground shielding.”