The Sharing Knife: Beguilement

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  He sat against the wall facing her, legs stretched out, and sipped some more.

  “There would be more I could do for you on the inside, patroller tricks with my groundsense, if only…”

  “Groundsense.” She uncurled a little more and regarded him gravely. “You said you’d tell me about that.”

  He blew out his breath, wondering how to explain it to a farmer girl in a way she wouldn’t take wrong. “Groundsense. It’s a sense of… everything around us. What’s alive, where it is, how it’s doing. And not just what’s alive, though that’s brightest. No one quite knows if the world makes ground, or ground makes the world, but ground is what a malice sucks out to sustain itself, the loss of which kills everything around its air. In the middle of a really bad patch of blight, not only is everything once alive now dead, even rocks don’t hold their form. Ground’s what groundsense senses.”

  “Magic?” she said doubtfully.

  He shook his head. “Not the way farmers use the term. It’s not like getting something for nothing. It’s just the way the world is, deep down.” He forged on against her frankly blank look. “We use words from sight and touch and the other senses to describe it, but it isn’t like any of those things, really. It’s like how you know… Close your eyes.”

  She raised her brows at him in puzzlement, but did so.

  “Now. Which way is down? Point.”

  Her thumb rotated toward the floor, and the big brown eyes opened again, still puzzled.

  “So how did you know? You didn’t see down.”

  “I…” She hesitated. “I felt it. With my whole body.”

  “Groundsense is something more like that. So.” He sipped more tea; the warm spice soothed his throat. “People are the most complicated, brightest things groundsense sees. We see each other, unless we close it down to block the distraction. Like shutting your eyes, or wrapping a lantern up in a cloak.

  You can—Lakewalkers can—match our body’s ground to someone else’s body’s ground.

  If you get the match up really close, almost like slipping inside each other, you can lend strength, rhythm… help with wounds, slow bleeding, help with when a hurt body starts to go all wrong down into that cold gray place. Lead the other back to balance. Did something like that for a patroller boy last—ye gods, last night? Saun. I have to stop thinking of him as Saun the Sheep, it’s going to slip out my mouth someday, and he’ll never forgive me, but anyway. Bandit whaled him in the chest with a sledgehammer during the fight, broke ribs, stunned his heart and lungs. I whacked my ground into a match with his right quick, persuaded his to dance with mine. It was all a bit brutal, but I was in a hurry.”

  “Would he have died? But for you?”

  “I… maybe. If he thinks so, I’m not going to argue; might finally get him to give up those overblown sword moves of his while he’s still impressed with me.”

  Dag grinned briefly, but the grin faded again. More tea. “Trouble is…”

  Blight, out of tea. “You’ve taken a wound to your womb. I can sense it in you, like a rip in your ground. But I can’t match it to lend you anything helpful through our grounds because, well, I haven’t got one. A womb, that is. Not part of my body or its ground. If Mari or one of the girls were here, they could maybe help. But I don’t want to leave you alone for eight or twelve hours or however long it would take to find one and bring her back.”

  “No, don’t do that!” Her hand clutched at his leg, then drew back shyly as she coiled more tightly on her side. How much pain was she in? Plenty.

  “Right. So, that means we have to ride this thing out the farmer way. What do farmer women do, do you know?”

  “Go to bed. I think.”

  “Didn’t your mother or sisters ever say?”

  “Don’t have any sisters, and my brothers are all older than me. My mother, she’s taught me a lot, but she doesn’t do midwifery. She’s always so busy with, well, everything. Mostly I think the body just cleans itself out like a bad monthly, though some women seem to get poorly, after. I think it’s all right if you bleed some, but bad if you bleed a lot.”

  “Well, tell me which you’re doing, all right?”

  “All right…” she said doubtfully.

  Her expression was so very reserved and inward. As though painfully trying to listen to the marred song of her own body with a groundsense blighted deaf.

  Or futilely looking for that other light within her, so bright and busy just this morning, now dark and dead. In all, Dag thought Fawn had been much too quiet ever since they’d left the lair. It made him feel unsettled and desperate.

  He wondered if he ought to invent a few sisters for himself, to bolster his authority in the matter. “Look, I am a very experienced patroller,” he blathered on into that fraught silence. “I delivered a baby single-handedly on the Great Lake Road, once.” Wait, was this a good tale to tell now? Perhaps not, but it was too late to stop. “Well, not single-handedly, I had two hands then, but they were both pretty clumsy. Fortunately, it was the woman’s fourth, and she could tell me how to go on. Which she did, pretty tartly. She was not best pleased to be stuck with me for a midwife. She called me such names. I stored ‘em up to treasure—they came in right useful later on, when I was dealing with feckless young patrollers. Twenty-two I was, and so proud of myself after, you’d think I did all the work. Let me tell you, next bandit I faced after that didn’t look nearly so scary.”

  This won a watery chuckle, as he’d hoped. Good, because if he’d gone with the fictional sisters, she might have asked their names, and he didn’t think his invention would last so far. His eyelids felt as if someone had attached lead weights to them when he wasn’t looking. The room was beginning to waver unpleasantly.

  “She was one straightforward lady. Set me an example I never forgot.”

  “I can see that,” murmured Fawn. And after a quiet moment added, “Thank you.”

  “Oh, you’re an easy patient. I won’t have to shave you in the morning, and you won’t throw your boots at my head because you’re cranky and hurting. Bored cranky patrollers who hurt, world’s worst company. Trust me.”

  “Do they really throw boots?”

  “Yes. I did.”

  A yawn cracked his face. His bruises and strains were reporting for duty, right enough. Reminded of his boots’ existence, he slowly drew up his feet and began to undo his laces. He’d had those boots on for two—no, four days, because he’d slept in them night before last.

  “Would you feel more comfortable if I went out to sleep on the porch?” he asked.

  Fawn eyed him over her sheets, now pulled up nearly to her lips. Pink, those lips, if much paler than he would have liked to see them, but not gray or bluish, good. “No,” she said in a curiously distant tone, “I don’t think I would.”

  “Good…” Another yawn split the word, and others crowded after: “Because I don’t think… I could crawl through all that… sticky jam right now. Softer here. You can have the inside, I’ll take the outside.” He flopped forward facedown in the tick. He really should turn his head so he could breathe, he supposed. He turned toward Fawn, that being the better view, and eyed what he could see of her over the hillock of stuffed cloth. Dark curls, skin petal-fair where it was not bruised. Smelling infinitely better than him. A surprised brown eye.

  “Mama,” he muttered, “the sheep are safe tonight.”

  “Sheep?” she said after a moment.

  “Patroller joke.” About farmers, come to think. He wasn’t going to tell it to her. Ever. Fortunately, he was growing too bludgeoned by his fatigue to talk.

  He roused himself just enough to stretch over, pinch out the candle, and flop again.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Good. ‘Night.” His rueful consciousness of that short curving body separated from his by only a couple of layers of fabric was intense, but very brief. Fawn woke in the dark of night on her right side, facing the kitchen wall, with a weight across her chest and a long, lumpy bo
lster seemingly wrapped around her in back. The weight was Dag’s left arm, she realized, and he must be dead asleep indeed to have flung it there, because he always seemed to carry it subtly out of the way, out of sight, when he was awake. His chin was scratching the back of her neck, his nose was buried in her hair, and she could feel her curls flutter with his slow breath. He lay very solidly between her and the door.

  And whatever might come through the door. Scary things out there. Bandits, mud-men, blight bogles. And yet… wasn’t the tall patroller the scariest of all?

  Because, at the end of the day, bandits, mud-men, and bogles all lay strewn in his path, and he was still walking. Limping, anyhow. How could someone scarier than anything make her feel safer? A riddle, that.

  If not precisely trapped by his menace, she did find herself pinned by his exhaustion. Her attempt to slip out without waking him failed. There followed disjointed mumbled arguments in the dark about a trudge to the privy versus a chamber pot (he won), the change and care of blood-soaked dressings (he won again), and where he would go to sleep next (hard to tell who won that one, but he did end up on the tick between her and the door as before). Despite a new hot stone, her gnawing cramps ordained that he was asleep again before her. But the unlikely comfort of that bony body, wrapped like a fort wall around her hurting, assured that it wasn’t so very much before. When next she awoke it was broad day outside, and she was alone. Yesterday’s agony in her belly was reduced to a knotting ache, but her dressings were soaked again. Before she had time to panic, boot steps sounded on the porch, accompanied by a tuneless chirping whistle. She had never heard Dag whistle, but it could be no one else. He ducked in through the door and smiled at her, gold eyes bright from the light.

  He must have been out bathing by the well, for his hair was wet and his damp skin free of blood and grime, leaving all his scratches looking tidier and less alarming. Also, he smelled quite nice, last night’s reek—although it had been reassuring to know exactly where he was even from several feet away in the dark—replaced with the clean sharpness of the lost farmwife’s homemade soap, rough brown stuff that she had nonetheless scented with lavender and mint.

  He was shirtless, wearing a pair of unbloodied gray trousers clearly not his own cinched around his waist with a stray bit of rope. She suspected they came about a foot short lengthwise, but with the ends tucked into his boots, no one could tell. He had an uneven tan, his coppery skin paler where his shirt usually fell, although not nearly as pale as hers. He favored long sleeves even in summer, it seemed. His collection of bruises was almost as impressive as her own. But he was not so bony underneath as she’d feared; his long, strappy muscles moved easily under his skin. “Morning, Spark,” he said cheerily.

  The first order of business was the repellent medical necessities, which he took on with such straightforward briskness that he left her almost feeling that blood clots were an achievement rather than a horror. “Clots are good. Red, spurting blood is bad. Thought we’d agreed on that one, Spark. Whatever the malice ripped up inside you is starting to mend, that says to me. Good work.

  Keep lying down.”

  She lay dozily as he wandered in and out. Things happened. A ragged white shirt appeared on his back, too tight across the shoulders and with the sleeves rolled up. More tea happened, and food: the remains of the pan bread she made yesterday rolled around some meat stew from the cellar. He had to coax her to eat, but miraculously, it stayed down, and she could feel strength starting to return to her body almost immediately because of it. Her hot stones were swapped out regularly. After a second longish expedition outside, he returned with a cloth full of strawberries from the farm woman’s kitchen garden and sat himself down on the floor beside her, sharing them out in mock exactitude.

  She woke from a longer doze to see him sitting at the kitchen table, mulling glumly over his hand contraption laid out atop it.

  “Can you fix it?” she asked muzzily. “Afraid not. Not a one-hand job even if I had the tools here. Stitching’s all ripped, and the wrist cap is cracked. This is beyond Dirla. When we get to Glassforge, I’ll have to find a harnessmaker and maybe a woodturner to put it right again.”

  Glassforge. Was she still going to Glassforge, when the reason for her flight had been so abruptly removed? Her life had been turned upside down one too many times lately, too fast, for her to be sure of much just now. She turned to the wall and clutched her stone—by the heat, he’d renewed it again while she’d slept—tighter to her aching, emptying womb.

  In the past weeks, she had experienced her child as fear, desperation, shame, exhaustion, and vomiting. She had not yet felt the fabled quickening, although she had gone to sleep nightly waiting intently for that sign. It was disquieting to think that this chance-met man, with his strange Lakewalker senses, had gained a more direct perception of the brief life of her child than she had.

  The thought hurt, but pressing the rag-wrapped stone to her forehead didn’t help.

  She rolled back over and her eye fell on Dag’s knife pouch, set aside last night near the head of her feather mattress. The intact knife with the blue hilt was still in its sheath where she’d shoved it. The other—green hilt and bone fragments—seemed to have been rewrapped in a bit of scavenged cloth, ends tied in one of Dag’s clumsy one-handed knots. The fine linen, though wrinkled and ripped and probably from the mending basket, had embroidery on it, once-treasured guest-day work.

  She looked up to see him watching her examine them, his face gone expressionless again.

  “You said you’d tell me about these, too,” she said. “I don’t guess it was just any bit of bone that killed an immortal malice.”

  “No. Indeed. The sharing knives are by far the most complex of our… tools.

  Hard and costly to make.”

  “I suppose you’ll tell me they aren’t really magic, again.”

  He sighed, rose, came over, and sat down cross-legged beside her. He took the pouch thoughtfully in his hand.

  “They’re human bone, aren’t they,” she added more quietly, watching him.

  “Yes,” he said a little distantly. His gaze swung back to her. “Understand, patrollers have had trouble with farmers before over sharing knives.

  Misunderstandings. We’ve learned not to discuss them. You have earned… there are reasons... you must be told. I can only ask that you don’t talk about it with anyone, after.”

  “Anyone at all?” she puzzled.

  He made a little jerk of his fingers. “Lakewalkers all know. I mean outsiders.

  Farmers. Although in this case… well, we’ll get to that.”

  Roundaboutly, it seemed. She frowned at this uncharacteristic loss of straightforwardness on his part. “All right.”

  He took a breath, straightening his spine a trifle. “Not just any human bones.

  Our own, Lakewalker bones. Not farmer bones, and most especially not kidnapped farmer children’s bones, all right? Adult. Have to be, for the length and strength. You’d think people would—well. Thighbones, usually, and sometimes upper arms. It makes our funeral practices something outsiders are not invited to. Some of the most aggravating rumors have been started around stray glimpses…

  we are not cannibals, rest assured!”

  “I actually hadn’t heard that one.”

  “You might, if you’re around long enough.”

  She had seen hogs and cows butchered; she could imagine. Her mind leaped ahead to picture Dag’s long legs—no.

  “Some mess is unavoidable, but it’s all done respectfully, with ceremony, because we all know it could be our turn later. Not everyone donates their bones; it would be more than needed, and some aren’t suitable. Too old or young, too thin or fragile. I mean to give mine, if I die young enough.”

  The thought made an odd knot in her belly that had nothing to do with her cramping. “Oh.”

  “But that’s just the body of the knife, the first half of the making. The other half, the thing that makes it possible to s
hare death with a malice, is the priming.” The quick would-be-reassuring smile with this did not reach his eyes.

  “We prime it with a death. A donated death, one of our own. In the making, the knife is bonded, matched to the intended primer, so they are very personal, d’you see.”

  Fawn pushed herself up, increasingly riveted and increasingly disturbed. “Go on.”

  “When you’re a Lakewalker who means to give your death to a knife and you’re close to dying—wounded in the field beyond hope of recovery, or dying at home of natural causes, you—or more often your comrade or kin—take the sharing knife and insert it into your heart.”

  Fawn’s lips parted. “But…”

  “Yes, it kills us. That’s the whole point.”

  “Are you saying people’s souls go into those knives?”

  “Not souls, ah! Knew you’d ask that.” He swiped his hand through his hair.

  “That’s another farmer rumor. Makes so much trouble… Even our groundsense doesn’t tell us where people’s souls go after their deaths, but I promise you it’s not into the knives. Just their dying ground. Their mortality.” He started to add, “Lakewalker god-stories say the gods have… well, never mind that now.”

  Now, there was a rumor she had heard. “People say you don’t believe in the gods.”

  “No, Little Spark. Somewhat the reverse. But that doesn’t enter into this.

  That knife”—he pointed to the blue hilt—“is my own, grounded to me. I had it made special. The bone for it was willed to me by a woman named Kauneo, who was slain in a bad malice war up northwest of the Dead Lake. Twenty years ago. We were way late spotting it, and it had grown very powerful. The malice hadn’t found many people to use out in that wilderness, but it had found wolves, and… well. The other knife, which you used yesterday, that was her primed knife, grounded to her. Her heart’s death was in it. The bone of it was from an uncle of hers—I never met him, but he was a legendary patroller up that way in his day, fellow named Kaunear. You probably didn’t have time to notice it, but his name and his curse on malices were burned on the blade.”