The Sharing Knife: Beguilement

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  After the postsupper chores the family usually gathered in the parlor, cooler than the kitchen, to share the lamplight. Dag had walked out with Fawn to feed scraps to the chickens; as they came through the kitchen door and into the central hall, he heard raised voices from the parlor. By this time Dag cringed at opening his groundsense in this raucous company, not a one of them capable of a decent veiling; but he did prick his ears to hear Reed’s voice, rumbling, hostile, and indistinct, and then Tril’s, raised in sharp fear: “Reed! Put that down! Fawn brought me that all the way from Glassforge!”

  Beside him, Fawn drew in her breath and hurried forward. Dag strode after, bracing himself.

  In the parlor, Reed and Rush had more or less cornered their parents. Tril was sitting beside the table that held the bright oil lamp, some sewing in her lap; Nattie sat across the room in the shadows with the drop spindle that was rarely out of her hands, now stilled. Whit crouched by Nattie, a spectator on the fringe, for once not heckling. Sorrel stood facing Reed, with Rush pacing nervously around them.

  Reed was holding up the glass bowl and declaiming, overdramatically in Dag’s view, “—sell your daughter to some bloody-handed corpse-eater for the sake of a piece of glass?”

  “Reed!” Fawn cried furiously, dashing forward. “You give that back! It’s not yours!”

  Dag thought it was sheer force of habit; when confronted with that familiar sisterly rise, Reed quite unthinkingly raised the bowl high out of Fawn’s hopping reach. At her enraged squeal, he tossed it to Rush, who just as unthinkingly caught it.

  Tears of fury sprang in Fawn’s eyes. “You two are just a pair of yard dogs—”

  “If you hadn’t dragged Useless here home with you—” Rush began defensively.

  Ah, yet another new nickname for himself, Dag realized. He was collecting quite a set of them here. But his own fraying temper was not nearly such a grating goad to him as Fawn’s humiliated helplessness.

  Sorrel glanced at his distraught wife, whose hands had flown to her mouth, and barked angrily, “Boys, that’s enough!” He strode forward and started to pull the bowl out of Rush’s grasp. Sorrel, unwilling to snatch, let go just as Rush, afraid to resist, did likewise.

  It was no one’s fault, exactly, or at least no one’s intention. Dag saw it coming as did Fawn, and a desolate little wail broke from her lips even before the bowl hit the wooden floor edge on and burst, falling into three large pieces and a sparkling spray of splinters.

  Everyone froze in equal horror. Whit opened his lips, looked around, and then closed them flat.

  Sorrel recovered his voice first, hoarse and low. “Whit, don’t move. You got no shoes on.”

  Tril cried, “Reed! Rush! How could you!” And began sobbing into her sewing.

  Their mother’s anger might have rolled right off the pair, Dag thought, but the genuine heartbreak in her voice seemed to cut them off at the knees. They both began incoherent apologies.

  “Sorry does no mending!” she cried, tossing the scrap of cloth aside. It was flecked with blood where she had inadvertently driven her needle into her palm in the shock of the crash. “I’ve had it with the whole pack of you—!”

  The Bluefield uproar was so painful in Dag’s ground, which he tried to close but could not for the strength of his link to Fawn, that he found himself dropping to his knees. He stared at the pieces of glass on the floor in front of him as the angry and anguished voices continued overhead. He could not shut them out, but he could redirect his attention; it was an old, old method of dealing with the unbearable.

  He slipped his splinted right arm from its sling, and with it and his hook he clumsily pushed the large pieces of the bowl as close together as he could.

  Those splinters, now—most of those glass splinters were no bigger than mosquitoes. If he could bounce a mosquito, he could move one splinter, and if he could move one, he could move two and four and more… He remembered the sweet song of this bowl’s ground as it had rested in the sunset light of their refuge in Glassforge, gifting rainbows, and he began a low humming, searching up and down for the right note, just… there.

  The glass splinters began to wink, then shift, then rise and flow over the boards of the parlor floor. He shifted them not with his hand, but with the ground of his hand. The ground of his left hand, the hand that was not there, and the very thought was so terrifying he shied from it.

  But even that terror did not break his concentration. The splinters flew up, circling and swirling like fireflies around the bowl to find their places once more. The bowl glowed golden along all the spider-lines of its fractures, like kiln fire, like star fire, like nothing earthly Dag had ever seen. It scintillated, reflecting off his draining, chilling skin. He held the pure note faintly through his rounded lips. The lines of light seemed to melt into rivulets, streams, rivers of pale gold running all through the glass, then spread out like a still lake under a winter sunrise.

  The light faded. And was gone.

  Dag came back to himself bent over on his knees, his hair hanging around his face like a curtaining fringe, mouth slack, staring down at the intact glass bowl. His skin felt as cold and clammy as lard on a winter morning, and he was shivering, shuddering so hard his stomach hurt. He pressed his teeth together so that they would not chatter.

  The only sounds in the room were of eight people breathing: some heavily, some rapidly, some choked with tears, some wheezing with shock. He thought he could pick out each one’s pattern with his ears alone. He could not force himself to look up.

  Someone—Fawn—thumped down on her knees before him. “Dag… ?” she said uncertainly. Her small hand reached out to touch his chin, to tilt his face upward to meet her wide, wide eyes.

  He pushed the bowl forward with his left arm. It was hot to the touch but not dangerously so. It did not melt or disappear or explode or fall apart again into a thousand pieces. It just sang slightly as it scraped across the floor, the ordinary song of ordinary glass that had never been slain or resurrected. He found his voice, or at least a close imitation of his voice; it sounded utterly unfamiliar in his own ears, as though it was coming from underwater or underground. “Give that back to your mama.”

  He pressed his wrist cuff to her shoulder and levered himself upright. The room wavered around him, and he was suddenly afraid he was going to vomit, making a mess right there on the middle of the parlor floor in front of everyone. Fawn clutched the bowl to her breast and rose after him, her eyes never leaving his face.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  He gave her a short headshake, wet his cold lips, and stumbled for the parlor door to the central hall. He hoped he could make it out onto the front porch before his stomach heaved. Tril, on her feet, was hovering nearby, and she stepped back as he passed. Fawn followed, pausing only long enough to thrust the bowl into her mother’s hands.

  Dag heard Fawn’s voice behind him, low and fierce: “He does that for hearts, too, you know.”

  And she marched forthrightly after him.

  Chapter 16

  Fawn followed Dag onto the front porch and watched in worry as he sat heavily on the step, his left elbow on his knee and his head down. In the west behind the house, the sky was draining of sunset colors; to the east, above the river valley, the first stars were pricking through the darkening turquoise vault.

  The air grew soft as the day’s heat eased. Fawn settled down to Dag’s right and raised her hand uncertainly to his face. His skin was icy, and she could feel the shudders coursing through his body.

  “You’ve gone all cold.”

  He shook his head, swallowing. “Give me a little…” In a few moments he straightened up, taking a deep breath. “Thought I was going to spew my nice dinner on my feet, but now I think not.”

  “Is that usual? For after doing things like that?”

  “No—I don’t know. I’m not a maker. We’d determined that by the time I was sixteen. Hadn’t the concentration for it. I needed to be moving all the time.


  I am not a maker, but that…”

  “Was?” she prompted when he stayed stopped.

  “That was a making. Absent gods.” He raised his left arm and rubbed his forehead on his sleeve.

  She tucked her arm around him, trying to share warmth; she wasn’t sure how much good it did, but he smiled shakily for the attempt. His body was chilled all down his side. “We should go into the kitchen by the hearth. I could fix you a hot drink.”

  “When I can stand up.” He added, “Maybe go around the outside of the house.”

  Where they would not have to hazard her family. She nodded understanding.

  “Groundwork,” he began, and trailed off. “You have to understand. Lakewalker groundwork—magic, you might say—involves taking something and making it more so, more itself, through reinforcing its ground. There’s a woman at Hickory Lake who works with leather, makes it repel rain. She has a sister who can make leather that turns arrows. She can make maybe two coats a month. I had one once.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Never had occasion to find out while I had it. I saw another turn a mud-man’s spear, though. Iron tip left nothing but a scratch in the hide. Of the coat, not of the patroller,” he clarified.

  “Had? What happened to it?”

  “Lent it to my oldest nephew when he began patrolling. He handed it on to his sister when she started. Last I knew my brother’s youngest took it with him when he went out of the hinterland. I’m not sure the coats are all that useful, for they’re like to make you careless, and they don’t protect the face and legs.

  But, you know… you worry for the youngsters.” His shudders were easing, but his expression remained strained and distant. “That bowl just now, though… I pushed its ground back to purest bowl-ness, and the glass just followed. I felt it so clear. Except that, except that…” He leaned his forehead down against hers, and whispered fearfully, “I pushed with the ground of my left hand, and I have no left hand and it has no ground. Whatever was there, for that minute, is gone again now. I’ve never heard of anything like that. But the best makers don’t speak of their craft much except to their own. So I don’t know. Don’t… know.”

  The door swung open; Whit edged out into the shadows of the porch. “Um… Fawn…

  ?”

  “What, Whit?” she said impatiently.

  “Um. Aunt Nattie says. Um. Aunt Nattie says she’s had enough of this nonsense and she’ll see you and the patroller in her rooms and be having the end of it one way or another as soon as the patroller is up to it. Um. Sir.”

  Behind the fringe of his hair, Dag’s lips twitched slightly. He raised his face.

  “Thank you, Whit,” he said gravely. “Tell Aunt Nattie we’ll be along soon.”

  Whit gulped, ducked his head, and fled back indoors.

  They rose and went around the north side of the house to the kitchen, Dag resting his left arm heavily across Fawn’s shoulders. He stumbled twice. She made him sit by the hearth while she fixed him a cup of hot water with some peppermint leaves crushed in, holding it to his lips while he drank it down.

  By then he’d stopped shivering, and his clammy skin had dried and warmed again.

  She saw her parents and Fletch peeking timidly from the darkness of the hall, but they said nothing and did not venture in.

  Aunt Nattie appeared at the door to her shadowed weaving room. “Well, patroller.

  You were flyin’ there for a bit, I guess.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I was,” Dag agreed wryly.

  “Fawn, you fetch in the patroller and what lights you want.” She turned back into the dark, scuffing feet and cane over the floorboards, not wearily, but just for the company of the sound, as she sometimes did.

  Fawn looked anxiously at Dag. The firelight she’d poked up glimmered red-orange over his skin, yellow on his coarse white shirt and the sling, and his eyes were dark and wide. He looked tired, and confused, and as if his arm was hurting, but he smiled reassuringly at her, and she smiled back. “You ready?” she asked.

  “Not sure, but I’m too curious to care. Possibly not a trait helpful to longevity in a patroller, but there you go.”

  She took down the candle lamp with the chipped glass sleeve from the mantel and lit it, grabbing the unlit iron holder with the three stubs while she was at it, and led off. With a muffled eh, he levered himself up out of his chair and paced after her.

  Nattie called from their bedroom, “Close both doors, lovie. It will keep the noise out.”

  And in, Fawn reflected. She pushed the door to the kitchen closed with her foot and picked her way around the loom and the piles of Dag’s gear. In the bedroom, Nattie seated herself on the side of her narrow bed and motioned to the one across from it. Fawn set the lamp and the iron ring on the table between and lit the other candles, and went back and closed the bedroom door. Dag glanced at her and sat down facing Nattie, the bed ropes creaking under his weight, and Fawn eased down at his left. “Here we are, Aunt Nattie,” she announced, to which Dag added, Ma’am.

  Nattie stretched her back and grimaced, then leaned forward on her cane, her pearly eyes seeming to stare at them in a disturbingly penetrating fashion.

  “Well, patroller. I’m going to tell you a story. And then I’m going to ask you a question. And then we’ll see where we’re goin’ on to.

  “I’m at your disposal,” Dag said, with that studied courtesy Fawn had learned concealed caution.

  “That’s to be seen.” She sniffed. “You know, you’re not the first Lakewalker I’ve met.”

  “I sensed that.”

  “I lead a dull life, mostly. Lived in this house since Tril married Sorrel nigh on thirty years ago. I hardly get off this farm ‘cept down to West Blue for the market day or a little sewing bee now and then.”

  Actually, Nattie did both regularly, being a chief supplier of fine cloth and having a deep ear for village gossip, but Fawn forbore to intrude on the stream of… whatever this was going to be. Reminiscence?

  Apparently so, for Nattie went on, “Now, the summer before Fawn was born was a tough time. Her mama was sick, and the boys were rambunctious, and her papa was overworked as usual. I wasn’t sleeping so good myself, so I did my gathering in the north woods at night after they’d all gone to bed. The boys being less help than more in the woods at that stage of their lives.”

  Ages three to ten, roughly; Fawn could picture it, and shuddered.

  “Roots and herbs and plants for remedies and dyes, you know. Night’s not only more peaceful, the scents are sharper. I especially wanted some wild ginger for Tril, thought I might make a tea to settle her poor stomach. Anyhow, I was sorry for the peaceful that night, because I fell and twisted my ankle something fierce. I tried callin’ for a bit, but I was too far from the house to be heard.”

  Truly, the woods on the steep valley slope to the north of their place extended for three miles before the next farm. Fawn made an encouraging noise in lieu of a nod.

  “I figured I was doomed to lie in the dew till morning when I’d be missed, but then I heard a sound in the leaves—I was afraid it was a wolf or bear come to eat me, but instead it was a Lakewalker patroller. I was thinking at first I’d rather a bear, but he turned out to be a nice young fellow.

  “He laid hands on my foot and eased me amazingly, and picked me up and carried me back to the house. I was skinnier back then, mind, bit of a dab, really.

  He was not near so tall as you”—she nodded in Dag’s general direction—“but right stout. Nice voice, almost as deep as yours.

  “He explained all about how he was on exchange from some camp way out east, and this was his first patrol in these parts—lonely and homesick, I was thinking.

  Anyhow, I fed him quiet in the kitchen, and he did a real fine job bandaging my ankle up nice and firm.

  “I don’t know if he decided I was his adopted aunt, or if he was more like a boy picking up a bird with an injured wing and making a pet of it, but late the next night
there came a tapping on my window. He was back with some medicine, some for my foot and some for Tril’s tummy, which he handed in—he wouldn’t stay that time, though. The powders worked wonderful well, I must say.” She sighed in fond recollection.

  “Off he went and I thought no more of it, but next summer, about the same time of year, there came that tapping at my window again. We had a bit of a picnic on the back porch in the dark, and talked. He was glad to hear Tril had delivered you safe, Fawn. He gave me some little presents and I gave him some food and cloth. The next summer the same; I got to looking out for him.

  “The next year he came back one more time, but not alone. He brought his new bride, just to show her off to me I think, he was that proud of her. He showed me their Lakewalker marriage-bracelets, string-bindings they called ‘em, knowin’

  I had a maker’s interest in all things to do with the craft, thread and cords and braids as well as the weaving and knitting. They let me hold them in my hands and feel them. Gave me a turn, they did. They weren’t just fancy cord.

  They were magical.”

  “Yes,” said Dag cautiously, and at Fawn’s curious look expanded, “Each betrothed puts a tiny bit of their ground into their own cord. The string-binding ceremony tangles the two grounds, then they exchange, his for hers.”

  “Really?” said Fawn, fascinated, trying to remember if she’d noticed such bracelets on the patrollers at Glassforge. Yes, for Mari’d had one, and so had a couple of other older patrollers. She had thought them merely decorative. “Do they do anything? Can you send messages?”

  “No. Well, only that if one spouse dies, the other can feel it, for the ground drains out of their binding cord. They’re often put safe away to save wear, although they can be remade if they’re damaged. But if one spouse is out on patrol, the other back in camp usually wears theirs. Just… to know. To the one out on patrol, it comes as more of a shock, because you don’t expect… I’ve seen that happen twice. It’s not good. The patroller is dismissed at once to ride home if it’s at all possible. There’s a special terror to knowing what but not how, except that you are too late, and a thought that, you know, maybe the string just got burned up in a tent fire or some freak thing—enough hope for agony but not enough for ease. When I woke up in the medicine tent after…”