She perched cross-legged on the bed’s head, smoothing her skirt over her knees, and watched the two patrollers. Mari had gold eyes much like Dag’s, if a shade more bronze, and she wondered if she really was his aunt and his use of the title not, as she’d first thought, just a joke or a respectful endearment.

Mari set the bag back down. “Do you plan to send it up to be buried with the rest of her uncle’s bones? Or burn it here?”

“Not sure yet. It will keep with me; it has so far.” Dag drew a deeper breath, staring down at the other knife. “Now we come to the long story.”

Mari sat down at the bed’s foot and crossed her arms, listening closely as Dag began his tale again, this time starting with the night raid on the bandit camp. His descriptions of his actions were succinct but very exact, Fawn noticed, as though certain details might matter more, though she was not sure how he sorted which to leave in or out. Until he came to, “I believe the mud-man lifted Miss Bluefield from the road because she was two months pregnant. And came back and took her from the farm for the same reason.”

Mari’s lips moved involuntarily, Was?, then compressed. “Go on.”

Dag’s voice stiffened as he described his risky raid on the malice’s cave. “I was just too late. When I hit the entrance and the mud-men, the malice was already taking her child.”

Mari leaned forward, her brows drawing down. “Separately?”

“So it seems.”

“Huh…’’ Mari leaned back, shook her head, and peered at Fawn. “Excuse me. I am so sorry for your loss. But this is new to me. We knew malices took pregnant women, but then, they take anyone they can catch. Rarely, the women’s bodies are recovered. I did not know the malice didn’t always take both grounds together.”

“I don’t think,” said Fawn distantly, “it would have kept me around very long. It was about to break my neck when I finally got the right knife into it.”

Mari blinked, glanced down at the blue-hilted bone knife lying on the bedroll, and stared up again at Dag. “What?”

Carefully, Dag explained Fawn’s mix-up with his knives. He was very kind, Fawn thought, to excuse her from any blame in the matter.

“The knife had been unprimed. You know what I was saving it for.”

Mari nodded.

“But now it’s primed. With the death of Spark’s—of Miss Bluefield’s daughter, I believe. What I don’t know is if that’s all it drew from the malice. Or whether it will even work as a sharing knife. Or…well, I don’t know much, I’m afraid. But with Miss Bluefield’s permission, I thought you could examine it too.”

“Dag, I’m no more a maker than you are.”