He nodded for her to run it through his fingertips below the increasingly grubby splint wrappings. The sensation was bizarre, like looking at a bit of himself in a distorted mirror, but the anchoring was sound and sweet. “Good! Done! We did it, Spark, Aunt Nattie!”

Fawn smiled like a burst of sunlight and pressed the cord into her aunt’s hands. Nattie fingered it and smiled too. “My word. Yes. Even I can feel that. Takes me back, it does. Well done, child!”

“And the next?” she said eagerly.

“Catch your breath,” Dag advised. “Walk around, shake out the kinks. The next will be a bit trickier.” The next might well be impossible, he admitted bleakly to himself, but he wasn’t going to tell Spark that; confidence mattered in these subtle things.

“Oh, yes, your poor shoulders must hurt after all that!” she exclaimed, and ran around to climb up on the bench behind him and knead them with her small strong hands, an exercise he could not bring himself to object to, although he did manage not to fall forward onto the bench and melt. He remembered what else those hands could do, then tried not to. He would need his concentration. Two days, now…

“That’s enough, rest your fingers,” he heroically choked out after a bit. He stood up and walked around the room himself, wondering what else he could do, or should do, or hadn’t done, to make the next and most critical task succeed. He was about to step into the unaccustomed and worrisome territory of things he’d never done before—of things no one had ever done before, to his knowledge. Not even in ballads.

They sat on the bench again, and Fawn secured the four strands of her own string on the nail. “Ready when you are.”

Dag lowered his face and breathed the scent of her hair, trying to calm himself. He ran his stiff hand and hook gently down and up her arms a couple of times, trying to pick up some fragment, some opening on the ground he could sense swirling, so alive, beneath her skin. Wait, there was something coming…“Begin.”

Her hands started moving. After only about three turns, he said, “Wait, no. Stop. That isn’t your ground, that’s mine again. Sorry, sorry.”

She blew out her breath, straightened her back, wriggled, and undid her work back to the beginning.