“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.”

Fawn shook her head. “Curse?”

“His choice, what to have written on his bone. You can order the makers to put any personal message you want that will fit. Some people write love notes to their knife-heirs. Or really bad jokes, sometimes. Up to them. Two notes, actually. One side for the donor of the bone, the other for the donor of the heart’s death, which is put on after the knife is primed. If there’s a chance.”

Fawn imagined that bone blade she’d held being slowly shoved into a dying patroller woman’s heart, maybe someone like Mari, by…who had done it? Dag? Twenty years seemed terribly long ago—could he really be as old as, say, forty?

“The deaths we share with the malices,” said Dag quietly, “are our own, and no others’.”

“Why?” whispered Fawn, shaken.