The salt had worked into everything except Ashaun’s dagger.
Ysabet discovered this while looking for the drying cloth. Their packs lay beneath the windward roots of a leaning tree, its bark fretted by old water, and the blade lay across the open mouth of Ashaun’s pack. A thumbprint of grease marked the cloth beneath it. There was no rust along the narrow edge. No white bloom dulled the darker metal beside the hilt.
Below their ledge, the lake sounded like somebody slowly tearing linen. Chaska slept with her head on her folded coat. Lilt lay beside the low shelter, one broad margin of her body pressed against the courier’s boots. Suth and the elk were farther uphill, behind a screen of branches. Pip occupied the warm hollow between the packs, its incomplete shell showing the pale split which the boy’s rescue had left. The mouse’s covered box stood on a flat stone. Its occupant was eating noisily enough to make sleep seem a poor use of anybody else’s time.
Ysabet bent, took the drying cloth from beside the dagger, and stopped.
She had known the weapon was there. That was different from seeing the short distance between it and Pip.
