He sniggered, but answered, “Their partners help ’em along. Feels sort of like a three-legged race some days, I admit. The idea is to keep ’em alive long enough to learn better. It works.” His smile faded a little. “Mostly.”
Her slim fingers combed back his hair, side and side, and pressed his head between them in a little shake. “You’re still thinking Lakewalker. Not farmer.”
“This walk we’re on is for changing that, though. I figure if I can practice on Whit…I might have more margin for mistakes.”
“We say two’s company, three’s a crowd. I swear with you it’s two’s partners, three’s a patrol.”
The fingers moved down to his shirt buttons; he aimed kisses at them in passing, and said, “I’ve been watching and listening, these past weeks, and not just all about how to herd beans. There’s no more head-space for Whit in this house than there was for you. It’s all for Fletch and Clover, and their children. Maybe if he was let out under a higher ceiling, he could straighten up a bit. With help, even grow—less wrenchingly than you had to.”
She shivered. “I wouldn’t wish that even on Whit.” Her smile crept back. “So are you picturing yourself as a tent-brother—or a tent-father? Old patroller.”
“Behave, child,” he returned, mock-sternly. He tried to pay back the favor with the buttons, one-handed, and, benefiting from much recent practice, succeeded.
“With your hand there?”
His only hand was gifting him the most lovely sensations, as his fingers slid and stretched. Silk was a poor weak comparison, for skin so breathing-soft. “I didn’t say what…” He groped for some wordplay on behave, but he was losing language as their bodies warmed each other.
The scent of her hair filled his mouth as she shook her head, and he breathed her in. She murmured muzzily, “Trust me. He will be the most awful pain.”
He drew his head back a little, to be sure of her expression. “Will be? Not would be? Was that a decision, slipped past there?”
She sighed. “I suppose so.”
“Well, he’ll not pain you, or he’ll be answering to me.”
Her eyebrows drew in. “He sneaks it in as jokes. Makes it hard to fight. Especially infuriating when he makes you laugh.”
“If I can run a company of pig-headed patrollers, I can run your brother. Trust me, too.”
“I’d pay money to watch that.”
“For you, the show is free.”
Her lips curved; her great brown eyes were dark and wide. The little hands descended to the next set of buttons. All farmers but one faded from his concern. At this range, opening his ground to her ground was no effort at all. It was like nocking star fire in the bow of his body. She whispered, “Show me…everything.”
Igniting, he rolled her over him, and did.
3
While Sorrel and Tril might have been dubious about letting their youngest son out on the roads of Oleana even under the escort of their alarming Lakewalker son-in-law, Fletch and Clover, once the idea was broached, were very amenable. Sorrel and Fletch did unite in extracting the most possible labor from Whit during the next week. With his precious permission hanging in the balance, Whit worked if not willingly then without audible protest. In any remaining spare moments, his bow lessons with Dag were set aside in favor of chopping cordwood for winter, a chore normally not due for another month. Though not discussed, the permission became tacit in the face of the mounting woodpile, as, Dag thought, not even Fletch would be capable of such a cruel betrayal.
Fawn’s parents were unexpectedly favorable to the idea of housing Grace. Dag eventually realized it wasn’t just because the mare was a sweet-tempered mount that not only Tril but even Nattie might ride—though Nattie, when this was pointed out, snorted and muttered something about The cart will do for me, thanks—but because she was a sort of equine hostage. That Fawn would need to return to collect her horse—or, by that time, possibly horses—seemed to give Tril some comfort. Though over the next several evening meals Tril did recall and recount every drowning accident that had occurred within a hundred miles of West Blue within living memory. Recognizing maternal nerves, Dag nonetheless quietly resolved to take Whit aside at some less ruffled moment and find out if he could swim any less like a rock than Fawn had, before Dag had done his best to drown-proof her. Even if it was growing a bit chilly for swimming lessons.
A light rain the night before their departure turned the dawn air gray and cool, muting the blush of autumn colors. As the three rode down the farm lane a few damp yellow leaves eddied past, along with farewells, blessings, and a deal of unsolicited advice ignored by both Bluefield siblings with much the same shoulder hunchings. Dag found it pleasant enough to be back aboard Copperhead and moving once more. Along the river road south, Dag tested his groundsense range and fancied it improved. A hundred and fifty paces now, maybe? Whit was temporarily too exhausted to squabble with his sister, so the day’s ride was largely peaceful. And Dag would have his wife to himself tonight, in a cozy inn chamber in Lumpton Market; a touch, an exchange of smiles, a promissory gleam, that furtive dimple, left him riding in a warm glow of expectation as the afternoon drew to a close.
At the shabby little inn off the old straight road north of town, these comfortable plans received an unexpected check. A chance crowd of drivers, drovers, and traveling farm families had nearly filled the place, and Dag’s party was lucky to secure a single small chamber up under the eaves. Looking it over with disfavor, Dag was inclined to think a bedroll in the stable loft would be better, except that the loft had been let out already. But the falling dark, the threat of renewed rain, the fatigue of a twenty-mile ride, and the smells of good cooking from the inn’s kitchen cured them all of ambition to seek farther tonight, and the debate devolved merely as to who was going to get the bed and who was going to put their bedrolls on the floor. It ended with Fawn in the bed, which was too short for Dag as well as too narrow for a couple, Dag down beside it, and Whit crosswise beyond the foot. Even a chaste cuddle was denied, though Fawn did hang her arm over the side and interlace her fingers with Dag’s for a while after she’d turned down the bedside lamp.
Peace did not descend. Before they’d gone down to supper Whit had forced open the window to combat the room’s mustiness; unfortunately, he had thus admitted a patrol of late mosquitoes, roused by the afternoon’s unseasonably warm damp. Every time anyone began to doze off, the thin, threatening whines induced more arm-waving, blanket-ducking, and irate mutters from one of the others, thwarting sleep for all. Dag instinctively bounced the pests away from himself and Fawn through their tiny grounds. Unfortunately, that concentrated the attack on Whit.
Some more rustling, scratching, and swearing, and Whit rose in the dark to try to hunt the bloodthirsty marauders by sound. After he bumped into the bed frame twice and stepped on Dag, Fawn sat up, turned up the oil lamp, and snapped, “Whit, will you settle? You’re worse ’n they are!”
“The buggers have bit me three times already. Wait, there—” Whit’s eyes narrowed to a gray gleam, and his hands rose in an attempt to cup a flying speck. Two quick claps missed, and he lurched over Dag again in pursuit, peering and trying to corner the insect against the whitewashed walls. His hands rose again, wavering with the target’s erratic flight. Muzzy with annoyance and the first confusion of dream sleep, Dag sat up, reached out his left arm, extended his ghost hand like a strand of smoke, and ripped the ground from the mosquito.
The whine abruptly stopped. A puff of gray powder sifted down into Whit’s outstretched palm. His eyes widened as he stared down at Dag. He gulped. “Did you just do that?”
Dag supposed he should say something useful like, Yes, and if you don’t go lie down and hush, you’re next, but he had shocked himself rather worse than he’d shocked Whit.
It’s coming back, like my groundsense range!
And—gone again. He folded his left arm, freed of the hook harness for the night, protectively against his chest, and twitched the blanket
over his stump, for all that Whit had seen it several times before. And tried to breathe normally.
Dag’s ghost hand had first appeared to him back when he’d mended that glass bowl so spectacularly last summer, and had been intermittently useful thereafter. It was just a ground projection, the medicine maker had assured him, if an unusually strong and erratic one. Not some uncanny blessing or curse. A ground projection such as powerful makers sometimes used, but haunting his wrist in that unsettling form like a memory of pain and loss, hence the name he’d given it back when he hadn’t yet understood what it was. Invisible to ordinary eyes, dense and palpable to groundsense. And then it had been destroyed, he’d thought—sacrificed in the complex aftermath of the fight with the malice in Raintree.
Where, in an utter extremity of panic and need, he’d ground-ripped the malice, and nearly killed himself doing so.
“Whit, just go lie down.” Fawn’s voice had an edge distinct enough from her earlier grumbling that even Whit heard it.
“Um, yeah. Sure.” He picked his way much more carefully back over Dag, and grunted down to his bedroll once more.
Dag looked up to find Fawn propped on her elbow, frowning over the side of the bed at him. She lowered her voice. “Are you all right, Dag?”
He opened his mouth, paused, and settled on, “Yeah.”
Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “You have a funny look on your face.”
He didn’t doubt it. He tried to substitute a smile, which didn’t seem to reassure her much. He felt a peculiar sharp throbbing in the ground of his left arm, as if a campfire spark had landed on his skin, or under it—a spark he could not brush away, though his fleshly fingers made a futile effort to, rubbing under his blanket.
She started to settle back, but added, “What did you do to that poor mosquito?”
“Ground-ripped it. I guess.” Except it was no guess. He could feel the creature’s lost ground stuck in his own, as those deadly malice-spatters had once been. Tinier, less toxic, not blighted, not a spreading death—but also not anything like a medicine maker’s gift of ground reinforcement, warm and welcome and healing. This felt uncomfortable and sticky, like a spot of hot tar. Painful. Wrong?
Fawn rolled up on her elbow again. She knew, if Whit clearly did not, just how far outside the usual range of Dag-doings this was. “Really?”
“I probably shouldn’t have,” he muttered.
Her eyes pinched in doubt. “But—it was only a mosquito. You must have killed hundreds by hand, in your time.”
“Thousands, likely,” he agreed. “But…it itches. In my ground.” He rubbed again.
Her brows flew up; her face relaxed in amused relief. “Oh, dear.”
He made no attempt to correct that relief. He captured her trailing hand, kissed it, and nodded to the oil lamp; she stretched up and doused it once again. As the bed creaked, he murmured, “Good night, Spark.”
“G’night, Dag,” she returned, already muffled by her pillow. “Try’n sleep.” A slight snicker. “Don’t scratch.”
He listened to her breathing till it slowed and eased, then, his arms crossed on his chest, turned his groundsense in upon himself.
The tiny coal of alien ground still throbbed within his own. He tried to divest it, to lay it as a ground reinforcement in the floor, or his sheet, or even his own hair. It remained stubbornly stuck. Neither did it seem to be starting to melt into his own ground, converted from mosquito-ground to Dag-ground as a man might digest food—or at least, not yet. He wondered if he had, in that moment of sleepy irritation, planted a permanent infliction upon himself.
Careless irritation. Not mortal panic. Not an overstretched, once-in-a-lifetime heroic reach, out of a heart, body, and ground pushed for an instant beyond human limits. Ground-ripping a mosquito was hardly a great act, nor of grave moral weight.
Except that ground-ripping anything wasn’t a human act at all. It was malice magic, the very heart of malice magic. Wasn’t it?
Lakewalker makers used two kinds of groundwork, in a thousand variations. They might persuade, push, or reorder ground within an object, to subtly alter or augment its nature. And so produce cloth that scarcely frayed, or steel that did not rust, or rope that was nearly impossible to break, or leather that repelled rain—or turned arrows. Or they might gift ground out of their own bodies; most commonly, into their wedding cords, but also as shaped or unshaped reinforcements laid in the matching region of another person’s ground, to speed healing, slow blood loss, fight shock or infection. But always, the limits of the groundwork were in the limits of the maker doing it.
A malice stole ground from the world around it—limited, Dag swore, by nothing but its attention. And its attention ranged somewhere well beyond human, too. But while a person altered gifted ground into their own as slowly as a healing wound, malices seemed to do so almost instantaneously, not by persuasion but by simple, brute, and overwhelming force. Powered by yet more ground-ripping, in a widening spiral.
Perhaps such transformative power was not a human capacity. Even from the malice, Dag had only snatched deadly fragments. Anyone trying to ground-rip something whole the way a malice did might simply burst, like a man trying to drink a lake.
But a man might drink a cup of lake water…
Was a mosquito like a cup of water?
Dag considered the question, and then considered, more dubiously, the sanity of the mind that could even frame it. Or maybe he was coming down with brain-worms, like Whit’s fabulous rumor. Maybe he simply needed to sleep it off. Surely the splotch would go down overnight like any other mosquito bite, absorbed by Dag’s ground just as his body healed more purely physical welts. He snorted and rolled over, firmly shutting his eyes.
It still itched, though.
By the next morning Dag’s whole left arm was so swollen he couldn’t get his arm harness on.
Fawn was inclined to declare a day of rest in Lumpton Market, but Dag insisted he could ride one-handed, and Whit, anxious to pass at last beyond the places he knew, was not much help on the side of reason. By mid-afternoon Fawn was not happy to have her judgment confirmed when Dag fell into a fever. As if she needed any more evidence, he settled on a blanket and watched without protest as she and Whit set up their camp just off the old straight road south. A chill mist rose from the damp ground in the gathering dusk, but at least no more rain threatened.
“All this from a mosquito bite?” she murmured, sliding in beside him as he drew up his knees and hunched around the swollen arm.
He shrugged. “I don’t think it’s going to kill me. That spot in my ground is already starting to feel less hot.”
She felt his forehead in doubt. But his skin was merely over-warm, not burning-dry, and he ate and drank, if with an indifferent appetite. When they rolled up to sleep she filched her brother’s spare blanket away from him to drape on Dag, ruthlessly ignoring Whit’s yelp of protest.
But by the following day, the swelling had gone down, and Dag claimed the ground-welt was being absorbed much like a normal ground reinforcement, if more slowly. He nevertheless grew flushed and silent in the afternoon; by his pinched brows and glazed eyes Fawn suspected a thumping headache.
As unshakable as Fawn felt in the lee-side of Dag’s full strength, she hated her sense of helplessness when he was laid up. He had a store of uncanny Lakewalker healing knowledge in his head and a host of patroller tricks at his fingertips, impressive enough that Hickory Lake’s chief medicine maker had tried to recruit him into her craft. But who cured the medicine maker? A farmer midwife or bonesetter would not be much help in some strange ground-illness, and Fawn realized that despite all this summer’s experiences, she didn’t actually know how to find a Lakewalker at need. It was too far back to Hickory Lake, and still several days ride to the Lakewalker ferry camp on the Grace River. Patrols or couriers did stop now and then at the inn at Lumpton Market or that hotel in Glassforge, but it could be days or even weeks till any chanced along.
The camp that C
hato’s patrol had hailed from was closer, she was fairly sure, but she didn’t even know how to find that. That at least had a cure; she asked Dag that night where it was to be found, and he described it to her. For the first time, she began to see the point of their little patrol of three: not only because it would take two Bluefields to even lift Dag, but because one of them could stay with him while the other rode for help.
If strange Lakewalkers would even give help to Dag, half-exiled as he was. Which was a new and ugly thought.
But by the next day, Dag seemed much recovered. At noon they stopped at the roadside farm with the public well where they had first encountered each other, and reminisced happily over small details of shared memory while stocking up on the farmwife’s good provender. That evening found them quite near to Glassforge. Dag opined they could detour off the straight road tomorrow to show Whit the blight and still make town before dark.
They could not have chanced on a prettier day for a ride up into the unpeopled hills east of the old straight road. The sky was the dry deep blue that only the northwest winds brought to Oleana, the air as cool and tangy as apple cider. The trees here were mostly holding their leaves, and the brilliant sun turned their colors blinding: bright crimson edged with blood maroon, yellow gold, a startling flash of nightshade-purple here and there in the drying weeds. Dag’s eyes grew coin-gold in this light, like autumn distilled. Fawn was glad it was Dag leading them up into these game-tracked humps and hollows, because she’d have lost her way as soon as their turn-off was out of sight. If not really been lost; she’d only to strike west to find the road again. But the blight was a smaller target—thankfully—some ten or twelve miles in.
The sun was climbing toward noon when Dag halted Copperhead on the beaten trail they’d been following. A frown tensed his mouth. Fawn kicked her mount Weft alongside, though Copperhead laid his ears back for show.
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