Passage

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Dag cleared his throat, wishing he were more sure of, well, anything. “Fawn said the answer to this puzzle ought to lie between us all, if only we could see it. I mean to try harder to see it. Why is Hod beguiled, but Fawn not? Why don’t Lakewalkers beguile each other? What are our grounds really doing, when we feel what we feel? My notion is that Remo and I will each open our grounds as wide as we can, try trading little ground reinforcements all around, and watch each other.”

  “What would we be looking for?” asked Remo, a trifle plaintively. “I mean—it’s not like we haven’t done this before.”

  Dag shook his head. “Watch for the things we don’t usually notice. Especially watch for the things we think we know that might not really be so. Watch for the differences between Hod and Fawn. Is it the receiver that makes the difference, or is it the way the ground is gifted? I hope it’s not all in the receiver, because that would mean I couldn’t fix it—I could only heal some sick or hurt farmers but not others, and how would I tell which was which, in advance? How could I say to someone in mortal trouble, no, you go away, I can’t—” Dag broke off. Swallowed. Said, “You start, Remo. Give a small reinforcement to Hod.”

  Remo’s lips twisted in doubt. “In his knee again?”

  “How about his nose?” Fawn suggested. “I think he’s getting the sniffles from being in that cold water yesterday. And it wouldn’t be mixed up with the old groundwork there.”

  Hod, who had in fact been making some ominously juicy snorting noises all morning, turned red, but nodded. Acutely aware that he would be laying himself entirely open to Remo’s perceptions, Dag dropped his every guard and closed his eyes. He felt the whorl of ground coming away from Remo’s face and floating between the two, the quick blink like water droplets joining as it settled into Hod’s ground in turn, a palpable touch of warmth. Remo sneezed, and Dag’s eyes shot open again.

  Hod rubbed his nose and looked bewildered. “Feels nice,” he offered.

  Dag squinted, but no, with neither sight nor groundsense could he detect anything out of the ordinary. He ran his hand through his hair. “Well, all right. Do the same for Fawn, then.”

  “Are you sure, Dag?” asked Remo. “I mean—I wouldn’t want to risk accidentally beguiling your wife.” His glance at Dag was sidelong and wary.

  “Fawn’s already received some pretty complex ground reinforcements from me, and minor ones from Mari and Cattagus—is that all, Fawn?”

  She nodded. “Old Cattagus fixed that little burn on my hand that time, and Mari—you were there when she helped me out.” She made a vague gesture to her belly and the slowly healing malice scars hidden there that still rendered her monthlies so painful.

  “She’s not been beguiled yet, and this is lighter than even a minor healing reinforcement,” said Dag. “Go ahead.”

  “Where?” said Remo. “I mean, Barr claims if you put a ground reinforcement in a farmer girl’s—” He broke off abruptly, his face flushing. His ground shuttered.

  “Out with it,” said Dag patiently. “Who knows what overlooked thing could be important?”

  Remo’s ground only eased back by half. He looked up the river valley, meeting no one’s eye. He said distantly, “Barr says if you put a ground reinforcement in a farmer girl’s t…c…p…private parts”—this last choice barely got past his teeth—“it makes her eager to, um, be with you.”

  “Huh?” said Hod.

  “Go out to the woodpile with him,” Dag translated into Hoddish.

  “Oh.” Hod nodded wisely. “Sure.”

  From the look on Fawn’s face, she did not require a translation. But she sat up straighter, her brow wrinkling. “Dag…is that why, when we first met, you said you couldn’t heal my womb after the malice ripped me there?”

  Remo’s head swiveled at this, and his inspection of her malice scars dropped below her neck for the first time. His eyes widened.

  Dag answered, “No! It was what I was always taught about field healings. For folks who aren’t trained up as medicine makers, ground reinforcements flow best from body part to the same body part—the way Remo did Hod’s nose, just now. Without a womb to pull ground from, I’d no such ground to give you.” He hesitated. The healings he was trying nowadays through his ghost hand—his ground projection—certainly didn’t work that way. “I wouldn’t put much faith in Barr’s hearsay.”

  “But it wasn’t hearsay,” Remo blurted. “He said he did it.”

  Dag, after an unmoving moment, pursed his lips. “You know this for sure?”

  Remo nodded in discomfiture. “We’d put up out on patrol in this farmer’s barn. He went after one of the sisters. The prettiest, naturally. He dared me to try with another one, but I said I’d tell our patrol leader if he ever pulled a stunt like that again, and he shut up about it.” After a moment, he added, “I’m pretty sure he’s done it more than once, though.”

  “He could hardly have pulled ground from his womb,” said Dag slowly, still not convinced he believed Barr’s brag.

  “No, he said it was from his”—Remo gestured crotch-ward—“parallel parts. Because he had plenty to spare. He claimed.”

  Fawn said, in a coolly thoughtful tone, “That wouldn’t have been a healing reinforcement then, exactly. Maybe it was just…stimulatin’. You know, Dag, what you were taught may just be what they tell the young patroller boys—and girls—so as to save trouble. And in the next generation, if no one tested it, they’d pass it along for fact. So you could both be right, in a way.”

  Dag rubbed the back of his neck as he considered this proposition. Maybe there ought to be another experiment, later, in private…he wrenched his mind back to the present trial. “Elbow. Try a tiny reinforcement in her elbow.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Remo, in a tone that added, And if anything goes wrong later, sir, remember you told me to do this. He leaned forward again.

  This ground reinforcement, as nearly as Dag could tell, worked identically to Hod’s. Fawn rubbed her elbow and squinted at Remo, then sat back with an unperturbed smile.

  Well, that had gone nowhere in particular. “All right,” Dag sighed. “Now me, I guess. If you’re up to it. Or do you need a rest?”

  Remo shook his head. “Not for those little bits.”

  Dag sat up and opened his ground as wide as he ever had, trying for a listening quietude. “Elbow’s fine for me, too. Better stay away from my left side, it’s still pretty roiled over there.”

  Remo’s head tilted, and his lips parted. He said uneasily, “Dag, yours is the strangest ground I’ve ever seen. Scarred up one side and knotted down the other, but dense…you’re as dense as any medicine maker I’ve met. It’s hard to know where to put a reinforcement!”

  Dag nodded. “That calling has been growing in me for some time, I suspect. Longer than I’ve known. Try a foot. They’re always happy for some help.” He cast a glint at Fawn, recalling her very alluring foot rubs; she glinted back.

  Remo gathered himself, touched his own right foot, then Dag’s. Dag felt the whorl of ground flow past. There! An echo of ground—like the fainter second rainbow that sometimes mirrored a first—passed back between them even as the bit of Remo’s ground joined to Dag’s. The ground in Remo’s foot closed again like some thick liquid settling around the warm return gift.

  “Did you see that?” Dag said in excitement.

  “What?” said Remo cautiously. “It seemed like a usual reinforcement to me.”

  “That little backsplash from me to you, like an undertow of ground.”

  “Can’t say as I noticed.”

  Dag’s teeth gritted in frustration. He bit back a sharp rejoinder of Then open wider, blight you! Remo was only a young patroller. It was more than probable that an improved sensitivity to ground was growing in Dag along with his other maker’s talents. Had his younger self ever experienced such simple field reinforcements as anything other than diffuse blobs? Although if Remo truly couldn’t sense this, he wasn’t going to be much help as a check on Da
g’s perceptions.

  Dag sighed and straightened. “All right. My turn. I need you to watch really closely, Remo. I’ll start with Hod’s right elbow, as there’s no other groundwork there.” That had been a good notion of Fawn’s, to keep the trials separated for clearer comparisons.

  He unfurled his ghost hand, reached out, and spun off a tiny reinforcement into the target. No ground-echo returned, hah! The reinforcement was swallowed up greedily as though gulped. Hod sighed contentedly.

  But Remo almost fell over in his scramble backward. Up on one knee and looking ready to bolt, he pointed toward Dag’s hook and cried, “Blight! What was that?”

  Dag had forgotten he’d not introduced Remo to his new talent. “Settle down. It’s just my gh—ground projection. Instead of mirroring body parts, it pulls ground generally from all through me. Hoharie—she’s Hickory Lake Camp’s senior medicine maker—says it’s a maker’s skill. It doesn’t usually take quite this form in other makers, but you can kind of see why it would for me.”

  “Uh,” said Remo. “Yeah.” Dag wished he wouldn’t look quite so bug-eyed, but he did settle back cross-legged and tried to be attentive.

  “I will wait,” said Dag patiently, “till you can get your ground open again.”

  Remo swallowed. It took him a few minutes, but he eventually achieved the relaxed openness Dag needed.

  Dag rubbed his jaw, and said, “Think I’ll try you next. I need you to watch not my reinforcement, but for a little echo of it coming back from you to me. I’d say underneath, but it’s more like the return ground passes right through the other, lagging a bit. Ready?”

  Remo nodded. Dag leaned forward and extended his ghost hand again. He paused while Remo’s ground flickered in alarm, then steadied. He nodded and spun off the reinforcement toward Remo’s right forearm. This time, watching for it, the ground return was distinctly discernible. The faint Remo-ground-echo was converted so rapidly it seemed to disperse through Dag’s arm like a blown dandelion puff. Dag’s brows rose.

  “I saw…” Remo began excitedly, then slowed. “I’m not just sure what I saw.”

  “You saw your ground-echo. I felt it slide into me. It converted a lot faster than…um…a primary ground reinforcement.” The one Remo had placed in Dag’s foot was still there, comfortable but distinct. Dag’s return echo in Remo’s foot was almost fully absorbed already. Dag blew out his breath and turned to Fawn. She was watching him closely, clearly struggling to follow all this. He gave her a reassuring nod, but it only made her lift her brows wryly.

  Dag centered himself, opened all his heart to her, reached out, and spun a reinforcement into her opposite elbow. The return echo came back to him like a kiss, and his lips softened in a smile.

  “I saw that thing again!” said Remo. “I think…”

  Dag sat back and rubbed his forehead. “I saw. Felt. Yes. The reason Fawn is not beguiled is that her ground is acting like a Lakewalker’s—at least—it did when I gave her the reinforcement. But it didn’t when you did. That’s…odd.”

  “Is it because you’re married?” said Remo.

  “I’m not sure.” Marriage—Lakewalker marriage—was certainly a ground-transforming act, as their binding strings testified. But Dag could hardly marry all his potential patients. A stumper, this.

  They’d gone all the way around with each of them. The answer had to be here, hidden in the crisscross of ground flow—or its absence. Dag fell onto his back and glowered up at the nearly leafless willow branches, at the cool, blue sky brightening toward noon. Dag and Remo had exchanged ground with each other; Dag only had exchanged with Fawn. Neither had exchanged with poor Hod.

  Or was that, neither had accepted an exchange with poor Hod…?

  Oh ye gods. Can I do this? I don’t want bits of Hod in me!

  So do you really want to be the farmers’ own medicine maker—old patroller? Because a real maker can’t pick and choose his patients. He has to take whoever and whatever comes, equally.

  “It’s not true,” he said to the sky in sudden wonder. “It was never true.”

  “What’s not true, Dag?” Fawn asked in that long-suffering voice that suggested she was about to snap. His lips curled up, which made her growl, which made them curl up more.

  “It’s not true,” he said, “that Lakewalkers don’t beguile each other. We beguile each other all the time.”

  “What?” said Remo, sounding startled.

  Dag sat up, his smile twisting. He raised his left arm toward Hod. Spun off a neat reinforcement into the nearly healed knee. And held himself open: not sternly, not rigidly, but warmly and without reservation.

  The backsplash this time was so blatant that Remo cried Whoa! There was, after all, a deal of accumulated ground-load for Hod to dump so suddenly.

  Hod bent, blinked, and touched his forehead, then gripped his leg. His smile flickered very uncertainly. “Uh,” he said. “I felt…it went away…” And added piteously after a moment, “But…can I still be your friend?”

  “Yes, Hod, you surely can,” said Dag. “You surely can.”

  “Dag,” said Fawn dangerously, “do you want to explain that for the rest of us? Because if you haven’t just done something worse ’n that catfish, I’ll eat my hat.”

  “I just un-beguiled Hod!” Dag exulted, choking back a thoroughly undignified chortle. “In a sense.”

  “The first half of that sounds good,” allowed Fawn, and waited with understandable suspicion for him to explain the second.

  “I think—I’m guessing—that the hunger a beguiled person has for repeated ground reinforcements isn’t only because they feel real good. It’s really an urgent attempt by their ground to rebalance itself. To complete the thwarted exchange. Except that it just gets worse with each addition if the Lakewalker doing the reinforcements still blocks—rejects—the return ground-gift.”

  Dag went on in growing elation, “That also explains why beguilement’s so blighted erratic. It depends on how open—or not—the Lakewalker feels about farmers—or about that particular farmer, leastways. I’ve been open to Fawn since almost the beginning, so no imbalance has ever built up in her. Hod…not. Till just now. Ha!” He supposed he’d only frighten Hod and Remo if he jumped up and danced around them all whooping like a madman, but he really wanted to.

  Remo looked less enthusiastic. “What do you mean, we beguile each other all the time? We don’t!”

  “Beguile and un-beguile both. Ground exchange, in balance, not thwarted. I swear it starts with our mother’s milk, and goes on—not a Lakewalker child comes of age without having received dozens of little reinforcements from dozens of kinfolk or friends for this or that ailment or injury. Grown up and out on patrol, or in camp with our tent-kin, we’re always swapping around. We float in a lake of shared ground. I’d not be surprised to find it’s part of why, when a Lakewalker is cut off from others, we feel so odd and unhappy.”

  Remo looked wholly interested but only half-convinced. “Dag, are you sure of this?”

  “Nearly. You’d best believe I’ll be watching out for it from now on.”

  Fawn asked, “Does this mean you really could teach other makers to heal farmers?”

  “Spark, if I’m right, any medicine maker who knew this could treat a farmer without beguiling—if only the maker was willing to take in farmer ground.” He hesitated. That might be a bigger if only than it looked at first. Still, medicine making had never been for the squeamish.

  Remo said slowly, “But what would happen to that lake of shared ground if a lot of Lakewalkers started taking in farmer ground? What would happen to the maker?”

  Dag fell silent. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I came out here this morning determined to wring some answers to my questions—and we did!—but it seems I’ve just stirred up a pack of bigger questions. I’m not getting ahead, here.”

  After a longer pause, Fawn clambered to her feet and motioned them all off the blanket so she could roll it up. The walk back to the
Fetch was very subdued. Although at least Hod had stopped sniffling.

  In the warmest part of the afternoon, Dag took Fawn down the island to, as they explained to Hawthorn, scout for squirrels. Hawthorn promptly begged to go along, brandishing a slingshot. Remo, bless him, understood the patrol code, and diverted the boy long enough for them to escape.

  Finding a warm nook took a little searching, as the wind was freshening and showing signs of veering northwest, with horse-tail clouds spread in gauzy lines turning the light paler. But a low spot in some deadfall, once it was lined with the good supply of blankets they’d packed along, lent both privacy and comfort.

  Over the next few delicious hours, Dag discovered that with his growing control of ground projection he could indeed lay reinforcements in select body parts that did not match his own, but, Fawn reported, it did nothing that his ghost hand didn’t already do better. They compared the techniques a couple of times, to be certain, during which Fawn’s solemnly helpful expression kept dissolving into giggles. Dag chortled in, he trusted, a more dignified fashion. Well, maybe not so dignified in that position…He was unable to test Barr’s assertion about making farmer girls suffer desire because he couldn’t force himself to stay closed to Fawn, and anyway, it would have been like pouring milk into milk and looking for a color change. But he hoped this new support around her hidden malice scars would help with the pain of her next monthly, coming up soon.

  “A ground reinforcement doesn’t actually heal a person,” he explained as they lay drowsily intertwined, bodies and investigations temporarily exhausted. “It just strengthens a body to heal itself quicker, or to fight infection better. If the damage is too great or the sickness spreads too fast, the maker’s work gets overwhelmed, too.”