Dag was unsurprised. He forged on nonetheless. “I always figured to train her myself, later, but having her just settin’ around like this is a huge waste of her time. And of a camp resource. Fawn can learn anything you can teach—except groundwork—we always meant her to be my spare hands, if ever I got out among farmers as a real medicine maker. You haven’t seen it, but I have. When she’s by my side, farmers calm right down and stop being afraid of me, despite what a starveling vagabond I generally look. The women because they can see she’s not scared, and the men because she’s so blighted cute they forget to worry about Lakewalker death magic. And if I’m ever to treat farmer women and girls, which I guess’d be about half my customers, I’d need her with me before I’d dare touch them.” He thought of Arkady’s breast-tumor treatment, and other even more intimate women’s ailments, and shivered. “Absent gods, yes!”
Arkady finished the brief note he’d been jotting about the tooth extraction, set down his quill, and frowned across at Dag. “It’s not by any means concluded that you’ll be turned loose to treat farmers. As for placing Fawn here in the medicine tent—I grant you she has clever hands, but that bright ground of hers, always open, would be a distraction to patients and makers alike.”
“It’s not a distraction to me,” said Dag. “These are the same fool arguments Hoharie made back at Hickory Lake. One little farmer girl’s open ground is only as much of a botheration as folks choose it to be. Lakewalkers can deal fine with Fawn around when they want to.”
“Yes, but why should they want to?”
Dag bit his lip. “I’m a stranger here. I’ve earned no trust from this camp. I know I can’t ask this of folks.” His eyes caught and held Arkady’s, and he dropped his voice to his company captain’s growl—not a gift of Dag’s that Arkady had guessed at, judging from his faint recoil. “But you can. I’ve seen how this camp respects you, and I’ve more than a notion by now of why. You can make this happen if you choose, and we both know it.” Dag let his voice and his look lighten. “Besides, what’s to lose? Try her for a couple of weeks. If Fawn doesn’t work out here, we can think of something else. It’s not like me and my farmer bride are asking to join your camp permanent.”
“Hm,” said Arkady, lowering his eyes and closing his casebook. “Is that what you think? Well. Perhaps I could talk to Challa and Levan.”
Fawn was ecstatic when Dag told her the news, which made him right proud of his husbandly insight. The next morning as he took her along to introduce to her new task makers at the medicine tent, she skipped down the road, caught his amused eye upon her, stopped, tossed her head, then skipped again. But she was walking sedately by the time they arrived.
Dag watched her welcome carefully, not above letting it be seen that he was watching. Challa was politely resigned. Levan, the aging herb master, had the air of a man with a long view enduring a temporary burden. His two female apprentices and Challa’s boy, at first stiff and cold, grew more pliant as they realized that Fawn would be taking over many of their most tedious chores, from washing pots and bedding to peeling stems and sweeping the floor. As the first days passed, her uncomplaining cheer and enthusiasm softened the older makers, too. Within half a week more, even camp residents stopping in for treatment or to pick up medicines ceased being surprised to find her about the place.
Dag’s own heart was comforted and mind eased by having her so often within his sight and hearing, and by her obvious happiness at being so. Gradually, Dag began calling her over to give him a hand, as opportunities presented, and gradually, the other members of the tent became used to the picture. The first time Challa absentmindedly assigned a two-handed chore to the pair of them, Dag smiled in secret victory.
One morning, as Dag made to rise from the breakfast table, Arkady said, “Wait.”
Dutifully, Dag sat back down.
“Have you made any further progress overcoming your asymmetry?”
Dag shrugged. “Can’t say as I have.” Which seemed better than I’ve hardly given it a thought.
“Try now.”
Dag laid his right arm out on the table and attempted a ground projection, with the same lack of results as before.
“Uh-huh,” said Arkady, and walked over to rummage on his shelves. He came back carrying a couple of lengths of rope and a penknife. After tying one rope around Dag’s hook, he bent Dag’s left arm behind him, and wove the end through the chair back and around to secure firmly in front. Dag cooperated uneasily.
“There. Will that hold?”
Dag tugged. “I expect so.”
“Right arm feel free?”
Dag wriggled his fingers. “Aye.” Fawn finished packing up the breakfast basket and slid back into her chair to watch. She met Dag’s look and grinned. Arkady had evidently paid better attention than Dag had thought to Fawn’s words about how his ghost hand had first emerged.
Arkady lit a candle by waving his hand over it, sat on Dag’s right, and picked up the sharp little knife. “You claim you’ve reattached blood vessels before, in your farmer healing?”
“Aye,” said Dag, watching in worry as Arkady began passing the knife blade through the candle flame. “In Hod’s knee, and Chickory’s busted skull. They’re stretchy, and coil up when they’re busted, but the ends seem to want to find each other again after. Just the bigger ones. They got littler and littler till I couldn’t follow them down and in without risking groundlock.”
“Mm, yes. I’ve always wondered if the little arteries empty into a pool in the tissues, and then the veins suck up the blood again, or if they’re connected all the way through, unimaginably tiny. If only Sutaw had advanced enough to pull me out of the deep groundlock, I thought I might try…well. Never mind. That doesn’t concern us today.” He held the knife in the air to cool. “Let’s give you something more interesting than a piece of paper to work on, shall we?”
He drew the tiny blade across the back of his own left hand, slicing through a plump vein. Fawn squeaked as blood began to well. Arkady laid his oozing hand down in front of Dag.
Dag, eyeing the red trickle with a mixture of alarm and annoyance, attempted once more to coax a ground projection from his right hand. His left arm jerked at its bindings behind him, but from the right…nothing.
“What,” said Arkady, “you’re just going to sit there and watch while your teacher bleeds? For shame, Dag.”
Dag flushed, grimaced, clenched and stretched his fingers. Shook his head. “Sorry. I’m sorry.”
Arkady waited, then shrugged, passed his right hand over his left—the flash of ground projection went by almost too fast for Dag to perceive—and mopped at the drips with a napkin. The bleeding stopped. He tilted his head for a long moment, eyeing Dag in a shrewd way that made him feel even more of a fool.
“Ye-es,” Arkady drawled. “Perhaps…” Taking the second length of rope, he knelt by Dag’s chair. “Fawn, give me a hand, here. I want to tie his feet firmly to the chair legs.”
“Why?” asked Dag. “No one does ground projections from their feet.”
“Safety precaution.”
Fawn touched Dag’s shoulder in encouragement and knelt on his other side; she and Arkady passed the rope back and forth and consulted on the knots. Fawn was inclined to be thorough. Dag craned his neck and tried to see what they’d done, but couldn’t quite. He flexed his ankles against their restraints, which held tight, and waited while the pair seated themselves, flanking him once more. Arkady cooked his knife blade in the candle flame again, looking bland.
Then, abruptly, he pounced across the table, yanked Fawn’s hand down in front of Dag, and sliced across its back. “Ow!” she cried.
Dag nearly fell over, trying to lunge out of his chair. Safety for who, you blighter? He strained at his bindings, clawed at the knot in front, thought wildly of ground-ripping the rope apart, then barely controlled his rocking as Arkady continued to press Fawn’s hand down, squeezing to make it drip. Her eyes were wide, and she gasped a little, but she did
not struggle to withdraw. Instead, she looked hopefully at Dag.
“You can fix this. Can’t you?” Arkady purred in Dag’s right ear.
“Blight your eyes…” Dag growled. Arkady hadn’t plotted this with Fawn in advance, hadn’t asked her permission; her surprise and distress had been spontaneous and loud in Dag’s groundsense, for all that she’d quickly overcome both. Her pain lingered, shivery sharp like shards of glass.
Arkady let Fawn’s hand go and leaned back as Dag extended his right hand above it, fingers not quite touching her pale skin. The slice was barely half an inch long, precisely placed across the blue vein. Dag forced himself to breathe, to open his ground, to concentrate. Down and in. The back of Fawn’s hand expanded in his perceptions, the wider world tilted away. He felt for the shuddering vein ends. The ground of his right hand seemed to spurt and sputter. Blight you, Arkady, I’ve no skill on this side…!
Skill or no, Dag managed to push his ground beyond the confines of his skin. Clumsily, he caught up the two cut ends of the biggest vessel, guided them back together—they seemed to seek each other, which helped—and shaped a strong—no, not quite that strong, right—ground reinforcement to hold them there. There. He forced himself to calm, lest he set Fawn’s hand afire and do more damage than Arkady had. Down and in…he found the living fibers of skin, and began weaving them back together. Farther down, farther in…
He was broken from his beginning trance not by a ground-touch, but by Arkady simply slapping him on the side of his head. Dag came back blinking and shaken to the morning light of the room. He inhaled, looked down. Fawn was wiping the blood from her hand with Arkady’s napkin. Nothing showed of the attack but a faint pink line.
Dag drew a deep breath. “You like living dangerously, do you, Arkady?”
Arkady’s shrug was devoid of apology. “It was time to move you along. It worked, didn’t it? Now, let’s see that projection again.”
His right-side projection felt weak and clumsy, but it was there. And again. And again. Dag was light-headed and nauseated when Arkady at last ceased his badgering and allowed Fawn to untie him.
Dag shook out both his arms, stretching his aching back. The only reason he didn’t then stand up and slug the maker across his close-shaved jaw was the sudden thought—Does this mean I’m almost over my quarantine?
7
On a bright day that breathed promise of an early southern spring, Fawn helped Nola and Cerie, the herb master’s apprentices, pack up a handcart to take to the New Moon Camp farmer’s market. The three young women dragged their load around through the sapling gate and down over the hill to the clearing where the horses had been watered that first day. The tree branches were still bare against the cool blue sky, but the buds swelled red, and a few low weeds winked green in the flattened and brownish grass.
It was at last made plain to Fawn why the medicine tent’s kitchen was always so busy. After concocting enough remedies for the needs of the camp, the herb master and his helpers produced yet more for the local trade. Some medicines were not so different from what Fawn’s mama and aunt Nattie compounded, but Maker Levan himself did groundwork on others that made them much more effective and—he seemed to think this an important point—uniform. Unlike the cure-all nostrums Fawn had seen hawked in the Drowntown market, which Dag claimed were mostly spirits—you might still be sick, but you’d be too drunk to care, Barr had quipped—the Lakewalkers made limited claims for their medicines. Dewormers for people, horses, cattle, and sheep; effective remedies for bog ague and hookworm, neither plague to be found in West Blue but common here, especially in the long, hot summers; a bitter pain powder from willow bark and poppy just like the northern one Fawn had seen Dag use when his arm had been broken; a tincture of foxglove for bad hearts; a gray powder much trusted by the locals to sprinkle on wounds to fight infection.
In the clearing, a number of Lakewalkers unrolled awnings from under the eaves of the shelter and set up trestle tables beneath them. Today they offered mostly handwork of a sort Fawn had seen before: fine leathers that would not rot, nearly unbreakable rope and cord, a small but choice selection from the camp blacksmith—tools that would not rust, blades that would hold their edge. Fawn helped the two apprentices lay out the medicine tent’s offerings fetchingly on their table, then they all settled down on upended logs to await their customers.
It wasn’t long. As the sun marked noon, a few farmers began to trickle in to the clearing, some driving rumbling carts or wagons, some with packhorses or mules. It would be a slow day, Nola informed Fawn; the market was busier in the summer, when the roads were better. Most people here on both sides seemed to already know their business, as well as one another’s names, and deals were struck quickly and efficiently, as when two cartloads of fat grain sacks were traded for several kegs of animal dewormer and some sets of unbreakable traces.
A well-sprung wagon drawn by a pretty team of four matched palomino horses swung into the clearing, and five people climbed down: a very well-dressed farmer with streaks of gray in his hair, a maidservant shepherding a small boy, a horseboy, who went immediately to unhitch and rub down the animals, and what had to be the graying man’s wife. She was half a head taller than he, but equally well dressed, in a traveling skirt, close-fitting jacket, and fine boots, with her sandy hair coiled up in tidy braids. She strode without hesitation to one of the armed patrollers lurking around the edge of the clearing, and spoke to him. After a moment he nodded, if a trifle reluctantly, and trotted away up the road.
“Look! She’s back,” muttered Nola.
“I see,” murmured Cerie.
The little boy grabbed his father’s hand and towed him around the shelter to see the fascinating contents of all the tables. The tall woman glanced over the array and walked straight to the medicine table. Fawn sat up and blinked as she drew closer. Despite her farmer dress, the woman had the fine-boned features and bright silvery-blue eyes of a full-blooded Lakewalker.
She looked down at Fawn, on the other side of the table, with quite as much surprise as Fawn looked up at her.
“Absent gods,” she said, in an amused alto voice. “Is New Moon taking in farmers now? Wonders and marvels!”
“No, ma’am,” said Fawn, raising her chin. She almost touched her temple the way Dag did; then, afraid it might be mistaken for some sort of mockery, gripped her hands in her lap. “I’m just visiting. My husband’s a Lakewalker from Oleana, though, studying groundsetting with Maker Arkady for a stretch.”
“Really!”
Uncertain what the woman’s exclamation meant, Fawn just smiled in what she hoped seemed a friendly way. Then the woman’s eye fell on the cord peeking from Fawn’s left jacket cuff, and her breath drew in. She leaned forward abruptly, reaching out, then caught herself, straightened, and motioned more politely. “May I see that? That’s a real wedding braid, isn’t it?”
Fawn pushed back her cuff and laid her arm out on the table. “Yes, ma’am. Dag and I made them for each other back in Oleana.”
The little boy came galloping around the side of the shelter and, suddenly shy, clutched his mother’s skirts and stared at Fawn. The man strolled after, putting his arm possessively around the woman’s waist.
A brief stillness flashed in the woman’s face that hinted at groundsense extended. “How?” she asked, sounding amazed.
“Dag wove his ground into his in the usual way for Lakewalkers. When we came to mine, we found that my ground would follow my live blood into my braid as I plaited it, and Dag could make it stick.”
“Blood! I never thought of that…”
The man was watching his wife’s profile warily. She glanced sideways at him, raised her chin, and said distinctly, “It doesn’t matter. I don’t need it.” Fawn wasn’t sure what emotion warmed his eyes—pride? relief? In any case, the woman selected some pain powder, some ague remedy, and half their stock of the anti-nausea syrup highly recommended, Fawn had learned, for morning sickness. She paid for it all with good G
raymouth coin from a heavy purse, and she and her husband and son returned to the wagon, where the maidservant was setting out a picnic lunch.
“Who was that woman?” Fawn asked her companions. “She looked like a Lakewalker—is she from here?”
“She was,” said Nola in a disapproving tone. “She was a patroller, but about ten years back she ran off to marry—if you can call it that—that farmer following her.”
“They say he owns several mills in Moss River City,” Cerie added, nodding toward the wagon, “and built her a house overlooking the river three floors high, with flower gardens that go all the way down to the water.”
“Was she banished?”
“She should have been,” said Nola. “But her tent didn’t ask it of the camp council.”
“Banishing deserters is a joke,” sighed Cerie. “Hardly any of them come back, so all it means is that their tent-kin can’t speak to them or visit them out there in farmer country. If their kin chase after them and drag them back here, they mostly just leave again at the first chance. And hardly anybody wants to hunt them down and hang them. Some claim if anyone’s that disaffected, it’s better to let them go, before they spread their mood around the camp.”
“Are there very many who leave?”
Cerie shrugged. “Not really. Maybe a dozen a year?”
Compared to the Unheard of! at Hickory Lake, that seemed like a lot to Fawn. And if the outward leak was like that at every camp in the south, it would add up. That peeled pole barrier at the camp gate only worked in one direction, it seemed.
In a while, three Lakewalkers appeared from the rutted road, an older woman and two sandy-haired adults. They sat down to the picnic with the Moss River family, speaking quietly. Once, the older woman stood up on her knees and measured the little boy against her shoulder, and said something that made him laugh, and once, the Lakewalker woman in farmer dress put her hand to her belly and gestured, which won strained smiles from the others. At length, the family packed up, made sober farewells, and drove off. The older woman turned her head to watch them out of sight, then the three vanished up the road again.