“One down, one to go,” Arkady muttered.
Tawa’s pain and fear flooded Dag’s ground, which he had matched to hers as closely as a man’s could match a woman’s. He thought of the look on her face and endured. He’d soaked up the like before, in roughand- ready treatment of patroller injuries on the trail. The sister and husband also partitioned the load of pain and stress, the sharing rendering it more bearable to Tawa; the senior makers had mastered the trick of closing grounds to pain but not to the person, and worked on steadily.
Dag hoped the pair was watching out for potential group groundlock.
The sharing wasn’t bearable to everyone. The two herb master’s apprentices had been holding down Tawa’s ankles. One was now headdown in the corner, sobbing, fighting black faintness, her ground snapped shut; her place had been taken over by a dogged-looking Fawn.
She grinned back at the glint of his eye, scared, determined-confident in him. Dag remembered to breathe.
“Now,” Arkady murmured in Dag’s ear, “you have to let go the placenta without letting go the pressure, so we can get it out of there and close up. Let your projection slip down through the tissues… a little tug on the cord, oh good, we have it all… that’s right… hold…”
Arkady and Challa together closed the inner cut, he weaving tissues back together in a fragile splice, she setting strong reinforcements. Then the abdominal wall, the support here applied physically, with curved needle and stitches. More washing of the wrinkled, flaccid belly with grain spirits, then dry cloths and dressings. Tawa’s chest heaved, tears of pain dripped down her temples, but her eyes flashed and she nodded weakly as her sister displayed a blanket-wrapped and red-faced little girl to her. Her husband was weeping unashamed, overwhelmed. You blighted should be, Dag thought, not disapprovingly.
A small eternity passed before Arkady murmured in Dag’s ear again: “Ease up gradually, let’s see where we are. The vessels in the womb wall should close on their own at this stage-it’s their good trick. Ah. Yes. It looks like they’re behaving…”
Slowly, Dag withdrew his ghost hands. The broad, natural wound left by the placenta within Tawa was raw but only oozing slightly. She stifled a cry as his breaking ground-match returned her pain to her. He backed away, and the kinswomen closed in to take care of the rest of the cleanup.
Dag blinked, aware again of his shivering body, cold as clay. Fawn appeared under his shoulder. They made it through the room’s other door and out onto the bright porch before he bent over the rail and heaved. The sun, strangely, still seemed to be at noon. Dag felt as though it ought to be sunset.
Arkady came out and handed him a cup of hot tea with a hand that shook slightly. “Here.”
Dag clutched it and sipped gratefully. Arkady lowered himself to a seat against the wall, warmed by the nearly springlike sun, and Dag sat beside him, with Fawn on folded knees at Dag’s other side.
“It was throwing you off the deep end of the dock, but I’m glad you were here today. We don’t often beat those odds,” said Arkady.
He didn’t, Dag noticed, accuse him of inelegant inefficiency this round. “Will Tawa live? ”
“If infection doesn’t set in. I’ll send everyone who can give ground reinforcements down to her tent in turns over the next couple of days.”
He added after a moment, “You kept your head well, patroller. Usually my apprentices get wobbly, first time we have to open up someone with knives.”
“I expect I’m older than your usual apprentice.” Dag hesitated. “And I’ve opened up folks with knives before, but never to save their lives.”
“Ah.” Arkady sipped.
Dag shared a swallow from his cup with Fawn, and thought about the other complications of childbearing Arkady had described to him.
The placenta tearing away from the womb wall prematurely, hiding lethal bleeding till too late; babies turned the wrong way ’round pinching off their own cords; a child too large to pass its mother’s pelvis. Without groundwork, farmer midwives sometimes had to break such a child inside its mother and draw it out dead. Even with groundwork that was sometimes the only way. “How do you make such choices? When it’s one life or the other?” Dag wondered if Arkady understood his question was practical, not despairing.
Arkady shook his head. “Best chance, usually. It varies, and often you can’t know till it’s right up on you.” He hesitated. “There is one other you should know about. And it’s not a choice.
“Sometimes-very rarely, fortunately-the placenta doesn’t implant in the womb at all, but roots in that little tube that runs from the sparkling organ down to it. A child can’t live or be born from there. Instead it grows till it rips the mother apart from the inside, and she dies of the bleeding and rotting. The pain is dreadful, and the fear. It’s not a quick death, nor a merciful one. What you must do if confronted with one of these is to immediately strip the life-ground from the conception.
You don’t let the mother or kin argue with you. You may be able to coax the material fragments down into the womb to be flushed out in her next monthly, though often by the time you see it, the tube is ruptured already, and all you can do is lay in ground reinforcements and hope the body will clean up the mess itself.”
“Ground-rip,” said Dag through dry lips. “Like a malice.” Like what the Glassforge malice had done to Fawn’s child; by her set face, he saw she realized this too.
“Ground-strip,” said Arkady, “like a groundsetter. In forty years I’ve only seen this three times, and thank the absent gods that the first time I was with my own mentor, who talked me through it. I could not have done it else.”
“So that ground… would end up in me.”
“Just like your experiments with food, I’m afraid, yes. It’s quickly absorbed.” But not, it seemed, quickly forgotten, judging by the bleak shadows rippling through Arkady’s bright ground.
Dag took a swallow of tea against his rising gorge. Fawn pried the cup from his fingers and took one herself, possibly for the same reason.
“I’ve never been sure,” said Arkady, “if I wanted to pray I’d never encounter one of those again, or pray that the next woman would at least encounter me. In time.”
Dag had always known that senior medicine makers kept secrets of their craft not discussed with outsiders. He was beginning to see why. “I always thought medicine making would be less harrowing than patrolling.”
“Today was happy.” Arkady finished his tea and grunted to his feet.
“Hold on to that.”
Dag followed suit. For the first time, he wondered why the brilliant Arkady was wifeless. Since he’d arrived at New Moon, he’d been too blighted busy to notice that inexplicable absence. He would ask Challa, he decided. Some other time. Because there were certain possible answers he wasn’t up to hearing, just now.
–-
Two nights later Dag sat with Arkady at the round table and armwrestled himself. Or at least, tested his right-side ground projection against his left. The left side always won, which was a bit boring. He glanced at Fawn, sitting by the fire and spinning up a bag of cotton she’d acquired at the farmer’s market, and thought he could devise a better practice drill and go to bed early with her at the same time, very efficient.
Arkady cleared his throat as the projections failed under Dag’s inattention. But before Dag could recover himself, a knock sounded at the door. Arkady nodded, and Dag rose to answer it.
Two people, his half-furled groundsense told him. But without urgency, unlike most night knocks for Arkady. He opened the door to find, to his surprise, Tawa Killdeer’s husband and sister.
“How de’, folks! Come on in.”
The sister shook her head. “We can’t stay. But the Killdeer tent wanted you to have this, Dag.” She thrust a long narrow bundle wrapped in hemmed cloth into his hand. “We heard you were in want of one.”
Heard from who? Dag felt through the wrapping and knew the contents at once.