Fairbolt hastened to set her a chair by the map table, and moved boxes of pegs to free two more. Fawn directed an uncertain knee-dip at her and sat where Fairbolt pointed, just around the table’s corner.
“Tell your tale, Fawn,” said Fairbolt, settling on her other side.
Fawn gulped. “Sir. Ma’am.” Fighting an urge to gabble, Fawn repeated her story, her right hand kneading her left as she spoke. She finished, “Dar accused Dag of making malice magic, but I swear it isn’t so! It wasn’t Dag’s fault—I asked him to fix my cord. Dar puts it in the worst possible light on purpose, and it makes me so mad I could spit.”
Hoharie had listened to the spate with her head cocked, not interrupting. She said mildly, “Well, let’s have a look then, Fawn.”
At her encouraging nod, Fawn laid her left arm out on the table for Hoharie’s inspection. The medicine maker’s lips twisted thoughtfully as she gazed down at it. Her fingers were thin and dry and hardly seemed to press the skin, but Fawn’s arm twinged deep inside as they drifted along. Fairbolt watched closely, occasionally remembering to breathe. Hoharie sat back at last with a hard-to-read expression.
“Well. That’s a right powerful piece of groundwork for a patroller. You been hoarding talent over here, Fairbolt?”
Fairbolt scratched his head. “If it’s so, Dag’s been hoarding himself.”
“Did he mention that thing about the glass bowl and the ghost hand to you?”
Fairbolt’s eyebrows shot up. “No…?”
“Huh.”
“Is it”—Fawn swallowed—“what Dar said? Bad magic?”
Hoharie shook her head, not so much in negation as caution. “Now, mind you, I’ve never seen a malice’s mind-slave up close. I’ve just heard about them. Though I have dissected mud-men, and there’s a tale. This almost reminds me more of matching grounds for healing, truth to tell. Which is like a dance between two grounds that push on each other. As contrasted with a shaped or unshaped ground reinforcement, where the medicine maker actually gives ground away. Could be when a malice matches ground, it’s just so powerful it compels rather than dances, pushing the other right over. Though there is a disparity in this as well…I wouldn’t be able to tell how much unless I had Dag right here.”
Fawn sighed wistfully at the notion of having Dag right here, safe.
Fairbolt said in a somewhat choked voice, “Isn’t a hundred miles away a bit far for matching grounds, Hoharie? It’s usually done skin to skin, in my experience.”
“That’s where the almost comes in. This has both, mixed. Dag’s put a bit of worked—rather delicately worked—ground reinforcement into Fawn’s left arm and hand, which is what she feels dancing with his ground in the cord. It’s all very, um…impulsive.”
Perhaps taking in the confusion in Fawn’s face, Hoharie went on: “It’s like this, child. What you farmers call magic, Lakewalker or malice, it’s all just groundwork of some kind. A maker draws the ground he works with out of himself, and has to recover by growing it back at the speed of life, no more. A malice steals ground from the world around it, insatiably, and puts nothing back. Think of a rivulet and a river in flood. The one’ll give you a nice drink on a hot day. The other will wash away your house and drown you. They’re both water. But no one sane has any trouble telling one from the other. See?”
Fawn nodded, if a bit uncertainly, to show willing.
“So is my company captain hurt or not?” said Fairbolt, shifting in impatience. “What’s going on over there in Raintree, Hoharie?”
Hoharie shook her head again. “You’re asking me to tell you what something looks like from a glimpse in a piece of broken mirror held around a corner. In the dark. Am I looking at all of it, or just a fragment? Does it correspond to anything?” She turned to Fawn. “What hurts, exactly?”
Fawn stretched and clenched her fingers. “My left hand, mostly. Up the arm it fades. Except I feel a little shivery all over.”
Fairbolt muttered, “But Dag hasn’t got a…” His face screwed up, and he scowled in a confusion briefly greater than Fawn’s.
“It’s…how shall I put this,” said Hoharie in some reluctance. “If the rest of his ground is as stressed as the bit I feel, his body must be in a pretty bad way.”
“How bad, how?” snapped Fairbolt. Which made Fawn rather glad, because she was much too frightened to yell at the medicine maker herself.
Hoharie opened her hands in a wide, frustrated shrug. “Well, not quite enough to kill him, evidently.”
Fairbolt bared his teeth at her, but then sat back in a glum slump. “If I get any sleep at all tonight, Hoharie, it won’t be your doing.”
Fawn leaned forward and stared at her hand. “I was kind of hoping you would tell me I was a stupid little farmer girl imagining things. Everybody else used to, but now that I want it…” She looked up, and added uneasily, “Dag’s not going to get in some kind of trouble for this making, is he?”
“Well, if—when he gets back I guarantee I’ll be asking him a few questions,” said Hoharie fervently. “But they won’t have anything to do with this argument before the camp council.”
“It was all my fault, truly,” said Fawn. “Dar made me afraid to tell. But I thought—I thought Fairbolt had a need and a right to know, on account of the company.”
Fairbolt pulled himself together, and said gravely, “Thank you, Fawn. You did the right thing. If you feel any changes in this, please tell me or Hoharie, will you?”
Fawn nodded earnestly. “So what do we do now?”
“What we generally have to do, farmer girl,” Fairbolt sighed. “We wait.”
13
D ag woke well after dark, to roll his aching body up, pull on his boots without lacing them, and stagger to the slit trench. The night air was chill and dank, but the two patrollers on duty had kept the campfire burning with a cheery orange glow. One waved to Dag as he wandered past, and Dag returned the silent salute. The scene looked deceptively peaceful, as though they watched over comrades merely sleeping.
After relieving himself, Dag considered more sleep. His bone-deep grinding fatigue of earlier seemed scarcely improved. The marsh remained silent—this hour should have been raucous with frogs, insects, and night birds—and eerily odorless. Either the reek of its normal life or the stench of death should have saturated this foggy air. Well, the rot would come in time, a week or a month or six or next spring. Which, while it would doubtless smell repulsive enough to gag anyone for a mile downwind, would be a first sign of life beginning its repair of the blight—rot had a lively ground of its own.
Dag stared at the grove, the campfire seeming like a lantern among the trees, remembering his patrol’s first approach…only yesterday? If this was after midnight—he glanced at the wheel of the stars—he could call it two days ago, though that seemed scarcely more reasonable. Frowning thoughtfully, he counted a careful two hundred paces away from the grove and found a stump to sit upon. He stretched out his aching legs. If he had opened his groundsense at this distance before without triggering the trap, presumably he might do it again.
He hissed in surprise as he eased his veil apart for the first time in days. Cramping, Mari had described his closure, and that seemed barely adequate to describe this shaking agony. Normally, he paid as little attention to his own ground as he did to his body, the two conflating seamlessly. Meaning to examine the groundlocked makers, Dag instead found his inner senses wrenched onto himself.