Back on the Fetch, they found a crisis brewing as Berry and Bo were ready to cast off, but Hawthorn’s raccoon kit had disappeared. Bo was all for leaving without the pesky creature, assuring the distraught Hawthorn that his pet would swim down the river and find a new home in the woods just fine. Hawthorn envisioned more dire fates, loudly. Then the listening Remo made himself hero of the hour—or at least of Hawthorn—by walking along the bank and retrieving the kit from a boat down the row where, caught raiding the pantry, it was about to meet its end at either the hands of the boat’s irate cook or the jaws of the excited boat-dog. Remo had a dangerously attractive face-lightening smile like Dag’s, Fawn discovered as he handed the little masked miscreant back to its ecstatic owner. Berry noticed it too, and smiled in pure contagion; Whit first smiled at her smile, then frowned at Remo.
As the boat made midstream and peace fell, Fawn pulled out her wool and drop spindle and took a seat on the bow to spin, watch the riverbank pass by, and think. Remo had to have opened and used his groundsense for that swift rescue, despite his aversion to farmer grounds. For Lakewalkers, hunting must be a very different activity than for farmers, if they could just stroll into a woods and find prey as easily as a woman picking jars off her pantry shelf. Although she supposed convincing, say, a bear to submit to having its skin peeled was just as dangerous to a Lakewalker hunter as to any farmer. Or was it? Were there other practical uses for persuasion than just on farmer merchants and maidens? And horses and mosquitoes and fireflies. She would have to ask Dag.
Twisting her yarn plump for warmth—it would knit up faster that way, too—she made quite a bit of progress before it was time to break off and go start lunch. An iron stove, she thought longingly, could be installed on a boat like this one and not be so sessile after all. But it would be a short love affair—you’d have to sell it downstream just as the boats were sold off at journey’s end, sometimes as houseboats for the poorer riverfolk but more usually broken up for their lumber. Most of Graymouth was built of former flatboats, she’d heard. She hated to think of the Fetch so dismembered, and hoped someone would buy it for a cozy floating home.
As she made her way into the kitchen, she found Dag sitting at the drop-table, his head bent strangely. He was staring down at a distressing lumpy gray blob on a pie plate, his face drained and almost greenish.
“What in the world is that thing?” Fawn asked, nodding at the plate. “You’re not going to eat it, are you?” The man certainly needed to get more food inboard, but preferably something wholesome. This looked like something dead too long that had been fished from the bottom of the river.
“Last piece of apple pie from last night,” he said.
“That’s not my—” She looked more closely. “Dag, what did you do?”
“Ground-ripped it. Tried to. I think I just found my upper limit.”
“Dag! Two oats, I said!”
“I tried two oats. They were good. So were five and ten. Time to try something else. This was food, too!”
“Was, yeah!” As she stared in a mix of exasperation and horror, Dag abruptly clawed off his arm harness and dropped it, bending over with his left arm held tight to his body. He swallowed ominously. Fawn darted for a washbasin and shoved it under his nose barely in time. He grabbed it and turned away from her, trying to retch quietly, but he didn’t bring up much. Wordlessly, she handed him a cup of water with which to rinse and spit.
“Thanks,” he whispered.
“Done?”
“Not sure.” He set the basin on the bench beside him, ready to hand. “This feels bizarre. It’s like my ground is trying to get rid of it, but it can’t, so my body tries instead.”
“But there wasn’t anything in your stomach.”
“I’m right grateful about that, just now.”
“Is this the same way you get sick after your healing groundwork?”
“No,” he said slowly. “That’s more light-headed, like blood loss except it passes quickly. This…is heavy like indigestion. It just sits there. Except in both cases the disruption of my ground is affecting my body.”
“So is your ground like a horse, or like a dog?”
He blinked at her in dizzy confusion. “Say what?”
“We had some farm dogs that would wolf down any garbage you left around, and then heave it back up if it disagreed with ’em, which it generally did. Usually someplace where you were going to step, seemed like.” She scowled in memory. “Then there was that dog of Reed’s whose joy was to roll in smelly things—manure, dead possums—and then rush up to share his bliss with you. But that’s dogs for you.”
Dag pressed the back of his hand to his lips. “Indeed…Are you ragging me, Spark?”
She shook her head, though her fierce glance said, You deserve to be ragged. “Then there’s horses. Now, horses can’t vomit like dogs do. Once they’ve eaten something wrong, they’re in big trouble and no mistake. Papa lost a good pony to colic, once, that had got into the corn, which is why Fletcher is so careful about fixing fencerows and keeping the feed bins latched tight. It’d been his pony, see. So if you ground-rip something bad, can you get rid of it or not?”
“Evidently not.” Dag’s brow wrinkled. “I couldn’t get rid of those toxic spatters after I ground-ripped the malice back in Raintree, either, come to think. They were blighting me, poisoning my ground. They were drawn out and destroyed with the rest of the residue when we broke the malice’s groundlock, but that trick wouldn’t work for this.”
“Will this kill you?” she asked in sudden terror. “Just a piece of pie—my pie?”
He shook his head. “Don’t think so. It’s not poison. And I didn’t—couldn’t—rip it all the way. But I sure wish I hadn’t done that.” He hunched tighter, grimacing.
“Then will you get better slow like after the mosquito?”
“I guess we’ll find out,” he sighed.
“Ground-colic,” said Fawn. “Eew.”
She took away the plate and basin and emptied them over the back rail, then returned to put Dag firmly to bed. It was a measure of his malaise that he went without argument.
She made his excuses to the others, come lunch—he thinks it’s something he ate—which were accepted without question but with lots of speculation as to what it might have been, since everyone else had eaten Fawn’s boat-food as well. In desperation—and in defense of her reputation as a cook—she finally suggested it might have been something he’d got hold of up in town that morning, which was allowed with wise nods. Remo seemed the most disturbed by the development, stopping by their bed-nook to ask Dag if he was all right and if there was anything he could do. Dag’s response was muffled and repelling. Fawn thought that Dag should take the only other Lakewalker available into his confidence about these alarming ground-ripping experiments, but wasn’t certain enough to force it. She was out of her depth, here. The notion that Dag might be too was not reassuring.
Dag’s loss was Hod’s gain, as he was suddenly promoted to sweep-man that afternoon in Dag’s place. Hod was clumsy and timid and mixed up his right and his left, but responded slowly both to Berry’s patience and Bo’s familiar hungover bluntness. His panicked mistakes became fewer as his confidence grew, though he seemed so surprised to be told he was doing well that he almost dropped his broad-oar overboard.
To Fawn’s immense relief, Dag revived enough in the evening to eat real food, although she noticed he left his arm harness off. He was still very quiet, answering most queries with a headshake and then pressing his forehead as if in regret of the sudden motion. But the next day Dag went back to taking turns on the oars, although only after a promise to the eager Hod that he would now be added to the regular rotation.