She estimated the number of grains in each pile. It was a lot more than ten. “Dag,” she said uneasily, “how many of those are you planning to try?”
He chewed on his lip. “Well, you remember back in Raintree when every patroller in camp who knew how gave me a ground reinforcement, trying to get me better quick so’s we could all ride home?”
“Yes?”
“After a while I started seeing these wavering purple halos around things, and Hoharie made them stop. She said I needed more absorption time.”
“You didn’t tell me about any purple halos!”
He shrugged. “They went away in a day. Anyway, the experience gave me a notion to try. I figure I’ll have hit my daily limit in live-ground theft when things start looking sort of lavender around the edges.”
She pursed her lips in doubt. But how could she demand he not explore his abilities when she was so full of questions herself? There was no expert here for him to beg explanations of. He could only question his own body and ground with these trials, and listen carefully to the answers. Truly, somebody had once had to try everything for the first time, or there would be no experts.
“Are you still thinking that if you could get more ground-food to restore yourself, you could do more healing, faster?”
He nodded. “Maybe. Of Lakewalkers, leastways. But I want to heal farmers, and if I can’t figure out this beguilement problem…” He moved another oat. Then a corn kernel. Then he sat up, blinked, twisted around, and stared at her face.
“Do I have a purple halo now?” she asked a little grimly.
He reached back, moved another oat, and blinked again. “Now you do,” he said in a voice of tentative satisfaction.
“Then stop!”
“Yes,” he sighed. He rubbed his night-stubbled chin and stared down at the two little heaps. “Huh.”
“Hm?”
“This pile”—he pointed to the one on his right—“is live seeds. If you put them in the ground and watered ’em, you’d get new plants.”
“Maybe,” said Fawn, from a lifetime’s experience on a farm. “Anyhow, if you planted enough of them, you’d likely get something. Plus the weeds.”
“This pile,” he said, ignoring the commentary, “is dead seeds. Plant them and they would just sit there and rot. Eventually.”
A bleak look crossed his face, and Fawn wondered if his mind’s eye was seeing a long row of uncorrupted little corpses. Blight it, oats weren’t children. Well, she supposed they were the oat plant’s children, in a way, but down that line of thought lay madness for anyone who meant to go on living in the world. She put in quickly, “Seeds won’t sprout once you cook them, either. How is this different from cooking our food, really?”
His squint, after a moment, grew grateful. “There’s a point, Spark.”
She peered more closely. The heap on the left did seem a bit duller to her eye than the bright yellow grains on the right. She pointed to the dull heap. “Could you still eat those, like cooked food?”
He looked a bit taken aback. “I don’t know. You’d think they’d have lost something.”
“Would they poison you?”
“I have no idea.” He stared down at the little pile for a long time. “I’d try feeding that handful to Copperhead, but he’s over on the island, and, well, a horse. We’ve no dog.” His eye fell speculatively on Daisy-goat.
“We drink milk from that goat,” Fawn said hastily. And, as his face swiveled toward the chicken pen, “And we eat the eggs!”
He frowned, then got a faraway look for a moment. A scratching sound made Fawn glance down to find that Hawthorn’s raccoon kit had appeared at Dag’s ankle and was pawing at his trouser leg. Dag reached down and gathered up the creature, tucking it in the crook of his left arm. Its little leathery paws gripped his sleeve, and its bright black eyes twinkled from its furry mask.
“Dag,” Fawn gasped, “you can’t!”
“The horse, goats, chickens, and you are out,” he said patiently. “What’s left on this boat that’ll eat grain? Well, Hod, but no. I don’t think it will poison the little critter, really.”
“It’s just not right. I mean, at the very least you should ask Hawthorn’s permission, and I can’t see you explaining all this to Hawthorn!”
“I can’t even explain it all to myself,” Dag sighed. “Very well.” He scooped up the pile of grain and raised his palm to his own lips.
“No!” Fawn clapped her hand to her mouth to muffle her shriek.
Dag raised his brows at her. “You can’t say I don’t have the right.”
Fawn bounced up and down in dismay, lips pressed tight. And finally blurted, “Try it on the raccoon, then.”
He tilted his head ironically at her and offered the grain to the kit. The kit seemed only mildly interested—spoiled, Fawn thought, by the tastier fodder that everyone aboard slipped to it—but at Dag’s urging and, she suspected, sorcerous persuasion, it did nibble down a spoonful or so of the grains, whiskers twitching. When Dag let it go, it toddled off, apparently unaffected, or at least it didn’t drop over dead on the spot. Dag tossed the remaining handful of dead seeds over the side, wiped his palm on his shirt, and picked off a few raccoon hairs. His eye fell on the chicken coop. “Food, huh,” he said in a distant tone. “I wonder what would happen if I tried to ground-rip a chicken? Next time you mean to serve up a chicken dinner, Spark, let me know.”
Fawn mentally took chicken off her menu plans for the indefinite future. “I don’t know, Dag. The idea of you ripping seed grains doesn’t bother me a bit. But if you could rip a chicken, could you—” she broke off.
He eyed her, not failing to follow. “Ground-rip a person? In full malice mode? I don’t know. A person’s bigger. I begin to suspect I could rip up a person’s ground, at least. And yes, the idea does trouble me, thank you very much.”
Fawn scrubbed her mouth with the back of her hand. “You can rip up a person’s body and ground with your war knife, and you have. Would this truly be different?”
“I don’t know yet,” sighed Dag. “Spark, I really do not know.” He folded her in to him then, leaning his forehead against hers. “I’ve been wondering for some time if I’ve stumbled across some craft secrets of senior medicine makers. Now you have me wondering if it’s secrets of the senior knife makers, instead. They’re even more close-mouthed about their work, and it may be with good reason. Because…”
“Because?” she prompted, when he didn’t go on.
“Because I can’t be the only person with these abilities. Unless I truly have been malice-corrupted, somehow. I wish I had someone to…”
“Someone to ask?” Alas, not Remo; a nice young patroller, but no maker.
Dag shook his head. “Someone safe to ask.”
“Urgh.” She didn’t fail to follow, either.
“Hoharie might be, but she’s back at Hickory Lake. She saw me—I don’t think I told you about this…”
Fawn rolled her eyes. “More purple halos? Yes?”
“Sorry. At the time, I didn’t know what to make of it, so I didn’t talk about it. But when her apprentice Othan was trying to give a ground reinforcement to my broken arm, he couldn’t get in. I ended up sort of…ripping it from him as he was trying to give it. Hoharie was right there, watching.”
“And?”
“And her only reaction was to try to recruit me for a medicine maker. On the spot. Till I pointed out my little problem with fine hand-work.” He waved his stump. “Later, she came up with the idea of partnering me with Othan’s brother, for my spare hands. If she’d offered to partner me with you, I might have taken her up on it, and we’d still be there instead of here. But she shied off from that suggestion.”