Hod, who had in fact been making some ominously juicy snorting noises all morning, turned red, but nodded. Acutely aware that he would be laying himself entirely open to Remo’s perceptions, Dag dropped his every guard and closed his eyes. He felt the whorl of ground coming away from Remo’s face and floating between the two, the quick blink like water droplets joining as it settled into Hod’s ground in turn, a palpable touch of warmth. Remo sneezed, and Dag’s eyes shot open again.
Hod rubbed his nose and looked bewildered. “Feels nice,” he offered.
Dag squinted, but no, with neither sight nor groundsense could he detect anything out of the ordinary. He ran his hand through his hair. “Well, all right. Do the same for Fawn, then.”
“Are you sure, Dag?” asked Remo. “I mean—I wouldn’t want to risk accidentally beguiling your wife.” His glance at Dag was sidelong and wary.
“Fawn’s already received some pretty complex ground reinforcements from me, and minor ones from Mari and Cattagus—is that all, Fawn?”
She nodded. “Old Cattagus fixed that little burn on my hand that time, and Mari—you were there when she helped me out.” She made a vague gesture to her belly and the slowly healing malice scars hidden there that still rendered her monthlies so painful.
“She’s not been beguiled yet, and this is lighter than even a minor healing reinforcement,” said Dag. “Go ahead.”
“Where?” said Remo. “I mean, Barr claims if you put a ground reinforcement in a farmer girl’s—” He broke off abruptly, his face flushing. His ground shuttered.
“Out with it,” said Dag patiently. “Who knows what overlooked thing could be important?”
Remo’s ground only eased back by half. He looked up the river valley, meeting no one’s eye. He said distantly, “Barr says if you put a ground reinforcement in a farmer girl’s t…c…p…private parts”—this last choice barely got past his teeth—“it makes her eager to, um, be with you.”
“Huh?” said Hod.
“Go out to the woodpile with him,” Dag translated into Hoddish.
“Oh.” Hod nodded wisely. “Sure.”
From the look on Fawn’s face, she did not require a translation. But she sat up straighter, her brow wrinkling. “Dag…is that why, when we first met, you said you couldn’t heal my womb after the malice ripped me there?”
Remo’s head swiveled at this, and his inspection of her malice scars dropped below her neck for the first time. His eyes widened.
Dag answered, “No! It was what I was always taught about field healings. For folks who aren’t trained up as medicine makers, ground reinforcements flow best from body part to the same body part—the way Remo did Hod’s nose, just now. Without a womb to pull ground from, I’d no such ground to give you.” He hesitated. The healings he was trying nowadays through his ghost hand—his ground projection—certainly didn’t work that way. “I wouldn’t put much faith in Barr’s hearsay.”
“But it wasn’t hearsay,” Remo blurted. “He said he did it.”
Dag, after an unmoving moment, pursed his lips. “You know this for sure?”
Remo nodded in discomfiture. “We’d put up out on patrol in this farmer’s barn. He went after one of the sisters. The prettiest, naturally. He dared me to try with another one, but I said I’d tell our patrol leader if he ever pulled a stunt like that again, and he shut up about it.” After a moment, he added, “I’m pretty sure he’s done it more than once, though.”
“He could hardly have pulled ground from his womb,” said Dag slowly, still not convinced he believed Barr’s brag.
“No, he said it was from his”—Remo gestured crotch-ward—“parallel parts. Because he had plenty to spare. He claimed.”
Fawn said, in a coolly thoughtful tone, “That wouldn’t have been a healing reinforcement then, exactly. Maybe it was just…stimulatin’. You know, Dag, what you were taught may just be what they tell the young patroller boys—and girls—so as to save trouble. And in the next generation, if no one tested it, they’d pass it along for fact. So you could both be right, in a way.”
Dag rubbed the back of his neck as he considered this proposition. Maybe there ought to be another experiment, later, in private…he wrenched his mind back to the present trial. “Elbow. Try a tiny reinforcement in her elbow.”
“Yes, sir,” said Remo, in a tone that added, And if anything goes wrong later, sir, remember you told me to do this. He leaned forward again.
This ground reinforcement, as nearly as Dag could tell, worked identically to Hod’s. Fawn rubbed her elbow and squinted at Remo, then sat back with an unperturbed smile.
Well, that had gone nowhere in particular. “All right,” Dag sighed. “Now me, I guess. If you’re up to it. Or do you need a rest?”
Remo shook his head. “Not for those little bits.”
Dag sat up and opened his ground as wide as he ever had, trying for a listening quietude. “Elbow’s fine for me, too. Better stay away from my left side, it’s still pretty roiled over there.”
Remo’s head tilted, and his lips parted. He said uneasily, “Dag, yours is the strangest ground I’ve ever seen. Scarred up one side and knotted down the other, but dense…you’re as dense as any medicine maker I’ve met. It’s hard to know where to put a reinforcement!”
Dag nodded. “That calling has been growing in me for some time, I suspect. Longer than I’ve known. Try a foot. They’re always happy for some help.” He cast a glint at Fawn, recalling her very alluring foot rubs; she glinted back.
Remo gathered himself, touched his own right foot, then Dag’s. Dag felt the whorl of ground flow past. There! An echo of ground—like the fainter second rainbow that sometimes mirrored a first—passed back between them even as the bit of Remo’s ground joined to Dag’s. The ground in Remo’s foot closed again like some thick liquid settling around the warm return gift.
“Did you see that?” Dag said in excitement.
“What?” said Remo cautiously. “It seemed like a usual reinforcement to me.”
“That little backsplash from me to you, like an undertow of ground.”
“Can’t say as I noticed.”
Dag’s teeth gritted in frustration. He bit back a sharp rejoinder of Then open wider, blight you! Remo was only a young patroller. It was more than probable that an improved sensitivity to ground was growing in Dag along with his other maker’s talents. Had his younger self ever experienced such simple field reinforcements as anything other than diffuse blobs? Although if Remo truly couldn’t sense this, he wasn’t going to be much help as a check on Dag’s perceptions.
Dag sighed and straightened. “All right. My turn. I need you to watch really closely, Remo. I’ll start with Hod’s right elbow, as there’s no other groundwork there.” That had been a good notion of Fawn’s, to keep the trials separated for clearer comparisons.
He unfurled his ghost hand, reached out, and spun off a tiny reinforcement into the target. No ground-echo returned, hah! The reinforcement was swallowed up greedily as though gulped. Hod sighed contentedly.
But Remo almost fell over in his scramble backward. Up on one knee and looking ready to bolt, he pointed toward Dag’s hook and cried, “Blight! What was that?”
Dag had forgotten he’d not introduced Remo to his new talent. “Settle down. It’s just my gh—ground projection. Instead of mirroring body parts, it pulls ground generally from all through me. Hoharie—she’s Hickory Lake Camp’s senior medicine maker—says it’s a maker’s skill. It doesn’t usually take quite this form in other makers, but you can kind of see why it would for me.”
“Uh,” said Remo. “Yeah.” Dag wished he wouldn’t look quite so bug-eyed, but he did settle back cross-legged and tried to be attentive.
“I will wait,” said Dag patiently, “till you can get your ground open again.”
Remo swallowed. It took him a few minutes, but he eventually achieved the relaxed openness Dag needed.
Dag rubbed his jaw, and said, “Think I’ll try you next. I need you to watch not my reinforcement, but for a little echo of it coming back from you to me. I’d say underneath, but it’s more like the return ground passes right through the other, lagging a bit. Ready?”