Fawn’s parents were unexpectedly favorable to the idea of housing Grace. Dag eventually realized it wasn’t just because the mare was a sweet-tempered mount that not only Tril but even Nattie might ride—though Nattie, when this was pointed out, snorted and muttered something about The cart will do for me, thanks—but because she was a sort of equine hostage. That Fawn would need to return to collect her horse—or, by that time, possibly horses—seemed to give Tril some comfort. Though over the next several evening meals Tril did recall and recount every drowning accident that had occurred within a hundred miles of West Blue within living memory. Recognizing maternal nerves, Dag nonetheless quietly resolved to take Whit aside at some less ruffled moment and find out if he could swim any less like a rock than Fawn had, before Dag had done his best to drown-proof her. Even if it was growing a bit chilly for swimming lessons.
A light rain the night before their departure turned the dawn air gray and cool, muting the blush of autumn colors. As the three rode down the farm lane a few damp yellow leaves eddied past, along with farewells, blessings, and a deal of unsolicited advice ignored by both Bluefield siblings with much the same shoulder hunchings. Dag found it pleasant enough to be back aboard Copperhead and moving once more. Along the river road south, Dag tested his groundsense range and fancied it improved. A hundred and fifty paces now, maybe? Whit was temporarily too exhausted to squabble with his sister, so the day’s ride was largely peaceful. And Dag would have his wife to himself tonight, in a cozy inn chamber in Lumpton Market; a touch, an exchange of smiles, a promissory gleam, that furtive dimple, left him riding in a warm glow of expectation as the afternoon drew to a close.
At the shabby little inn off the old straight road north of town, these comfortable plans received an unexpected check. A chance crowd of drivers, drovers, and traveling farm families had nearly filled the place, and Dag’s party was lucky to secure a single small chamber up under the eaves. Looking it over with disfavor, Dag was inclined to think a bedroll in the stable loft would be better, except that the loft had been let out already. But the falling dark, the threat of renewed rain, the fatigue of a twenty-mile ride, and the smells of good cooking from the inn’s kitchen cured them all of ambition to seek farther tonight, and the debate devolved merely as to who was going to get the bed and who was going to put their bedrolls on the floor. It ended with Fawn in the bed, which was too short for Dag as well as too narrow for a couple, Dag down beside it, and Whit crosswise beyond the foot. Even a chaste cuddle was denied, though Fawn did hang her arm over the side and interlace her fingers with Dag’s for a while after she’d turned down the bedside lamp.
Peace did not descend. Before they’d gone down to supper Whit had forced open the window to combat the room’s mustiness; unfortunately, he had thus admitted a patrol of late mosquitoes, roused by the afternoon’s unseasonably warm damp. Every time anyone began to doze off, the thin, threatening whines induced more arm-waving, blanket-ducking, and irate mutters from one of the others, thwarting sleep for all. Dag instinctively bounced the pests away from himself and Fawn through their tiny grounds. Unfortunately, that concentrated the attack on Whit.
Some more rustling, scratching, and swearing, and Whit rose in the dark to try to hunt the bloodthirsty marauders by sound. After he bumped into the bed frame twice and stepped on Dag, Fawn sat up, turned up the oil lamp, and snapped, “Whit, will you settle? You’re worse ’n they are!”
“The buggers have bit me three times already. Wait, there—” Whit’s eyes narrowed to a gray gleam, and his hands rose in an attempt to cup a flying speck. Two quick claps missed, and he lurched over Dag again in pursuit, peering and trying to corner the insect against the whitewashed walls. His hands rose again, wavering with the target’s erratic flight. Muzzy with annoyance and the first confusion of dream sleep, Dag sat up, reached out his left arm, extended his ghost hand like a strand of smoke, and ripped the ground from the mosquito.
The whine abruptly stopped. A puff of gray powder sifted down into Whit’s outstretched palm. His eyes widened as he stared down at Dag. He gulped. “Did you just do that?”
Dag supposed he should say something useful like, Yes, and if you don’t go lie down and hush, you’re next, but he had shocked himself rather worse than he’d shocked Whit.
It’s coming back, like my groundsense range!
And—gone again. He folded his left arm, freed of the hook harness for the night, protectively against his chest, and twitched the blanket over his stump, for all that Whit had seen it several times before. And tried to breathe normally.
Dag’s ghost hand had first appeared to him back when he’d mended that glass bowl so spectacularly last summer, and had been intermittently useful thereafter. It was just a ground projection, the medicine maker had assured him, if an unusually strong and erratic one. Not some uncanny blessing or curse. A ground projection such as powerful makers sometimes used, but haunting his wrist in that unsettling form like a memory of pain and loss, hence the name he’d given it back when he hadn’t yet understood what it was. Invisible to ordinary eyes, dense and palpable to groundsense. And then it had been destroyed, he’d thought—sacrificed in the complex aftermath of the fight with the malice in Raintree.
Where, in an utter extremity of panic and need, he’d ground-ripped the malice, and nearly killed himself doing so.
“Whit, just go lie down.” Fawn’s voice had an edge distinct enough from her earlier grumbling that even Whit heard it.
“Um, yeah. Sure.” He picked his way much more carefully back over Dag, and grunted down to his bedroll once more.
Dag looked up to find Fawn propped on her elbow, frowning over the side of the bed at him. She lowered her voice. “Are you all right, Dag?”
He opened his mouth, paused, and settled on, “Yeah.”
Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “You have a funny look on your face.”
He didn’t doubt it. He tried to substitute a smile, which didn’t seem to reassure her much. He felt a peculiar sharp throbbing in the ground of his left arm, as if a campfire spark had landed on his skin, or under it—a spark he could not brush away, though his fleshly fingers made a futile effort to, rubbing under his blanket.
She started to settle back, but added, “What did you do to that poor mosquito?”
“Ground-ripped it. I guess.” Except it was no guess. He could feel the creature’s lost ground stuck in his own, as those deadly malice-spatters had once been. Tinier, less toxic, not blighted, not a spreading death—but also not anything like a medicine maker’s gift of ground reinforcement, warm and welcome and healing. This felt uncomfortable and sticky, like a spot of hot tar. Painful. Wrong?
Fawn rolled up on her elbow again. She knew, if Whit clearly did not, just how far outside the usual range of Dag-doings this was. “Really?”
“I probably shouldn’t have,” he muttered.
Her eyes pinched in doubt. “But—it was only a mosquito. You must have killed hundreds by hand, in your time.”
“Thousands, likely,” he agreed. “But…it itches. In my ground.” He rubbed again.
Her brows flew up; her face relaxed in amused relief. “Oh, dear.”
He made no attempt to correct that relief. He captured her trailing hand, kissed it, and nodded to the oil lamp; she stretched up and doused it once again. As the bed creaked, he murmured, “Good night, Spark.”
“G’night, Dag,” she returned, already muffled by her pillow. “Try’n sleep.” A slight snicker. “Don’t scratch.”
He listened to her breathing till it slowed and eased, then, his arms crossed on his chest, turned his groundsense in upon himself.