The tiny coal of alien ground still throbbed within his own. He tried to divest it, to lay it as a ground reinforcement in the floor, or his sheet, or even his own hair. It remained stubbornly stuck. Neither did it seem to be starting to melt into his own ground, converted from mosquito-ground to Dag-ground as a man might digest food—or at least, not yet. He wondered if he had, in that moment of sleepy irritation, planted a permanent infliction upon himself.
Careless irritation. Not mortal panic. Not an overstretched, once-in-a-lifetime heroic reach, out of a heart, body, and ground pushed for an instant beyond human limits. Ground-ripping a mosquito was hardly a great act, nor of grave moral weight.
Except that ground-ripping anything wasn’t a human act at all. It was malice magic, the very heart of malice magic. Wasn’t it?
Lakewalker makers used two kinds of groundwork, in a thousand variations. They might persuade, push, or reorder ground within an object, to subtly alter or augment its nature. And so produce cloth that scarcely frayed, or steel that did not rust, or rope that was nearly impossible to break, or leather that repelled rain—or turned arrows. Or they might gift ground out of their own bodies; most commonly, into their wedding cords, but also as shaped or unshaped reinforcements laid in the matching region of another person’s ground, to speed healing, slow blood loss, fight shock or infection. But always, the limits of the groundwork were in the limits of the maker doing it.
A malice stole ground from the world around it—limited, Dag swore, by nothing but its attention. And its attention ranged somewhere well beyond human, too. But while a person altered gifted ground into their own as slowly as a healing wound, malices seemed to do so almost instantaneously, not by persuasion but by simple, brute, and overwhelming force. Powered by yet more ground-ripping, in a widening spiral.
Perhaps such transformative power was not a human capacity. Even from the malice, Dag had only snatched deadly fragments. Anyone trying to ground-rip something whole the way a malice did might simply burst, like a man trying to drink a lake.
But a man might drink a cup of lake water…
Was a mosquito like a cup of water?
Dag considered the question, and then considered, more dubiously, the sanity of the mind that could even frame it. Or maybe he was coming down with brain-worms, like Whit’s fabulous rumor. Maybe he simply needed to sleep it off. Surely the splotch would go down overnight like any other mosquito bite, absorbed by Dag’s ground just as his body healed more purely physical welts. He snorted and rolled over, firmly shutting his eyes.
It still itched, though.
By the next morning Dag’s whole left arm was so swollen he couldn’t get his arm harness on.
Fawn was inclined to declare a day of rest in Lumpton Market, but Dag insisted he could ride one-handed, and Whit, anxious to pass at last beyond the places he knew, was not much help on the side of reason. By mid-afternoon Fawn was not happy to have her judgment confirmed when Dag fell into a fever. As if she needed any more evidence, he settled on a blanket and watched without protest as she and Whit set up their camp just off the old straight road south. A chill mist rose from the damp ground in the gathering dusk, but at least no more rain threatened.
“All this from a mosquito bite?” she murmured, sliding in beside him as he drew up his knees and hunched around the swollen arm.
He shrugged. “I don’t think it’s going to kill me. That spot in my ground is already starting to feel less hot.”
She felt his forehead in doubt. But his skin was merely over-warm, not burning-dry, and he ate and drank, if with an indifferent appetite. When they rolled up to sleep she filched her brother’s spare blanket away from him to drape on Dag, ruthlessly ignoring Whit’s yelp of protest.
But by the following day, the swelling had gone down, and Dag claimed the ground-welt was being absorbed much like a normal ground reinforcement, if more slowly. He nevertheless grew flushed and silent in the afternoon; by his pinched brows and glazed eyes Fawn suspected a thumping headache.
As unshakable as Fawn felt in the lee-side of Dag’s full strength, she hated her sense of helplessness when he was laid up. He had a store of uncanny Lakewalker healing knowledge in his head and a host of patroller tricks at his fingertips, impressive enough that Hickory Lake’s chief medicine maker had tried to recruit him into her craft. But who cured the medicine maker? A farmer midwife or bonesetter would not be much help in some strange ground-illness, and Fawn realized that despite all this summer’s experiences, she didn’t actually know how to find a Lakewalker at need. It was too far back to Hickory Lake, and still several days ride to the Lakewalker ferry camp on the Grace River. Patrols or couriers did stop now and then at the inn at Lumpton Market or that hotel in Glassforge, but it could be days or even weeks till any chanced along.
The camp that Chato’s patrol had hailed from was closer, she was fairly sure, but she didn’t even know how to find that. That at least had a cure; she asked Dag that night where it was to be found, and he described it to her. For the first time, she began to see the point of their little patrol of three: not only because it would take two Bluefields to even lift Dag, but because one of them could stay with him while the other rode for help.
If strange Lakewalkers would even give help to Dag, half-exiled as he was. Which was a new and ugly thought.
But by the next day, Dag seemed much recovered. At noon they stopped at the roadside farm with the public well where they had first encountered each other, and reminisced happily over small details of shared memory while stocking up on the farmwife’s good provender. That evening found them quite near to Glassforge. Dag opined they could detour off the straight road tomorrow to show Whit the blight and still make town before dark.
They could not have chanced on a prettier day for a ride up into the unpeopled hills east of the old straight road. The sky was the dry deep blue that only the northwest winds brought to Oleana, the air as cool and tangy as apple cider. The trees here were mostly holding their leaves, and the brilliant sun turned their colors blinding: bright crimson edged with blood maroon, yellow gold, a startling flash of nightshade-purple here and there in the drying weeds. Dag’s eyes grew coin-gold in this light, like autumn distilled. Fawn was glad it was Dag leading them up into these game-tracked humps and hollows, because she’d have lost her way as soon as their turn-off was out of sight. If not really been lost; she’d only to strike west to find the road again. But the blight was a smaller target—thankfully—some ten or twelve miles in.
The sun was climbing toward noon when Dag halted Copperhead on the beaten trail they’d been following. A frown tensed his mouth. Fawn kicked her mount Weft alongside, though Copperhead laid his ears back for show.
“Are we close?”
“Yes.”
Her own recall of the place was too dizzied to permit recognition. She’d been carried in head-down and ears ringing, a prisoner, retching from blows and terror. And carried out…her memory shied from that.
Dag pointed up the trail. “This path goes to the ravine on the same side I came down. The visible blight should start about two hundred paces along.”
“And the blight you can’t see?”
He shrugged, though his face stayed strained. “I’ve been feeling the outer shadow for the past half-mile.”
“Healing as you still are, should you go any closer?”
He grimaced. “Likely not.”
“Suppose you wait here, then. Or better, back down the trail a ways. And I’ll just take Whit in for a quick peek.”
He couldn’t argue with the logic of that. A hesitation, a short nod. “Don’t linger, Spark.”