Her mouth set mulishly. “Promise me anyway.”
“I promise, Spark.” He kissed those lips to soften them.
After, she drew back to search his eyes, then nodded. “You’d best believe it.”
8
Fawn returned late one evening from the medicine tent along with Dag and Arkady-there had been another child with an intractable fever-to find the dinner basket left by their door with a letter propped up on it.
Arkady read the inscription and raised his brows. “For you,” he said, handing it to Fawn. “Courier must have brought it by.”
Surprised, she made out her name and Dag’s, and Arkady’s Place, New Moon Cutoff Camp, in Whit’s crabbed handwriting. Whit was a reluctant correspondent; any letter from him had to be important. She took it to the round table while Arkady stoked the fire for his endless tea. Dag set down the basket, lit the brace of table candles, then came to her shoulder, looking concerned. “Anything wrong? ”
“No, not really,” she reported, tilting the paper to catch the flickering light. Whit’s scrawl was actually legible, in a painful sort of way.
“Whit says Berry found a buyer for the Fetch who wants it for a houseboat.”
The Fetch had been much better built than most makeshift crafts launched from the upper Grace feeder creeks by venturesome Oleana hill boys. Berry would be happy that her papa’s last boat wouldn’t be broken up for timber, or worse, firewood. Daisy-goat was slated to be sold with her floating home, alas. “He also says Berry’s found them all work with a keeler boss she trusts, heading upriver soon to catch the last of the winter fall. All on the same boat-Whit and Bo and Hod for hands, Hawthorn for boat boy, and her for the fiddler.” Berry had been holding out for just such a collection of berths, though exactly when she would find it had still been up in the air when Dag and Fawn had left Graymouth. Whit had talked idly about the whole crew joining the long-planned overland ride up the Trace, but the money would be much better this way. “Whit says if we want to change our minds, we should meet them in Graymouth before the end of the week, and if not, to write and let him know when to look for us back at Clearcreek.”
“Ah,” said Dag.
She glanced up at him. “I better write back soon, or the letter might not reach him before they shove off. So… what are we doing, Dag? When we started out for New Moon, I thought we might be here a few days, but it’s already been more ’n a month.”
Dag delayed answer by going to the sink to wash his hand before dinner, a ritual Arkady insisted upon with more than maternal firmness.
Fawn followed suit. They laid out the contents of the basket, and Arkady brought over the tea, before Dag spoke. “I’ve hardly finished training up for medicine maker.”
Arkady, pouring, snorted. “You’ve hardly started. I’d give you two years. Most apprentices take three or four.”
“Two years!” said Fawn.
Dag merely nodded. “I begin to see why.”
“Really,” said Arkady, “medicine makers don’t ever stop learning from each other, and from their patients. The common ailments become routine very quickly-and I will say, you’re the most relentless student I’ve ever had-but some experiences can’t be sped up. You just have to wait for them to occur.”
Dag bit into his bread and butter, chewed, swallowed. “When would you guess I’d be fit to start actual groundwork? ”
Arkady didn’t answer right off. Instead he went to his shelf, took down a familiar little book, and paged through it. He eyed Dag steadily for an unnerving minute, then, with some danger of mixing ink and crumbs, jotted a few notes and blew on the page to dry them. “Tomorrow,” he said.
Dag looked startled but pleased. “What about all my so-called dirty ground you were so worried about? ”
“As I hoped, the best remedy was time. Your ground is cleaning itself out quite nicely, and will continue to do so as long as you don’t contaminate yourself again. The permanent cure, of course, is to stop doing that.”
Dag took a slow sip of tea. “That’s… not enough, Arkady. If I’m ever to treat farmers and not leave them crazy with beguilement, I’m going to have to go on absorbing all sorts of strange ground.”
Arkady glowered at him.
“It was all mixed together in my head for a while,” Dag went on, “but looking back, I’m less and less sure how much of my upset was from taking in strange ground, and how much was just from dealing with Crane and his bandits, which was plenty to give any thinking man nightmares.”
“Mind and ground-and emotion-do intersect on the deepest levels,” Arkady conceded. He glanced, oddly, at Fawn.
Dag nodded. “Because for all the things I took in-barring Crane- it seems to me I just kept getting stronger and better at groundwork all the way downriver. ’Cept for the part about being untidy, just what about having dirty ground unfits me for medicine making? ”
“Every bit of strange ground you take in changes your own ground, and so how it works. The results risk being uncontrolled.”
Dag frowned. “Everything I do and learn-blight, every breath I take-changes my ground. My ground can’t not change, not while I’m alive. Could be dirty ground is just something to live with, like the bugs and blisters and weather and weariness on patrol.”
“Rough-and-ready may do for patrolling. Not for the delicate control needed for groundsetting.”
“Groundsetting isn’t so sweet and delicate as all that, that I’ve seen.”
“Your projection changes everything you touch with it.”
“My hand changes everything I touch with it. Always has. Anyway, I want to change folks.”
“Dag, you can’t treat farmers. Not at New Moon Cutoff.”
“What if Fawn falls ill? I will sure enough treat her!”
Arkady waved this away. “That’s different.”
“Oh? How? Groundwise.”
Arkady sighed and rubbed his brow. “I can see I’m going to have to give you the set speech. For my usual apprentices it starts out, When I was your age… but I suppose that won’t do for you.”
“When you were my age? ” Fawn suggested helpfully.
Arkady eyed her. “A little older than that. Not much, I grant.”
Dag eased back and occupied his protesting mouth with another bite of bread. He nodded to signal that Arkady had his full attention.
Arkady drew a long breath. “When I was much younger, and stupider, and vastly more energetic, my wife and I were training up together as medicine makers at a camp called Hatchet Slough, which is about a hundred and fifty miles northeast of here.”
What wife? Fawn hadn’t seen hide nor hair of a Missus Arkady since she’d arrived, nor, more tellingly, heard any word. Dag nodded understanding- of the geography? Or of something else? She wasn’t sure if Arkady saw the little flinch that went-with. Tales of the ill fates of first wives would likely do that to Dag. Fawn gulped and shut up hard.
“We were both newly come into our full maker’s powers. Bryna had a special talent for women’s ailments. There were already hints that I’d be a groundsetter when I grew into myself. It seemed we had more enthusiasm than sick or injured to treat at Hatchet Slough. An excess of energy that’s hard to imagine, now…
“Being young, we talked about the problems of our neighboring farmers. She thought it a grand idea to offer treatments to them- perhaps set up a little medicine tent at the camp farmer’s market, next to the table for herbs and preparations. Our mentors put their feet down hard on that before it became more than talk, of course, but you can see how far our thinking had gone. Your notions aren’t new, Dag.”
Dag’s eyes lit. “But with unbeguilement, you could really do that!”
Arkady made a little wait-for-the-rest gesture. “A desperate farmer woman with a dying husband who’d heard our loose talk came to Bryna for help. She went.”
“Is this one of those failed-and-blamed tales?” Dag said uneasily.
Fawn shivered. Accusations of black sorcery could get a lone Lakewalker beaten up-or burned alive, if the mob was vicious enough. Lakewalkers in pairs or groups were much harder to tackle.