The child’s ground was roiling. Down and in. The flare of fever was familiar by now, not good but not the main problem. The deep puncture in the foot hadn’t been cleaned out properly, and was hot and dirty and poisonous inside despite its deceptively healed surface skin. But it was indeed the frenzied noise along the nerves that drove the relentless muscle spasms. Dag sent soothing groundwork twisting down their branches like releasing dye into a stream, and felt the frenzy slacken.
He fought his way up and out before groundlock set in, and came back blinking to a room that seemed awfully quiet. He sat back on his heels. Looked around vaguely, found Fawn. “How long was I in? ”
“ ’Bout ten minutes. Dag, it was amazing! You could just see his poor little muscles give way, one by one!”
A new figure had arrived, clearly Finch’s older brother, staring hard at the scene. He held Sparrow’s mother tightly around the shoulders.
“Is he better? Is he well? ” she choked.
“Not yet, ma’am,” Dag told her regretfully. “Just a temporary respite. I’m going to have to go back in again when this wears off. But each treatment buys some time. First, we have to get as much drink and food into him as the little fellow can hold, to keep the disease from killing him of starvation. And we need to go in and do a better job cleaning out that puncture. We’ll need boiled water-Fawn, can you see to it? And some sort of soft, rich food, but easy to keep down-I don’t know-”
Fawn nodded. “I expect oatmeal boiled up with cream and honey would do for a start.”
“Perfect.”
The women, anxious for something effective to do at last, clattered out in a body. The boy’s father-what had they said his name was?-Lark Bridger, that was it-took the chair formerly held by the grandmother.
Finch leaned his forehead against the tall bedpost and closed his eyes.
“Papa? Uncle Finch?” A weak little voice.
Lark took up the boy’s hand. “Hey, chirping Sparrow!” His voice was hoarse, seeming unaccustomed to such softness. “Good to hear from you at last! Your uncle Finch has brought this Lakewalker fellow here to help you out.”
“He’s funny-looking,” said Finch, “but he’s all right.”
The boy’s head turned. Grave young eyes found Dag, squinted. Sparrow must have agreed with his uncle’s assessment, because he didn’t recoil, but said the first thing a child, whether Lakewalker or farmer, inevitably asked: “What happened to your hand? ”
Dag ignored the embarrassed rustle from the grown-ups, and gave the child a straight answer: “Wolf bit it off.”
“Oh!” said Sparrow, sounding impressed as only a five-year-old could; but then, more unusually, blinked sympathetic tears. “Did it hurt? ”
“Yes, but it was a long time ago. It’s fine now. Hey, now, it’s all right, don’t cry for me. We still have some work to do healing you, do you know? ”
Blinks. Suspicion. “What kind o’ work? ”
“I know you won’t feel like it, but you have to drink and eat as much as you can-all your mama and Fawn bring you. Your muscles are working harder than plowing a forty-acre field, see, and you need your food. Then Fawn and I-she’s my wife, that real pretty girl you just saw-are going to clean out your foot a bit more.”
In a way, Dag was grateful for this task; it would be visible to farmer eyes, comprehensible, reassuring. Though on second thought, he wasn’t sure he wanted Fawn so closely involved with the wound. He made Finch wash his hands in preparation to help, instead.
“I hurt all over…” Sparrow moaned to his papa.
I’ll bet.
Dag’s initial groundwork was already wearing off by the time Fawn came back with the boiled water, the boy beginning to twitch and spasm. As she set up their supplies, Dag went in again. It was easier this time in that he had some idea what he was doing, but he could feel the drain on his ground, and he began to dread the long night to come.
When he came back up, Dag set the mother to coaxing a dose of the bitter-tasting pain powder down the boy; Fawn gave him a nod for the wisdom of that. But Fawn clearly didn’t understand why he drew Finch into the clean-out work in her place.
“No!” Sparrow whimpered as they turned him over and placed his foot across the towels on his uncle’s lap. “It’ll hurt! Papa, don’t let them!”
“I promise you it’ll hurt less ’n a wolf bite, and that’s the absolute truth,” Dag intoned.
The resistant wriggling paused, and Dag marveled how well that specious argument worked on youngsters. Every time. Fawn, familiar with the ploy, grinned sideways at him.
Dag threw a ground reinforcement into the little foot, did his best to numb the nerves, and bent to the nasty task. One-handed, he reopened the cut with one of Arkady’s sharp scalpels, and with a syringe Fawn filled with boiled water, plus groundwork, thoroughly flushed out the poisoned flesh. Working with Finch to rewrap the foot in a bandage was much more awkward than working with Fawn, but the results were adequate. After, Dag handed everything off to the grandmother to be boiled or burned. More hand washing, thinking uneasily of Arkady.
And then it was time to go in after the child’s sizzling nerves, again.
They fell into a cycle as the day wore on into dusk. Ten minutes of groundwork gave twenty minutes of relief from the spasms, during which Sparrow either was coaxed to eat by one of the women, or rested limply. Then the wrenching twitches and painful weeping would begin again, and Dag would kneel, bow his head, and slip back into his trance.
The fever remained high, but they were giving the boy’s own body the means to fight back. Another brief respite. And again.
As the task became familiar, Dag found space within it to think and wonder. Could a maker set up some sort of involution containing groundwork to soothe the frantic nerves, something that would last better than half an hour at a time? And why did this disruption remind Dag weirdly of the ground of some snakebite victims? Meditating on that peculiar question, he was only brought out of his trance by a sharp slap to his skull.
He blinked up in the lamplight to find Fawn scowling at him in worry.
“Did I interrupt anything? ” she asked.
“No. Thank you. That was right.”
“Good.”
Blight. He’d thought he could send her off to another room to rest, but it looked as though she’d have to keep this night vigil right alongside him. No one else here could even guess when his trance began to slip dangerously into groundlock. They laid their bedroll on the floor, and slept in snatches.
By morning, they were both growing frayed. When Fawn next slapped him out of his trance, he just grunted at her, horribly irritated. Bending his aching forehead to the cotton-stuffed mattress, he closed his eyes.
“Why do you keep making him stop?” Cherry Bridger demanded nervously. “If he kept on, couldn’t he fix it for good and all? ”
“Because,” Fawn rather snarled, “if Dag gets groundlocked to Spa-to a patient, and the patient dies, Dag could die with him. That’s what happened to Arkady’s apprentice just before Dag.”
“Oh,” said Cherry in a smaller voice. “I didn’t know that.”
“Time you learned. Farmers need to learn more about Lakewalkers so they won’t misunderstand how to handle them. They’re a dreadfully nervy bunch, you know. High-strung.”
Delicately conveying that Dag should be treated carefully; Dag was not ungrateful.
The afternoon was bad. The evening, worse, and Dag began to wonder if coming out with Finch would turn into one of the worst mistakes of his life. But sometime during the night his ten minutes of snatched sleep became twenty, then forty. When Fawn woke him, blinking, after two hours solid, he realized they’d turned some corner. That, and a good farm breakfast, revived him enough to go on.
The lull between bouts lengthening, Sparrow had time, in his restless misery, to grow bored. Dag diverted him with what children’s stories he could remember from his distant youth, or Lakewalker ballads recast into tall tale. He wished Bo were here. The other members of the boy’s family, as they drifted in and out to help, listened along wordlessly.