“Well… well, find something, then. For in between.”
Now was not, definitely not, the time to argue with female irrationality.
“Right.”
He poked up the faint remains of the fire, fed it with some wood chips, and lit two wax stubs, one of which he left on the hearth for her; the other he took with him for a quick exploration. A couple of those chests and wardrobes upstairs had still had things in them, he dimly recalled. A patroller should be resourceful. What did the girl most need? A miscarriage was a natural enough process, even if this one was most unnaturally triggered; women survived them all the time, he was fairly sure. He just wished they had discussed them more, or that he had listened more closely. Lie flat, check, they’d got that far.
Make her comfortable? Cruel joke… peace. He supposed she’d be more comfortable cleaned up than filthy; at any rate, he’d always been grateful for that when recovering from a serious injury. What, you can’t fix the real problem, so you’ll fix something else instead? And which of you is this supposed to aid?
Peace. And a bucket and an unfouled well, with luck.
It took more time than he’d have liked, during which to his swallowed aggravation she insisted on lying on the blighted kitchen floor, but he eventually assembled a clean gownlike garment, rather too large for her, some old mended sheets, an assortment of rags for pads, actual soap, and water. In a moment of ruthless inspiration, he broke through her reticence by persuading her to wash his hand first, as though he needed help.
She still had the shakes, which she seemed to take for residual fear but which he recognized as one with the chilled skin and grayness in her ground, and which he treated by piling on whatever blanket-like cloths he could find, and building up the fire. The last time he’d seen a woman coiled around her belly that hard, a blade had penetrated almost to her spine. He heated a stone, wrapped it in cloth, and gave it to Fawn to clutch to herself, which to his relief seemed finally to help; the shakes faded and her ground lightened. Eventually, she was arranged all tidy and sweet and patient-like, her curl around the stone relaxing as she warmed, blinking up at him in the candlelight as he sat cross-legged beside the tick.
“Did you find any clothes you could use?” she asked. “Though I suppose you’d be lucky to find a fit.”
“Haven’t looked, yet. Got spares in my saddlebags. Which are on my horse.
Somewhere. If I’m lucky, my patrol will find him and bring him along sometime.
They had better be looking for me by now.”
“If you could find something else to wear, I bet I could wash those tomorrow.
I’m sorry that—”
“Little Spark,” he leaned forward, his ragged voice cracking, “do not apologize to me for this.”
She recoiled.
He regained control. “Because, don’t you see, a crying patroller is a very embarrassing sight. M’ face gets all snivelly and snotty. Combine that with this blue eye I’ve got starting, and it’d be like to turn your stomach. And then there’d just be another mess to clean up, and we don’t want that now, do we.”
He tweaked her nose, which was on the whole an insane thing to do to a woman who’d just saved the world, but it worked to break her bleak mood; she smiled wanly.
“All right, we’re making great progress here, you know. Food, what about food?”
“I don’t think I could, yet. You go ahead.”
“Drink, then. And no arguments with me about that one, I know you need to drink when you’ve lost blood.” Are losing blood. Still. Too much, too fast. How long was it supposed to go on?
Candlelight explorations in the rather astonishing cellar yielded a box of dried sassafras; uncertain of the unknown well water, he boiled some up for tea and dosed them both. He was thirstier than he’d thought, and set Fawn an example, which she followed as docilely as a naive young patroller. Why, why do they do whatever you tell them like that? Except when they didn’t, of course.
He sat against the wall facing her, legs stretched out, and sipped some more.
“There would be more I could do for you on the inside, patroller tricks with my groundsense, if only…”
“Groundsense.” She uncurled a little more and regarded him gravely. “You said you’d tell me about that.”
He blew out his breath, wondering how to explain it to a farmer girl in a way she wouldn’t take wrong. “Groundsense. It’s a sense of… everything around us. What’s alive, where it is, how it’s doing. And not just what’s alive, though that’s brightest. No one quite knows if the world makes ground, or ground makes the world, but ground is what a malice sucks out to sustain itself, the loss of which kills everything around its air. In the middle of a really bad patch of blight, not only is everything once alive now dead, even rocks don’t hold their form. Ground’s what groundsense senses.”
“Magic?” she said doubtfully.
He shook his head. “Not the way farmers use the term. It’s not like getting something for nothing. It’s just the way the world is, deep down.” He forged on against her frankly blank look. “We use words from sight and touch and the other senses to describe it, but it isn’t like any of those things, really. It’s like how you know… Close your eyes.”
She raised her brows at him in puzzlement, but did so.
“Now. Which way is down? Point.”
Her thumb rotated toward the floor, and the big brown eyes opened again, still puzzled.
“So how did you know? You didn’t see down.”
“I…” She hesitated. “I felt it. With my whole body.”
“Groundsense is something more like that. So.” He sipped more tea; the warm spice soothed his throat. “People are the most complicated, brightest things groundsense sees. We see each other, unless we close it down to block the distraction. Like shutting your eyes, or wrapping a lantern up in a cloak.
You can—Lakewalkers can—match our body’s ground to someone else’s body’s ground.
If you get the match up really close, almost like slipping inside each other, you can lend strength, rhythm… help with wounds, slow bleeding, help with when a hurt body starts to go all wrong down into that cold gray place. Lead the other back to balance. Did something like that for a patroller boy last—ye gods, last night? Saun. I have to stop thinking of him as Saun the Sheep, it’s going to slip out my mouth someday, and he’ll never forgive me, but anyway. Bandit whaled him in the chest with a sledgehammer during the fight, broke ribs, stunned his heart and lungs. I whacked my ground into a match with his right quick, persuaded his to dance with mine. It was all a bit brutal, but I was in a hurry.”
“Would he have died? But for you?”
“I… maybe. If he thinks so, I’m not going to argue; might finally get him to give up those overblown sword moves of his while he’s still impressed with me.”
Dag grinned briefly, but the grin faded again. More tea. “Trouble is…”
Blight, out of tea. “You’ve taken a wound to your womb. I can sense it in you, like a rip in your ground. But I can’t match it to lend you anything helpful through our grounds because, well, I haven’t got one. A womb, that is. Not part of my body or its ground. If Mari or one of the girls were here, they could maybe help. But I don’t want to leave you alone for eight or twelve hours or however long it would take to find one and bring her back.”
“No, don’t do that!” Her hand clutched at his leg, then drew back shyly as she coiled more tightly on her side. How much pain was she in? Plenty.
“Right. So, that means we have to ride this thing out the farmer way. What do farmer women do, do you know?”
“Go to bed. I think.”
“Didn’t your mother or sisters ever say?”
“Don’t have any sisters, and my brothers are all older than me. My mother, she’s taught me a lot, but she doesn’t do midwifery. She’s always so busy with, well, everything. Mostly I think the body just cleans itself out like a bad monthly, though some women seem to get poorly, after. I think it’s all right if you bleed some, but bad if you bleed a lot.”