Dag nodded understanding and aligned the scraps. Fawn slipped back into her chair, still clutching the cup, and watched wide-eyed. In anticipation of another conflagration her hand crept toward the damp dishcloth she’d been using to wipe the table, but then returned bravely to her lap.
This time, Dag deliberately slowed himself down, drawing his ghost hand back until it was barely projecting. He took his time, easing along the rip, peering warily through his lashes for any untoward flash of flame. Finishing, he opened his eyes, staring down at the repaired paper. Good as… old.
“Strange…” he said. “In a way, this is harder than Hod’s knee. The body seems to cooperate with its own healing in ways that dead objects don’t.”
“Huh,” said Arkady. “You already know that, do you…?” Dag glanced up to catch an unblinking frown. Arkady went on, “Do that one more time. More gently still, if you can.”
Dag ripped the page in half himself this round, smoothed it, pulled it back together once more. Handed it to Arkady.
“Good,” said the maker simply. “Something of the same technique works to hold together skin, as well. Best to save it for tissues you can’t reach with a needle, however.”
“That… would be all of them, in my case,” Dag noted gently.
“Ah.” Caught out for the second time, the maker grimaced. “My apologies. Habit, I’m afraid. I’ll try to be more heedful.”
“I’m used to it,” said Dag.
Did Arkady wince? Hard to tell. But he only said, “That does bring up… Have you ever attempted a ground projection from your right hand? ”
Dag shook his head. “It came out from the left side all on its own, seemed like. I thought it was… well, I’m not just sure what I thought it was.”
Fawn said loyally, “To me, it didn’t seem any stranger than the rest of what you did.”
“Yes… it was you first guessed it was something I should have, that got delayed.” He smiled to remember just when she’d said it, too.
“Seems you were square on.”
She shrugged. “Stood to reason, I thought.”
“Try now,” said Arkady. “Right hand.”
Dag did; nothing happened. His ground on the right side remained firmly intertwined with the flesh that generated it, just as always.
“Did Dag mention,” said Fawn, “that at the time his ghost hand first came out, his right arm was busted? All tied up with splints in a sling. Though I had to keep making him put it back in the sling.”
Arkady sat back. “Really? ” It was more a noise of surprise than disbelief.
“That’s… interesting.” After a moment, and another glance at the hook, his brows drew down in puzzlement. “My word. How in the world did you manage everything? ”
“I had a little help,” said Dag.
“Who you callin’ little? ” Fawn breathed at him, dimpling deeply. He couldn’t help smiling back.
Arkady rubbed his brow and sighed.
Dag straightened self-consciously, clearing his throat. “Besides me bein’ so lopsided,” he said, “you talked about doing something to, ah, cleanse my dirty ground. What did you have in mind?” Or was the cure for contamination, like that for the aftereffects of groundsetting, to be simple, tedious self-regulation? Pace yourself could be pretty useless advice, in the midst of some pressing emergency.
“Well… I admit, I don’t know yet. You’re an odd collection of puzzles to turn up at my gate.”
“At first it seemed to me that my ground cleansed, or healed, or remade itself all by itself, over time. The way anyone absorbs a ground reinforcement-or the ground of their food, for that matter. Figured the problem was that I’d just taken in too much, too fast.”
“Both of those, certainly. Though one might argue that any farmer ground is too much.”
Anyone, or Arkady? Dag frowned at the evasive wording. “Except the ground I most choked on was pure Lakewalker.” Or, considering Crane, impure Lakewalker. “I actually found the ground of food strengthening. At least after I learned to limit myself to the life-ground of things like seed grains, instead of ripping right down to the matter.”
Fawn said, “Yeah, that mess you made of my pie didn’t sit too well, did it? Because it was cooked and dead, do you reckon? ”
“Maybe,” said Dag. “Which reminds me, I meant to try a live fish- minnow!” he corrected hastily at her dismayed look.
Arkady swallowed a noise of horror. “No! No! For the next several days-in fact, till I give you permission-don’t ground-rip anything! At least until I can get some sense of whether your disruptions are clearing on their own. Which reminds me…”
He rose and went to his shelves, returning with a quill, a bottle of ink, and what Dag now recognized as a medicine maker’s casebook.
He laid them all out, opened the book to a fresh page, dipped his quill, and scribbled. He glanced up and added in an abstracted tone, “Open yourself, please.” A couple more minutes passed while he jotted what Dag, squinting sideways, read as notes upon the present condition of his ground, although between the handwriting and the abbreviations he could hardly guess what Arkady thought it was. Arkady’s own strange bright-shadowed ground was equally unrevealing.
“There,” said Arkady, finishing. “I should have done this yesterday. It goes without saying that-no, I suppose it doesn’t. You are to do no ground-gifting till I tell you, either, understood? ”
“Sir? ” said Dag uncertainly. No medicine making at all? Observation could only go so far as a teaching method… It’s only the beginning, Dag chided himself. You’d think you were a sixteen-year-old on your first patrol again, stupid with daydreams of instant achievement. He couldn’t even argue, But now there’s the problem of Greenspring! since the problem of Greenspring had been sitting out there all his life, unnoticed. Yet all this attention to the particulars of his own ground, here in this quiet southern camp, seemed a long way from becoming help for the beleaguered north.
“We don’t want that ground contamination of yours spread all around the camp. At least till we know how much of your present problems stem from it.”
Dag nodded reluctant acknowledgment. About to ask, But could I heal farmers? They won’t care how dirty with farmer ground I am, he realized that the necessary unbeguilement would violate Arkady’s ban against taking in strange ground, too. He sighed, resigning himself to his- temporary, he trusted-quarantine.
6
Dag mulishly chose to share Fawn’s ostracism, keeping to Arkady’s house when he wasn’t on duty, but the medicine tent brought the camp to him. He divided his time between what traditional apprentice dog chores Maker Challa could think of that a one-handed man might do, and close observing. Perforce, he learned names, tent-names, personalities, and, more intimately, grounds of a growing string of New Moon folks; what they made of him he was less sure. But it was plain that a camp medicine maker must come to know his people over time the way a patroller memorized the trails of his territory.
Barr and Remo, meanwhile, wasted no time in going off to explore the camp at large, with the result that they’d shortly cooked up a scheme to go out on patrol as exchange volunteers. Dag approved; it would make good use of their time, take the burden of feeding them off Arkady’s neighbors for a couple of weeks, and pay the camp back something for their welcome here. It soon came out that their gingerliness in presenting the plan was not because they needed Dag’s permission, but because they wanted to borrow Dag’s sharing knife.
Carrying a primed knife marked a patroller as tried and trusted, and they’d both earned that from him. In this camp’s patrol territory, where not even a sessile had been found for over three generations, Dag was nearly certain to get his knife back intact. It was his own workmanship, not Barr and Remo’s dependability, that Dag doubted. So the next afternoon, he gathered up his knife and his nerve and sought out New Moon’s senior knife maker.
Her name, he’d been told, was Vayve Blackturtle. Her work shack, a neat cypress-wood cabin overlooking the lake near its south end, was instantly recognizable by the small collection of human thighbones hung to cure along its eaves. As he climbed nearer Dag found, more unexpectedly, signs of a garden surrounding it-not of practical food, but of flowers. Even in this drab dawning of the year, a spatter of bright purple and yellow crocuses poked up from tidy mulch beds, and the unopened buds on the flowering shrubs were fat and red.