fingers;
Fawn thought everyone could imagine it, though. “It was plain something needed done, and it was plainer no one was doing it. And that we were running out of time to wait for someone smarter than me to try to figure out what. That’s why I broke with my kin and camp and quit the patrol. They thought it was over Fawn, and it was, but it was Fawn led me to Greenspring. Roundaboutly.” Dag gave a sharp nod, and fell silent.
“I… see,” said Arkady slowly.
He glanced toward his front door; annoyance flashed across his face, but then shifted to a shrewder look. He rose and was halfway to it when a knock sounded. Sticking his head out, Arkady exchanged murmurs with his caller; Fawn caught a glimpse of a middle-aged woman, who craned her neck in turn, but did not enter. Arkady turned back holding a large basket covered with a cloth, which he thumped down upon the table. “Some lunch all around would be as well just now, I think.”
Fawn, Remo, and Barr all jumped up to help Arkady set out tools and plates; Dag sat more wearily, and let them. The break from the tension was welcomed by everyone, Fawn suspected, even Arkady. The basket yielded a big lidded clay pot full of a thick stew, two kinds of bread wrapped in cloths, and, almost to Fawn’s greater astonishment than this farmer-style fare, what were identifiably a couple of plunkins, spheres half the size of her head with brown husks. Cut open, they revealed a solid fruit both redder in color and sweeter than the plunkin she’d encountered at Hickory Lake.
“Why don’t you have this kind up north, Dag? ” she asked around a mouthful.
“Longer growing season, I think,” he answered, also around a mouthful. Judging from the munching, all the northern Lakewalkers at the table plainly thought it was a treat. Arkady explained that these were grown in the shallow ends of the crescent lake.
Arkady did not pursue his interrogation while they ate-thinking, or did he just have medical notions about guarding digestion? Nor did Dag volunteer anything further. The boys, Fawn thought, wouldn’t have dared to say boo. But Arkady wouldn’t be feeding us this good if he wasn’t at least thinking of keeping us, would he? Or maybe he just reckoned wild patrollers, like wild animals, could be tamed with vittles.
Finally growing replete, Fawn thought to ask Arkady, “Where did all this food come from? Who should we thank? ”
He looked a trifle surprised at the question. “My neighboring tents take it in turns to send over my lunches and suppers. Breakfasts I do for myself. Tea, usually.”
“Are you sick? ” she asked diffidently.
His brows went up. “No.”
He busied himself making another pot of tea while Fawn and Remo repacked the basket and set it outside the front door at Arkady’s direction.
He washed his hands again, sat, poured, frowned at Dag. Dag frowned back.
“Your wife,” said Arkady delicately, “does not appear to be beguiled.”
“She never has been,” Dag said.
“Have you not done any groundwork on her? ”
“Quite a bit, time to time,” said Dag, “but she never grew beguiled with me. That was half the key to unlocking unbeguilement. Hod was the other half.”
A sweep of Arkady’s clean hand invited Dag to continue. Maybe this subject would be less fraught than Greenspring?
“You know beguilement can be erratic,” said Dag.
“Painfully aware.” Arkady grimaced. “Like most young and foolish medicine makers, I once tried to heal farmers. The results were disastrous. Lesson learned.”
Fawn wanted to hear more of this, but Arkady waved Dag on again.
Dag sighed, as if steeling himself for this next confession. “Hod was a teamster’s helper out of Glassforge-we hitched a ride with his wagon down to Pearl Riffle. My horse kicked him in the knee, which made me feel sort of responsible. I remembered what I’d done with that glass bowl, and set myself to try a real healing. Which I did do-pulled his broken kneecap back together good. But it left him beguiled to the eyebrows, which we found out when he made to follow us on our flatboat. And Fawn said, Take him along and maybe you can figure out why, but if you leave him you never will. And she was right. Come to it, me, Fawn, Hod, and Remo all sat in a circle and traded around little ground reinforcements till we figured it out. I don’t think anyone who didn’t have both a beguiled and an unbeguiled farmer to compare at the same time could have seen it.”
Remo said, “Even I could see it, once Dag showed me. I can’t quite do the unbeguiling trick yet, though.”
Arkady’s glance went in surprise to Remo. “And what did you see? ” he asked.
“Don’t tell him, Dag,” said Fawn. “Show him.” She felt uncomfortable volunteering to be the Demonstration Farmer, but from his expression she suspected Arkady had some pretty stiff-set ideas on the subject that mere assertion would not shift.
“Elbows again? ” said Remo.
“That’d do,” agreed Dag. “Watch close, Arkady, as the ground transfers.”
Remo reached across the table and touched Fawn’s left elbow; she felt the spreading warmth of a tiny ground reinforcement. She tried to decide if it also made her feel any friendlier toward the boy, or made him look finer to her eyes; since she already liked him well, it was hard to tell.
Arkady looked across at Dag in some puzzlement. “So? ”
“Now watch again. Watch for a little backflow of ground from Fawn to me, almost as it flows from me to her. It’s like it flows back through the reinforcement.”
Dag smiled and reached his left arm toward her right elbow. As before, she saw nothing; but Arkady swore- the first she’d heard him do so, she realized.
“Absent gods. That explains it!”
“Yes. You just saw an unbeguilement. The farmer ground tries to rebalance itself through a ground exchange, the way it happens when two Lakewalkers trade ground, but if the Lakewalker is closed-rejects it-it bounces back and sets up this odd, um… imbalance in the farmer ground, which the farmer experiences as longing for another reinforcement. Obsession, if the imbalance is bad enough.”
“No, yes…” Arkady reached up and almost mussed his carefully tied hair. “Yes, I see, but not that alone. Is this why your ground is such a ghastly mess? How many of these have you been doing?” His voice wasn’t quite a shriek. Fawn stared at him with disappointment. She felt Dag’s discovery should be due much more applause.
“I unbeguiled every farmer I did healing groundwork on, of course. Once I’d figured it out, that is,” Dag added a bit guiltily. Fawn wondered how Cress was getting along.
“And then there were the oats,” Fawn put in. “And the pie. And the mosquito, don’t forget that, that started it all. Your poor arm swelled up so bad you couldn’t get your arm harness on after you ground-ripped that mosquito, remember? ”
“You took in ground from all those things? ” said Arkady in horror.
“It’s a miracle you’re still alive! Absent gods, man, you could have killed yourself!”
“Aha!” said Fawn in triumph. “I told you ripping that thorny tree would be a bad idea, Dag!”
Dag smiled wearily. “I sort of figured that out for myself, sir. Well… Fawn and I did. After a bit.”
“A properly supervised apprentice,” said Arkady, somewhat through his teeth, “would never have been permitted to contaminate himself with such dreadful experiments!”
“Groundsetter’s apprentice, you mean? ”
“Of course,” said Arkady impatiently. “No one else would be capable of the idiocy.”
Dag scratched his stubbled chin, and said mildly, “Then he wouldn’t ever have been able to discover unbeguilement. Would he. Might be a good thing I started out unsupervised.”
“Is it still? ” asked Arkady.
Dag lost his glint of humor. “No,” he admitted. “Because then came Crane.”
Arkady, leaning forward to vent something irate, sat back more slowly. In a suddenly neutral voice, he said, “Tell me about Crane.”
“The boys were there for that one,” Dag said, with a tired nod at Barr and Remo.
Remo said, “Crane was a real Lakewalker renegade. Nastiest piece of work I ever did see. Which is why, sir, you shouldn’t ought to call Dag one.” Awed till now by the groundsetter, quiet Remo flashed genuine anger with this; Arkady’s head went back a fraction.
