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.
As he wasn’t sneaking up on a malice’s lair, here, Dag forced himself to leave his ground partly open. So he hadn’t yet mounted the porch steps when a woman emerged to stare down at him. She looked alarmingly like a younger version of Dag’s aunt Mari, lean and shrewd of eye.
Her brown hair was drawn back in the usual mourning knot that makers wore while working, but her soberly cut skirt and jacket were embroidered with recognizable dogwood flowers. The stern air common to knife makers hung about her, yet her look was not that of an offended recluse-Dag thought of Dar-but of open curiosity.
“Maker Vayve? M’ name’s Dag Bluefield.” He left off the No-Camp part. “May I trouble you with a question about a knife? ”
“Oh, would you be Arkady Waterbirch’s prodigy? I’ve heard of you. Step on up.” Her roofed porch had hospitable seats, with stuffed cushions; the woven wicker creaked as Dag lowered himself. She took the next seat, half around a low plank table.
Dag wondered at her description of him. He’d certainly done nothing prodigious here. He dragged the cord Fawn had fashioned over his head, held the leather sheath to the table with his hook, and drew out the plain bone blade. “Some weeks back, up on the Grace River, I was called upon to rededicate and bond-and prime-a sharing knife. Under emergency conditions, more or less.”
“You were traveling with those two young patrollers who smoked out a nest of river bandits, I heard. All Oleana men, aren’t you? You’re a fair way from home.”
Dag decided not to pursue just what Barr and Remo had been saying about themselves, and him. We drifted downriver till we ran into bandits could easily be misconstrued as We were sent downriver to destroy bandits, dodging awkward questions about how the partners had come to be trailing Dag.
Leaving out the preamble of Raintree, Dag gave much the same truncated account of Crane and his death to Maker Vayve as he had to Arkady. As he spoke, her grim frown deepened.
“A sharing knife,” she said, “is made as an instrument of sacrifice and redemption-not of criminal execution.”
“This one was all three, in its way. Crane paid far less than he owed, but all that he had. I’m not asking you to judge the morality of its making, ma’am. Just its workmanship. First knife I ever made, see. Will it kill a malice? ”
“The gossip I heard wasn’t clear if you were a patroller or a medicine maker.” Politely, she left out the renegade/deserter/banished/or-justplain- mad part. “How did you know how to make any knife at all? ”
“My older brother is senior knife maker back at Hickory Lake Camp in Oleana. I’ve been around the craft quite a bit, time to time.”
Her brows twitched up in some doubt. “If lurking underfoot was all it took to create talent, I’d have better luck with my apprentices.” But she picked up the knife and opened her ground to examine it, holding it to her lips and forehead in turn, eyes closed and open. Dag watched anxiously.
She laid it gently back on the table. “Your involution is about four times stronger than it needs to be, but it’s sound and shows no sign of leakage. I see no reason it wouldn’t break open properly when exposed to the disruption of a malice. I grant it seems an unusually dark, unhappy knife, but primed knives are seldom chirping merry.”
“Crane was as close to a mad dog in human form as makes no nevermind, but he wasn’t stupid. I think he liked the irony of tying this around my neck,” Dag admitted. But it seemed this knife was safe to lend; he would do
