her groundsense. She said dryly, “I’d say you took befriending a bit far, Oleana man.”
Not nearly far enough, yet. Dag sighed, rose, touched his brow politely.
“I’ll check back about those bone blanks. Good day, ma’am. Patrollers.”
–-
Over the next week Dag grew increasingly absorbed by the work in the medicine tent. Not that he hadn’t been in and out of the hands of the makers plenty before, but this shift in his angle of view, looking down the throats of such varied problems, made a bigger difference than he’d have guessed. As a patroller, he’d never visited the medicine tent except as a last resort; now, as part of that last resort, he found himself not only understanding, but actually reciting, that annoying maker chant of Why didn’t you come in sooner?
A half-dozen folks a day turned up with minor ailments or injuries, although once a man was carried in with a broken leg, and a day later, more interesting and much more difficult, an aged woman with a broken hip. Still more delicate was a woman with an ugly tumor in her breast, which Arkady was treating daily by pinching off its blood supply, tiny vessel by tiny vessel. His explanation of why he didn’t try to destroy it by ground-ripping gave Dag chills-tumor ground could be nearly as toxic as malice spatter, it appeared. Arkady began taking Dag with him on his daily round of tent visits, too, although Dag was uncertain how he’d earned this advancement, since though he might fetch, carry, or hold, he was still not allowed to do even the simplest groundwork.
The old casebooks packed on the shelves, once Challa taught him how to interpret them, proved unexpectedly gripping. They reminded Dag of patrol logs: stained, tattered, with terrible handwriting and baffling abbreviations. But also like patrol logs, the more he read the more he began to see what was between the lines as well as what was on them. The folks trickling into the tent showed Dag how the makers treated some complaints; the books taught him about things he hadn’t yet seen, and so he squinted at their pages daily till the light failed. With his late start as a maker’s apprentice, he felt urgent to catch up any way he could, and he overcame his halting north- country tongue to ask Challa and Arkady as many questions as Fawn might.
His head was bursting with it all when he came back to Arkady’s place one midafternoon for a forgotten bundle of tooth-extraction tools, to find Fawn curled weeping in their bedroll. He lowered himself beside her as she sat up, hastily drying her eyes and pretending to yawn. “Oh, you’re back! I was just having a nap. It always makes me all rumpled and funny-looking, sleeping in the daytime.” But her smile lacked its dimple, and her big brown eyes were bleak.
“Spark, what’s wrong?” He ran his thumb gently down the moist tracks from her eyes.
“Nothing.” She shook her dark curls, abandoning, to his relief, her shaky subterfuge. “I’m just… being stupid, I guess.”
“It’s not nothing. Because you’re not stupid. Tell me. You can tell me anything, can’t you?” He hoped so. Because here, so far from home and kin, he was all she had.
She sniffed dolefully, considered this, nodded. “I’m just… it’s just… it’s all right at night, when you come back and talk to me, but it’s been so quiet all day since Barr and Remo left. And I ran out of things to do.” She waved her empty hands. “I finished sewing the last of the drawers, and I ran out of yarn for socks, and there’s not even any cooking or cleaning, because Arkady’s neighbor women do all that. It’s too gray and cold to sit outside, so I just sit in here, and, and do nothing. Which isn’t as much fun as I’d ’a thought.” She rubbed her face, then said in a lower voice, “I can’t possibly be homesick for West Blue, because I don’t want to go back there. Maybe it’s just my monthly coming on. You know how that makes me cranky.”
He bent and kissed her damp temple, contemplating both her notions.
It was perfectly possible, as he well knew, to be homesick for a place one didn’t want to go back to. And her monthly was indeed coming on. All true, he thought, but incomplete. “Poor Spark!” He lifted her hands one by one and kissed them, which made her gulp and sniff again.
“Nothing is just what the problem is. Your hands have got all lonely, that’s what. They’re not used to resting folded up.”
“Can you get me-does this camp have Stores, like Hickory Lake? Can you get me some more wool or cotton or something?” She frowned.
“Oh. But I guess we don’t have any camp credit here.”
“No, we don’t.” He stared down at her. Had his head truly been stuffed so full as to drive all care for her out of it? Each night her eyes had sparkled, her lips parted, as she listened eagerly to his tales of his day, and so he’d thought her content. He should have noticed how she’d had less and less to offer in return. Her days should be laden with new things right along with his; absent gods knew her head was better built for learning than his had ever felt.
She sat up more sternly. “Never mind me. I promised I’d take whatever this camp dished out till you got what you needed, and I don’t mean to go back on my word. I’ll be fine.”
“Shh, Spark. Surely we can do better than that.” He hugged and comforted her as best he could, till her faked cheer grew less wobbly, then went to find Arkady.
–-
“Out of the question,” Arkady said, when Dag finished explaining his request. “A farmer can’t learn our techniques.”
Dag was unsurprised. He forged on nonetheless. “I always figured to train her myself, later, but having her just settin’ around like this is a huge waste of her time. And of a camp resource. Fawn can learn anything you can teach-except groundwork-we always meant her to be my spare hands, if ever I got out among farmers as a real medicine maker. You haven’t seen it, but I have. When she’s by my side, farmers calm right down and stop being afraid of me, despite what a starveling vagabond I generally look. The women because they can see she’s not scared, and the men because she’s so blighted cute they forget to worry about Lakewalker death magic. And if I’m ever to treat farmer women and girls, which I guess’d be about half my customers, I’d need her with me before I’d dare touch them.” He thought of Arkady’s breast-tumor treatment, and other even more intimate women’s ailments, and shivered.
“Absent gods, yes!”
Arkady finished the brief note he’d been jotting about the tooth extraction, set down his quill, and frowned across at Dag. “It’s not by any means concluded that you’ll be turned loose to treat farmers. As for placing Fawn here in the medicine tent-I grant you she has clever hands, but that bright ground of hers, always open, would be a distraction to patients and makers alike.”
“It’s not a distraction to me,” said Dag. “These are the same fool arguments Hoharie made back at Hickory Lake. One little farmer girl’s open ground is only as much of a botheration as folks choose it to be. Lakewalkers can deal fine with Fawn around when they want to.”
“Yes, but why should they want to? ”
Dag bit his lip. “I’m a stranger here. I’ve earned no trust from this camp. I know I can’t ask this of folks.” His eyes caught and held Arkady’s, and he dropped his voice to his company captain’s growl-not a gift of Dag’s that Arkady had guessed at, judging from his faint recoil.
“But you can. I’ve seen how this camp respects you, and I’ve more than a notion by now of why. You can make this happen if you choose, and we both know it.” Dag let his voice and his look lighten. “Besides, what’s to lose? Try her for a couple of weeks. If Fawn doesn’t work out here, we can think of something else. It’s not like me and my farmer bride are asking to join your camp permanent.”
“Hm,” said Arkady, lowering his eyes and closing his casebook. “Is that what you think? Well. Perhaps I could talk to Challa and Levan.”
–-
Fawn was ecstatic when Dag told her the news, which made him right proud of his husbandly insight. The next morning as he took her along to introduce to her new task makers at the medicine tent, she skipped down the road, caught his amused eye upon her, stopped, tossed her head, then skipped again. But she was walking sedately by the time they arrived.
Dag watched her welcome carefully, not above letting it be seen that he was watching. Challa was politely resigned. Levan, the aging herb master, had the air of a man with a long view enduring a temporary burden.
His two female apprentices and Challa’s boy, at first stiff and cold, grew more pliant as they realized that Fawn would be taking over many of their most tedious chores, from washing pots and bedding to peeling stems and sweeping the floor. As the first days passed, her uncomplaining cheer and enthusiasm softened the older makers, too. Within half a week more, even camp residents stopping in for treatment or to pick up medicines
