Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [102]
Remo’s lips twisted in doubt. “In his knee again?”
“How about his nose?” Fawn suggested. “I think he’s getting the sniffles from being in that cold water yesterday. And it wouldn’t be mixed up with the old groundwork there.”
Hod, who had in fact been making some ominously juicy snorting noises all morning, turned red, but nodded. Acutely aware that he would be laying himself entirely open to Remo’s perceptions, Dag dropped his every guard and closed his eyes. He felt the whorl of ground coming away from Remo’s face and floating between the two, the quick blink like water droplets joining as it settled into Hod’s ground in turn, a palpable touch of warmth. Remo sneezed, and Dag’s eyes shot open again.
Hod rubbed his nose and looked bewildered. “Feels nice,” he offered.
Dag squinted, but no, with neither sight nor groundsense could he detect anything out of the ordinary. He ran his hand through his hair. “Well, all right. Do the same for Fawn, then.”
“Are you sure, Dag?” asked Remo. “I mean—I wouldn’t want to risk accidentally beguiling your wife.” His glance at Dag was sidelong and wary.
“Fawn’s already received some pretty complex ground reinforcements from me, and minor ones from Mari and Cattagus—is that all, Fawn?”
She nodded. “Old Cattagus fixed that little burn on my hand that time, and Mari—you were there when she helped me out.” She made a vague gesture to her belly and the slowly healing malice scars hidden there that still rendered her monthlies so painful.
“She’s not been beguiled yet, and this is lighter than even a minor healing reinforcement,” said Dag. “Go ahead.”
“Where?” said Remo. “I mean, Barr claims if you put a ground reinforcement in a farmer girl’s—” He broke off abruptly, his face flushing. His ground shuttered.
“Out with it,” said Dag patiently. “Who knows what overlooked thing could be important?”
Remo’s ground only eased back by half. He looked up the river valley, meeting no one’s eye. He said distantly, “Barr says if you put a ground reinforcement in a farmer girl’s t…c…p…private parts”—this last choice barely got past his teeth—“it makes her eager to, um, be with you.”
“Huh?” said Hod.
“Go out to the woodpile with him,” Dag translated into Hoddish.
“Oh.” Hod nodded wisely. “Sure.”
From the look on Fawn’s face, she did not require a translation. But she sat up straighter, her brow wrinkling. “Dag…is that why, when we first met, you said you couldn’t heal my womb after the malice ripped me there?”
Remo’s head swiveled at this, and his inspection of her malice scars dropped below her neck for the first time. His eyes widened.
Dag answered, “No! It was what I was always taught about field healings. For folks who aren’t trained up as medicine makers, ground reinforcements flow best from body part to the same body part—the way Remo did Hod’s nose, just now. Without a womb to pull ground from, I’d no such ground to give you.” He hesitated. The healings he was trying nowadays through his ghost hand—his ground projection—certainly didn’t work that way. “I wouldn’t put much faith in Barr’s hearsay.”
“But it wasn’t hearsay,” Remo blurted. “He said he did it.”
Dag, after an unmoving moment, pursed his lips. “You know this for sure?”
Remo nodded in discomfiture. “We’d put up out on patrol in this farmer’s barn. He went after one of the sisters. The prettiest, naturally. He dared me to try with another one, but I said I’d tell our patrol leader if he ever pulled a stunt like that again, and he shut up about it.” After a moment, he added, “I’m pretty sure he’s done it more than once, though.”
“He could hardly have pulled ground from his womb,” said Dag slowly, still not convinced he believed Barr’s brag.
“No, he said it was from his”—Remo gestured crotch-ward—“parallel parts. Because he had plenty to spare. He claimed.”
Fawn said, in a coolly thoughtful tone, “That wouldn’t have been a healing reinforcement then, exactly. Maybe it was just…stimulatin’. You know, Dag,