Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [103]
Dag rubbed the back of his neck as he considered this proposition. Maybe there ought to be another experiment, later, in private…he wrenched his mind back to the present trial. “Elbow. Try a tiny reinforcement in her elbow.”
“Yes, sir,” said Remo, in a tone that added, And if anything goes wrong later, sir, remember you told me to do this. He leaned forward again.
This ground reinforcement, as nearly as Dag could tell, worked identically to Hod’s. Fawn rubbed her elbow and squinted at Remo, then sat back with an unperturbed smile.
Well, that had gone nowhere in particular. “All right,” Dag sighed. “Now me, I guess. If you’re up to it. Or do you need a rest?”
Remo shook his head. “Not for those little bits.”
Dag sat up and opened his ground as wide as he ever had, trying for a listening quietude. “Elbow’s fine for me, too. Better stay away from my left side, it’s still pretty roiled over there.”
Remo’s head tilted, and his lips parted. He said uneasily, “Dag, yours is the strangest ground I’ve ever seen. Scarred up one side and knotted down the other, but dense…you’re as dense as any medicine maker I’ve met. It’s hard to know where to put a reinforcement!”
Dag nodded. “That calling has been growing in me for some time, I suspect. Longer than I’ve known. Try a foot. They’re always happy for some help.” He cast a glint at Fawn, recalling her very alluring foot rubs; she glinted back.
Remo gathered himself, touched his own right foot, then Dag’s. Dag felt the whorl of ground flow past. There! An echo of ground—like the fainter second rainbow that sometimes mirrored a first—passed back between them even as the bit of Remo’s ground joined to Dag’s. The ground in Remo’s foot closed again like some thick liquid settling around the warm return gift.
“Did you see that?” Dag said in excitement.
“What?” said Remo cautiously. “It seemed like a usual reinforcement to me.”
“That little backsplash from me to you, like an undertow of ground.”
“Can’t say as I noticed.”
Dag’s teeth gritted in frustration. He bit back a sharp rejoinder of Then open wider, blight you! Remo was only a young patroller. It was more than probable that an improved sensitivity to ground was growing in Dag along with his other maker’s talents. Had his younger self ever experienced such simple field reinforcements as anything other than diffuse blobs? Although if Remo truly couldn’t sense this, he wasn’t going to be much help as a check on Dag’s perceptions.
Dag sighed and straightened. “All right. My turn. I need you to watch really closely, Remo. I’ll start with Hod’s right elbow, as there’s no other groundwork there.” That had been a good notion of Fawn’s, to keep the trials separated for clearer comparisons.
He unfurled his ghost hand, reached out, and spun off a tiny reinforcement into the target. No ground-echo returned, hah! The reinforcement was swallowed up greedily as though gulped. Hod sighed contentedly.
But Remo almost fell over in his scramble backward. Up on one knee and looking ready to bolt, he pointed toward Dag’s hook and cried, “Blight! What was that?”
Dag had forgotten he’d not introduced Remo to his new talent. “Settle down. It’s just my gh—ground projection. Instead of mirroring body parts, it pulls ground generally from all through me. Hoharie—she’s Hickory Lake Camp’s senior medicine maker—says it’s a maker’s skill. It doesn’t usually take quite this form in other makers, but you can kind of see why it would for me.”
“Uh,” said Remo. “Yeah.” Dag wished he wouldn’t look quite so bug-eyed, but he did settle back cross-legged and tried to be attentive.
“I will wait,” said Dag patiently, “till you can get your ground open again.”
Remo swallowed. It took him a few minutes, but he eventually achieved the relaxed openness Dag needed.
Dag rubbed his jaw, and said, “Think I’ll try you next. I need you to watch