Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [15]
“The buggers have bit me three times already. Wait, there—” Whit’s eyes narrowed to a gray gleam, and his hands rose in an attempt to cup a flying speck. Two quick claps missed, and he lurched over Dag again in pursuit, peering and trying to corner the insect against the whitewashed walls. His hands rose again, wavering with the target’s erratic flight. Muzzy with annoyance and the first confusion of dream sleep, Dag sat up, reached out his left arm, extended his ghost hand like a strand of smoke, and ripped the ground from the mosquito.
The whine abruptly stopped. A puff of gray powder sifted down into Whit’s outstretched palm. His eyes widened as he stared down at Dag. He gulped. “Did you just do that?”
Dag supposed he should say something useful like, Yes, and if you don’t go lie down and hush, you’re next, but he had shocked himself rather worse than he’d shocked Whit.
It’s coming back, like my groundsense range!
And—gone again. He folded his left arm, freed of the hook harness for the night, protectively against his chest, and twitched the blanket over his stump, for all that Whit had seen it several times before. And tried to breathe normally.
Dag’s ghost hand had first appeared to him back when he’d mended that glass bowl so spectacularly last summer, and had been intermittently useful thereafter. It was just a ground projection, the medicine maker had assured him, if an unusually strong and erratic one. Not some uncanny blessing or curse. A ground projection such as powerful makers sometimes used, but haunting his wrist in that unsettling form like a memory of pain and loss, hence the name he’d given it back when he hadn’t yet understood what it was. Invisible to ordinary eyes, dense and palpable to groundsense. And then it had been destroyed, he’d thought—sacrificed in the complex aftermath of the fight with the malice in Raintree.
Where, in an utter extremity of panic and need, he’d ground-ripped the malice, and nearly killed himself doing so.
“Whit, just go lie down.” Fawn’s voice had an edge distinct enough from her earlier grumbling that even Whit heard it.
“Um, yeah. Sure.” He picked his way much more carefully back over Dag, and grunted down to his bedroll once more.
Dag looked up to find Fawn propped on her elbow, frowning over the side of the bed at him. She lowered her voice. “Are you all right, Dag?”
He opened his mouth, paused, and settled on, “Yeah.”
Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “You have a funny look on your face.”
He didn’t doubt it. He tried to substitute a smile, which didn’t seem to reassure her much. He felt a peculiar sharp throbbing in the ground of his left arm, as if a campfire spark had landed on his skin, or under it—a spark he could not brush away, though his fleshly fingers made a futile effort to, rubbing under his blanket.
She started to settle back, but added, “What did you do to that poor mosquito?”
“Ground-ripped it. I guess.” Except it was no guess. He could feel the creature’s lost ground stuck in his own, as those deadly malice-spatters had once been. Tinier, less toxic, not blighted, not a spreading death—but also not anything like a medicine maker’s gift of ground reinforcement, warm and welcome and healing. This felt uncomfortable and sticky, like a spot of hot tar. Painful. Wrong?
Fawn rolled up on her elbow again. She knew, if Whit clearly did not, just how far outside the usual range of Dag-doings this was. “Really?”
“I probably shouldn’t have,” he muttered.
Her eyes pinched in doubt. “But—it was only a mosquito. You must have killed hundreds by hand, in your time.”
“Thousands, likely,” he agreed. “But…it itches. In my ground.” He rubbed again.
Her brows flew up; her face relaxed in amused relief. “Oh, dear.”
He made no attempt to correct that relief. He captured her trailing hand, kissed it, and nodded to the oil lamp; she stretched up and doused it once again. As the bed creaked, he murmured, “Good night, Spark.”
“G’night, Dag,” she returned, already muffled by her pillow. “Try’n sleep.” A slight snicker. “Don’t scratch.”
He listened to her breathing