Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [164]
“Ah,” she breathed. She looked up to catch his gaze square. “But, you know, it’s not impossible, if I’m to be a true Lakewalker’s kinswoman, that such a task might fall to me someday. It would be the worst thing to botch I can imagine. Don’t you think I’d better watch and learn how it’s done right?”
He swallowed, nodded, folded her in tight. “Yes,” he whispered. “That, too.”
At length, he let her go, and she went into the kitchen to fix him a meal with no meat, because he did remember Dar ate no flesh before a binding. When he came in after carefully washing up, she set before him a dish of potatoes, apples, and onions fried up in salt butter, took a little for herself, and passed the remainder on to Hod and Hawthorn, who would be staying in to keep watch on Bo. In an attempt to spare Dag, Remo had given a ground reinforcement to Hawthorn’s swollen nose, for the pain and bruising; Dag would release the trace of beguilement later, he decided, when he had the chance to set it properly.
As Dag scraped up his last bite, Fawn set down a cup beside his right elbow. He looked over in surprise to find it piled with oats.
“There you go. You sit there and ground-rip those till my hair turns purple, you hear?”
“Um?”
She sat quietly beside him, her back to the room. “Because it seems to me that when you take in something vile that you can’t hack up, next best thing for it is to take in something bland, to cushion it.”
“Ah. You, um…realized I ground-ripped Crane.”
“Pretty much straight off, yeah. So now there’s a bit of him in you, isn’t there? Till you break him down, at least.”
“Does that…bother you?”
“I think it bothers you. A lot.”
“True, Spark,” he sighed. He took her hand and pressed the back of it briefly to his forehead. “Stay near me through this. It helps me remember who I am and what I am about, when things get too confusing.”
He took up oat grains and rolled them between his fingers, tossing the ripped ones onto his dirty plate, until, indeed, the outlines of things started to look preternaturally sharp and strange.
If there was anything more he ought to do in preparation, well, he didn’t know what it was. After a moment of consideration he unbuckled his arm harness, set it aside, and rolled down his sleeve, buttoning the empty cuff so it wouldn’t flap. He adjusted the knife sheath on his chest, clasped Fawn’s hand, and rose.
Dag had the litter-carriers position Crane in the middle of the scree just a few paces from the shore, heart-side toward the river, so that the sixty or so boatmen could sit or stand on the slope that rose toward the cave and all hear and get a clear view. Whit, Wain, and two other keelers set down the litter and retrieved Wain’s poles, and Whit retreated to one side to wait with Berry. Remo and Barr sat a little way off on the other, at a deliberate distance chosen by Dag to mark them as witnesses, not participants. Dag folded a blanket for his knees and Fawn’s on Crane’s far side, where they would not block the boatmen’s view. She knelt and looked up at him expectantly.
The boatmen crunched around on the rocks of the incline, finding positions, hunkering or sitting or standing. None crowded all that close. The half dozen or so of the Snapping Turtle’s keelers who’d heard his talk on Lakewalker groundwork back at Pearl Riffle were amongst those toward the front, staring with interest. At least this afternoon they were all stone-sober. So.
Dag stood up, raised his voice to carry to the edge of the crowd, and began—again: “First I have to explain about ground, and Lakewalker groundsense. Ground is in everything, underlies everything, live or inert, but live ground is brightest. You all have ground in you, but you don’t sense it…” He’d made this explanation so many times down this valley that it felt as smoothed as stones in a streambed. Some here had heard earlier versions, but it never hurt to hammer it in again. How many hundreds of times had he repeated himself explaining patrol techniques to each year’s new crop of young patrollers?