Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [4]
Five blank stares greeted this statement, and Fawn wondered how he was going to explain ground and groundsense in a way that would make them all understand when they hadn’t seen what she’d seen. When he also had to overcome a lifetime of deep reserve and the habit—no, imperative—of secrecy. It seemed by his long intake of breath that he was about to try.
“Only you farmers use the term magic. Lakewalkers just call it groundwork. Or making. We don’t think it’s any more magic than, than planting seed to get pumpkins or spinning thread to get shirts. Ground is…it’s in everything, underlies everything. Live or un-live, but live ground is brightest, all knotty and shifting. Un-live sits and hums, mainly. You all have ground in you, but you don’t sense it. Lakewalkers perceive it direct. You can think of groundsense as like seeing double, except that seeing doesn’t quite cover—no.” He muttered to his lap, “Keep it simple, Dag.” His eyes and voice rose again. “Just think of it as like seeing double, all right?” He stared hopefully around.
Taking the uncharacteristic quiet that had fallen for encouragement, he went on, “So, just as we can sense ground in things, we can, most of us—sometimes—move things through their grounds. Change them, augment them. That’s groundwork.”
Mama wet her lips. “So…when you mended that glass bowl the twins broke, whistled it back together, was that what you’d call groundwork?”
Stunning the entire Bluefield clan to silence at that time, too, as Fawn vividly recalled—now that had been magic.
Dag, beaming, shot Mama a look of gratitude. “Yes, ma’am. Exactly! Well, it wasn’t the whistling that—well, close enough. That was probably the best groundwork I’d ever done.”
Second best, now, thought Fawn, remembering Raintree. But Raintree had come later, and cost more: very nearly Dag’s life. Did they understand that this wasn’t trivial trickery?
“Lakewalkers like to think that only we have groundsense, but I’ve met a lot of farmers with a trace. Sometimes more than a trace. Nattie’s one.” Dag nodded across the table at Nattie, who grinned in his general direction, though her pearl-colored eyes could not see him. Fletch and Clover and Whit looked startled; Mama, less so. “I don’t know if her blindness sharpened it, or what. But with Nattie’s helping, Fawn and I wove our grounds into our wedding cords as sound as any Lakewalker’s.”
He left out the alarming part about the blood, Fawn noted. He was picking his way through the truth as cautiously as a blindfolded man crossing a floor studded with knives.
Dag went on, “So when we got up to camp, every Lakewalker there could see that they were valid cords. Which threw everyone into a puzzle. Folks had been relying on the cord-weaving to make Lakewalker marriages to farmers impossible, d’you see. To keep bloodlines pure and our groundsense strong. They were still arguin’ about what it meant when we left.”
Papa had been staring at Nattie, but this last drew his frown back to Dag. “Then did your people throw you out for marrying Fawn, patroller?”
“Not exactly, sir.”
“So…what? Exactly?”
Dag hesitated. “I hardly know where to start.” A longer pause. “What all have you folks here in Oleana heard about the malice that emerged over in Raintree?”
Papa said, “There was supposed to have been a blight bogle pop up somewheres north of Farmer’s Flats, that killed a lot of folks, or drove them mad.”
Whit put in, “Or that it was a nerve-ague or brain-worms, that made folks there run around attacking one another. It’s bog country up that way, they say, bad for strange fevers.”
Fletch added, “Down at Millerson’s alehouse, I heard someone say it was an excuse got up by the Lakewalkers to drive farmers back south out of their hunting country. That there never was any blight bogle, and it wasn’t bogle-maddened farmers attacking Lakewalkers, but the other way around.”
Dag squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his mouth. “No,” he said into his hand, and lowered it.
Clover sat back with a sort of flounce; she didn’t voice it, but her face said it for her: