Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [58]
Nicie said slowly, “Really, healing farmers is the same problem as fighting farmers. The burden would put us behind, drag us down.”
At least she’d been listening. Well, she was a councilor, maybe she was used to hearing folks argue. Dag tried, “But we could keep the balance if the farmers, in turn, took over some of our tasks. Not a gift but a trade.” He glanced at Nicie, and dared to add, “Or even a cash business.” Dag’s own secret notion for making a living in farmer country, before this beguilement problem had taken him so aback.
Nicie raised her brows. “So, only rich farmers would get healed?”
Dag’s mouth opened, and closed. Maybe he hadn’t quite thought it through…well, he knew he hadn’t. Yet.
Verel was giving Dag an indecipherable look. “Not many can do deep groundsetting.”
“Not everyone would need to. Lots of folks can do minor groundwork. We do it for each other on patrol all the time.”
“Just what did you do for that wagon-man?” Verel asked. “Patroller.”
Dag shrugged. Gulped. Described, in as few words as he could manage, the trance-deep groundwork that had pulled Hod’s bone fragments, vessels, and nerves back into alignment and held them there so that they might begin healing. He was careful to call his ghost hand a ground projection, since that was the term Hoharie had so plainly preferred. He hoped the medicine maker would approve his techniques, if not his patient. He didn’t continue into the unexpected later consequences, although he did allow a plaintive note to leak into his voice when he described his wish for an anchoring partner.
“The Hickory Lake medicine maker knew you could do this sort of thing, and let you get away?” asked Verel.
Hoharie had seen Dag do much stranger magery than that, in Raintree. “Hoharie tried to recruit me. If she’d been willing to accept Fawn as my wife, and maybe as my spare hands, she might have succeeded. But she wasn’t. So we left.” Verel was regarding him covetously as well as charily, Dag realized at last. Would he take the hint? Between them, Dag and Fawn might add up to a medicine maker and a half, a valuable addition to a straitened camp.
Maybe, for Verel’s ground flicked out to touch Dag’s wedding cord, concealed from ordinary eyes by his rolled-down sleeve. “It seems just like a real cord,” he said doubtfully.
“It is.”
Verel was plainly itching to get Dag alone and ask how they’d woven it. Dag longed even more to take the medicine maker aside and squeeze out everything he knew about healing, groundlock, beguilement, and a hundred other complexities. But that wasn’t the reason the irate camp captain had tracked him here.
Amma Osprey said grimly, “The old ways have worked for better ’n a thousand years. Nothing lasts that long without good reason. Let farmers keep to farmers, and Lakewalkers to Lakewalkers, and we’ll all survive. Mixing things up is dangerous. Which is fine if it falls on your own fool head, but not so fine when it falls on someone else’s.” She gestured, inarguably, toward Verel’s bandaged hand.
“Is that all you want?” Dag challenged. “For the problem to go somewhere else?”
She snorted. “If I tried to shoulder the troubles of the whole world, I’d go mad. And Pearl Riffle would be lost. I run Pearl Riffle patrol. My neighbor camps run their territories, and their neighbors do the same, all the way to the edge of the hinterland and on to the hinterlands beyond, and so we all get through. One by one and all together. I have to trust them; they have to trust me. Trust me not to go haring off after swamp gas, for one thing. So I’ll thank you, Dag No-camp, to keep yourself to yourself and not stir up these people worse in my territory.”
“I’ll be gone on the rise,” said Dag. He pointed to the windless sky, chilling gold-and-blue as the sun slanted. “Though I can’t control the rain.”
“That works for me,” said Amma Osprey. She stood abruptly, signaling an end to the talk. The other two rose as well, though their brows seemed wrinkled as much in troubled thought as in irritation.
Clearly, this was not a good moment to bring