Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [62]
They looked at each other; the sick woman squeezed her husband’s hand, and he wet his lips and nodded.
“There’s another hitch. For later. Subtler.” Dag swallowed hard. “Sometimes, when Lakewalkers do deep groundwork on farmers, the farmers end up beguiled. It’s not on purpose, but it’s part of why the Lakewalkers here won’t treat you. Now, I’ll be gone on the rise. There’s a good chance that a touch of beguilement would do no worse to Cress than leave her sad for something she can never have, which can happen to a person whether they’re beguiled or not. So, I don’t know if you’re a stupid-jealous sort of fellow, Mark-carpenter, or more sensible. But if that mood should come on her, later, it’d be your husband-job to help her ease it, not to harry her about it. Do you understand?”
The carpenter shook his head no, then yes, then puffed out his breath in confusion. “Are you saying my Cress would run off? Leave me, leave her baby?” He stared wildly across at Fawn. “Is that what you did?”
Fawn shook her head vigorously, making her black curls bounce. “Dag and I killed a blight bogle together. That’s how we met.” She thought of adding, I’m not beguiled, just in love, then wondered how you could demonstrate the difference. Cress’s breath was coming in shallow pants; Fawn caught up her other hand and squeezed it. “She wouldn’t run off lessn’ you drove her.”
The carpenter gulped. “Do it, Lakewalker. Whatever you’re going to do. Help her, make the hurting stop!”
Dag nodded, leaned forward, and placed his spread right hand over the apparent gap of his left atop the woman’s lower belly. His face got that no-look-at-all Fawn had witnessed while he’d been healing Hod, as if he had no attention to spare for animating it. Absent in a very real sense. He paused; his merely expressionless expression returned.
“Oh,” breathed Cress. “That eases me…”
Fawn wondered if anyone else was thinking of the man who’d been fooled, uncertain if this was the ground reinforcement working or a sudden disaster. Could Dag hope to be gone on the rise before a soaring fever made the difference apparent?
“That was the ground reinforcement,” said Dag. His brief grimace was meant to be a reassuring smile, Fawn guessed. “It needs a few minutes to set in.”
“Magic?” whispered the carpenter hopefully.
“It’s not magic. It’s groundwork. It’s…” Dag looked up for the first time at the ring of faces looking down at him: the two boat bosses, another curious keeler who might be Wain’s right-hand man, a worried Pearl Bend couple who could be relatives or relatives-in-law; behind them, Whit and Hod and Hawthorn. “Huh.” He set his hand on the deck and levered himself to his feet. Fawn scrambled up with him. He turned slowly, looking at the restive crowd still milling on the shore, craning their necks and muttering. Bending, he murmured to Fawn, “You know, Spark, it’s just dawned on me that I got a captive audience, here.”
She whispered back, “I figured they were just fixing to beat you to a pulp and then set the pulp on fire.”
His grin flitted past. “Then I’ll have their full attention while they’re waiting their chance, won’t I? Better ’n six cats at one mouse hole.”
He stepped to the bow in front of the chicken coop. A wide wave of his left arm invited the folks on the foredeck to attend to him, and ended catching Fawn around the waist and hoisting her up to stand on a step-rail beside him, a head higher than usual. He left his stump hidden behind her back, but raised his hand in a temple-touch, half-greeting, half-salute, and began loudly, “Did you all out there hear what I just told Mark-carpenter and Cress? No? I explained that I just set a ground reinforcement around the infection in Cress’s gut. Now, I reckon most of you don’t know what a ground reinforcement is, nor ground neither, so I’m going to tell you…”
And then, to Fawn’s astonishment, he went off into much the same explanation of ground