Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [78]
“Only it isn’t so,” he went on more thoughtfully. “We meet a sprinkling of farmers near the threshold of ground function—at least, we do if we get out of the camps to patrol, and are paying attention. Aunt Nattie. You, in a way.”
“Me?” said Fawn, surprised. “I’ve got no groundsense range. I’ve got no groundsense to have a range.”
“None at all,” he agreed cheerfully. She almost poked him. “But you have unusual ground…not density, though there’s that, too, but brightness. Your ground is very beautiful, you know. Why do you think I call you Spark, Spark?”
“I thought it was a pet name. For a pet,” she added provokingly.
He gave her a pained look, but said, “No, it’s pure description. As natural as it would be to call red-haired Sassa Carrot Top.”
“Carrot tops are green. I’m a farmer girl, trust me.” Still, she had to smile a little. Was beauty in the groundsense of the beholder? Evidently. Other Lakewalkers had not seemed as entranced by her ground as Dag. Maybe it was a matter of taste, as the old lady said as she kissed the cow—Fawn smiled outright in memory at Aunt Nattie’s old saw. Yet—elusive thought—what if it was so? What if it was neither flattery nor infatuation, but true report? Dag was a truthful sort of fellow, by preference. What if Dag really did see her as brighter, the way sensitive or sore eyes squinted at the sun? The way thirst saw water…? She asked abruptly, “What do I give you?”
“Breath.”
“No, seriously.” She stopped; he turned to face her.
“I was serious.” He wore his serious smile, anyhow.
“Back when Hod first came on the Fetch, you said I didn’t know what I gave you, every day. Do you?”
In that moment, she discovered the difference between stopped and stopped cold. “What?” he said.
“What do I give you in your ground?”
A slow blink. He wrapped her in a hug, bent his head, and explored her mouth in a long kiss. Not evading the question—testing it. He released her at last, his brows drawn in, and she came down off her toes.
“Balance,” he said. “You—untangle me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I.”
“Dag…” she protested. “If you can’t figure this out and tell me, who else can?”
He ducked his head in wry accord. “You make my ground disappear. No, that’s not right,” he continued, as she began to protest again. “Imagine…imagine your muscles all full of knots, pulled and sore and stiff, fighting you with every move you try to make. Now imagine your muscles when they’re working smooth and warm, effortlessly, without thought. To will is to have is to be, all one. Like a perfect shot.”
“Hm?” He wasn’t there yet, but he had hold of the tail of something, she could tell. Something elusive.
“When I make a perfect shot with my bow. Which happens from time to time, though never often enough. I don’t just mean get the arrow into the target, which I can do pretty consistently. In a perfect shot, everything’s there the same as any ordinary shot, yet not. For that fleeting moment, it’s like—my worries, my body, my bow, the target, even the arrow disappear. Only the flight is left.” His hand closed, opened.
“My left-hand groundwork is like the flight of the arrow without the arrow.”
He stared down as if his words had fallen into his palm as unexpectedly as a jeweled tooth.
He just said something important. Hang on to that, farmer girl, even if you don’t quite get it yet. “So why am I not beguiled, yet Hod is? You’ve done groundwork on us both. The why and how has to lie somewhere in the space between us three.”
His mouth slowly closed; the gold of his eyes turned flat and unreflective. But he said only, “We’re keeping Berry,” and walked on.
Fawn matched his pace, satisfied that her question had not been dismissed; his sudden abstraction only marked the wheels in his head turning creakily in unaccustomed directions. So maybe I should keep that axle grease coming, huh?
12
Despite the delay from Dag’s fruitless errand, the Fetch made another eight downriver miles before darkness drove them to shore. At supper, Berry opined that they would reach Silver Shoals