Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [95]
“That’s not my—” She looked more closely. “Dag, what did you do?”
“Ground-ripped it. Tried to. I think I just found my upper limit.”
“Dag! Two oats, I said!”
“I tried two oats. They were good. So were five and ten. Time to try something else. This was food, too!”
“Was, yeah!” As she stared in a mix of exasperation and horror, Dag abruptly clawed off his arm harness and dropped it, bending over with his left arm held tight to his body. He swallowed ominously. Fawn darted for a washbasin and shoved it under his nose barely in time. He grabbed it and turned away from her, trying to retch quietly, but he didn’t bring up much. Wordlessly, she handed him a cup of water with which to rinse and spit.
“Thanks,” he whispered.
“Done?”
“Not sure.” He set the basin on the bench beside him, ready to hand. “This feels bizarre. It’s like my ground is trying to get rid of it, but it can’t, so my body tries instead.”
“But there wasn’t anything in your stomach.”
“I’m right grateful about that, just now.”
“Is this the same way you get sick after your healing groundwork?”
“No,” he said slowly. “That’s more light-headed, like blood loss except it passes quickly. This…is heavy like indigestion. It just sits there. Except in both cases the disruption of my ground is affecting my body.”
“So is your ground like a horse, or like a dog?”
He blinked at her in dizzy confusion. “Say what?”
“We had some farm dogs that would wolf down any garbage you left around, and then heave it back up if it disagreed with ’em, which it generally did. Usually someplace where you were going to step, seemed like.” She scowled in memory. “Then there was that dog of Reed’s whose joy was to roll in smelly things—manure, dead possums—and then rush up to share his bliss with you. But that’s dogs for you.”
Dag pressed the back of his hand to his lips. “Indeed…Are you ragging me, Spark?”
She shook her head, though her fierce glance said, You deserve to be ragged. “Then there’s horses. Now, horses can’t vomit like dogs do. Once they’ve eaten something wrong, they’re in big trouble and no mistake. Papa lost a good pony to colic, once, that had got into the corn, which is why Fletcher is so careful about fixing fencerows and keeping the feed bins latched tight. It’d been his pony, see. So if you ground-rip something bad, can you get rid of it or not?”
“Evidently not.” Dag’s brow wrinkled. “I couldn’t get rid of those toxic spatters after I ground-ripped the malice back in Raintree, either, come to think. They were blighting me, poisoning my ground. They were drawn out and destroyed with the rest of the residue when we broke the malice’s groundlock, but that trick wouldn’t work for this.”
“Will this kill you?” she asked in sudden terror. “Just a piece of pie—my pie?”
He shook his head. “Don’t think so. It’s not poison. And I didn’t—couldn’t—rip it all the way. But I sure wish I hadn’t done that.” He hunched tighter, grimacing.
“Then will you get better slow like after the mosquito?”
“I guess we’ll find out,” he sighed.
“Ground-colic,” said Fawn. “Eew.”
She took away the plate and basin and emptied them over the back rail, then returned to put Dag firmly to bed. It was a measure of his malaise that he went without argument.
She made his excuses to the others, come lunch—he thinks it’s something he ate—which were accepted without question but with lots of speculation as to what it might have been, since everyone else had eaten Fawn’s boat-food as well. In desperation—and in defense of her reputation as a cook—she finally suggested it might have been something he’d got hold of up in town that morning, which was allowed with wise nods. Remo seemed the most disturbed by the development, stopping by their bed-nook to ask Dag if he was all right and if there was anything he could do. Dag’s response was muffled and repelling. Fawn thought that Dag should take the only other Lakewalker available into his confidence about these alarming ground-ripping experiments, but wasn’t certain enough to force it. She was out of her depth, here. The notion that Dag might