Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [98]
He made an odd face. “I got to thinking. Even a malice doesn’t normally ground-rip its victims down to deep physical structure—that gray slumping’s more an effect of prolonged draining blight. It only snatches the life-ground. The cream off the top, if you will.”
She frowned in concentration. “I remember when Dar told me about how sharing knives are primed. The knife just draws in a person’s dying ground. The whole person doesn’t dissolve. So it’s not just malices.”
His lips parted, closed. “That’s…a better thought. Though I don’t think of sharing knives as ground-ripping so much as accepting the greatest possible ground-gift. I…hm.” His brows drew in. After a moment he shook off the distracting notion, whatever it was, and went on. “Live ground is more complex than the ground of inert or dead things—lighter, brighter, more fleeting…and it seems”—he reached out with a fingertip beneath his hovering stump and shifted one more oat from the pile on his right to the pile on his left—“more digestible. Speaking of ground-colic.”
She estimated the number of grains in each pile. It was a lot more than ten. “Dag,” she said uneasily, “how many of those are you planning to try?”
He chewed on his lip. “Well, you remember back in Raintree when every patroller in camp who knew how gave me a ground reinforcement, trying to get me better quick so’s we could all ride home?”
“Yes?”
“After a while I started seeing these wavering purple halos around things, and Hoharie made them stop. She said I needed more absorption time.”
“You didn’t tell me about any purple halos!”
He shrugged. “They went away in a day. Anyway, the experience gave me a notion to try. I figure I’ll have hit my daily limit in live-ground theft when things start looking sort of lavender around the edges.”
She pursed her lips in doubt. But how could she demand he not explore his abilities when she was so full of questions herself? There was no expert here for him to beg explanations of. He could only question his own body and ground with these trials, and listen carefully to the answers. Truly, somebody had once had to try everything for the first time, or there would be no experts.
“Are you still thinking that if you could get more ground-food to restore yourself, you could do more healing, faster?”
He nodded. “Maybe. Of Lakewalkers, leastways. But I want to heal farmers, and if I can’t figure out this beguilement problem…” He moved another oat. Then a corn kernel. Then he sat up, blinked, twisted around, and stared at her face.
“Do I have a purple halo now?” she asked a little grimly.
He reached back, moved another oat, and blinked again. “Now you do,” he said in a voice of tentative satisfaction.
“Then stop!”
“Yes,” he sighed. He rubbed his night-stubbled chin and stared down at the two little heaps. “Huh.”
“Hm?”
“This pile”—he pointed to the one on his right—“is live seeds. If you put them in the ground and watered ’em, you’d get new plants.”
“Maybe,” said Fawn, from a lifetime’s experience on a farm. “Anyhow, if you planted enough of them, you’d likely get something. Plus the weeds.”
“This pile,” he said, ignoring the commentary, “is dead seeds. Plant them and they would just sit there and rot. Eventually.”
A bleak look crossed his face, and Fawn wondered if his mind’s eye was seeing a long row of uncorrupted little corpses. Blight it, oats weren’t children. Well, she supposed they were the oat plant’s children, in a way, but down that line of thought lay madness for anyone who meant to go on living in the world. She put in quickly, “Seeds won’t sprout once you cook them, either. How is this different from cooking our food, really?”
His squint, after a moment, grew grateful. “There’s a point, Spark.”
She peered more closely. The heap on the left did seem a bit duller to her eye than the bright yellow grains on the right. She pointed to the dull heap. “Could you still eat those, like cooked food?”
He looked a bit taken aback. “I don’t