“What’s not true?” said Nicie.

“It’s not true that Lakewalkers can’t do groundwork on farmers.”

“It’s what we tell ’em around here,” said Amma impatiently. “Absent gods, man, use your head. All we have is one good medicine maker and two apprentices, barely enough for our own.”

“Not even enough,” muttered Verel.

“We’ll sell the farmers what remedies we make and can spare, yes,” Amma continued. “But they would drain poor Verel dry, if they knew. And then they would keep coming, and scenes like this morning would be the least of our troubles.”

“They’d never understand groundwork,” said Verel. “What it costs us, what it lays us open to.”

“Not if they’re never taught, no,” said Dag dryly. “Funny, that.”

Amma eyed him sharply. “It’s all fine for you; you’ll be moving on at the next rise. We have to stay here and deal every day with these people.”

Verel was frowning at Dag with fresh speculation. “Your partner Saun said you were unusually strong in groundwork. For a patroller, I mean.”

Ye gods, yes, the medicine maker here would certainly have treated and talked with the convalescent Saun last spring, and Reela as well. “I did what I could with what I had. Patrol healing can get pretty rough-and-ready.” Granted, since Dag’s ghost hand had emerged, he’d seemed to have…more. Whether it was new-grown strength, or just new access to strength long crippled, even Hickory Lake’s medicine maker, the remarkable Hoharie, had been unable to say.

Verel hadn’t mentioned inadvertent beguilement as a reason not to do groundwork on farmers. Did he even know about it, if he’d never healed anyone but Lakewalkers? Was Dag’s effect on Hod something unique? Dag suddenly wondered if Amma knew that Hod hadn’t gone home with the other wagon-men. It seemed not, since she didn’t ask after him.

Nicie Sandwillow rubbed her lined face in a weary gesture. “Just what all have you been telling these farmers and flatties, Dag?”

“Nothing. Or the truth, but mostly nothing.” He added darkly, “Leastways I haven’t been telling them convenient lies.”

“Absent gods,” said Amma. “Are you just banished, or are you aiming to go renegade?”

“Neither!” Dag stiffened, indignant. Renegade was an even uglier word than refugee. Seldom did a Lakewalker of any skill go rogue; not in Dag’s life experience, but there were lurid tales from the past. Patrols, who were good at hunting evil things, would surely hunt down such a madman just like a malice. “Fairbolt Crow as much as sent me off with his blessing. If I find the answer, he wants to hear it. He sees the question plain as I do.”

“And what question would that be?” asked Amma skeptically.

“I saw it this past summer in Raintree,” Dag began, trying to marshal his wits. This was no good lead-in for his pitch, but it was the one he’d been handed. “The Raintree malice almost got away from us because it came up nearly under a farmer town, and had already stolen power from half a thousand people before it even started to sweep south. Because no one had taught them enough about malices. I asked Fairbolt, what if it hadn’t been just a little squatter village? What if it had been a big town like Tripoint or Silver Shoals? Instant capital for a malice-king. And the more farmers filter north, the more territory they settle, the bigger their towns will grow—Pearl Bend is twice the size it was last time I was through here—and the more such an ill chance becomes a certainty, and then what will we do?”

“Push the farmers back south,” said Amma instantly. “They don’t belong here.”

“You know they won’t go. They’ve been settled north of the Grace for generations already, on land they’ve made their own by their labor. And if we’re this stretched just patrolling for malices, we for sure can’t stop and fight a war with the farmers, which wouldn’t be won by either side, but only by the next malice to come along. Farmers are here, so it’s here that we have to find another way.”

A place for farmers and Lakewalkers both would be a place his and Fawn’s children could live, Dag couldn’t help thinking. This new and personal urgency to the problem was no more suspect than were the years he’d ignored it when it hadn’t seemed so personal. This crisis has been building all my life. It shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Dag’s voice slowed in new thought. “Hickory Lake Camp doesn’t deal with farmers, only our patrols do, because Hickory’s off in the woods still north of farmer expansion. Here at Pearl Riffle ferry, you’ve been dealing with the problems for decades. You must have learned something about how to rub along.”

“Not really,” growled Amma. “Think about those stupid pots, and what it says about how afraid and suspicious these folks are of us. And you think we should hand them proof of what we could really do to them? If the farmers can’t be shifted, we should move. Five miles upstream at least. That’s my answer.” She glowered at Nicie, who glowered back.

Dag shook his head. “Farmers will fill this valley, in time. If it’s hard to keep separate now, it will be impossible later, when there’s nowhere left to move to. We may as well figure it out now.”

“Who is we, Dag Bluefield No-camp?” said Amma. “Your happy idea of dealing with farmers nearly got our medicine maker murdered this morning.”

Verel raised a hand in faint protest, though apparently only of the notion that he’d come so close to being slain.

Amma went on belligerently, “I’d have told them at the Bend that only Lakewakers with gold eyes could heal farmers, which they might have bought, except I worried for the next fellow to come down the road with your eye color. I should have told ’em it was only folks from Hickory Lake, and let your people cope with the knife-wavers.”

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.