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 and groundwork that he had practiced so haltingly around the dinner table in West Blue. Only this time, it wasn’t nearly so halting: smoother, more logically connected, with all the details and comparisons that had seemed to work best for his dubious Bluefield in-laws. His talk was in what Fawn thought of as his patroller-captain voice, pitched to carry.

Whit came up behind her shoulder, wide-eyed, and whispered in her ear, “Are they following all this?”

She whispered back, “I’m guessing one in three are smart or sober enough. That makes a good half-dozen, by my reckoning.” But the crowd of keelers and townsmen had all stopped muttering and rustling amongst themselves, and the folks leaning on the nearby boat rails looked as entertained as if Dag were a stump speaker.

To Fawn’s greater astonishment, when Dag finished with groundwork and malice blight, he glanced over his shoulder and went right on with sharing knives. And then the silence grew as rapt as if folks were listening to a ghost story. “Which was why,” Dag finished, “when that fool patroller boy broke his bone knife in the fight up behind the landing the other night, all those Pearl Riffle Lakewalkers acted like someone had murdered his grandmother. Because that’s pretty near just what happened. That’s why they’ve all been so blighted touchy with you lately, see…”

And, Fawn thought, at least some of the men listening did seem to see. Or at least, they nodded wisely and murmured canny comments, or parted their lips in wonder, round-mouthed and silent.

“Some of you may be wondering why no Lakewalker has told you these things before. The answer is standing beside you, or maybe it’s in your own hand. You say you’re afraid of us, our sorcery and our secrets. Well, we’re mortal afraid of you, too. Of your numbers, and of your misunderstandings. Ask poor Verel, the camp medicine maker, if he’d dare to go near a farmer again soon. The reasons Lakewalkers don’t explain things to you as we should aren’t our fault alone.”

A number of the men clutching cudgels looked at one another and lowered them discreetly to their sides, or even behind their backs. One shamefaced townsman dropped his altogether, glanced to either side, and folded his arms somewhat defiantly.

Dag drew a long breath, letting his gaze pass over the crowd; each fellow whose eyes he met rose a bit on his toes, so that a ripple passed along them in response, as though Dag had run his hand through the still water of a horse trough. “Now, Mark-carpenter here asked if groundwork was magic, and I told him no. Ground is part of the world, and groundwork works best running with the grain of the world and not against it. Like the difference between splitting a log or cutting it crossways. And it isn’t miracle either, at least no more than planting corn is a miracle, which it kind of is, really. Farmer puts four kernels in the ground, and hopes one will sprout, or two will let him break even, or three will let him get ahead, and if it ever came up all four, he’d likely call it a miracle. Groundwork doesn’t make miracles any oftener than planting, but some days, we do break even.”

Dag glanced again over his shoulder. “Now, if you folks will excuse me, I have some groundwork to try. And if you all are the hoping sort, you can hope with me that tonight I can break even.”

He finished with his old self-deprecating head-duck and salute, and turned back to his waiting—patient, Fawn decided. He’s sure not fooling now.

“Absent gods,” he breathed to Fawn’s ear alone. “If there’s any rules left to bust, I can’t think of ’em.”

“Flyin’, patroller?” she breathed back. That had been Aunt Nattie’s shrewd description of Dag the night he’d mended that glass bowl so gloriously, surprising himself even more than he’d surprised the Bluefields.

His lips tweaked up in shared memory, but then his gaze grew grave again. He went back to Cress’s side and lowered himself, folding his long legs awkwardly. Hitching his shoulders, he leaned forward and went absent again.

Just as quick as that: here, then gone…there, wherever there was. Fawn made mental inventory as she settled again in her place beside him. There was a pot of hot water still on the hearth, blankets just inside the cabin.

A whimper from Cress became a stuttering groan. Fawn grabbed her hand and held it hard as it tried to jerk defensively toward her belly. Fawn was afraid to touch Dag lest she spoil his concentration, but the color draining from his skin made her think he was chilling down awfully fast. The night air was growing raw despite the torches and lanterns held up by their spellbound audience.

The minutes crept by, but in not nearly so many as it had taken for Hod’s knee, Dag sat up and blew out his breath. He stretched his shoulders, rubbed his face. Cress had stopped crying and was staring up at him with her lips parted in awe.

“I’ve done what I can for now. The pocket drained well and the swelling’s eased.” Dag’s brow wrinkled. “I think…maybe Cress and her sister and Mark had best stay the night here on the boat. That infection’s still pretty warm, could do with another ground reinforcement in the morning. A Lakewalker who’d had gut work, they’d give him boiled water with a little sugar and salt in it to drink, and then maybe tea, but nothing else for a couple of days. Rests up your sore innards while they heal, see. Wrap her up warm by the fire tonight, too.”