“Well, that’s interestin’,” murmured Dag.

“How so?” said Remo.

“Seems Hod’s got a talent for managing difficult drunks. I wasn’t expecting anything like that. You wonder where and how he learned it, so young.”

Remo’s brows drew down. He was quiet for a long time. “Kind of disturbing, in a way. In light of how he flinches at most everything.”

“Uh-huh,” said Dag, pleased at Remo for following through that far. The boy might make a patrol leader someday after all, if he survived. Remo was open enough again to sense the ripple of approval in Dag’s ground, and his spine straightened a bit, unwittingly.

Dag smiled and slid down off the roof to go find out what Fawn had arranged for their bedding.

To Fawn’s bemusement, Remo tagged along on the trip to the mint, which made her wonder what Dag had been saying to him last night. She’d thought Remo had been too terrified of the town to set foot in it. He started the tour with a set look on his face that could more easily be mistaken for disapproval. Which made her wonder in turn what emotions some of Dag’s grimmer looks masked—a Lakewalker bride would not have to guess, she reflected with a sigh. At the last moment, Dag thought to ask Hod if he wanted to come along, which made the boy turn red with pleasure and nod mutely and vigorously.

Disappointingly, the mint was not in operation that day, but in return for a few copper crays a man took visitors around, answered their questions, and, Fawn suspected, kept an eye on them. He certainly eyed the pair of Lakewalkers askance. Even idle, the coin-stamping presses were fascinating, almost as complex as Aunt Nattie’s loom, and much heavier. “Sessile,” Dag muttered, staring at them over her shoulder with profound Lakewalker suspicion of sitting targets. Remo nodded agreement.

On the walk back through town, she and Whit were diverted by a shop selling tools and hardware—not a blacksmithery, as nothing but small repairs were done on the premises, but more like a goods-shed. Most of the items for sale seemed to come from upriver, including a fascinating Tripoint stove cast entirely of black iron, with an iron pipe acting as a chimney to take the smoke away. It was like an iron hearth-oven box turned inside out, made to stand out into a room with the fire on the inside.

“Look!” Fawn told Dag in excitement. “It has to be so much better for heating, because a fireplace only shows one face to a room, and this thing shows, what, six. Six times better. And you wouldn’t have to bend and crouch to cook on it, and it wouldn’t blow smoke in your face, either, and you’re less like to catch your clothes or hair on fire, too!” Oh, I want one!

He stared at it and her in mild alarm. “You’d need a wagon and team to shift it, Spark!”

“Naturally you wouldn’t cart it around with you, any more than you would a fireplace. Fire pit,” she revised, thinking of Lakewalkers camps.

“It would have to be planted someplace permanent.”

“Hm,” he said, looking at her with one of his odder smiles. “Farmer tool.”

“Well, of course.” She tossed her head, imagining someplace permanent where you could plant such a stove, and a garden. And children. Not a Lakewalker camp, they’d proved that. Not a farmer village, or at least not West Blue. A town like this one? Maybe not, as such a big concentration of folks plainly made Lakewalkers deeply uncomfortable. Where, then? Regretfully, she allowed Dag and Remo to drag them away from the fascinating emporium.

Back on the Fetch, they found a crisis brewing as Berry and Bo were ready to cast off, but Hawthorn’s raccoon kit had disappeared. Bo was all for leaving without the pesky creature, assuring the distraught Hawthorn that his pet would swim down the river and find a new home in the woods just fine. Hawthorn envisioned more dire fates, loudly. Then the listening Remo made himself hero of the hour—or at least of Hawthorn—by walking along the bank and retrieving the kit from a boat down the row where, caught raiding the pantry, it was about to meet its end at either the hands of the boat’s irate cook or the jaws of the excited boat-dog. Remo had a dangerously attractive face-lightening smile like Dag’s, Fawn discovered as he handed the little masked miscreant back to its ecstatic owner. Berry noticed it too, and smiled in pure contagion; Whit first smiled at her smile, then frowned at Remo.

As the boat made midstream and peace fell, Fawn pulled out her wool and drop spindle and took a seat on the bow to spin, watch the riverbank pass by, and think. Remo had to have opened and used his groundsense for that swift rescue, despite his aversion to farmer grounds. For Lakewalkers, hunting must be a very different activity than for farmers, if they could just stroll into a woods and find prey as easily as a woman picking jars off her pantry shelf. Although she supposed convincing, say, a bear to submit to having its skin peeled was just as dangerous to a Lakewalker hunter as to any farmer. Or was it? Were there other practical uses for persuasion than just on farmer merchants and maidens? And horses and mosquitoes and fireflies. She would have to ask Dag.

Twisting her yarn plump for warmth—it would knit up faster that way, too—she made quite a bit of progress before it was time to break off and go start lunch. An iron stove, she thought longingly, could be installed on a boat like this one and not be so sessile after all. But it would be a short love affair—you’d have to sell it downstream just as the boats were sold off at journey’s end, sometimes as houseboats for the poorer riverfolk but more usually broken up for their lumber. Most of Graymouth was built of former flatboats, she’d heard. She hated to think of the Fetch so dismembered, and hoped someone would buy it for a cozy floating home.

As she made her way into the kitchen, she found Dag sitting at the drop-table, his head bent strangely. He was staring down at a distressing lumpy gray blob on a pie plate, his face drained and almost greenish.

“What in the world is that thing?” Fawn asked, nodding at the plate. “You’re not going to eat it, are you?” The man certainly needed to get more food inboard, but preferably something wholesome. This looked like something dead too long that had been fished from the bottom of the river.

“Last piece of apple pie from last night,” he said.

“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?”