Wain raised his arm and slapped his massive biceps. “Nice try, Berry!”

Fawn considered volunteering a kiss in Berry’s place, in support of the Fetch, but looking over the rowdy keelboat men decided better of the impulse.

“I’ll play you over the bar!” Berry raised her arms back and mimicked fiddling.

This actually started a hot debate amongst the dozen or so men of the Snapping Turtle’s crew; before it could quite turn to mutiny, Wain shouted, “A concert and a kiss!”

Berry gritted her teeth. “I’ll wait for the rain!”

Moans of disappointment drifted back from the keelboat, but the river bore it inexorably on, and in a few more minutes it had floated out of hearing and then sight. Berry heaved a frustrated sigh. It had all been fairly good-humored, Fawn thought, but—they were still stuck on the sand bar.

Copperhead was turned loose to graze on the island, since, although he had jumped into the water readily enough under Dag’s practiced persuasion, getting him back aboard would be nigh impossible until they could again tie the Fetch to the bank bow-first and run out the gangplank. The men washed in the river and came back aboard, crowding the hearth where Fawn was trying to start an early supper, there seeming to be little else to do for the long evening. They stamped and shivered and rubbed their hands, all but Dag who tucked his under his left arm, but eventually settled down enough out of her way that she could make pies and stew. Dag asked if Fawn wanted him to catch her some fish, but for some reason this amiable suggestion was voted down.

In the night Fawn awoke to find their bedroll empty of Dag. At first she thought he’d gone to piss, but when he didn’t reappear after a reasonable time, she wrapped a blanket around herself and crept out to look for him. A light was seeping in from around the bow hatch, too amber to be the moon. She slipped out the door and closed it behind her. The night air was cold, damp, and smelled of fallen leaves and the river, with a whiff of warm goat and sleepy chicken, but overhead the stars burned bright.

The bench was pulled out from the wall, and Dag was sitting astride it, with a lantern glowing at the other end. He seemed dressed by guess, hair sticking up, and was without his arm harness. He was frowning down at two little piles of mixed oats and corn kernels on the board between his knees, although when she came to his shoulder he looked up and cast her a quick smile.

“What are you doing?” she whispered.

He ran his hand through his hair, to no good effect. “I’ve gone back to oats. Figured you’d approve.”

She nodded provisionally. “Are you planning to ground-rip some?” She didn’t see any little piles of gray dust, so perhaps she’d caught him in time. Which begged the question In time for what? — although it was possible her mere presence would inhibit him from dodgier trials.

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 know. You’d think they’d have lost something.”

“Would they poison you?”

“I have no idea.” He stared down at the little pile for a long time. “I’d try feeding that handful to Copperhead, but he’s over on the island, and, well, a horse. We’ve no dog.” His eye fell speculatively on Daisy-goat.

“We drink milk from that goat,” Fawn said hastily. And, as his face swiveled toward the chicken pen, “And we eat the eggs!”

He frowned, then got a faraway look for a moment. A scratching sound made Fawn glance down to find that Hawthorn’s raccoon kit had appeared at Dag’s ankle and was pawing at his trouser leg. Dag reached down and gathered up the creature, tucking it in the crook of his left arm. Its little leathery paws gripped his sleeve, and its bright black eyes twinkled from its furry mask.

“Dag,” Fawn gasped, “you can’t!”

“The horse, goats, chickens, and you are out,” he said patiently. “What’s left on this boat that’ll eat grain? Well, Hod, but no. I don’t think it will poison the little critter, really.”