The morning meal was leisurely, abundant, and prolonged; the sun was high over the hills before Fawn stopped thinking of amusing new treats to try cooking up out of the Fetch’s stores. The younger male eaters, originally ravenous, showed signs of going sessile, losing interest in the idea of hunting on the island in favor of lazing on the boat, at least till Berry starting reeling off a long list of maintenance chores that a fellow with time on his hands could turn to.

On impulse, Dag interrupted this: “Actually, I’d like to borrow Remo and Hod this morning. And Fawn. I want to try some things.”

Berry looked up shrewdly. “Is this about Hod’s beguilement thing?”

“Yep,” said Dag, and marveled at how far they’d come, that he could say such a thing openly—and be understood, at least well enough to go on with.

Boss Berry nodded. “Fine by me.” She added wistfully, “Say, I don’t suppose you two Lakewalkers can magic up some rain for us while you’re at it?”

“I don’t know of any groundwork that manages weather, sorry,” said Dag seriously. “Though who knows what the old lake lords could do, back before the world broke?”

Berry eyed him. “That was a joke, Dag.”

“Oh.”

Fawn patted his hand. “That’s all right. I don’t always get patroller humor, either. Though if something’s appalling, patrollers likely think it’s hilarious.”

Remo looked as though he wanted to object to this, but his mouth was too full.

Dag originally thought to retreat to the boat roof for the trials he had in mind, but then decided it would be best to get more out of groundsense range from the others. They rowed to shore dry-shod in the Fetch’s little skiff, though they might almost have waded, and hiked up the bank, waving good-bye to Berry and Whit, who were setting up a makeshift water-gauge in hopes of spotting some slight rise that might be just enough to lift the flatboat out of its sandy trap. At a high-ish spot near the towhead, with a view up the river valley framed by sand bar willows, Fawn laid out a blanket, and they all settled cross-legged in a circle and looked to Dag. Hod gulped nervously. Remo frowned in misgiving. Fawn just waited, watching him.

Dag cleared his throat, wishing he were more sure of, well, anything. “Fawn said the answer to this puzzle ought to lie between us all, if only we could see it. I mean to try harder to see it. Why is Hod beguiled, but Fawn not? Why don’t Lakewalkers beguile each other? What are our grounds really doing, when we feel what we feel? My notion is that Remo and I will each open our grounds as wide as we can, try trading little ground reinforcements all around, and watch each other.”

“What would we be looking for?” asked Remo, a trifle plaintively. “I mean—it’s not like we haven’t done this before.”

Dag shook his head. “Watch for the things we don’t usually notice. Especially watch for the things we think we know that might not really be so. Watch for the differences between Hod and Fawn. Is it the receiver that makes the difference, or is it the way the ground is gifted? I hope it’s not all in the receiver, because that would mean I couldn’t fix it—I could only heal some sick or hurt farmers but not others, and how would I tell which was which, in advance? How could I say to someone in mortal trouble, no, you go away, I can’t—” Dag broke off. Swallowed. Said, “You start, Remo. Give a small reinforcement to Hod.”

Remo’s lips twisted in doubt. “In his knee again?”

“How about his nose?” Fawn suggested. “I think he’s getting the sniffles from being in that cold water yesterday. And it wouldn’t be mixed up with the old groundwork there.”

Hod, who had in fact been making some ominously juicy snorting noises all morning, turned red, but nodded. Acutely aware that he would be laying himself entirely open to Remo’s perceptions, Dag dropped his every guard and closed his eyes. He felt the whorl of ground coming away from Remo’s face and floating between the two, the quick blink like water droplets joining as it settled into Hod’s ground in turn, a palpable touch of warmth. Remo sneezed, and Dag’s eyes shot open again.

Hod rubbed his nose and looked bewildered. “Feels nice,” he offered.

Dag squinted, but no, with neither sight nor groundsense could he detect anything out of the ordinary. He ran his hand through his hair. “Well, all right. Do the same for Fawn, then.”

“Are you sure, Dag?” asked Remo. “I mean—I wouldn’t want to risk accidentally beguiling your wife.” His glance at Dag was sidelong and wary.

“Fawn’s already received some pretty complex ground reinforcements from me, and minor ones from Mari and Cattagus—is that all, Fawn?”

She nodded. “Old Cattagus fixed that little burn on my hand that time, and Mari—you were there when she helped me out.” She made a vague gesture to her belly and the slowly healing malice scars hidden there that still rendered her monthlies so painful.

“She’s not been beguiled yet, and this is lighter than even a minor healing reinforcement,” said Dag. “Go ahead.”

“Where?” said Remo. “I mean, Barr claims if you put a ground reinforcement in a farmer girl’s—” He broke off abruptly, his face flushing. His ground shuttered.

“Out with it,” said Dag patiently. “Who knows what overlooked thing could be important?”

Remo’s ground only eased back by half. He looked up the river valley, meeting no one’s eye. He said distantly, “Barr says if you put a ground reinforcement in a farmer girl’s t…c…p…private parts”—this last choice barely got past his teeth—“it makes her eager to, um, be with you.”

“Huh?” said Hod.

“Go out to the woodpile with him,” Dag translated into Hoddish.

“Oh.” Hod nodded wisely. “Sure.”

From the look on Fawn’s face, she did not require a translation. But she sat up straighter, her brow wrinkling. “Dag…is that why, when we first met, you said you couldn’t heal my womb after the malice ripped me there?”

Remo’s head swiveled at this, and his inspection of her malice scars dropped below her neck for the first time. His eyes widened.

Dag answered, “No! It was what I was always taught about field healings. For folks who aren’t trained up as medicine makers, ground reinforcements flow best from body part to the same body part—the way Remo did Hod’s nose, just now. Without a womb to pull ground from, I’d no such ground to give you.” He hesitated. The healings he was trying nowadays through his ghost hand—his ground projection—certainly didn’t work that way. “I wouldn’t put much faith in Barr’s hearsay.”

“But it wasn’t hearsay,” Remo blurted. “He said he did it.”

Dag, after an unmoving moment, pursed his lips. “You know this for sure?”

Remo nodded in discomfiture. “We’d put up out on patrol in this farmer’s barn. He went after one of the sisters. The prettiest, naturally. He dared me to try with another one, but I said I’d tell our patrol leader if he ever pulled a stunt like that again, and he shut up about it.” After a moment, he added, “I’m pretty sure he’s done it more than once, though.”

“He could hardly have pulled ground from his womb,” said Dag slowly, still not convinced he believed Barr’s brag.

“No, he said it was from his”—Remo gestured crotch-ward—“parallel parts. Because he had plenty to spare. He claimed.”

Fawn said, in a coolly thoughtful tone, “That wouldn’t have been a healing reinforcement then, exactly. Maybe it was just…stimulatin’. You know, Dag, what you were taught may just be what they tell the young patroller boys—and girls—so as to save trouble. And in the next generation, if no one tested it, they’d pass it along for fact. So you could both be right, in a way.”

Dag rubbed the back of his neck as he considered this proposition. Maybe there ought to be another experiment, later, in private…he wrenched his mind back to the present trial. “Elbow. Try a tiny reinforcement in her elbow.”