“Yes, sir,” said Remo, in a tone that added, And if anything goes wrong later, sir, remember you told me to do this. He leaned forward again.

This ground reinforcement, as nearly as Dag could tell, worked identically to Hod’s. Fawn rubbed her elbow and squinted at Remo, then sat back with an unperturbed smile.

Well, that had gone nowhere in particular. “All right,” Dag sighed. “Now me, I guess. If you’re up to it. Or do you need a rest?”

Remo shook his head. “Not for those little bits.”

Dag sat up and opened his ground as wide as he ever had, trying for a listening quietude. “Elbow’s fine for me, too. Better stay away from my left side, it’s still pretty roiled over there.”

Remo’s head tilted, and his lips parted. He said uneasily, “Dag, yours is the strangest ground I’ve ever seen. Scarred up one side and knotted down the other, but dense…you’re as dense as any medicine maker I’ve met. It’s hard to know where to put a reinforcement!”

Dag nodded. “That calling has been growing in me for some time, I suspect. Longer than I’ve known. Try a foot. They’re always happy for some help.” He cast a glint at Fawn, recalling her very alluring foot rubs; she glinted back.

Remo gathered himself, touched his own right foot, then Dag’s. Dag felt the whorl of ground flow past. There! An echo of ground—like the fainter second rainbow that sometimes mirrored a first—passed back between them even as the bit of Remo’s ground joined to Dag’s. The ground in Remo’s foot closed again like some thick liquid settling around the warm return gift.

“Did you see that?” Dag said in excitement.

“What?” said Remo cautiously. “It seemed like a usual reinforcement to me.”

“That little backsplash from me to you, like an undertow of ground.”

“Can’t say as I noticed.”

Dag’s teeth gritted in frustration. He bit back a sharp rejoinder of Then open wider, blight you! Remo was only a young patroller. It was more than probable that an improved sensitivity to ground was growing in Dag along with his other maker’s talents. Had his younger self ever experienced such simple field reinforcements as anything other than diffuse blobs? Although if Remo truly couldn’t sense this, he wasn’t going to be much help as a check on Dag’s perceptions.

Dag sighed and straightened. “All right. My turn. I need you to watch really closely, Remo. I’ll start with Hod’s right elbow, as there’s no other groundwork there.” That had been a good notion of Fawn’s, to keep the trials separated for clearer comparisons.

He unfurled his ghost hand, reached out, and spun off a tiny reinforcement into the target. No ground-echo returned, hah! The reinforcement was swallowed up greedily as though gulped. Hod sighed contentedly.

But Remo almost fell over in his scramble backward. Up on one knee and looking ready to bolt, he pointed toward Dag’s hook and cried, “Blight! What was that?”

Dag had forgotten he’d not introduced Remo to his new talent. “Settle down. It’s just my gh—ground projection. Instead of mirroring body parts, it pulls ground generally from all through me. Hoharie—she’s Hickory Lake Camp’s senior medicine maker—says it’s a maker’s skill. It doesn’t usually take quite this form in other makers, but you can kind of see why it would for me.”

“Uh,” said Remo. “Yeah.” Dag wished he wouldn’t look quite so bug-eyed, but he did settle back cross-legged and tried to be attentive.

“I will wait,” said Dag patiently, “till you can get your ground open again.”

Remo swallowed. It took him a few minutes, but he eventually achieved the relaxed openness Dag needed.

Dag rubbed his jaw, and said, “Think I’ll try you next. I need you to watch not my reinforcement, but for a little echo of it coming back from you to me. I’d say underneath, but it’s more like the return ground passes right through the other, lagging a bit. Ready?”

Remo nodded. Dag leaned forward and extended his ghost hand again. He paused while Remo’s ground flickered in alarm, then steadied. He nodded and spun off the reinforcement toward Remo’s right forearm. This time, watching for it, the ground return was distinctly discernible. The faint Remo-ground-echo was converted so rapidly it seemed to disperse through Dag’s arm like a blown dandelion puff. Dag’s brows rose.

“I saw…” Remo began excitedly, then slowed. “I’m not just sure what I saw.”

“You saw your ground-echo. I felt it slide into me. It converted a lot faster than…um…a primary ground reinforcement.” The one Remo had placed in Dag’s foot was still there, comfortable but distinct. Dag’s return echo in Remo’s foot was almost fully absorbed already. Dag blew out his breath and turned to Fawn. She was watching him closely, clearly struggling to follow all this. He gave her a reassuring nod, but it only made her lift her brows wryly.

Dag centered himself, opened all his heart to her, reached out, and spun a reinforcement into her opposite elbow. The return echo came back to him like a kiss, and his lips softened in a smile.

“I saw that thing again!” said Remo. “I think…”

Dag sat back and rubbed his forehead. “I saw. Felt. Yes. The reason Fawn is not beguiled is that her ground is acting like a Lakewalker’s—at least—it did when I gave her the reinforcement. But it didn’t when you did. That’s…odd.”

“Is it because you’re married?” said Remo.

“I’m not sure.” Marriage—Lakewalker marriage—was certainly a ground-transforming act, as their binding strings testified. But Dag could hardly marry all his potential patients. A stumper, this.

They’d gone all the way around with each of them. The answer had to be here, hidden in the crisscross of ground flow—or its absence. Dag fell onto his back and glowered up at the nearly leafless willow branches, at the cool, blue sky brightening toward noon. Dag and Remo had exchanged ground with each other; Dag only had exchanged with Fawn. Neither had exchanged with poor Hod.

Or was that, neither had accepted an exchange with poor Hod…?

Oh ye gods. Can I do this? I don’t want bits of Hod in me!

So do you really want to be the farmers’ own medicine maker—old patroller? Because a real maker can’t pick and choose his patients. He has to take whoever and whatever comes, equally.

“It’s not true,” he said to the sky in sudden wonder. “It was never true.”

“What’s not true, Dag?” Fawn asked in that long-suffering voice that suggested she was about to snap. His lips curled up, which made her growl, which made them curl up more.

“It’s not true,” he said, “that Lakewalkers don’t beguile each other. We beguile each other all the time.”

“What?” said Remo, sounding startled.

Dag sat up, his smile twisting. He raised his left arm toward Hod. Spun off a neat reinforcement into the nearly healed knee. And held himself open: not sternly, not rigidly, but warmly and without reservation.

The backsplash this time was so blatant that Remo cried Whoa! There was, after all, a deal of accumulated ground-load for Hod to dump so suddenly.

Hod bent, blinked, and touched his forehead, then gripped his leg. His smile flickered very uncertainly. “Uh,” he said. “I felt…it went away…” And added piteously after a moment, “But…can I still be your friend?”

“Yes, Hod, you surely can,” said Dag. “You surely can.”

“Dag,” said Fawn dangerously, “do you want to explain that for the rest of us? Because if you haven’t just done something worse ’n that catfish, I’ll eat my hat.”

“I just un-beguiled Hod!” Dag exulted, choking back a thoroughly undignified chortle. “In a sense.”

“The first half of that sounds good,” allowed Fawn, and waited with understandable suspicion for him to explain the second.

“I think—I’m guessing—that the hunger a beguiled person has for repeated ground reinforcements isn’t only because they feel real good. It’s really an urgent attempt by their ground to rebalance itself. To complete the thwarted exchange. Except that it just gets worse with each addition if the Lakewalker doing the reinforcements still blocks—rejects—the return ground-gift.”