Dag tilted his head.

“It was no joke, Dag,” Saun said earnestly. “They stripped him to his skin before they turned him out. In the middle of winter. Nobody seemed to know what had happened to him after that, if he made it back to her, or…or what.”

He was staring at Dag in deep alarm, as if picturing his mentor so used. Was Saun’s hero worship of Dag finally to be called into question? Dag thought it a good thing if so, but not for this reason.

“Hardly the same situation, Saun.” For one thing, it’s summer. “In any case, I’ll handle it.”

Taking this heavy hint—anything lighter would not have penetrated, Dag thought—Saun managed an embarrassed laugh. “Yeah, I suppose you will.” After a moment he added in a more chipper tone, turning the subject, “I’m something in the same line myself. Well, of course not with a…I’m thinking of asking Fairbolt for a transfer to Log Hollow this fall. Reela”—Saun’s voice went suddenly shy—“said she’d wait for me.”

Dag recognized that sappy look; he’d seen it in his own shaving mirror. “Congratulations.”

“Nothing is fixed yet, you understand,” Saun said hastily. “Some people think I’m too young to be, well. Thinking about anything permanent. But how can you not, when…you know?”

Dag nodded sympathetically. Because either snickering or pity would be a tad hypocritical, coming from him just now. Was I ever that feckless? Dag was very much afraid the answer was yes. Possibly even without the rider at his age.

Saun brightened still further. “Well. Looks like you need the makers more than I did. I won’t hold you up. Maybe I’ll stop by and say hi to Fawn, later on.”

“I expect she’d be glad for a familiar face,” Dag allowed. “She’s had a rough welcome, I’m afraid.”

Saun gave a short nod and took himself off. When in camp, Saun stayed with a family farther down the shore who had a couple of their own children out on exchange patrol at present; Dag gathered that the boy, away from home for the first time, did not lack for mothering.

Dag pushed open the door and made his way into the anteroom. The familiar smell of herbs—sharp, musty, deep, pungent—was strong today, and he glanced through the open door to the next room on this side to see two apprentices processing medicines. Pots bubbled on the fire, piles of dried greenery were laid out on the big table in the room’s center, and one girl busied herself with a mortar. They were making up packets: for patrols, or to be sold to farmers for coin or trade goods. Dag didn’t doubt that some of what he smelled would end up in that shop at Lumpton Market, at double the price the Lakewalkers received for them.

Another apprentice looked up from the table crammed up to the anteroom’s window, where he was writing. He smiled at the patroller, regarding Dag’s sling with professional interest. But before he could speak, the door to the other chamber opened and a slight, middle-aged woman stepped out, her summer shift cinched at the waist by a belt holding half a dozen tools of her trade. She was rubbing her chest and frowning.

The medicine maker looked up. “Ah! Dag! I’ve been expecting you.”

“Hello, Hoharie. I saw Saun coming out just now. Is he going to be all right?”

“Yes, he’s coming along nicely. Thanks to you, he says. I understand you did some impressive emergency groundwork on him.” She eyed Dag in speculation, but at least she refrained from comment on his marriage cord.

“Nothing special. In and out for a quick match at a moment he needed it, was all.”

Her brows twitched, but she didn’t pursue the point further. “Well, come on in, let’s have a look at this.” She gestured at his sling. “How in the world have you managed?”

“I’ve had help.”

Dag followed her into her workroom, closing the door behind them. A tall bed, onto which he’d helped lift more than one hurt comrade over the years, stood out in the room’s center, but Hoharie gestured him to a chair beside a table, taking another around the corner from it. He slipped his arm out of its sling and laid it out, and she pulled a pair of sharp scissors from her belt and began undoing the wrappings. Upon inquiry, he favored her with a much-shortened tale of how he’d come by the injury back in Lumpton Market. She ran her hands up and down the bared forearm, and he could feel the press of her ground on his own, more invasive than the long probing fingers.

“Well, this is a clean break and a straight setting,” she reported. “Doing well, for what, two weeks?”

“Nearer three.” It seemed a lot more than that.

“If not for that”—she nodded at his hook—“I’d send you home to heal on your own, but you’d like these splints off sooner, I’d imagine.”

“Oh, yes.”

She smiled at his heartfelt drawl. “I’ve done all the groundwork I can for today on your young friend Saun, but my apprentice will be pleased to try.”

Dag gave this the grimace it deserved; she grinned back unrepentantly. “Come, Dag, they have to practice on someone. Youth to experience, experience to youth.” She tapped his arm cuff. “How’s the stump? Giving you any trouble?”

“No. Well…no.”

She sat back, eyeing him shrewdly. “In other words, yes. Off with the harness, let me see.”

“Not the stump itself,” he said, but let her unbuckle the harness and lay it aside, and run her experienced hands down his arm and over its callused end. “Well, it’s sometimes a little sore, but it’s not bad today.”

“I’ve seen it worse. So, go on…?”

He said cautiously, “Have you ever heard of a missing limb still having…ground?”

She rubbed her bony nose. “Phantom limbs?”

“Yes, just like that,” he said eagerly.

“Itching, pain, sensations? I’ve heard of it. It’s apparently very maddening, to have an itch that can’t be scratched.”

“No, not that. I knew about that. Met a man up in Luthlia once, must be twenty-five years back, who’d lost most of both feet to frostbite. Poor fellow used to complain bitterly about the itching, and his toes that he didn’t have anymore cramping. A little groundwork on the nerves of his legs usually cleared it right up. I mean the ground of missing limbs.”

“If something doesn’t exist, it can’t have a ground. I don’t know if someone could have an illusion of ground, like the illusion of an itch; folks have hallucinations about all sorts of bizarre things, though, so I don’t see why not.”

“A hallucination shouldn’t be able to do real groundwork.”

“Of course not.”

“Well, mine did. I did.”

“What’s this tale?” She sat back, staring.

He took a breath and described the incident with the glass bowl in the Bluefield parlor, leaving out the ruckus that had led up to it and concentrating on the mending itself. “The most of it was done, I swear, with the ground of my left hand.” He thumped his left arm on the table. “Which isn’t there. I was deathly sick after, though, and cold all through for an hour.”

She scowled in thought. “It sounds as though you drew ground from your whole body. Which would be reasonable. Why it should take that form to project itself, well, your theory about your right arm being lost to use forcing a, um”—she waved her hands—“some sort of compensation seems like a fair one. Sounds like a pretty spectacular one, I admit. Has it happened again?”

“Couple of times.” Dag wasn’t about to explain the circumstances. “But I can’t make it happen at will. It’s not even reliably driven by my own tension. It’s just random, or so it seems to me.”

“Can you do it now?”

Dag tried, concentrating so hard his brow furrowed. Nothing. He shook his head.

Hoharie bit her lip. “A funny form of ground projection, yes, maybe. Ground without matter, no.”

Dag finally said what he hadn’t wanted to say, even to himself. “Malices are pure ground. Ground without matter.”

The medicine maker stared at him. “You’d know more about that than I would. I’ve never seen a malice.”