“Yeah?” Barr muttered back. “I find them useful. This is just the first time you’ve ever appreciated them.”

As the pair climbed nearer, Dag studied the groundsetter warily.

Arkady Waterbirch wore clean trousers, shirt, and an undyed wool coat to the knees, open in this moderate chill. His hair was blond streaked with gray, pulled back in a neat mourning knot at his nape; in the pale light of this winter noon, it shone silver gilt. His hairline was not thinning yet, but seemed to be thinking about it. As he drew nearer still, Dag eyed his tawny skin, with fine lines at the corners of his eyes and around his mouth, and found himself unable to guess the man’s age; his silvering hair said older, his unweathered skin suggested younger; in any case, he was likely not far off from Dag’s own generation. His hands, too, were smooth, with the cleanest fingernails Dag had ever seen even on a medicine maker. His eyes were bright copper shot with gold. The general effect was a trifle blinding.

What the man’s ground was like Dag could not tell until he opened his own, shuttered most of the time since… since Crane, really. As the maker’s gaze swept him in turn, Dag grew conscious of his own travel-worn appearance. Two days of trudging through the mire and sleeping rough last night had returned him to his patrol look: clothing shabby and sweat-stained-although, thanks to Fawn, neatly mended; cropped hair uncombed; jaw unshaved, because they’d all been eager to leave last night’s damp camp and move along. Most of his old scars were covered by his clothing, but for the first time in a while Dag felt an impulse to hold his maimed left arm behind his back.

The boys were tidy enough, for patrollers; their youth, Dag thought with an inward sigh, could have made rags look good on them, though they did not know it. Fawn, still atop Magpie, was her own fair, small, strong self, brown eyes bright with hope and worry, every scant inch a farmer girl. He was reminded of the day she’d told the formidable Captain Fairbolt Crow to go take a jump in Hickory Lake, during another not-altogether-easy introduction, and almost smiled.

As the maker came to a halt and took in the folks awaiting him, he seemed more and more nonplussed. After a second sweeping look over the party, pausing on Remo, he addressed himself to Dag: “Tavia’s tale seems a trifle confused. But if that’s your boy, there, I can tell you right now he hasn’t the ground to apprentice for a medicine maker. He’s a patroller born. If you’ve come all this way for a different answer than you had at home, I’m sorry for it, because I can’t give it to you.”

Remo looked taken aback. “No, sir,” he said hastily, “that’s not what we’re here for. And Dag’s not my father, he’s my… um. Captain, I guess.”

Captain No-Camp, the ill-fated Crane had dubbed Dag; the name seemed to be sticking, along with a few more unwanted gifts.

The copper-gilt eyes narrowed on Dag’s hook. Arkady said more gently, “Ah. You may have been misled by rumor. On a day with the right wind at my back, I can do some useful things, but I don’t make miracles. I’m afraid there’s not much I can do for your arm. That injury’s far too old.”

Dag unlocked his voice. “I’m not here about my missing hand, sir.”

I’m here about the hand that came back. So bluntly confronted, Dag found it hard to explain his needs. “It’s not Remo who’s interested in training for medicine maker. It’s me.”

Arkady’s eyes flew wide. “Surely not. Maker’s talents, if you have them, should have shown by age twenty. Even a groundsetter’s potential should be starting to show by age forty.”

“I was long gone for patroller by then, and no one much could have stopped me. My maker’s calling was… delayed. But everything changed for me this year, from my name to my ground.” Dag swallowed.

“Anyhow,” Fawn put in, “Dag doesn’t just think he can be a medicine maker, he’s been healing folks, all down the Grace and Gray valleys. He fixed Hod’s busted kneecap where the horse kicked him, and Cress’s infected gut, and Chicory’s busted skull and that other fellow’s cut throat after the fight at the bandit cave, and who knows what all else there, and he healed Bo’s stab to his stomach that we all thought sure was going to kill him. And he made a sharing knife. Before that, he did patrol healing on the trail I guess, but since last summer all this other has come roaring out. I don’t know why now, but talent he has. He needs instruction.

So as not to make bad mistakes from not knowing things, which is a regret I could tell you all about.”

Arkady’s head rocked back. His eyes narrowed at Dag, then fixed on Remo. “Have you seen this?” he demanded.

“Yes, sir,” said Remo. “Well, the kneecap I saw later, after it was part healed, and I wasn’t there for the woman at Pearl Riffle, but all the rest, yes.”

“And more,” said Barr, his lips twisting.

“If so, why wasn’t he invited-snatched up!-by the makers at one of those camps along the river?”

“All the folks he healed were farmers,” said Fawn.

Arkady recoiled; he wheeled on Dag. In a voice of suppressed fury, he said, “You unspeakable fool! You went and left all those poor people mad with beguilement?”

Dag’s lips curled up. “No, sir. Because between Fawn, Remo, Hod, and me, we cracked unbeguilement as well. I could see it was the first thing had to be done, if I meant to be a medicine maker to farmers. Which I did and do.”

All three New Moon folks were staring at Dag openmouthed. And seeing… not much; he still held his ground veiling tight-furled. None could tell if he was concealing lies or truth, only that he was concealing himself.

“You’re raving,” said Arkady abruptly. “And I can’t be dealing with a renegade.”

“I’m no renegade!” said Dag, stung on the raw. Are you so sure, old patroller? He was going to have to unveil, open himself to those coppergold eyes and whatever lay behind them, which he hadn’t wanted to do at this gate. Or at all, he admitted to himself.

“Deserter?” said Neeta suspiciously. She glanced at Fawn, and her voice grew edged with scorn. “Oh, of course. It’s obvious. Banished for farmer loving, back in Oleana.”

“No!” Although the latter had come too close to being true. “I resigned from the patrol in good order. My old camp captain knows where I went and why.” The problem was huge, complex, with snarled strings running down into the most intimate aspects of his ground and up and out into the whole wide green world. Blight, it’s impossible to speak this tangle plain. But Fawn’s eyes were urgent on him. He must not disappoint her appalling trust.

“Renegade, deserter, banished, or just plain mad, it’s clear you’re unfit to be a medicine maker,” said Arkady coldly. “Off with you. Get out of this camp.” He began to veer away. Fawn’s hand went out in pleading; he did not glance at her.

We pretend to save farmers, thought Dag, but in truth we turn our backs…

Opening his ground here, now, felt like tearing off a bandage stuck to a half-healed wound. Dag nearly expected to see blood and pus flying.

For the first time in weeks, he extended his ghost hand in its full power.

And ground-ripped a strip from the back of the maker’s left hand, right down to the matter. Blood burst from it like a cat scratch. Arkady hissed and wheeled back.

Open at last to the man, Dag bent before the density of his ground, a subdued brilliance like the sun behind a cloud. What Arkady would make of the dark mess that was presently Dag, there was no guessing.

The maker’s face worked with ripples of emotion: shock, outrage, chilling anger.

Arkady touched the bleeding scratch with the finger of his other hand; the blood stopped flowing. Some floating part of Dag’s mind marveled: Ah! He can do groundwork on himself!

Dag said, in a dead-level voice, “Open as you were, I could have reached in and done that to the artery from your heart just as easily. At your first heartbeat, it would have burst, and you’d have been dead in the next. And I’m walkin’ around loose out here. If I’m not to turn into a real renegade, a man who just needs killin’, I need some kind of a pathfinder. Because right now I’m almost as lost as I’ve ever been.” Save for after Wolf Ridge, and the death of Kauneo. Nothing would ever be as dark as that again; the realization was oddly consoling.