“Your wife,” said Arkady delicately, “does not appear to be beguiled.”

“She never has been,” Dag said.

“Have you not done any groundwork on her? ”

“Quite a bit, time to time,” said Dag, “but she never grew beguiled with me. That was half the key to unlocking unbeguilement. Hod was the other half.”

A sweep of Arkady’s clean hand invited Dag to continue. Maybe this subject would be less fraught than Greenspring?

“You know beguilement can be erratic,” said Dag.

“Painfully aware.” Arkady grimaced. “Like most young and foolish medicine makers, I once tried to heal farmers. The results were disastrous. Lesson learned.”

Fawn wanted to hear more of this, but Arkady waved Dag on again.

Dag sighed, as if steeling himself for this next confession. “Hod was a teamster’s helper out of Glassforge-we hitched a ride with his wagon down to Pearl Riffle. My horse kicked him in the knee, which made me feel sort of responsible. I remembered what I’d done with that glass bowl, and set myself to try a real healing. Which I did do-pulled his broken kneecap back together good. But it left him beguiled to the eyebrows, which we found out when he made to follow us on our flatboat. And Fawn said, Take him along and maybe you can figure out why, but if you leave him you never will. And she was right. Come to it, me, Fawn, Hod, and Remo all sat in a circle and traded around little ground reinforcements till we figured it out. I don’t think anyone who didn’t have both a beguiled and an unbeguiled farmer to compare at the same time could have seen it.”

Remo said, “Even I could see it, once Dag showed me. I can’t quite do the unbeguiling trick yet, though.”

Arkady’s glance went in surprise to Remo. “And what did you see? ” he asked.

“Don’t tell him, Dag,” said Fawn. “Show him.” She felt uncomfortable volunteering to be the Demonstration Farmer, but from his expression she suspected Arkady had some pretty stiff-set ideas on the subject that mere assertion would not shift.

“Elbows again? ” said Remo.

“That’d do,” agreed Dag. “Watch close, Arkady, as the ground transfers.”

Remo reached across the table and touched Fawn’s left elbow; she felt the spreading warmth of a tiny ground reinforcement. She tried to decide if it also made her feel any friendlier toward the boy, or made him look finer to her eyes; since she already liked him well, it was hard to tell.

Arkady looked across at Dag in some puzzlement. “So? ”

“Now watch again. Watch for a little backflow of ground from Fawn to me, almost as it flows from me to her. It’s like it flows back through the reinforcement.”

Dag smiled and reached his left arm toward her right elbow. As before, she saw nothing; but Arkady swore-the first she’d heard him do so, she realized.

“Absent gods. That explains it!”

“Yes. You just saw an unbeguilement. The farmer ground tries to rebalance itself through a ground exchange, the way it happens when two Lakewalkers trade ground, but if the Lakewalker is closed-rejects it-it bounces back and sets up this odd, um… imbalance in the farmer ground, which the farmer experiences as longing for another reinforcement. Obsession, if the imbalance is bad enough.”

“No, yes…” Arkady reached up and almost mussed his carefully tied hair. “Yes, I see, but not that alone. Is this why your ground is such a ghastly mess? How many of these have you been doing?” His voice wasn’t quite a shriek. Fawn stared at him with disappointment. She felt Dag’s discovery should be due much more applause.

“I unbeguiled every farmer I did healing groundwork on, of course. Once I’d figured it out, that is,” Dag added a bit guiltily. Fawn wondered how Cress was getting along.

“And then there were the oats,” Fawn put in. “And the pie. And the mosquito, don’t forget that, that started it all. Your poor arm swelled up so bad you couldn’t get your arm harness on after you ground-ripped that mosquito, remember? ”

“You took in ground from all those things? ” said Arkady in horror.

“It’s a miracle you’re still alive! Absent gods, man, you could have killed yourself!”

“Aha!” said Fawn in triumph. “I told you ripping that thorny tree would be a bad idea, Dag!”

Dag smiled wearily. “I sort of figured that out for myself, sir. Well… Fawn and I did. After a bit.”

“A properly supervised apprentice,” said Arkady, somewhat through his teeth, “would never have been permitted to contaminate himself with such dreadful experiments!”

“Groundsetter’s apprentice, you mean? ”

“Of course,” said Arkady impatiently. “No one else would be capable of the idiocy.”

Dag scratched his stubbled chin, and said mildly, “Then he wouldn’t ever have been able to discover unbeguilement. Would he. Might be a good thing I started out unsupervised.”

“Is it still? ” asked Arkady.

Dag lost his glint of humor. “No,” he admitted. “Because then came Crane.”

Arkady, leaning forward to vent something irate, sat back more slowly. In a suddenly neutral voice, he said, “Tell me about Crane.”

“The boys were there for that one,” Dag said, with a tired nod at Barr and Remo.

Remo said, “Crane was a real Lakewalker renegade. Nastiest piece of work I ever did see. Which is why, sir, you shouldn’t ought to call Dag one.” Awed till now by the groundsetter, quiet Remo flashed genuine anger with this; Arkady’s head went back a fraction.

Barr put in, “Crane was an Oleana man, banished from a camp up there for theft and, um, keeping a farmer woman. He’d set himself up as leader to this bandit gang on the lower Grace River, taking and burning boats and murdering their crews-horrible stuff. If it wasn’t for us Lakewalkers being aboard, our flatboat would have been tricked like the others, I think.”

Remo went on, “Dag set us to gathering all the other boats and men that came down the river that day to make an attack on the camp and clean it out. Which we did. Dag, um, captured Crane himself. Barr and I were up the hill dealing with another bandit just then, so I didn’t exactly witness…” He trailed off with a beseeching look at Dag.

Dag said, in an expressionless voice, “I dropped him by ground-ripping a slice out of his spinal cord, just below the neck. Once saw a man fall from a horse and break his neck about there, so I had a pretty good guess what it would do.”

“That… seems extreme,” said Arkady, in a nearly matching voice.

He regarded Dag steadily.

“He was holding a knife to my throat at the time,” Fawn put in, nervous lest Arkady go picturing Dag as some cold-blooded killer, “and his men were about to get away with our boat. I don’t think Dag had much choice.”

“If I had it to do over,” said Dag, “… well, if I had it all to do over, I’d leave more men to guard the boats, regardless of how shorthanded it made us at the cave. But if it were all the same again, I’d do it again. I don’t regret it. But it left me stuck with this last mess in my ground…”

A general gesture at his torso.

Arkady frowned judiciously. “I see.”

“Aren’t you going to tell about the sharing knife? ” said Remo anxiously.

“Oh.” Dag shrugged. “We found an unprimed sharing knife in the bandits’ spoils, that they’d apparently taken off a murdered Lakewalker woman. Crane was due to be hanged with the rest, so I gave him the choice of sharing, instead. Which he chose. Surprised me, a little. I boiled the old bonding off the knife and reset the involution, and bonded it to Crane. And used it to execute him, which was dodgy, but everything else about the man was dodgy, so I figured it fit. First knife I ever made. I’d like to have your camp’s knife maker look it over for soundness, if I get a chance, though I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing as a half-made knife. It either primes or it doesn’t.”

“And,” said Arkady, “you thought you could do this… why? ”

Dag shrugged once more. “My brother is a knife maker at Hickory Lake, so I’ve been around the process off and on. But mostly I learned how from taking apart the groundwork of my knife at Bonemarsh.”