Marshaled what had to be said. “Now-you sure, Dag? Because if you’re not, I can go tell Finch no myself.” That much, at least, she could spare him. “This could cost you Arkady.”

He smiled wryly down at her, traced his thumb across her warm cheek. “If it does… then his price is too high, and I’m too poor an old patroller to afford him.”

She gave a short nod, swallowing the lump in her throat. “We’d best bustle about, then.”

She went to their room to pack a sack, and he went to Arkady’s work chamber to borrow a few items of equipment he thought he might need. Quite without permission, and Fawn suspected that wasn’t going to go down too well with Arkady either. She returned to the main room to find him writing Arkady a brief, truthful note.

Well… it said he’d been asked away to treat a sick youngster, and not to expect them back at any particular time. If he left out the word farmer in front of youngster, it wasn’t a lie. Nor even, in all probability, a concealment.

She led Dag back to the sun-speckled hollow to find Finch sitting on the ground with his arms wrapped around his knees, his head bent.

When he heard them approaching he scrambled to his feet, wiping his sleeve across his wet face.

He stared in shock at Dag, looking back and forth-or up and down-between them. “Uh…”

“This is Dag,” said Fawn, grabbing his left arm in a possessive hug.

Snapping eyes daring Finch to say boo, defying him to stare at the hook, and if he blurted one word about how short and young she was, or how old Dag was…

Dag nodded politely. “Finch.”

“Sir!” Finch gulped. “You’re, um…” He peered sideways. And up.

And back to Fawn’s tense face. “… not what I expected.”

“Generally not, but folks get over it,” said Fawn rather tartly, then controlled her prickliness. Finch had enough troubles; he didn’t need to know what they might be sacrificing in his cause. “I’ve been thinking. It might be more discreet if we were to circle around and meet your cart at the end of the road, out of sight of the market.”

“I don’t think it’ll make much difference in the end, Spark,” said Dag.

“Still, there’s no point in going fishing for questions and arguments and delay.”

Since Finch nodded vigorously, this plan was adopted. A quick walk through the open woods brought them to the head of the road not long after the cart arrived, and Dag helped her swing their sacks up into the back. She sat next to Finch, and Dag took the rear-facing seat behind them, folding in his long legs with a sigh. Finch slapped the reins across his mare’s back, urging her into as fast a trot as the roads would allow.

–-

To Dag’s eye, the Bridger farm looked not so snug and rich as Fawn’s family place in West Blue, being more crowded and cluttered, its flat yard still full of churned mud from the winter rains. But it seemed to have all the essentials: a big barn, a large woodlot, outbuildings in varied states of repair, fences penning cows, pigs, and chickens, if not their smell. The unpainted wooden farmhouse was two stories high and foursquare.

Dag followed Finch into the dim center hall feeling they were a noisy invasion; for a moment, the hush seemed deathly, and he thought, Too late!, not knowing whether to be grieved or relieved. But a moan from above-stairs, and a woman’s sob, cured that impression as fast as did his reaching groundsense.

They clumped up the stairs into a crowded corner room. On a bed that seemed far too big for him, a small boy writhed in pain. His lips were drawn back in the distinctive near-grin of his disease, his neck rigid, his breath whistling through his tight little teeth. A young woman, clearly his frantic mother, was patting and stroking him as if she could coax his straining muscles to relax. His grim grandmother sat on the bed’s other side, holding his clutching hand and looking exhausted.

Both stood and stared at the apparition of Dag, eyes filling with fear and desperate hope. A few days earlier, Dag thought, it would likely have just been fear. Dag swallowed and drew Fawn in front of him like a human shield. His own ground seemed to center itself, drawn like a lodestone to the agony in the bed. “Fawn,” he muttered, “deal with them. I need to see to this.”

He released his grip on her right shoulder, and she stepped forward, her motion catching the women’s eyes. Smiling, Fawn gave her little knee dip, and said brightly, “How de’! I’m Fawn Bluefield and this is my husband, Dag Bluefield. I guess Finch has told you how he met me in the New Moon farmer’s market. Dag here’s training up to be a Lakewalker medicine maker.”

Good of her to get that training up in right away, to stop them from expecting such miracles as Arkady could no doubt produce. Names were offered in return in thin voices: Cherry Bridger, the mama, Missus Bridger, the grandmama. Finch’s mother stared at her careless son who had produced this Lakewalker prodigy, new doubt sapping old anger.

“Now,” Fawn went on briskly, “the first thing Dag needs to do with little Sparrow here is take a look at him in his ground, and then we can see how to go on from there. So if you could just let him by, ma’am…” She pursed her lips and picked the grandmother to draw out of Dag’s way.

“Take off my arm harness first, Spark. I doubt I’ll need it for anything here.” Fawn nodded, folded up his left sleeve, and went to work on his buckles. He bent his head toward her, but watched the others out of the corner of his eye. This ritual, with sweet-faced Fawn making short work of the ugly, threatening hook, always seemed to have a soothing effect on farmer patients. Dag wasn’t sure if it was pure distraction, or his display of vulnerability, or a signal, or just a show: You’ve all seen a man rolling up his sleeves to get down to work? Well, watch this!

Dag rubbed the red marks left by the leather straps on his arm, and slipped past the wide-eyed women. He abandoned his attempt to marshal a greeting for a frightened five-year-old when it became obvious the boy was too gripped by his spasms to hear or understand. He muttered in Fawn’s ear, “Now, if it looks like I’ve gone in too deep or am staying too long, slap me on the side of the head the way you saw Arkady do. Hard as you have to. Can you do that? ”

She nodded firmly. Dag sank to his knees at the bedside, the visible world already fading from his senses, the swirl of its true substance rising to the fore. Behind him, he could hear Fawn’s cheerful voice raised in the beginner lecture: Now, let me tell you all something about Lakewalker groundsense…

The child’s ground was roiling. Down and in. The flare of fever was familiar by now, not good but not the main problem. The deep puncture in the foot hadn’t been cleaned out properly, and was hot and dirty and poisonous inside despite its deceptively healed surface skin. But it was indeed the frenzied noise along the nerves that drove the relentless muscle spasms. Dag sent soothing groundwork twisting down their branches like releasing dye into a stream, and felt the frenzy slacken.

He fought his way up and out before groundlock set in, and came back blinking to a room that seemed awfully quiet. He sat back on his heels. Looked around vaguely, found Fawn. “How long was I in? ”

“ ’Bout ten minutes. Dag, it was amazing! You could just see his poor little muscles give way, one by one!”

A new figure had arrived, clearly Finch’s older brother, staring hard at the scene. He held Sparrow’s mother tightly around the shoulders.

“Is he better? Is he well? ” she choked.

“Not yet, ma’am,” Dag told her regretfully. “Just a temporary respite. I’m going to have to go back in again when this wears off. But each treatment buys some time. First, we have to get as much drink and food into him as the little fellow can hold, to keep the disease from killing him of starvation. And we need to go in and do a better job cleaning out that puncture. We’ll need boiled water-Fawn, can you see to it? And some sort of soft, rich food, but easy to keep down-I don’t know-”