“Magic?” she said doubtfully.

He shook his head. “Not the way farmers use the term. It’s not like getting something for nothing. It’s just the way the world is, deep down.” He forged on against her frankly blank look. “We use words from sight and touch and the other senses to describe it, but it isn’t like any of those things, really. It’s like how you know… Close your eyes.”

She raised her brows at him in puzzlement, but did so.

“Now. Which way is down? Point.”

Her thumb rotated toward the floor, and the big brown eyes opened again, still puzzled.

“So how did you know? You didn’t see down.”

“I…” She hesitated. “I felt it. With my whole body.”

“Groundsense is something more like that. So.” He sipped more tea; the warm spice soothed his throat. “People are the most complicated, brightest things groundsense sees. We see each other, unless we close it down to block the distraction. Like shutting your eyes, or wrapping a lantern up in a cloak.

You can—Lakewalkers can—match our body’s ground to someone else’s body’s ground.

If you get the match up really close, almost like slipping inside each other, you can lend strength, rhythm… help with wounds, slow bleeding, help with when a hurt body starts to go all wrong down into that cold gray place. Lead the other back to balance. Did something like that for a patroller boy last—ye gods, last night? Saun. I have to stop thinking of him as Saun the Sheep, it’s going to slip out my mouth someday, and he’ll never forgive me, but anyway. Bandit whaled him in the chest with a sledgehammer during the fight, broke ribs, stunned his heart and lungs. I whacked my ground into a match with his right quick, persuaded his to dance with mine. It was all a bit brutal, but I was in a hurry.”

“Would he have died? But for you?”

“I… maybe. If he thinks so, I’m not going to argue; might finally get him to give up those overblown sword moves of his while he’s still impressed with me.”

Dag grinned briefly, but the grin faded again. More tea. “Trouble is…”

Blight, out of tea. “You’ve taken a wound to your womb. I can sense it in you, like a rip in your ground. But I can’t match it to lend you anything helpful through our grounds because, well, I haven’t got one. A womb, that is. Not part of my body or its ground. If Mari or one of the girls were here, they could maybe help. But I don’t want to leave you alone for eight or twelve hours or however long it would take to find one and bring her back.”

“No, don’t do that!” Her hand clutched at his leg, then drew back shyly as she coiled more tightly on her side. How much pain was she in? Plenty.

“Right. So, that means we have to ride this thing out the farmer way. What do farmer women do, do you know?”

“Go to bed. I think.”

“Didn’t your mother or sisters ever say?”

“Don’t have any sisters, and my brothers are all older than me. My mother, she’s taught me a lot, but she doesn’t do midwifery. She’s always so busy with, well, everything. Mostly I think the body just cleans itself out like a bad monthly, though some women seem to get poorly, after. I think it’s all right if you bleed some, but bad if you bleed a lot.”

“Well, tell me which you’re doing, all right?”

“All right…” she said doubtfully.

Her expression was so very reserved and inward. As though painfully trying to listen to the marred song of her own body with a groundsense blighted deaf.

Or futilely looking for that other light within her, so bright and busy just this morning, now dark and dead. In all, Dag thought Fawn had been much too quiet ever since they’d left the lair. It made him feel unsettled and desperate.

He wondered if he ought to invent a few sisters for himself, to bolster his authority in the matter. “Look, I am a very experienced patroller,” he blathered on into that fraught silence. “I delivered a baby single-handedly on the Great Lake Road, once.” Wait, was this a good tale to tell now? Perhaps not, but it was too late to stop. “Well, not single-handedly, I had two hands then, but they were both pretty clumsy. Fortunately, it was the woman’s fourth, and she could tell me how to go on. Which she did, pretty tartly. She was not best pleased to be stuck with me for a midwife. She called me such names. I stored ‘em up to treasure—they came in right useful later on, when I was dealing with feckless young patrollers. Twenty-two I was, and so proud of myself after, you’d think I did all the work. Let me tell you, next bandit I faced after that didn’t look nearly so scary.”

This won a watery chuckle, as he’d hoped. Good, because if he’d gone with the fictional sisters, she might have asked their names, and he didn’t think his invention would last so far. His eyelids felt as if someone had attached lead weights to them when he wasn’t looking. The room was beginning to waver unpleasantly.

“She was one straightforward lady. Set me an example I never forgot.”

“I can see that,” murmured Fawn. And after a quiet moment added, “Thank you.”

“Oh, you’re an easy patient. I won’t have to shave you in the morning, and you won’t throw your boots at my head because you’re cranky and hurting. Bored cranky patrollers who hurt, world’s worst company. Trust me.”

“Do they really throw boots?”

“Yes. I did.”

A yawn cracked his face. His bruises and strains were reporting for duty, right enough. Reminded of his boots’ existence, he slowly drew up his feet and began to undo his laces. He’d had those boots on for two—no, four days, because he’d slept in them night before last.

“Would you feel more comfortable if I went out to sleep on the porch?” he asked.

Fawn eyed him over her sheets, now pulled up nearly to her lips. Pink, those lips, if much paler than he would have liked to see them, but not gray or bluish, good. “No,” she said in a curiously distant tone, “I don’t think I would.”

“Good…” Another yawn split the word, and others crowded after: “Because I don’t think… I could crawl through all that… sticky jam right now. Softer here. You can have the inside, I’ll take the outside.” He flopped forward facedown in the tick. He really should turn his head so he could breathe, he supposed. He turned toward Fawn, that being the better view, and eyed what he could see of her over the hillock of stuffed cloth. Dark curls, skin petal-fair where it was not bruised. Smelling infinitely better than him. A surprised brown eye.

“Mama,” he muttered, “the sheep are safe tonight.”

“Sheep?” she said after a moment.

“Patroller joke.” About farmers, come to think. He wasn’t going to tell it to her. Ever. Fortunately, he was growing too bludgeoned by his fatigue to talk.

He roused himself just enough to stretch over, pinch out the candle, and flop again.

“I don’t get it.”

“Good. ‘Night.” His rueful consciousness of that short curving body separated from his by only a couple of layers of fabric was intense, but very brief. Fawn woke in the dark of night on her right side, facing the kitchen wall, with a weight across her chest and a long, lumpy bolster seemingly wrapped around her in back. The weight was Dag’s left arm, she realized, and he must be dead asleep indeed to have flung it there, because he always seemed to carry it subtly out of the way, out of sight, when he was awake. His chin was scratching the back of her neck, his nose was buried in her hair, and she could feel her curls flutter with his slow breath. He lay very solidly between her and the door.

And whatever might come through the door. Scary things out there. Bandits, mud-men, blight bogles. And yet… wasn’t the tall patroller the scariest of all?

Because, at the end of the day, bandits, mud-men, and bogles all lay strewn in his path, and he was still walking. Limping, anyhow. How could someone scarier than anything make her feel safer? A riddle, that.