“Oh, you haven’t made yourself sick again with this, have you?”
“No, in fact. Although this wasn’t near such a draining effort. Pretty, um, stimulating, actually. Thing is…that night I mended the bowl, that was the first time I experienced that, that, call it a ghost hand. I tried several times after, secretly, to make it emerge again, but nothing happened. Couldn’t figure it out. In the parlor, you were upset, I was upset, I wanted to, I don’t know. Fix things. I wasn’t upset just now, but I sure was in, um, a heightened mood. Flying, your aunt Nattie called it. Except now I’ve fallen back down, and the ghost hand’s gone again.”
He glanced over to find her up on one elbow, looking at him with the same interested expression as ever. Happy eyes. Not shocked or scared or repelled. He said, “You don’t mind that it’s, well, strange? You think this is just the same as all the other things I do, don’t you?”
Her brows rose in consideration. “Well, you summon horses and bounce mosquitoes and make firefly lamps and kill malices and you know where everyone is for a country mile all around, and I don’t know what you did to Reed and Rush last night, but the effect was sure magical today. And what you do for me I can’t hardly begin to describe, not decently anyhow. How do you know it isn’t?”
He opened his mouth, then closed it, squinting at his question turned upside down.
She cocked her head, and continued, “You said Lakewalker folks’ groundsense doesn’t come in all at once, and not at all when they’re younger. Maybe this is just something you should have had all along, that got delayed. Or maybe it’s something you should have now, growing right on time.”
“There’s a new thought.” He lay back, frowning at the blameless evening sky. His life was full of new things, lately. Some of them were new problems, but he had to admit, a lot of the tired, dreary, old problems had been thoroughly shaken out. He began to suspect that it wasn’t only the breaking of his right arm that was triggering this bizarre development. The farmer girl was plowing his ground, it seemed. What was that phrase? Breaking new land. A very literal form of ground transformation. He blinked to chase away these twisting notions before his head started to ache.
“So, that’s twice,” said Fawn, pursuing the thought. “So it can happen, um, more than once, anyhow. And it seems you don’t have to be unhappy for it to work. That’s real promising.”
“I’m not sure I can do it again.”
“That’d be a shame,” she said in a meditative tone. But her eyes were merry. “So, try it again next time and we’ll see, eh? And if not, as it seems you have no end of ingenuity in a bedroll, we’ll just do something else, and that’ll be good, too.” She gave a short, decisive nod.
“Well,” he said in a bemused voice. “That’s settled.”
She flopped down again, nestling in close, hugging him tight. “You’d best believe it.”
To Fawn’s gladness they lingered late in the glade the next morning, attempting to repeat some of last night’s trials; some were successful, some not. Dag couldn’t seem to induce his ghost hand again—maybe he was too relaxed? — which appeared to leave him someplace between disappointment and relief. As Fawn had guessed, he found other ways to please her, although she thought he was trying a bit too hard, which made her worry for him, which didn’t help her relax.
She fed him a right fine breakfast, though, and they mounted up and found their way back to the river road by noon. In the late afternoon, they at last left the valley, Dag taking an unmarked track off to the west. They passed through a wide stretch of wooded country, sometimes in single file on twisty trails, sometimes side by side on broader tracks. Fawn was soon lost—well, if she struck east, she’d be sure to find the river again sometime, so she supposed she was only out of her reckoning for going forward, not back—but Dag seemed not to be.
For two days they pushed through similar woodland. Pushed might be too strong a term, with their early stops and late starts. Twice Dag persuaded his ghost hand to return, to her startled delight, twice he didn’t, for no obvious reason either way, which plainly puzzled him deeply. She wondered at his spooky choice of name for this ground ability. He worried over it equally afterwards whether or not he succeeded, and Fawn finally decided that it had been so long since he hadn’t known exactly what he was doing all the time, he’d forgotten what it felt like to be blundering around in the dark, which made her sniff with a certain lack of sympathy.
She gradually became aware that he was dragging his feet on this journey, despite his worries about beating his patrol back to Hickory Lake, and not only for the obvious reason of extending their bedroll time together. Fawn herself was growing intensely curious about what lay ahead, and inclined to move along more briskly, but it wasn’t till the third morning that they did so, and that only because of a threatened change in the weather. The high wispy clouds that both farmers and Lakewalkers called horsefeathers had moved in from the west last night, making fabulous pink streaks in the sunset indigo, and the air today was close and hazy, both signs of a broad storm brewing. When it blew through, it would bring a sparkling day in its wake, but was like to be violent before then. Dag said they might beat it to the lake by late afternoon.
Around noon the woods opened out in some flat meadowlands bordering a creek, with a dual track, and Fawn found herself riding alongside Dag again. “You once said you’d tell me the tale of Utau and Razi if you were either more drunk or more sober. You look pretty sober now.”
He smiled briefly. “Do I? Well, then.”
“Whenever I can get you to talk about your people, it helps me form up some better idea what I’m heading into.”
“I’m not sure Utau’s tale will help much, that way.”
“Maybe not, but at least I won’t say something stupid through not knowing any better.”
He shrugged, though he amended, “Unknowing, maybe. Never stupid.”
“Either way, I’d still end up red-faced.”
“You blush prettily, but I give you the point. Well. Utau was string-bound for a good ten years to Sarri Otter, but they had no children. It happens that way, sometimes, and even Lakewalker groundsense can’t tell why. Both his family and hers were pressuring them to cut their strings and try again with different mates—”
“Wait, what? People can cut their marriage strings? What does that mean, and how does it work?” Fawn wrapped a protective right hand around her left wrist, then put her palm hastily back on her thigh, kicking Grace’s plump sides to encourage her to step along and keep up with Copperhead’s longer legs.
“What leads up to a string-cutting varies pretty wildly with the couple, but lack of children after a good long time trying is considered a reason to part without dishonor to either side. More difficult if only one partner assents to the cutting; then the argument can spread out to both their families’ tents and get very divisive. Or tedious, if you have to listen to them all go on. But if both partners agree to it, the ceremony is much like string-binding, in reverse. The wedding cords are taken off and re-wrapped around both partners’ arms, only with the opposite twist, and knotted, but then the string-blesser takes a knife and cuts the knot apart, and each takes back the pieces of their own.”
Fawn wondered if that knife was carved of bone.
“The grounds drain out back to their sources, and, well, it’s done. People usually burn the dead strings, after.” He glanced aside at her deepening frown. “Don’t farmer marriages ever come apart?”
“I think sometimes, but not often. The land and the families hold them together. And there’s considered to be a shame in the failure. People do up and leave, sometimes, men or women, but it’s more like chewing off your leg to escape a trap. You have to leave so much behind, so much work. So much hope, too, I suppose.” She added, “Though I heard tell of one marriage down south of the village that came apart again in two weeks. The bride and all her things just got carted right back to her family, being hardly settled in yet, and the entry was scratched out in the family book. Nobody would ever explain to me why, although the twins and Fletch were snickering over it, so I suppose it might have had to do with bed problems, though she wasn’t pregnant by someone else or anything. It was all undone right quick with no argument, though, so someone must have had something pretty big to apologize for, I’d guess.”