Fawn’s companions were looking impatiently at the shifting sun and their dwindling stocks of medicines and customers when a light cart drove up to the shelter, drawn by a rather winded mare. As she dropped her head to crop the scant grass, a young man jumped down and fetched out some slat crates. He glanced around, then carried them up to the medicine table and went back for two more. Fawn peeked over to see they were jammed with a jumble of glass jars and bottles packed in clean straw.
Almost as winded as his horse, the fellow set down the last boxes and said, “I’m not too late? Good! I don’t have much coin, but figure what these are worth to you.”
Cerie and Nola actually looked pleased by the offered barter—good glass containers were always in demand in the medicine tent—and circled the table to kneel down and inventory the boxes. The young man’s stare lit on Fawn, and he looked taken aback. “Well, hello there! You’re no Lakewalker!”
“No, sir.” The sir was a trifle flattering, but there was no harm in it. She recited her well-worn speech, repeated to nearly every buyer they’d had today: “But I’m married to one. My husband is a Lakewalker from Oleana learning medicine making here.”
“Go on! You don’t look old enough to be married to anyone!”
Fawn tried not to glower at a paying customer. She supposed she’d know herself a woman grown when that remark began to be gratifying and not just annoying. “I’m nineteen. People just think I’m younger on account as I’m so short.” She sat up straight, so he could see she was much too curvy to be a child.
“Nineteen!” he repeated. “Oh.” He looked about nineteen himself, fresh-faced, with brown hair and bright blue eyes. He had a wiry build like Whit, but was, of course, taller. “I guess your, um…husband must be pretty important, to get you into the camp. They don’t usually let farmers past their gates here, you know.”
Fawn shrugged. “New Moon hasn’t taken us on as members or anything. We’re just visiting. Dag found me a job here when I ran out of stuff to spin and got to pining for home. He used to be a patroller up Oleana way, but now he feels a calling to be a medicine maker. To farmers,” she added proudly. “No one’s done that before.”
His mouth opened in surprise. “But that’s not possible! Farmers are supposed to go crazy if Lakewalkers use their sorcery on ’em.”
A surprisingly accurate comment, but maybe he was a near neighbor and so less ill-informed than most.
“Dag thinks he’s cracked beguilement, figured out how to make that not happen.” She added honestly, “He’s still working out whether or not it’ll do something bad to the Lakewalker. He’s just a beginner as far as medicine making goes. But he figures, if he can make it work…His notion is that Oleana farmers need to learn a lot more about Lakewalkers, on account as we have so many more malice—blight bogle—outbreaks up our way, and it’s dangerous for folks to remain so ignorant. He figures healing would give him a straight road to teaching people.”
“Are there really—are the bogles really bad, up that way?”
“No, because the Oleana patrol keeps ’em down, but their job could stand to be made easier.”
The young man rubbed his mouth. “A couple of my friends keep talking about walking the Trace, maybe moving up to Oleana. Is it true there’s free land there, just for the taking?”
“Well, you got to register your claim with whatever village clerk is closest, and then clear the trees and rocks and pull the stumps. There’s land for the back-busting working of it, yes. Two of my brothers are homesteading that way, right up on the edge of the great woods the Lakewalkers still hold. My oldest brother’ll get our papa’s farm, of course.”
“Yeah, mine, too,” sighed the young man. He added after a moment, “My name’s Finch Bridger, by the way. My parents’ place is about ten miles that way.” He pointed roughly southeast.
“I’m Fawn Bluefield,” returned Fawn.
“How de’!” He stuck out a friendly, work-hardened hand; Fawn shook it and smiled back. He added after a moment, “Aren’t the winters tough in Oleana?”
“Nothing like so bad as north of the Dead Lake, Dag says. You prepare for it. Lay in your food and fodder and firewood, make warm clothes.”
“Is there snow?”
“Of course.”
“I’ve never seen snow here but once, and it was gone by noon. In these parts, we mostly just have cold rain, instead.”
“We have some nice quiet times in winter. And it’s fun to have the sleigh out. Papa puts bells on the harnesses.” An unexpected spasm of homesickness shot through Fawn at the recollection.
“Huh,” Finch said, evidently trying to picture this. “That sounds nice.”
Nola and Cerie finished their count and came back around the table, and Finch dug in his pockets to lay out a few supplemental coins. “Let me know how far this goes…I need this, and this…and I can’t leave without this, or I’ll be skinned.”
He took up all their remaining stock of anti-nausea medicine. Fawn raised her eyebrows. “You don’t look old enough to be married, either.”
“Huh? Oh.” He blushed. “That’s for my sister-in-law. She’s increasing, again, and she’s so sick she can barely hold her head up. That’s why I was let off chores to drive over here today.”
“Well, that nice syrup’s bound to help her keep her food down and get her strength back. It doesn’t even taste bad, for medicine.” Fawn sure wished she’d had some, back when. She banished the bleak memory. Her own child had been lost to her before becoming much more than a sick stomach and a social disaster; she had no call to picture her as a bright-eyed little girl the size of that Lakewalker woman’s half-blood child.
The Bridger boy packed his medicines carefully on his cart, then made two trips to a table on the other side of the shelter, lugging half a dozen bulging sacks like overstuffed pillowcases. Fawn didn’t see what he’d acquired in return, but he circled back to her table with a similar sack, scantly filled. He thrust it at her. “Here. You can have this.”
Fawn peeked in to find several pounds of washed cotton. “What else do you need? I don’t know how to value this.” She glanced to Nola for help.
“Nothing. It’s a present.”
“For me?” said Fawn, surprised.
He nodded jerkily.
“I can’t take this off you!”
“It was leftover. No point in hauling it back home again.”
“Well…thanks!”
He nodded again. “Well. Um. It was nice talking to you, Fawn Bluefield. I sure hope everything works out for you. When are you starting back north?”
“I don’t hardly know, yet. It all depends on Dag.”
“Um. Oh. Sure.” He hovered uncertainly, as if wanting to say more, but then glanced at the sun, smiled at her again, and tore himself away.
At the end of another half hour, the last farmer bought the last item left on their table, a jar of purple ointment meant for cuts on horses’ knees, and rode off. All three girls helped the remaining Lakewalkers take down the trestles and roll up the awnings. Cerie and Nola were cheerful at having a good haul of coin to show for the day, as well as the valued glass. They trundled the handcart, reloaded with all their barter, back up the rutted road. Fawn glanced back over her shoulder at the tidied clearing, thinking, This place isn’t quite what it looked at first glance.
Was anywhere? She remembered the little river below the West Blue farm in winter. All hard, rigid ice, seeming utterly still—but with water running underneath secretly eroding its strength until, one day, it all cracked and washed away in ragged lumps. How close were these southern Lakewalker camps to cracking apart like that? It was an unsettling notion.
Dag was watching Fawn unpack the day’s lunch basket on the round table when the distant clanging of a bell echoed through the quiet noon. Arkady shot to his feet, dropping his bread and cheese, though he managed one gulp of hot tea before saying to Dag, “Come on.” And, after a fractional hesitation, “You, too, Fawn.”
&n
bsp; They sprinted up the road to the medicine tent. Arkady fell to a rapid gasping walk as they found themselves crowding up behind a makeshift litter being maneuvered through the door. He grabbed Dag’s arm.
“I thought I’d have at least another week to drill you,” he muttered. “Never mind, you’ll do. Come along, do exactly what I tell you, and don’t hesitate. Drop that hook, it’ll just get in the way.”
“What about my contaminated ground?”
“For the next half hour, we have more urgent worries.”
Dag rolled up his sleeve and worked on his buckles, following after. He’d recognized the pregnant woman on the litter and her tent-kin carrying it almost as fast as Arkady had, because he’d visited her daily in Arkady’s wake.
Somewhat to Dag’s discomfiture, Arkady had dragged him along to every childbirth in New Moon Cutoff Camp since his arrival. As a terrified young patroller, Dag had once delivered a child on the Great North Road under the direction of its irate but fortunately experienced mother, so he was long past mere embarrassment, but he still felt an intruder in these women’s tents. Two births had progressed quite normally, and Dag had been given no tasks but to sit quietly, listen to Arkady instruct him, and try not to loom. In the third, the child had to be shifted into better position inside its mother’s body, which Arkady accomplished with a combination of handwork, groundwork, and, Dag was almost certain, lecturing it.
It was all a much more complicated process than Dag had imagined. What, did you think women were stuffed with straw in there? Arkady had inquired tartly. And gone on to explain that about once a year, all the medicine makers’ apprentices in the area were assembled to witness a human dissection, when someone gifted their body to the purpose, at which all the shifting, sparkling ground the young makers directly perceived was mapped to the secret physical structures that generated it. Arkady promised, or threatened, to make sure Dag observed the next such demonstration. But today Dag would glimpse inside a body still alive. Maybe.
Tawa Killdeer’s complication horrified Dag. The mysterious, nourishing placenta had grown across the mouth of her womb, instead of up a side as it was supposed to. Her labor must rip apart the supporting organ long before the child could emerge to breathe; without aid, the result would be a dead blue infant and a mother swiftly bleeding to death. The proposed treatment was drastic: to cut the child directly from its mother’s belly. The chance of saving the child this way was good; the mother, poor; without groundwork, impossible. But Dag now realized why Arkady had pushed him so hard learning to control blood flow in their practice sessions.
Tawa’s kin, Challa, and Arkady all helped shift the pregnant woman up onto the waist-high bed in the bright far room. Challa was already washing her straining belly with grain spirits as her sister pulled off her clothing. A wad of cloth between her legs was bright with blood.
She didn’t have a bonded sharing knife with her, nor did any of her kin carry one. A northern woman would have…
“Here, Dag,” snapped Arkady. “Open yourself. Down and in.” He grabbed Dag’s left arm and positioned it over Tawa’s lower belly. The room tilted away; before Dag shut his eyes to concentrate on Tawa’s ground, he had one glimpse of her pale face, her set jaw stifling outcry. Her sister held one white-knuckled hand, her frightened husband the other, and Challa’s boy coaxed her clenching teeth apart to insert a leather strap for her to bite. The last time Dag had seen a look like that was on the face of a fellow patroller closing on a malice. Staring down death, eyes defiantly wide open.
Arkady’s voice in his ear: “Placenta’s parting too soon and bleeding underneath. Let your left-side ground projection sink down and in. Spread it as far as you can. Hold pressure just like stopping any other bleeding wound, but you’re working from the inside out. Good…”
Dag shaped his ghost hand like a broad lily pad, pressing against the inside of Tawa’s womb. His right-side projection as well, from the opposite direction, providing counterpressure. The flow of blood between her legs slowed to a trickle. From the corner of one eye, barely open, he saw Challa lean in, the flash of a sharp knife, felt as well as saw flesh part. Two cuts, one of the abdominal wall, a second of the womb itself. Arkady worked across from her, following the blade with his ground-hands, stemming bleeding. Dag caught a glimpse of a tiny, slick purple body sliding out from the cut feetfirst, the flash of the infant’s distressed but alive ground. Other hands took it from Challa. Choking noises, a thin wail.
“One down, one to go,” Arkady muttered.
Tawa’s pain and fear flooded Dag’s ground, which he had matched to hers as closely as a man’s could match a woman’s. He thought of the look on her face and endured. He’d soaked up the like before, in rough-and-ready treatment of patroller injuries on the trail. The sister and husband also partitioned the load of pain and stress, the sharing rendering it more bearable to Tawa; the senior makers had mastered the trick of closing grounds to pain but not to the person, and worked on steadily. Dag hoped the pair was watching out for potential group groundlock.
The sharing wasn’t bearable to everyone. The two herb master’s apprentices had been holding down Tawa’s ankles. One was now head-down in the corner, sobbing, fighting black faintness, her ground snapped shut; her place had been taken over by a dogged-looking Fawn. She grinned back at the glint of his eye, scared, determined—confident in him. Dag remembered to breathe.
“Now,” Arkady murmured in Dag’s ear, “you have to let go the placenta without letting go the pressure, so we can get it out of there and close up. Let your projection slip down through the tissues…a little tug on the cord, oh good, we have it all…that’s right…hold…”
Arkady and Challa together closed the inner cut, he weaving tissues back together in a fragile splice, she setting strong reinforcements. Then the abdominal wall, the support here applied physically, with curved needle and stitches. More washing of the wrinkled, flaccid belly with grain spirits, then dry cloths and dressings. Tawa’s chest heaved, tears of pain dripped down her temples, but her eyes flashed and she nodded weakly as her sister displayed a blanket-wrapped and red-faced little girl to her. Her husband was weeping unashamed, overwhelmed. You blighted should be, Dag thought, not disapprovingly.
A small eternity passed before Arkady murmured in Dag’s ear again: “Ease up gradually, let’s see where we are. The vessels in the womb wall should close on their own at this stage—it’s their good trick. Ah. Yes. It looks like they’re behaving…”
Slowly, Dag withdrew his ghost hands. The broad, natural wound left by the placenta within Tawa was raw but only oozing slightly. She stifled a cry as his breaking ground-match returned her pain to her. He backed away, and the kinswomen closed in to take care of the rest of the cleanup.
Dag blinked, aware again of his shivering body, cold as clay. Fawn appeared under his shoulder. They made it through the room’s other door and out onto the bright porch before he bent over the rail and heaved. The sun, strangely, still seemed to be at noon. Dag felt as though it ought to be sunset.
Arkady came out and handed him a cup of hot tea with a hand that shook slightly. “Here.”
Dag clutched it and sipped gratefully. Arkady lowered himself to a seat against the wall, warmed by the nearly springlike sun, and Dag sat beside him, with Fawn on folded knees at Dag’s other side.
“It was throwing you off the deep end of the dock, but I’m glad you were here today. We don’t often beat those odds,” said Arkady.
He didn’t, Dag noticed, accuse him of inelegant inefficiency this round. “Will Tawa live?”
“If infection doesn’t set in. I’ll send everyone who can give ground reinforcements down to her tent in turns over the next couple of days.” He added after a moment, “You kept your head well, patroller. Usually my apprentices get wobbly, first time we have to open up someone with knives.”
“I expect I’m older than your usual apprentice.” Dag hesitated. “And I’ve opened up folks with knives before, but never to s
ave their lives.”
“Ah.” Arkady sipped.
Dag shared a swallow from his cup with Fawn, and thought about the other complications of childbearing Arkady had described to him. The placenta tearing away from the womb wall prematurely, hiding lethal bleeding till too late; babies turned the wrong way ’round pinching off their own cords; a child too large to pass its mother’s pelvis. Without groundwork, farmer midwives sometimes had to break such a child inside its mother and draw it out dead. Even with groundwork that was sometimes the only way. “How do you make such choices? When it’s one life or the other?” Dag wondered if Arkady understood his question was practical, not despairing.
Arkady shook his head. “Best chance, usually. It varies, and often you can’t know till it’s right up on you.” He hesitated. “There is one other you should know about. And it’s not a choice.
“Sometimes—very rarely, fortunately—the placenta doesn’t implant in the womb at all, but roots in that little tube that runs from the sparkling organ down to it. A child can’t live or be born from there. Instead it grows till it rips the mother apart from the inside, and she dies of the bleeding and rotting. The pain is dreadful, and the fear. It’s not a quick death, nor a merciful one. What you must do if confronted with one of these is to immediately strip the life-ground from the conception. You don’t let the mother or kin argue with you. You may be able to coax the material fragments down into the womb to be flushed out in her next monthly, though often by the time you see it, the tube is ruptured already, and all you can do is lay in ground reinforcements and hope the body will clean up the mess itself.”
“Ground-rip,” said Dag through dry lips. “Like a malice.” Like what the Glassforge malice had done to Fawn’s child; by her set face, he saw she realized this too.
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