He regained control. “Because, don’t you see, a crying patroller is a very embarrassing sight. M’ face gets all snivelly and snotty. Combine that with this blue eye I’ve got starting, and it’d be like to turn your stomach. And then there’d just be another mess to clean up, and we don’t want that now, do we.” He tweaked her nose, which was on the whole an insane thing to do to a woman who’d just saved the world, but it worked to break her bleak mood; she smiled wanly.

“All right, we’re making great progress here, you know. Food, what about food?”

“I don’t think I could, yet. You go ahead.”

“Drink, then. And no arguments with me about that one, I know you need to drink when you’ve lost blood.” Are losing blood. Still. Too much, too fast. How long was it supposed to go on?

Candlelight explorations in the rather astonishing cellar yielded a box of dried sassafras; uncertain of the unknown well water, he boiled some up for tea and dosed them both. He was thirstier than he’d thought, and set Fawn an example, which she followed as docilely as a naive young patroller. Why, why do they do whatever you tell them like that? Except when they didn’t, of course.

He sat against the wall facing her, legs stretched out, and sipped some more. “There would be more I could do for you on the inside, patroller tricks with my groundsense, if only…”

“Groundsense.” She uncurled a little more and regarded him gravely. “You said you’d tell me about that.”

He blew out his breath, wondering how to explain it to a farmer girl in a way she wouldn’t take wrong. “Groundsense. It’s a sense of…everything around us. What’s alive, where it is, how it’s doing. And not just what’s alive, though that’s brightest. No one quite knows if the world makes ground, or ground makes the world, but ground is what a malice sucks out to sustain itself, the loss of which kills everything around its lair. In the middle of a really bad patch of blight, not only is everything once alive now dead, even rocks don’t hold their form. Ground’s what groundsense senses.”

“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.