Beguilement by Lois McMaster Bujold

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 air. 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.
    “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