Lois Bujold - The Sharing Knife - Beguilement

He glanced at her in surprise. “From a place of safety? I don’t understand.”

“Well, I didn’t think the road would be this dangerous. That woman from Glassforge made it, after all. It seemed like an even trade, me for her.”

He pursed his lips and stared off down the lane to ask, even more quietly,

“Were you forced?”

“No!” She blew out her breath. “I can clear Stupid Sunny of that, at least. I wanted—to tell the truth, I asked him.”

His brows went up a little, although a tension eased out of his shoulders.

“Is there a problem with this, among farmers? It seems quite the thing to me. The woman invites the man to her tent. Except I suppose you don’t have tents.”

“I could have wished for a tent. A bed. Something. It was at his sister’s wedding, and we ended up out in the field behind the barn in the dark, hiding in the new wheat, which I thought could have stood to be taller. I hoped it might be romantic and wild. Instead, it was all mosquitoes and hurry and dodging his drunken friends. It hurt, which I expected, but not unbearably. I’d just thought there would be… more to it. I got what I asked for but not what I wanted.”

He rubbed his lips thoughtfully. “What did you want?”

She took a breath, thinking. As opposed to flailing, which was maybe what she had been doing back home. “I think… I wanted to know. It—what a man and a woman do—was like some kind of wall between me and being a grown-up woman, even though I was plenty old.”

“How old is plenty old?” He cocked his head curiously at her.

“Twenty,” she said defiantly.

“Oh,” he said, and though he managed to keep the amusement out of his voice, his gold eyes glinted a bit.

She would have been annoyed, but the glint was too pretty to complain about, and then there were the crow’s-feet, which framed the glint so perfectly. She waved her hands in defeat and went on, “It was like a big secret everyone knew but me.

I was tired of being the youngest, and littlest, and always the child.” She sighed. “We were a bit drunk, too.”

She added after a morose silence, “He did say a girl couldn’t be got with child the first time.”

Dag’s eyebrows climbed higher. “And you believed this? A country girl?”

“I said I was stupid about it. I thought maybe people were different than heifers. I thought maybe Sunny knew more than me. He could hardly know less.

It’s not as if anyone talked about it. To me, I mean.” She added after a moment,

“And… I’d had such a hard time nerving myself up to it, I didn’t want to stop.”

He scratched his head. “Well, among my people, we try not to be crude in front of the young ones, but we have to instruct and be instructed. Because of the hazards of tangling our grounds. Which young couples still do. There’s nothing so embarrassing as having to be rescued from an unintended groundlock by your friends, or worse, her kin.” At Fawn’s baffled look, he added, “It’s a bit like a trance. You get wound up in each other and forget to get up, go eat, report for duty… after a couple of hours—or days—the body’s needs break you out. But that’s pretty uncomfortable. Dangerous in an unsafe place to be so unaware of your surroundings for that long, too.”

It was her turn to say, “Oh,” rather blankly. She glanced up at him. “Did you ever… ?”

“Once. When I was very young.” His lips twitched. “Around twenty. It’s not something most people let happen twice. We look out for each other, try not to let the first learning kill anyone.”

A couple of days? I think I had a couple of minutes… She shook her head, not sure if she believed this tale. Or understood it, for that matter. “Well, that—what Sunny said then—wasn’t what made me so mad. Maybe he didn’t know either. Even getting with child didn’t make me mad, just scared. So I went to Sunny, because I reckoned he had a right to know. Besides, I thought he liked me, or maybe even loved me.”

Dag started to say something, but then at her last statement stopped himself, looking taken aback, and just waved her to continue. “This has to have happened to other farmer women. What do your folk usually do?”

Fawn shrugged. “Usually, people get married. In kind of a hurry. Her folks and his folks get together and put a good face on it, and things just go on. I mean, if no one is married already. If he’s already married, or if she is, I guess things get uglier. But I didn’t think… I mean, I had nerved myself up for the one, I figured I could nerve myself up for the other. “But when I told Sunny… it wasn’t what I’d expected. I didn’t necessarily think he’d be delighted, but I did expect him to follow through. After all, I had to.

But”—she took a deeper breath—“it seems he had other arrangements. His parents had made him a betrothal with the daughter of a man whose land bordered theirs.

Did I say Sunny’s folks have a big place? And he’s the only son, and she was the only child, and it had been understood for years. And I said, why didn’t he tell me earlier, and he said, everyone knew and why should he have, if I was giving myself away for free, and I said, that’s fine but there’s this baby now, and it was all going to have to come out, and both our parents would make us stand up together anyhow, and he said, no, his wouldn’t, I was portionless, and he would get three of his friends to say they’d had me that night too, and he’d get out of it.” She finished this last in a rush, her face hot. She stole a glance at Dag, who was sitting looking down the lane with a curiously blank face but with his teeth pressed into his lower lip. “And at that point, I decided I didn’t care if I was pregnant with twins, I wouldn’t have Stupid Sunny for my husband on a bet.” She jerked up her chin in defiance.

“Good!” said Dag, startling her. She stared at him.

He added, “I’d been wondering what to make of Stupid Sunny, in all this tale.

Now I think maybe a drum skin would be good. I’ve never tanned a human skin, mind you, but how hard could it be?” He blinked cheerfully at her.

A spontaneous laugh puffed from her lips. “Thank you!”

“Wait, I haven’t done it, yet!”

“No, I mean, thank you for saying it.” It had been a joke offer. Hadn’t it?

She remembered the bodies strewn in his wake yesterday and was suddenly less sure.

Lakewalkers, after all. “Don’t really do it.”

“Somebody should.” He rubbed his chin, which was stubbled and maybe itchy, and she wondered if shaving was something he didn’t do one-handed, either, or if it was just that his razor was in the bottom of his lost saddlebags along with his comb. “It’s different for us,” he went on. “You can’t lie about such things, for one. It shows in your ground. Which is not to say my people don’t get tangled up and unhappy in other ways.” He hesitated. “I can see why his family might choose to believe his lie, but would yours have? Is that why you ran off?”

She pressed her lips together, but managed a shrug. “Likely not. It wasn’t that, exactly. But I’d have been lessened. Forever. I would always be the one who…

who had been so stupid. And if I got any smaller in their eyes, I was afraid I’d just disappear. I don’t suppose this makes any sense to you.”

“Well,” he said slowly. “No. Or maybe yes, if I broaden the notion from just having babies to living altogether. I am put in mind of a certain not-so-young patroller who once moved the world to get back on patrol, for all that there were plenty of one-handed tasks needing doing back in the camps. His motives weren’t too sensible at the time, either.”

“Hm.” She eyed him sideways. “I figured I could learn to deal with a baby, if had to. It was dealing with Stupid Sunny and my family that seemed impossible.”