Lois Bujold - The Sharing Knife - Beguilement

“How could they think that?” said Fawn indignantly. She straightened her spine against the house wall, twitching the white folds of her overabundant gown tighter about her, and frowned.

“Well, there’s a bit of history, there. Some bandits have claimed to be patrollers, in the past. Usually we leave bandits to their farmer-brethren, but those we string up good, if we catch ‘em at it. Farmers can’t always tell. I expect these’ll be all right, once they get over being jumpy.”

Dag stayed seated on the porch edge as the men neared, though he too sat up straighter. He raised his right hand to his temple in what might have been a salute of greeting or just scratching his head, but in either case conveyed no threat. “Evenin’,” he rasped.

The men sidled forward, looking ready either to pounce or bolt at the slightest provocation. The oldest, a thickset fellow with a bit of gray in his hair and the pitchfork in his grip, stepped in front. His glance at Fawn was bewildered.

She smiled back and waved her fingers.

Provisionally polite, the thickset man returned a “How de’.” He grounded the butt of his pitchfork and continued more sternly, “And who might you be, and what are you doing here?”

Dag gave a nod. “I’m from Mari Redwing’s Lakewalker patrol. We were called down from the north a couple of days ago to help deal with your blight bogle. This here’s Miss Sawfield. She was kidnapped off the road yesterday by the bogle I was hunting, and injured. I’d hoped to find folks here to help her, but you were all gone. Not willingly, by the signs.”

He’d left out an awful lot of important complications, Fawn thought. Only one was hers alone to speak to: “Bluefield,” she corrected. “M’ name’s Fawn Bluefield.”

Dag glanced over his shoulder, eyebrows rising. “Ah, right.”

Fawn tried to lighten the frowns of the farmers by saying brightly, “This your place?”

“Ayup,” said the man.

“Glad you made it back. Is everyone all right?”

A look of thankfulness in the midst of adversity came over the faces of all the men. “Ayup,” the spokesman said again, in a huff of blown-out breath. “Praise be, we didn’t suffer no one getting killed by those, those… things.”

“It was a near chance,” muttered a brown-haired fellow, who looked to be a brother or cousin of the thickset man.

A younger man with bright chestnut hair and freckles slid around to Dag’s left, staring at his empty shirt cuff. Dag feigned not to notice the stare, but Fawn thought she detected a slight stiffening of his shoulders. The man burst out,

“Hey—you wouldn’t be that fellow Dag all those other patrollers are looking for, would you? They said you couldn’t hardly be mistook—tall drink of water with his hair cropped short, bright goldy eyes, and missing his left hand.” He nodded in certainty, taking inventory of the man on the porch.

Dag’s voice was suddenly unguarded and eager. “You’ve seen my patrol? Where are they? Are they all right? I’d expected them to find me before now.”

The red-haired fellow made a wry face, and said, “Spread out between Glassforge and that big hole back in the hills those crazy fellows were trying to make us dig, I guess. Looking for you. When you hadn’t turned up in Glassforge by this morning, that scary old lady carried on like she was afraid you were dead in a ditch somewheres. I had four different patrollers buttonhole me with your particulars before we got out of town.”

Dag’s lips lifted at that apt description of what Fawn guessed must be his patrol leader, Mari. The boy and the skinny graybeard on the horse, once the fence rails were replaced, drifted up to the edge of the group watch and listen.

The thickset man gripped his pitchfork haft tighter again, although not in threat. “Them other patrollers all said you must have killed the bogle. They said that had to be what made all them monsters, mud-men they calls ‘em, run off like that yesterday night.”

“More or less,” said Dag. A twitch of his hand dismissed—or concealed—the details. “You’re right to travel cautious. There might still be a few bandits abroad—that’ll be for the Glassforge folks to deal with. Any mud-men who escaped my patrol or Chato’s will be running mindless through the woods for a while, till they die off. I put down two yesterday, but at least four I know of got away into the brush. They won’t attack you now, but they’re still dangerous to surprise or corner, like any sick wild animal. The malice’s—bogle’s—lair was up in the hills not eight miles due east of here. You all were lucky to escape its attentions before this.”

“You two look like you collected some attentions yourselves,” said the thickset man, frowning at their visible bruises and scrapes. He turned to the lanky boy.

“Here, Tad—go fetch your mama.” The boy nodded eagerly and pelted back down the lane toward the woods.

“What happened here?” Dag asked in turn.

This released a spate of increasingly eager tale-telling, one man interrupting another with corroboration or argument. Some twenty, or possibly thirty, mud-men had erupted out of the surrounding woods four days ago, brutalizing and terrifying the farm folk, then driving them off in a twenty-mile march southeast into the hills. The mud-men had kept the crowd under control by the simple expedient of carrying the three youngest children and threatening to dash out their brains against the nearest tree if anyone resisted, a detail that made Fawn gasp but Dag merely look more expressionless than ever. They had arrived at length at a crude campsite containing a couple dozen other prisoners, mostly victims of road banditry; some had been held for many weeks. There, the mud-men, uneasily supervised by a few human bandits, seemed intent on making their new slaves excavate a mysterious hole in the ground.

“I don’t understand that hole,” said the thickset man, eldest son of the graybeard and apparent leader of the farm folk, whose family name was Horseford.

The stringy old grandfather seemed querulous and addled—traits that seemed to predate the malice attack, Fawn judged from the practiced but not-unkind way everyone fielded his complaints.

“The malice—the blight bogle—was probably starting to try to mine,” said Dag thoughtfully. “It was growing fast.”

“Yes, but the hole wasn’t right for a mine, either,” put in the red-haired man, Sassa. He’d turned out to be a brother-in-law of the house, present that day to help with some log-hauling. He seemed less deeply shaken than the rest, possibly because his wife and baby had been safely back in Glassforge and had missed the horrific misadventure altogether. “They didn’t have enough tools, for one thing, till those mud-men brought in the ones they stole from here. They had folks digging with their hands and hauling dirt in bags made out of their clothes.

It was an awful mess.”

“Would be, at first, till the bogle caught someone with the know-how to do it right,” said Dag. “Later, when it’s safe again, you folks should get some real miners to come in and explore the site. There must be something of value under there; the malice would not have been mistaken about that. This part of the country, I’d guess an iron or coal seam, maybe with a forge planned to follow, but it might be anything.”

“I’d wondered if they were digging up another bogle,” said Sassa. “They’re supposed to come out of the ground, they say.” Dag’s brows twitched up, and he eyed the man with new appraisal. “Interesting idea. When two bogles chance to emerge nearby, which happily doesn’t occur too often, they usually attack each other first thing.”

“That would save you Lakewalkers some trouble, wouldn’t it?”