Lois Bujold - The Sharing Knife - Beguilement

“No. Unfortunately. Because the winning bogle ends up stronger. Easier to take them down piecemeal.”

Fawn tried to imagine something stronger and more frightening than the creature she had faced yesterday. When you were already as terrified as your body could bear, what difference could it make if something was even worse? She wondered if that explained anything about Dag.

Movement at the end of the lane caught her eye. Another plow horse came out of the woods and trotted ponderously up to the farmyard, a middle-aged woman riding with the lanky boy up behind. They paused on the other side of the well, the woman staring down hard at something, then came up to join the others.

The red-haired Sassa, either more garrulous or more observant than his in-laws, was finishing his account of yesterday’s inexplicable uproar at the digging camp: the sudden loss of wits and mad flight of their captor mud-men, followed, not half an hour later, by the arrival from the sunset woods of a very off-balance patrol of Lakewalkers. The Lakewalkers had been trailed in turn by a mob of frantic friends and relatives of the captives from in and around Glassforge. Leaving the local people to each other’s care, the patrollers had withdrawn to their own Lake walkerish concerns, which seemed mainly to revolve around slaying all the mud-men they could catch and looking for their mysterious missing man Dag, who they seemed to think somehow responsible for the bizarre turn of events.

Dag rubbed his stubbled chin. “Huh. I suppose Mari or Chato must have thought this mining camp might be the lair. Following up traces from that bandit hideout we raided night before last, I expect. That explains where they were all day yesterday. And well into the night, sounds like.”

“Oh, aye,” said the thickset man. “Folks was still trailing into Glassforge all night and into this morning, yours and ours.”

The farmwife slid down off the horse and stood listening to this, her eyes searching her house, Dag, and especially Fawn. Fawn guessed from the farm men’s talk that she must be the woman they’d called Petti. Judging by the faint gray in her hair, she was of an age with her husband, and as lean as he was thick, tough and strappy, if tired-looking. Now she stepped forward. “What blood is all that in the tub out by the well?”

Dag gave her a polite duck of his head. “Miss S—Bluefield’s mostly, ma’am. My apologies for filching your linens. I’ve been throwing another bucket of water on them each time I go by. I’ll try to get them cleaned up better before we leave.”

We not I, some quick part of Fawn’s mind noted at once, with a catch of relief.

“Mostly?” The farmwife cocked her head at him, squinting. “How’d she get hurt?”

“That would be her tale to tell, ma’am.”

Her face went still for an instant. Her eye flicked up to Fawn and then back, to take in his empty cuff. “You really kill that bogle that did all this?”

He hesitated only briefly before replying, precisely but unexpansively, “We did.”

She inhaled and gave a little snort. “Don’t you be troubling about my laundry.

The idea.”

She turned back to, or upon, her menfolk. “Here, what are you all doing standing about gabbing and gawking like a pack of ninnies? There’s work to do before dark. Horse, see to milking those poor cows, if they ain’t been frightened dry.

Sassa, fetch in the firewood, if those thieves left any in the stack, and if they didn’t, make some more. Jay, put away and put right what can be, what needs fixin’, start on, what needs tomorrow’s tools, set aside. Tad, help your grandpa with the horses, and then come and start picking up inside. Hop to it while there’s light left!”

They scattered at her bidding.

Fawn said helpfully, pushing up, “The mud-men didn’t find your storage cellar—”

And then her head seemed to drain, throbbing unpleasantly. The world did not go black, but patterned shadows swarmed around her, and she was only dimly aware of abrupt movement: a strong hand and truncated arm catching her and half-walking, half-carrying her inside. She blinked her eyes clear to find herself on the feather pallet once more, two faces looming over her, the farmwife’s concerned and wary, Dag’s concerned and… tender? The thought jolted her, and she blinked some more, trying to swim back to reason.

“—flat, Spark,” he was saying. “Flat was working.” He brushed a sweat-dampened curl out of her eyes.

“What happened to you, girl?” demanded Petti.

“ ‘M not a girl,” Fawn mumbled. “ ‘M twenty…”

“The mud-men knocked her around hard yesterday.” Dag’s intent gaze on her seemed to be asking permission to continue, and she shrugged assent. “She miscarried of a two-months child. Bled pretty fierce, but it seems to have slowed now. Wish one of my patrol women were here. You do much midwifery, ma’am?”

“A little. Keeping her lying down is right if she’s been bleeding much.”

“How do you know if she… if a woman is going to be all right, after that?”

“If the bleeding tails off to nothing within five days, it’s a pretty sure bet things are coming back around all right inside, if there’s no fever. Ten days at the most. A two-months child, well, that’s as chance will happen. Much more than three months, now, that gets more dangerous.”

“Five days,” he repeated, as if memorizing the number. “Right, we’re still all right, then. Fever… ?” He shook his head and rose to his feet, wincing as he rubbed his left arm, and followed the farmwife’s gaze around her kitchen.

With an apologetic nod, he removed his arm contraption from her table, bundled it up, and set it down at the end of the tick.

“And what knocked you around?” asked Petti.

“This and that, over the years,” he answered vaguely. “If my patrol doesn’t find us by tomorrow, I’d like to take Miss Bluefield to Glassforge. I have to report in. Will there be a wagon?”

The farmwife nodded. “Later on. The girls should bring it tomorrow when they come.” The other women and children of the Horseford family were staying in town with Sassa’s wife, it seemed, sorting out recovered goods and waiting for their men to report the farm safe again.

“Will they be making another trip, after?”

“Might. Depends.” She scrubbed the back of her neck, staring around as if a hundred things cried for her attention and she only had room in her head for ten, which, Fawn guessed, was just about the case.

“What can I do for you, ma’am?” Dag inquired.

She stared at him as if taken by surprise by the offer. “Don’t know yet.

Everything’s been knocked all awhirl. Just… just wait here.”

She marched off to take a look around her smashed-up house.

Fawn whispered to Dag, “She’s not going to get settled in her mind till she has her things back in order.”

“I sensed that.” He bent over and took up the knife pouch, lying by the head of the pallet. Only then did Fawn realize how careful he’d been not to glance at it while the farmwife was present. “Can you put this somewhere out of sight?”

Fawn nodded, and sat up—slowly—to flip open her bedroll, laid at the pallet’s foot. Her spare skirt and shirt and underdrawers lay atop the one good dress she’d packed along to go look for work in, that hasty night she’d fled home.

She tucked the knife pouch well away and rolled up the blanket once more.

He nodded approval and thanks. “Best not to mention the knife to these folks, I think. Bothersome. That one worse than most.” And, under his breath, “Wish Mari would get here.”

They could hear the farmwife’s quick footsteps on the wooden floors overhead, and occasional wails of dismay, mostly, “My poor windows!”