Lois Bujold - The Sharing Knife - Beguilement

“I noticed you left a lot out of your story,” said Fawn.

“Yes. I’d appreciate it if you would, too.”

“I promised, didn’t I? I sure don’t want to talk about that knife to just anyone, either.”

“If they ask too many questions, or too close of ones, just ask them about their troubles in turn. It’ll usually divert them, when they have so much to tell as now.”

“Ah, so that’s what you were doing out there!” In retrospect, she could spot how Dag had turned the talk so that they had learned so much of the Horsefords’

woes, but the Horsefords had received so little news in return. “Another old patroller trick?”

One corner of his mouth twitched up. “More or less.”

The farmwife came back downstairs about the time her son Tad came in from the barn, and after a moment’s thought she sent the boy and Dag off together to clean up broken glass and rubble around the house. She surveyed her kitchen and climbed down into her storage cellar, from which she emerged with a few jars for supper, seeming much reassured. After setting the jars in a row on the table—Fawn could almost see her counting stomachs and planning the upcoming meal in her head—she turned back and frowned down at Fawn.

“We’ll have to get you into a proper bed. Birdy’s room, I think, once Tad gets the glass out. It wasn’t too bad, otherwise.” And then, after a pause, in a much lower voice, “That patroller fellow tell the straight story on you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Fawn.

The woman’s face pinched in suspicion. “ ‘Cause he didn’t get those scratches on his face from no mud-man, I’ll warrant.”

Fawn looked back blankly, then said, “Oh! Those scratches. I mean, yes, that was me, but it was an accident. I mistook him for another bandit, at first. We got that one straightened out right quick.”

“Lakewalkers is strange folk. Black magicians, they say.”

Fawn struggled up on one elbow to say hotly, “You should be grateful if they are. Because blight bogles are blacker ones. I saw one, yesterday. Closer than you are to me now. Anything patrollers have to do to put them down is all right by me!”

Petti’s thoughts seemed to darken. “Was that what—did the blight bogle…

blight you?”

“Make me miscarry?”

“Aye. Because girls don’t usually miscarry just from being knocked around, or falling down stairs, or the like. Though I’ve seen some try for it. They just end up being bruised mothers, usually.”

“Yes,” said Fawn shortly, scrunching back down. “It was the bogle.” Were these too-close questions? Not yet, she decided. Even Dag had offered some explanations, just enough to satisfy without begging more questions. “It was ugly. Uglier than the mud-men, even. Bogles kill everything they touch, seemingly. You should go look at its lair, later. The woods are all dead for a mile around. I don’t know how long it will take for them to grow back.”

“Hm.” Petti busied herself unsealing jars, sniffing for wholesomeness and fishing out the broken wax to be rinsed and remelted, later. “Them mud-men was ugly enough. The day before we was brought to the digging camp, seems there was a woman had a sick child, who went to them and insisted on being let go to get him help. She tried carrying on, weeping and wailing, to force them. Instead, they killed her little boy. And ate him. She was in a state by the time we got there. Everybody was. Even them bandits, who I don’t think was in their right minds either, wasn’t too easy about that one.”

Fawn shuddered. “Dag said the mud-men ate folks. I wasn’t sure I believed him.

Till after… afterwards.” She hitched her shoulders. “Lakewalkers hunt those things. They go looking for them.”

“Hm.” The woman frowned as she kept trying to assemble the meal by her normal routine and coming up short against missing tools and vessels. But she improvised and went on, much as Fawn had. She added from across the room after a while, “They say Lakewalkers can beguile folk’s minds.”

“Look, you.” Fawn lurched back up on her elbow, scowling. “I say, that Lakewalker saved my life yesterday. At least twice. No, three times, because I’d have bled to death in the woods trying to walk out if he’d died in the fight.

He fought off five of those mud-men! He took care of me all last night when I couldn’t move for the pain, and carried out my bloody clouts with never a word of complaint, and he cleaned up your kitchen and he fixed your fence and he buried your dogs nice in the shady woods, and he didn’t have to do any of that.”

And his heart breaks for the memory of water lilies. “I’ve seen that man do more good with one hand in a day than I’ve seen any other man do with two in a week.

Or ever. If he’s beguiled my mind, he sure has done it the hard way!”

The farmwife had both her hands raised as if to ward off this hot, pelting defense, half-laughing. “Stop, stop, I surrender, girl!”

“Huh!” Fawn flopped back again. “Just don’t you give me any more they says.”

“Hm.” Petti’s smile dwindled to bleakness, but whatever shadowed her thoughts now, she did not confide to Fawn. Fawn lay quietly on her pallet till dusk drove the men indoors. At that point, Tad was made to carry off the feather tick, and the space was used for a trestle table. Makeshift benches—boards placed across sawed-off logs—were brought in to serve for the missing chairs. Petti allowed to Dag as how she thought it all right for Fawn to sit up long enough to take the meal with the family. Since the alternative appeared to be having Petti bring her something in bed in some lonely nook of the house, Fawn agreed decisively to this.

The meal was abundant, if makeshift and simple, eaten by the limited light of candle stubs and the fire at the end of the long summer day. Everyone would be going to bed right after, not just her, Fawn thought. The room was hot and the conversation, at first, scant and practical. All were exhausted, their minds filled with the recent disruptions in their lives. Since everyone was mostly eating with their hands anyhow, Dag’s slight awkwardness did not stick out, Fawn observed with satisfaction. You wouldn’t think his missing hand bothered him a bit, unless you noticed how he never raised his left wrist into sight above the table edge. He spoke only to encourage Fawn, next to him, to eat up, though about that he was quite firm.

“Kind o’ you to help Tad with all that busted glass,” the farmwife said to Dag.

“No trouble, ma’am. You should all be able to step safe now, leastways.” Sassa offered, “I’ll help you to get new windows in, Petti, soon as things are settled a bit.”

She gave her brother-in-law a grateful look. “Thankee, Sassa.”

Grandfather Horseford grumbled, “Oiled cloth stretched on the frames was good enough in my day,” to which his gray-haired son responded only, “Have some more pan bread, Pa.” The land might still be the old man’s, in name at least, but it was plain that the house was Petti’s.

Inevitably, Fawn supposed, the talk turned to picking over the past days’

disasters. Dag, who looked to Fawn’s eye as though he was growing tired, and no wonder, was not expansive; she watched him successfully use his diversion trick of answering a question with a question four times running. Until Sassa remarked to him, sighing, “Too bad your patrol didn’t get there a day sooner. They might’ve saved that poor little boy who got et.”

Dag did not exactly wince. It was merely a lowering of his eyelids, a slight, unargumentative tilt of his head. A shift of his features from tired to expressionless. And silence.

Fawn sat up, offended for him. “Careful what you wish after. If Dag’s patrol had got there anytime before I—we—before the bogle died and the mud-men ran off, there’d have been a big fight. Lots of folks might have gotten killed, and that little boy, too.”