Lois Bujold - The Sharing Knife - Beguilement

Petti paused, staring down at her store of food. “Nice girl, that Miss Bluefield.”

“Yes.”

“You wonder how she got in this fix.”

“Not my tale, ma’am.”

“Aye, I noticed that about you.”

What? That he told no tales?

“Accidents happen, to the young,” she went on. “Twenty, eh?”

“So she says.”

“You ain’t twenty.” She moved to kneel by the fire and poke it back for the night.

“No. Not for a long time, now.”

“You could take that horse and ride back to your patrol tonight, if you’re that worried about them. That girl would be all right, here. I’d take her in till she’s mended.”

That had been precisely his plan, yesterday. It seemed a very long time ago.

“Good of you to offer. But I promised to see her safe to Glassforge, which was where she was bound. Also, I want Mari to look her over. My patrol leader—she’ll be able to tell if Fawn’s healing all right.”

“Aye, figured you’d say something like that. I ain’t blind.” She sighed, stood, turned to face him with her arms crossed. “And then what?”

“Pardon?”

“Do you even know what you’re doing to her? Standing there with them cheekbones up in the air? No, I don’t suppose you do.”

Dag shifted from cautious to confused. That the far m wife was shrewd and observant, he had certainly noticed; but he did not understand her underlying distress in this matter. “I mean her only good.”

“Sure you do.” She frowned fiercely. “I had a cousin, once.”

Dag tilted his head in faint encouragement, torn between curiosity and an entirely unmagical premonition that wherever she was going with this tale, he didn’t want to go along.

“Real nice young fellow; handsome, too,” Petti continued. “He got a job as a horse boy at that hotel in Glassforge where your patrols always stay, when they’re passing through these parts. There was this patroller girl, young one, came there with her patrol. Very pretty, very tall. Very nice. Very nice to him, he thought.”

“Patrol leaders try to discourage that sort of thing.”

“Aye, so I understood. Too bad they don’t succeed. Didn’t take too long for him to fall mad in love with the girl. He spent the whole next year just waiting for her patrol to come back. Which it did. And she was nice to him again.”

Dag waited. Not comfortably.

“Third year, the patrol came again, but she did not. Seems she was only visiting, and had gone back to her own folks way west of here.”

“That’s usual, for training up young patrollers. We send them to other camps for a season or two, or more. They learn other ways, make friends; if ever we have to combine forces in a hurry, it makes everything easier if some patrollers already know each other’s routes and territories. The ones training up to be leaders, we send ‘em around to all seven hinterlands. They say of those that they’ve walked around the lake.”

She eyed him. “You ever walk around the lake?”

“Twice,” he admitted.

“Hm.” She shook her head, and went on, “He got the notion he would go after her, volunteer to join with you Lakewalkers.”

“Ah,” said Dag. “That would not work. It’s not a matter of pride or ill will, you understand; we just have skills and methods that we cannot share.”

“You mean to say, not pride or ill will alone, I think,” said the woman, her voice going flat.

Dag shrugged. Not my tale. Let it go, old patroller.

“He did find her, eventually. As you say, the Lakewalkers wouldn’t have him.

Came back after about six months, with his tail between his legs. Bleak and pining. Wouldn’t look at no other girl. Drank. It was like, if he couldn’t be in love with her, he’d be in love with death instead.”

“You don’t have to be a farmer for that. Ma’am,” Dag said coolly.

She spared him a sharp glance. “That’s as may be. He never settled, after that.

He finally took a job with the keelboat men, down on the Grace River. After a couple of seasons, we heard he’d fallen off his boat and drowned. I don’t think it was deliberate; they said he’d been drunk and had gone to piss over the side in the night. Just careless, but a kind of careless that don’t happen to other folks.”

Maybe that had been the trouble with his own schemes, Dag thought. He had never been careless enough. If Dag had been twenty instead of thirty-five when the darkness had overtaken him, it might have all: worked rather differently…

“We never heard back from that patroller girl. He was just a bit of passin’

fun to her, I guess. She was the end of the world to him, though.”

Dag held his silence.

She inhaled, and drove on: “So if you think it’s amusin’ to make that girl fall in love with you, I say, it won’t seem so funny down the road. I don’t know what’s in it for you, but there’s no future for her. Your people will see to that, if hers won’t. You and I both know that—but she don’t.”

“Ma’am, you’re seeing things.” Very plausible things, maybe, given that she could not know the true matter of the sharing knife that bound Dag and Fawn so tightly to each other, at least for now. He wasn’t about to try to explain the knife to this exhausted, edgy woman.

“I know what I’m seeing, thank you kindly. It ain’t the first time, neither.”

“I’ve scarcely known the girl a day!”

“Oh, aye? What’ll it be after a week, then? The woods’ll catch fire, I guess.”

She snorted derision. “All I know is, in the long haul, when folks tangle hearts with your folks, they end up dead. Or wishing they was.”

Dag unclenched his jaw, and gave her a short nod. “Ma’am… in the long haul, all folks end up dead. Or wishing they were.”

She just shook her head, lips twisting.

“Good night!” He touched his hand to his temple and went to haul the tick, stuffed into the next room, out onto the porch. If Little Spark was able to travel at all tomorrow, he decided, they would leave this place as soon as might be.

To Dag’s discontent, no patrollers emerged from the woods that night, either before or after the rain drove him inside. He did not see Fawn again till they met over the breakfast trestle. They were both back in their own clothes, dry and only faintly stained; in the shabby blue dress she looked almost well, except for a lingering paleness. A check of the insides of her eyelids, and of her fingernails, showed them not as rosy as he thought they ought to be, and she still grew dizzy if she attempted to stand too suddenly, but his hand on her brow felt no fever, good.

He was pressing her to eat more bread and drink more milk when the boy Tad burst through the kitchen door, wide-eyed and gasping. “Ma! Pa! Uncle Sassa!

There’s one of them mud-men in the pasture, worrying the sheep!”

Dag exhaled wearily; the three farm men around the table leaped up in a panic and scattered to find their tool-weapons. Dag loosened his war knife in its belt sheath and stepped out onto the porch. Fawn and the farmwife followed, peering fearfully around him, Petti clutching a formidable kitchen knife.

At the far end of the pasture, a naked man-form had pounced across the back of a bleating sheep, face buried in its woolly neck. The sheep bucked and threw the creature off. The mud-man fell badly, as if its arms were numb and could not properly catch itself. It rose, shook itself, and half loped, half crawled after the intended prey. The rest of the flock, bewildered, trotted a few yards away, then turned to stare.

“Worried?” Dag murmured to the women. “I’d say those sheep are downright appalled. That mud-man must have been made from a dog or a wolf. See, it’s trying to move like one, but nothing works. It can’t use its hands like a man, and it can’t use its jaws like a wolf. It’s trying to tear that silly sheep’s throat out, but all it’s getting is a mouthful of wool. Yech!”