Lois Bujold - The Sharing Knife - Beguilement

The nasty name that Sunny had called her during their argument over the baby stuck in her craw. With one mocking word, Sunny had somehow turned all her love-in-intent, her breathless curiosity, her timid daring, into something ugly and vile. He’d been happy enough to kiss her and fondle her in the wheatfield in the dark, and call her his pretty thing; the slur came later. Dubious therefore, but still… was it typical for men to despise the women who gave them the attention they claimed to want? Judging from some of the rude insults she’d heard here and there, maybe so.

She did not want Dag to despise her, to take her for something low. But then, she would never apply the word typical to him.

So… was Dag lonely? Or lucky?

He didn’t seem the lucky sort, somehow.

So how would you know? Her heart felt as if it knew him better than any man, no, any person she’d ever met. The feeling did not stand up to inspection. He could be married, for all he’d said to the contrary. He could have children. He could have children almost as old as her. Or who knew what? He hadn’t said. There was a lot he hadn’t talked of, when she thought about it.

It was just that… what little he’d talked about had seemed so important. As though she’d been dying of thirst, and everyone else had wanted to give her piles of dry gimcrackery, and he’d offered her a cup of plain pure water.

Straightforward. Welcome beyond desire or deserving. Unsettling…

The valley they were riding down opened out, the creek ran away through broad fields, and the farm lane gave onto the straight road at last.

Dag turned the mare left. And whatever opportunity she had just wasted was gone forever.

The straight road was busier today, and grew more so as they neared the town.

Either the removal of the bandit threat had brought more people out on the highway, or it was market day. Or both, Fawn decided. They passed sturdy brick-wagons and goods-wagons drawn by teams of big dray horses pulling hard going out, and rode alongside ones returning, not empty, but loaded with firewood or hitchhiking county folk taking produce and handcrafts to sell.

She caught snatches of cheerful conversation, the girls flirting with the teamsters when no elders rode with them. Farm carts and haywains and yes, even that manure wagon she’d wished for in vain the other day. The scent of coal smoke and woodsmoke came to Fawn’s nose even before they rounded the last curve and the town came into sight.

Nothing about this arrival was like anything she had pictured when she’d started out from home, but at least she’d got here. Something that she’d begun, finally finished. It felt like breaking a curse. Glassforge. At last.

Fawn leaned precariously around Dag’s shoulder and gazed down the main street, lined with older buildings of wood and stone or newer ones of brick. Plank sidewalks kept people’s feet out of the churned mud of the road. A block farther on, the mud gave way to cobblestones, and beyond that, brick. A town so rich they paved the street with brick! The road curved away to follow the bend in the river, but she could just glimpse a town square busy with a day market. Most of the smokes that smudged the air seemed to be coming from farther downstream and downwind. Dag turned the mare into a side street, jerking his chin at the brick building rising to their left, blunt and blocky but softened by climbing ivy.

“There’s our hotel. Patrols always stay there for free. It was written into the will of the owner’s father. Something about the last big malice we took out in these parts, nigh on sixty years ago. Must’ve been a scary one. Good thinking on someone’s part, because it gets the area patrolled more often.”

“You looked for sixty years without finding another?”

“Oh, there’ve been a couple in the interim, I believe. We just got them so small, the farmers never knew. Like, um… pulling a weed instead of chopping down a tree. Better for us, better for everyone, except harder to convince folks to chip in some payment. Farsighted man, that old innkeep.”

They turned again under a wide brick archway and into the yard between the hotel and its stable. A horse boy polishing harness on a bench glanced up and rose to come forward. He did not reach for the mare’s makeshift bridle.

“Sorry, mister, miss.” His nod was polite, but his look seemed to sum up the worth of the battered pair riding bareback and find it sadly short. “Hotel’s full up. You’ll have to find another place.” The twist of his lips turned slightly derisive, if not altogether without sympathy. “Doubt you could make the price of a room here anyways.”

Only Fawn’s hand on Dag’s back felt the faint rumble of—anger? no, amusement pass through him. “Doubt I could too. Happily, Miss Bluefield, here, has made the price of all of them.”

The boy’s face went a little blank, as he tried to work this out to anything that made sense to him. His confusion was interrupted by a pair of Lakewalkers hobbling out of the doorway into the yard, staring hard at Dag.

These two looked more like proper patrollers, neat in leather vests, with their long hair pulled back in decorated braids. One had a face nearly as bruised as Fawn’s, with a strip of linen wrapped awkwardly around his head and under his jaw not quite hiding a line of bloody stitches. He leaned on a stick. The other had her left arm, thickened with bandages, supported in a sling. Both were dark-haired and tall, though their eyes were an almost normal sort of clear bright brown.

“Dag Redwing Hickory… ?” said the woman cautiously.

Dag swung his right leg over the mare’s neck and sat sideways a moment; smiling faintly, he touched his hand to his temple in a gesture of acknowledgment.

“Aye.

You all from Chato’s Log Hollow patrol?”

Both patrollers stood straighter, despite their evident hurts. “Yes, sir!”

said the man, while the woman hissed at the hotel servant, “Boy, take the patroller’s horse!”

The boy jumped as though goosed and took the halter rope, his stare growing wide-eyed. Dag slid down and turned to help Fawn, who swung her legs over.

“Ah! Don’t you dare jump,” he said sternly, and she nodded and slid off into his arm, collecting something pleasantly like a hug as he eased her feet to the ground. She stifled her longing to lean her head into his chest and just stand there for, oh, say, about a week. He turned to the other patrollers, but his left arm stayed behind her back, a solid, anchoring weight.

“Where is everyone?” Dag asked. The man grinned, then winced, his hand going to his jaw. “Out looking for you, mostly.”

“Ah, I was afraid of that.”

“Yeah,” said the woman. “Your patrol all kept swearing you’d turn up like a cat, and then went running out again anyway without hardly stopping to eat or sleep.

Looks like the cat fanciers had the right of it. There’s a fellow upstairs name of Saun’s been fretting his heart out for you. Every time we go in, he badgers for news.”

Dag’s lips pursed in a breath of relief. “On medicine tent duty, are you?”

“Yep,” said the man.

“How many carrying-wounded have we got?”

“Just two—your Saun and our Reela. She got her leg broke when some mud-men spooked her horse over a drop.”

“Bad?”

“Not good, but she’ll get to keep it.”

Dag nodded. “Good enough, then.”

The man blinked in belated realization of Dag’s stump, but he added nothing more awkward. “I don’t know how tired you are, but it would be kindly done if you could step up and put Saun’s mind at ease first thing. He really has been fretting something awful. I think he’d rest better for seeing you with his own eyes.”