Lois Bujold - The Sharing Knife - Beguilement

Razi smiled eagerly. “It’s a party, patroller-style. They happen sometimes, to celebrate a kill, or when two or more patrols chance to get together. Having another patrol to talk to is a treat. Not that we don’t all love one another”—Utau rolled his eyes at this—“but weeks on end of our own company can get pretty old. A bow-down has music. Dancing. Beer if we can get it…”

“We could get lots of beer, here,” Utau observed distantly.

“Lingerrrring in dark corners—” Razi trilled, catching up the tail of his braid and twirling it.

“Enough—she gets the idea,” said Dag, but he smiled. Fawn wondered if it was in memory. “Could happen, but I guarantee it won’t be till Mari thinks the cleanup is all done. Or as done as it ever gets.” His eye was caught by something over Fawn’s shoulder. “I feel prophetic. I predict chores before cheer.” “Dag, you’re such a morbid crow—” Razi began.

“Well, gentlemen,” said Mari’s voice. “Do your feet hurt?”

Fawn turned her head and smiled diffidently at the patrol leader, who had drifted up to their table.

Razi opened his mouth, but Dag cut in, “Don’t answer that, Razi. It’s a trick question. The safe response is, ‘I can’t say, Mari, but why do you ask?’ ”

Mari’s lips twitched, and she returned in a sugary voice, “I’m so glad you asked that question, Dag!”

“Maybe not so safe,” murmured Utau, grinning.

“How’s the arm-harness repair coming?” Mari continued to Dag.

Dag grimaced. “Done tomorrow afternoon, maybe. I had to stop at two places before I found one that would do it for free. Or rather, in exchange for us saving his life, family, town, territory, and everyone in it.”

Utau said dryly, “Naturally, you forgot to mention it was you personally who took their malice down.”

Dag shrugged this off in irritation. “Firstly, that wasn’t so. Secondly, none of us could do the job without the rest of us, so all are owed. I shouldn’t…

none of us should have to beg.”

“It so happens,” said Mari, letting this slide by, “that I have a sitting-down job for a one-handed man tomorrow morning. In the storeroom here is a trunkful of patrol logs and maps for this region that need a good going-over. The usual.

I want someone with an eye for it to see if we can figure how this malice slipped through, and stop up the crack in future. Also, I want a listing of the nearby sectors that have been especially neglected. We’re going to stay here a few extra days while the injured recover, and to repair gear and furbish up.”

Utau and Razi both brightened at this news.

“We’ll do some local search-pattern catch-up at the same time,” Mari continued.

“And let the Glassforge folk see us doing so,” she added, with dour emphasis and a nod at Dag. “Give ‘em a show.”

Dag snorted. “Better we should offer them double their blight bogles back if they’re not happy with our work.”

Razi choked on the beer he was just swallowing, and Utau kindly if unhelpfully thumped his back. “Oh, how I wish we could!” Razi wheezed when he’d caught his breath again. “Love to see the looks on their stupid farmer faces, just once!”

Fawn congealed, her beginning ease and enjoyment of the patrollers’ banter abruptly quenched. Dag stiffened.

Mari cast them both an enigmatic look, but moved off without comment, and Fawn remembered their exchange earlier on the universal nature of loutishness. So.

Razi burbled on obliviously, “Patrolling out of Glassforge is like a holiday.

Sure, you ride all day, but when you come back there are real beds. Real baths!

Food you don’t have to fix, not burned over a campfire. Little comforts to bargain for up in the town.”

“And yet farmers built this place,” Fawn murmured, and she was sure by his wince that Dag heard clearly the missing stupid she’d clipped out.

Razi shrugged. “Farmers plant crops, but who planted farmers? We did.” What? Fawn thought.

Utau, perhaps not quite as oblivious as his comrade, glanced at her, and countered, “You mean our ancestors did. Pretty broad claim of credit, there.”

“Why shouldn’t we get the credit?” said Razi.

“And the blame as well?” said Dag.

Razi made a face. “I thought we did. Fair’s fair.”

Dag smiled tightly, drew a breath, and pushed himself up. “Well. If I’m to spend tomorrow peering at a bunch of ill-penned, misspelled, and undoubtedly incomplete patrol logs, I’d better get my eyes some rest now. If everyone else is as short on sleep as I am, it’ll be a good quiet night for catching up.”

“Find us lots of local patrols, Dag,” urged Razi. “Weeks’ worth.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Fawn rose too, and Dag shepherded her out. He made no attempt to apologize for Razi, but an odd look darkened his eyes, and Fawn did not like her sense of his thoughts receding to someplace barred to her. Outside, the late-summer dusk was closing in. He bade her good night at her door with studied courtesy. The next morning Dag woke at dawn, but Fawn, to his approval, still slept. He went quietly downstairs and nabbed two patrollers from their breakfast to lug the records trunk upstairs to his room. In a short time he had logs, maps, and charts spread out on the room’s writing table, bed, and, soon after, the floor.

He heard the muffled creak of the bed and Fawn’s footsteps through the adjoining wall as she finally arose and rattled around her room getting dressed. At length, she poked her head cautiously around the frame of his door open to the hall, and he jumped up to escort her down to a breakfast much quieter than last night’s dinner, as a last few sleepy patrollers drifted out singly or in pairs.

After the meal, she followed him back upstairs to stare with interest at the paper and parchment drifting across his room. “Can I help?”

He remembered her susceptibility to boredom and itchy hands, but mostly he heard the underlying, Can I stay? He obligingly set her to mending pens, or fetching a paper or logbook from across the room from time to time—make-work, but it kept her quietly occupied and pleasantly near. She grew fascinated with the maps, charts, and logs, and fell to reading them, or trying to. It was not just the faded and often questionable handwriting that made this a slow process for her.

Her claim to be able to read proved true, but it was plain from her moving finger and lips and the tension in her body that she was not fluent, probably due to never having had enough text to practice on. But when he scratched out a grid on a fresh sheet to turn the muddled log entries into a record visible at a glance, she followed the logic swiftly enough.

Around noon, Mari appeared in the open doorway. She raised an eyebrow at Fawn, perched on the bed poring over a contour map annotated with hand corrections, but said only, “How goes it?”

“Almost done,” said Dag. “There is no point going back more than ten years, I think. Quiet around here this morning. What are folks up to?”

“Mending, cleaning gear, gone uptown. Working with the horses. We found a blacksmith whose sister was among those we rescued from the mine, who’s been very willing to help out in the stable.” She wandered in and peered over his shoulder, then leaned back against the wall with her arms folded. “So. How did this malice slip past us?”

Dag tapped his grid, laid out on the table before him. “That section was last walked three years ago by a patrol from Hope Lake Camp. They were trying to run a sixteen-man pattern with just thirteen. Three short. Because if they’d dropped it down to a twelve-pattern, they’d have had to make two more passes to clear the area, and they were already three weeks behind schedule for the season.