Lois Bujold - The Sharing Knife - Beguilement

At length, Fawn’s face sobered in some new thought. She wandered back out of the stall and stood with her arms folded a moment. “Except… I’m not sure if I’ll be able to keep her on a milkmaid’s pay, or whatever.”

“She’s yours absolutely; you could sell her,” Dag said neutrally.

Fawn shook her head, but her expression did not lighten.

“In any case,” Dag continued, “it’s too early for you to be thinking of taking on work. You’re going to need this mare to ride, first.”

“I’m feeling much better. The bleeding stopped two days ago, if I were going to get a fever I think I would have by now, and I don’t get dizzy anymore.”

“Yes, but… Mari has given me leave to take the sharing knife back to camp and have it looked at by a maker. I know the best. I was thinking, since Lumpton Market and West Blue are more or less on the way to Hickory Lake from here, we ought to stop in at your farm on the way and put your folks out of their cruel suspense.”

Her eyes flashed up at him with an unreadable look. “I don’t want to go back.”

Her voice wavered. “I don’t want my whole stupid story to come out.” And firmed:

“I don’t want to be within a hundred miles of Stupid Sunny.”

Dag took a breath. “You don’t have to stay. Well, you can’t stay; your testimony will be needed on the matter of the knife. Once that’s done, the choice of where to go next is yours.”

She sucked on her lower lip, eyes downcast. “They’ll try to make me stay. I know them. They won’t believe I can be a grown…” Her voice grew more urgent. “Only if you promise to go with me, promise not to leave me there!”

His hand found its way to her shoulder in attempted reassurance of this odd distress. “And yet I might with your goodwill leave you here?”

“Mm…”

“Just trying to figure out if it’s the here or the there or the me leaving that’s being objected to.”

Her eyes were wide and dark, and her moist lips parted as her face rose at these words. Dag felt his head dipping, his spine bending, as his hand slipped around her back, as if he were falling from some great height, falling soft…

A throat cleared dryly behind him, and he straightened abruptly.

“There you are,” said Mari. “Thought I might find you here.” Her voice was cordial but her eyes were narrowed.

“Oh, Mari!” said Fawn, a bit breathlessly. “Thank you for getting me this nice horse. I wasn’t expecting it.” She made her little knee-dip.

Mari smiled at her, managing to give Dag an ironic eyebrow-cock at the same time. “You’ve earned much more, but it was what I could do. I am not entirely without a sense of obligation.”

This crushed conversation briefly. Mari continued blandly, “Fawn, would you excuse us for a while? I have some patrol business to discuss with Dag, here.”

“Oh. Of course.” Fawn brightened. “I’ll go tell Saun about Grace.” And she was off again at a scamper, flashing a grin over her shoulder at Dag.

Mari leaned against the end post of the stall and crossed her arms, staring up at Dag, till Fawn had vanished through the stable door and out of ear shot.

The aisle was cool and shady compared to the white afternoon outside, redolent with horses, quiet but for the occasional champing and shifting of the heat-lazy animals and the faint humming of the flies. Dag raised his chin and clasped his hand and hand replacement behind his back, winding his thumb around the hook-with-spring-clamp presently seated in the wooden cuff, and waited. Not hopefully.

It wasn’t long in coming. “What are you about, boy?” Mari growled.

Any sort of response that came to, Whatever do you mean, Mari? seemed a waste of time and breath. Dag lowered his eyelids and waited some more.

“Do I need to list everything that’s wrong with this infatuation?” she said, exasperation plain in her voice. “I daresay you could give the blighted lecture yourself. I daresay you have.”

“A time or two,” he granted.

“So what are you thinking? Or are you thinking?”

He inhaled. “I know you want to tell me to back away from Fawn, but I can’t.

Not yet anyway. The knife binds us, till I get it up to camp. We’re going to have to travel together for a time yet; you can’t argue with that.”

“It’s not the traveling that worries me. It’s what’s going to happen when you stop.”

“I’m not sleeping with her.”

“Aye, yet. You’ve had your groundsense locked down tight in my presence ever since you got in. Well, that’s partly just you—it’s such a habit with you, you stay veiled in your sleep. But this—you’re like a cat who thinks it’s hiding because it’s got its head stuck in a sack.”

“Ah, mental privacy. Now, there’s a farmer concept that could stand to catch on.”

She snorted. “Fine chance.”

“I’m taking her up to camp,” Dag said mulishly. “That’s a given.”

In a sweetly cordial voice, Mari murmured, “Going to show her off to your mother? Oh, how lovely.”

Dag’s shoulders hunched. “We’ll go by her farm, first.”

“Oh, and you’ll meet her mother. Wonderful. That’ll be a success. Can’t you two just hold hands and jump off a cliff together? It’d be faster and less painful.”

His lips twitched at this, involuntarily. “Likely. But it has to be done.”

“Does it?” Mari pushed off the post and stalked back and forth across the stable aisle. “Now, if you were a young patroller lout looking to dip his wick in the strange, I’d just thump him on the side of the head and end this thing here and now. I can’t tell if you’re trying to fool me, or yourself!”

Dag set his teeth and went on saying nothing. It seemed wisest.

She fetched up at her post again, leaned back, scuffed her boot, and sighed.

“Look, Dag. I’ve been watching you for a long time, now. Out on patrol, you’d never neglect your gear or your food or your sleep or your feet. Not like the youngsters who get heroic delusions about their stamina, till they crash into a rock wall. You pace your body for the long haul.”

Dag tilted his head in acknowledgment, not certain where she was going with this.

“But though you’d never starve your body to wasting and still expect to go on, you starve your heart, yet act as though you can still draw on it forever without the debt ever coming due. If you fall—when you fall, you’re going to fall like a starving man. I’m standing here watching you start to topple now, and I don’t know if any words of mine are strong enough to catch you. I don’t know why, blast and blight it”—her voice shifted in renewed aggravation—“you haven’t let yourself get string-bound with any one of the nice widows that your mother—well, all right, not your mother—that one of your friends or other kin used to introduce you to, till they gave up in despair. If you had, I daresay you’d be immune to this foolishness now, knife or no.”

Dag hunched tighter. “It would not have been fair to the woman. I can’t have what I had with Kauneo over again. Not because of any lack on the woman’s part.

It’s me. I can’t give what I gave to Kauneo.” Used up, emptied out, dry.

“Nobody expected that, except maybe you. Most people don’t have what you had with Kauneo, if half of what I’ve heard is true. Yet they contrive to rub along tolerably well just the same.”

“She’d die of thirst, trying to draw from that well.”

Mari shook her head, mouth flat with disapproval. “Dramatic, Dag.”

He shrugged. “Don’t push for answers you don’t want to hear, then.”

She looked away, pursed her lips, stared up at the rafters stuck about with dusty cobwebs and wisps of hay, and tried another tack. “Now, all things considered, I can’t object to your indulging yourself. Not you. And after all, this farmer girl has no relatives here to kick up a fuss for me.”