Lois Bujold - The Sharing Knife - Beguilement

Dag’s eyes narrowed, and a fool’s hope rose in his heart. Was Mari about to say she wouldn’t interfere? Surely not…

“If you can’t be turned or reasoned with, well, these things happen, eh?” The sarcasm tingeing her voice quenched the hope. “But if you are so bound and determined to get in, you’d better have a plan for how you’re going to get out, and I want to hear it.”

I don’t want to get out. I don’t want an end. Unsettling realization, and Dag wasn’t sure where to put it. Blight it, he hadn’t even begun…anything. This argument was moving too fast for him, no doubt Mari’s intent. “All the great plans I ever made for my life ended in horrible surprises, Mari. I swore off plans sometime back.”

She shook her head in scorn. “I halfway wish you were some lout I could just thump. Well… no, I don’t. But you’re you. If she’s cut up at the end—and I don’t see how this can be anything other than a real short ride—so will you be.

Double disaster. I can see it coming, and so can you. So what are you going to do?”

Dag said tightly, “What do you suggest, seeress?”

“That there’s no way you can end this well. So don’t start.”

I haven’t started, Dag wanted to point out. A truth on his lips and a lie in his ground, perhaps? Endurance had been his last remaining virtue for a long, long time, now; he hugged his patience to him and stood, just stood.

In the face of his stubborn silence, Mari shifted her stance and her attack once more. “There are two great duties given to those born of our blood. The first is to carry on the long war, with resolute fortitude, in living and in dying, in hope or out of it. In that duty you have not ever failed.”

“Once.”

“Not ever,” she contradicted this. “Overwhelming defeat is not failure; it’s just defeat. It happens sometimes. I never heard that you ran from that ridge, Dag.”

“No,” he admitted. “I didn’t have the chance. Surrounded makes running away a bit of a puzzle, which I did not get time to solve.”

“Aye, well. But then there’s the other great duty, the second duty, without which the first is futile, dross and delusion. The duty you have so far failed altogether.”

His head came up, stung and wary. “I’ve given blood and sweat and all the years of my life so far. I still owe my bones and my heart’s death, which I mean to give, which I will give in their due time if chance permits, but suicide is a self-indulgence and a desertion of duty no one will ever accuse me of, I decided that years ago, so I don’t know what else you want.”

Her lips compressed; her gaze went intent with conviction. “The other duty is to create the next generation to hand on the war to. Because all we do, the miles and years we walk, all that we bleed and sweat and sacrifice, will come to nothing if we do not also pass on our bodies’ legacy. And that’s a task on which you have turned your back for the past twenty years.”

Behind his back, his right hand gripped the arm cuff till he could hear the wood creak, and he forced his clench to loosen lest he break what had been so recently mended. He tried clamping his teeth down just as tight on any response, but one leaked out nonetheless: “Borrow my mother’s jawbone, did you?”

“I expect I could do her whole speech by rote, I’ve had to listen to her complaints often enough, but no. This is my own, hard-won with my life’s blood.

Look, I know your mother pushed you too soon and too hard after Kauneo and set your back up good and stiff, I know you needed more time to get over it all.

But time’s gone by, Dag, time and past time. That little farmer girl’s the proof of it, if you needed any. And I don’t want to be caught underneath when you come crashing down.”

“You won’t be; we’re leaving.”

“Not good enough. I want your word.” You can’t have it. And was that, itself, some decision? He knew he wavered, but had he already gone beyond some point of no return? Ana what would that point be? He scarcely knew, but his head was pounding with the heat, and a bone-deep exhaustion gripped him. His drying clothing itched and stank. He longed for a cold bath. If he held his head under for long enough, would the pain stop?

Ten or fifteen minutes ought to do it.

“If I had died at Wolf Ridge, I would be childless now just the same,” he snarled at Mari. And not even my kin could complain. Or leastways, I wouldn’t have to listen. “I have a plan. Why don’t you just pretend that I’m dead?”

He turned on his heel and marched out.

Which would have made a grander exit if she hadn’t shouted so furiously and so accurately after him, “Oh, certainly—why not? You do!”

Dag thought he’d had his groundsense strapped down tight, but whatever of his vile mood still leaked through the cracks was enough to clear the bathhouse of the three convalescent patrollers idling there within five minutes of his entry.

Still, at length both his body and his wits cooled, and he went off to find some useful task to occupy himself, preferably away from his comrades. He found it in taking a saddle with a broken tree uptown to the harnessmaker’s to trade in for a replacement, and retrieving some other mended gear there, which filled the time till dinner and the arrival of the anxious Utau and the rest of his swamp-slimed patrol.

Mari’s arguments were not, any of them, wrong, exactly. Or at all, Dag admitted glumly to himself. Ashamed, he dutifully set his mind to the upholding of a self-restraint that had once been more routine than breathing… which had somehow grown as heavy as a stone cairn upon his chest. Dead men don’t need air, eh?

At dinner that night he behaved toward Fawn with meticulous courtesy, no more.

Her eyes watched him curiously, wary. But there were enough other patrollers at the table for her to pelt with her questions, tonight mostly about how patrol patterns were arranged and walked, that his silence passed unremarked.

Never had rectitude seemed less rewarding.

The next day was officially devoted to rest and the preparations for the bow-down, and Dag allowed himself to be made mule to help carry in supplies from uptown gathered by the more eager. He crossed paths with Mari only long enough to volunteer for evening watch and door duty, and be briskly refused.

“I can’t put the patroller who slew the malice onto guard duty during the celebration of his own deed,” she said shortly. “I’d have a revolt on my hands—and rightly, too.” She added after a reluctant moment, stopping his protest, “Make sure that little farmer girl knows she’s invited, too.”

Shortly after, he ran into the enthusiast from Log Hollow who was nabbing the volunteer musicians from the combined patrols for practice, a novelty in the experience of most involved, and did not escape till almost time to collect Fawn. Fawn peered at her hair in the shaving mirror and decided that the green ribbons, loaned by Reela of the broken leg, matched her good dress very well.

Reela had been teaching her how to do Lakewalker hair braids, which had turned out to have various meanings; the knot at the nape, Fawn had found out, was a sign of mourning, except when it was a prudent arrangement for going into a fight. Knowing this made the mob of patrollers look different to Fawn’s eyes, and gave her a strange feeling, as though the world had shifted under her feet, if only a little, and could never shift back. In any case she could be certain that tonight’s style, with her hair tied up high on the back of her head by a jaunty bow and allowed to swing like a horsetail, curls bouncing, didn’t say anything she didn’t intend in patroller.

Dag came to her door, seeming more relaxed this evening; Fawn wondered if Mari had imparted some bad news to him in the stable yesterday, to so depress his spirits last night. But now his eyes were bright. His simple white shirt made his coppery skin seem to glow. Yesterday’s reek of swamp and horse and emergency was replaced with lavender soap and something warm underneath that was just Dag.