Lois Bujold - The Sharing Knife - Beguilement

Confirming this, he stretched, and said, “I wouldn’t mind pushing on. There’s folks at Hickory Lake who can do things to help this heal faster.”

“Is it set all right?” she asked anxiously.

“Oh, yes. That bonesetter might have been a ham-handed torturer, but he knew his trade. It’ll heal straight.”

Dag had called him much worse things than that during the setting, but the fellow had just grinned, evidently used to colorful invective from his patients.

Possibly, Fawn thought, he collected the choice bits.

“If you don’t knock it around.” Fawn felt a little sick with anticipation of her homecoming. But if she had to do it at all, better to get it over with. Dag clearly thought it her duty, the right thing to do; and not even for Stupid Sunny and all her brothers put together would she risk Dag thinking her craven.

Even if I am. “All right. We’ll ride on.”

Dag rubbed his chin with his left sleeve. “In that case, we’d best get our tales straight. I want to leave out the primed knife in front of your family, just as we did for my patrol all but Mari.”

That seemed both fair and prudent. Fawn nodded.

“Anything else is up to you, but you have to tell me what you want.”

She stared down at the red streaks and crumbs on her empty plate. “They don’t know about me and Sunny. So they’re going to be mad that I scared them for seemingly nothing, running off like that.”

He leaned over and touched his lips to a red dent in her neck where one of the malice scabs had finally flaked off. “Not for nothing, Spark.”

“Yeah, but they don’t know much about malices, either.”

“So,” he said slowly, as if feeling his way, “if your Sunny has ‘fessed up, you will have one situation, and if he hasn’t, you’ll have another.”

“He’s not my Sunny,” Fawn said grumpily. “We were both real clear on that.” “Hm. Well, if you don’t tell your folks why you really left, you’ll have to make up some lie. This creates a tension and darkness in your ground that weakens a person, in my experience. I really don’t see why you feel any need to protect Sunny. Seems to me he benefits more from you keeping this secret than you do.”

Fawn’s eyebrows rose. “The shame of the thing goes on the girl. Used goods, they call you. You can’t get another suitor with good land, if word gets around you’re no virgin. Though… I think a lot of girls do anyhow, so you really have to wonder.”

“Farmers, eh.” Dag pursed his lips. “Does the same apply to widows, then?

Real ones, not grass ones.”

Fawn colored at this reminder, though she had to smile a little. “Oh, no.

Widows are a whole different matter. Widows, now… well, nobody can do as they please, really, there might be children, there might be no money, but widows hold their heads up fine and make their own way. Better if they’re not poor, to be sure.”

“So, ah… do you hanker after a suitor with good land, Spark?”

She sat up, startled. “Of course not! I want you.”

He cocked an eyebrow at her. “So why are you worrying about this, again?

Habit?”

“No!” She hesitated; her heart and voice fell. “I suppose… I thought we were a midsummer dream. I just keep trying real hard not to wake up. Stupid, I guess.

Somewhere, sometime… someone will come along who won’t let me keep you. Not for always.”

He looked away, through the deep shade of the walnut trees and down the side road where dust from the recent passage of a pony cart still hung golden in the westering sun. “However difficult your family is, mine is going to be worse, and I expect to stand up to them. I won’t lie, Spark; there are things that can take me from you, things I can’t control. Death is always one.” He paused. “Can’t think of anything else right at the moment, though.”

She gave a short, shaken nod, turning her face into his shoulder till she got her breath back.

He sighed. “Well, what you’ll say to your people is not my choice. It’s yours.

But my recommendation is to tell as much truth as you can, save for the knife priming.”

“How will we explain my going to your camp?”

“Your testimony to my captain is required in the death of the malice. Which is true. If they ask for more, I’ll get up on my tall horse and say it’s Lakewalker business.”

Fawn shook her head. “They won’t want to let me go off with you.”

“We’ll see. You can’t plan other people’s actions; only your own. If you try, you just end up facing the wrong way for the trouble you actually get. Hey.”

He bent down and kissed her hair. “If they chain you to the wall with iron bolts, undertake to break you out.”

“With no hands?”

“I’m very ingenious. And if they don’t chain you, then you can walk away. All it takes is courage, and I know you have that.”

She smiled, comforted, but admitted, “Not in my heart, not really. They… I don’t know how to explain this. They have ways of making me smaller.”

“I don’t know how they’ll be, but you are not the same as you were. One way or another, things will be different than you expect.”

Truly.

Exhausted, hurting, and uneasy, they did not make love that night, but held each other close in the stuffy inn chamber. Sleep was slow in coming. The summer sun was again slanting west when Fawn halted her mare and sat staring up the hill where a descending farm lane intersected the road. It had been a twenty-mile ride from Lumpton Market, and Dag had to admit, if only to himself, that his right arm was swollen and aching more than he cared for, and that his left, picking up an unaccustomed load, was not at its best either. They had taken the straight road north along the spreading ridge between the rivers for almost fifteen miles before turning west. Descending into the valley of the western branch, they’d crossed at a stony ford before turning north once more along the winding river road. A shortcut, Fawn claimed, to avoid doubling back a mile to the village of West Blue with its wagon bridge and mill.

And now she was home. Her ground was a complicated swirl at the moment, but it hardly took groundsense to see that her foremost emotion was not joy.

He kneed his horse up next to hers. “I think I’d like my social hand, to start,”

he murmured.

She nodded, and leaned over to open his belt pouch and swap out his hook for the less useful but less startling false hand. She paused to recomb her own hair and retie it in the curly horsetail with the bright ribbon, then stood up in her stirrups to take the comb to him as well; he lowered his head for the, in his unvoiced opinion, useless attempt to make him look his best. He perfectly understood her determination to walk back into her home looking proud and fine, not beaten and bedraggled. He just wished for her sake that he could look more the part of a valiant protector instead of something the cat had dragged in.

You’ve looked worse, old patroller. Go on.

Fawn swallowed and turned Grace into the lane, which wound up the slope for almost a quarter mile, lined on both sides with the ubiquitous drystone walls.

Past a grove of sugar maple, walnut, and hickory trees, a dilapidated old barn appeared on the right, and a larger, newer barn on the left. Above the new barn lay a couple of outbuildings, including a smokehouse; faint gray curls of smoke leaked from its eaves, and Dag’s nose caught the pleasant tang of smoldering hickory. A covered well sat at the top of the yard, and, on around to the right, the large old farmhouse loomed.

The central core of it was a two-story rectangle of blocky yellowish stone, with a porch and front door in the middle overlooking the river valley. On the far north end, a single-story add-on looked as though it contained two rooms. On the near end, an excavation was in progress, with piles of new stone waiting, evidently an addition planned to match the other. On the west, another add-on girdled with a long, covered porch ran the length of the house, clearly the kitchen. No one was in sight.