Lois Bujold - The Sharing Knife - Beguilement

She was fluting the edge of the second one and reluctantly contemplating building up the fire under the hearth oven, which would make the hot room hotter still, when Dag came in.

“Drink?” she guessed.

“Please…”

She held the water ladle to his lips; when he’d drained it, he added, “There’s a young fellow who’s tethered his horse in your front woods. I believe he imagines he’s sneaking up the hill in secret. His ground seems pretty unsettled, but I don’t think he’s a house robber.”

“Did you see him?” she asked, then halted, considering what an absurd question that sounded if you didn’t know Dag. And then how well she had come to know Dag, that it should fall so readily from her lips.

“Just a glimpse.”

“Was he bright blond?”

“Yes.”

She sighed. “Sunny Sawman. I’ll bet Clover told folks that I’m back, and he’s come to see for himself if it’s true.”

“Why not ride openly up the lane?”

She flushed a little, not that he’d likely notice in this heat, and admitted,

“He used to sneak up to steal kisses from me that way, from time to time. He was afraid of my brothers finding out, I think.”

“Well, he’s afraid of something.” He hesitated. “Do you want me to stay?”

She tilted her head, frowning. “I better talk to him alone. He won’t be truthful if he’s in front of anyone.” She glanced up uneasily at him. “Maybe… don’t go far?”

He nodded; she didn’t seem to need to explain further. He stepped into Aunt Nattie’s weaving room, flanking the kitchen, and set the door open. She heard him dragging a chair behind it, and the creak of wood and possibly of Dag as he settled into it.

A few moments later, footsteps sounded on the porch, attempted tiptoe; they paused outside the kitchen window above the drainboard. She stepped up and stared without pleasure at Sunny’s face, craning around and peering in. He jerked back as he saw her, then whispered, “Are you alone?”

“For now.”

He nodded and nipped in through the back door. She regarded him, testing her feelings. Straw-gold hair still curled around his head in soft locks, his eyes were still bright blue, his skin fair and fine and summer-flushed, his shoulders broad, his muscular arms, tanned where his sleeves were rolled up, coated with a shimmer of gold hairs that had always seemed to make him gleam in sunlight.

His physical charm was unchanged, and she wondered how it was that she was now so wholly unmoved by it, who had once trembled beneath it in a wheatfield in such wild, flattered elation.

His daughter would have been a pretty girl. The thought twisted in her like a knife, and she fought to set it aside.

“Where is everyone?” he asked cautiously, looking around again.

“Papa and the boys are up cutting hay, Mama is out giving the chickens a dusting with that antilice powder she got from your uncle, and Aunt Nattie’s bad knee hurt so she went to lie down after lunch.”

“Nattie’s blind, she won’t see me anyhow. Good.” He loomed nearer, staring hard at her. No—just at her belly. She resisted an impulse to slump and push it out.

His head cocked. “As little as you are, I’d have thought you’d be popping out by now. Clover sure would have bleated about it if she’d noticed.”

“You talk to her?”

“Saw her at noon, down in the village.” He shifted restlessly. “It’s all the talk there, you turning up again.” He turned again, scowling. “So, did you come back to fuss at me some more? It won’t do you any good. I’m betrothed to Violet now.”

“So I heard,” said Fawn, in a flat voice. “I actually hadn’t planned to see you at all. We wouldn’t have stayed on today except for Dag’s broken arm.”

“Yeah, Clover said you had some Lakewalker fellow trailing you. Tall as a flagpole, with one arm wooden and the other broke, who didn’t hardly say boo.

Sounds about useless. You been running around alone with him for three or four weeks, seemingly.” He wet his lips. “So, what’s your plan? Switching horses in the middle of the river? Going to tell him the baby is his and hope he can’t count too good?”

A cast-iron frying pan was sitting on the drainboard. Swung in an appropriate arc, it would just fit Sunny’s round face, Fawn thought through a red haze.

“No.”

“I’m not playing your little game, Fawn,” said Sunny tightly. “You won’t pin this on me. I meant what I said.” His hands were trembling slightly. But then, so were hers.

Her voice went, if possible, even flatter. “Well, you can put your mind and your nasty tongue to rest. I miscarried down near Glassforge the day the blight bogle nearly killed me. So there’s nothing left to pin on anyone, except bad memories.”

His breath of relief was visible and audible; he squeezed his eyes shut with it.

The tension in the room seemed to drop by half. She thought Sunny must have gone into a flying panic when he’d heard of her return, watching his comfortable little world teeter, and felt grimly recompensed. Her world had been turned upside down. But if she could now turn it back upright, make all her misery not have been, at the cost of losing all she’d learned on the road to Glassforge—would she?

She could not, she thought, in all fairness judge Sunny for acting as though his daughter weren’t real to him; she’d scarcely seemed real to Fawn a deal of the time either, after all. She asked instead, “So where did you think I’d gone?”

He shrugged. “I thought at first you might have thrown yourself in the river.

Gave me a turn, for a while.”

She tossed her head. “But not enough of one to do anything about it, seemingly.”

“What would there have been to do at that point? It seemed like the sort of stupid thing you’d do when you get a mad on. You always did have a temper. I remember how your brothers’d get you so wound up you could scarcely breathe for screaming, sometimes, till your pa’d tear his hair and come beat you for making such awful noise. Then the word got around that some of your clothes had gone missing, which made it seem you’d run off, since not even you would take three changes to go drowning. Your folks all looked, but I guess not far enough.”

“You didn’t help look then, either, I take it.”

“Do I look stupid? I didn’t want to find you! You got yourself into this fix, you could get yourself out.”

“Yeah, that’s what I figured.” Fawn bit her lip.

Silence. More staring.

Just go away, you awful lout. “I haven’t forgotten what you said to me that night, Sunny Sawman. You aren’t welcome in my sight. In case you’d any doubt.”

He shrugged irritably. His golden brows drew together over his snub nose. “I figured the blight bogle was a tall tale. What really happened?”

“Bogles are real enough. One touched me. Here and there.” She fingered her neck where the dents glowed an angry red, and, reluctantly, laid her palm over her belly. “Lakewalkers make special knives to kill malices—that’s their name for blight bogles. Dag had one. Between us, we did for the bogle, but it was too late for the child. It was almost too late for the two of us, but not quite.”

“Oh, magic knives, now, as well as magic monsters? Sure, I believe that. Or maybe some of those secret Lakewalker medicines did the job, and the rest is a nice tale to cover it, make you look good in front of your family, eh?” He moved closer to her. She moved back.

“They don’t even know I was pregnant. I didn’t tell them that part.” She drew a long breath. “Do you really care which, so long as it’s not on you? Feh!” She gripped her hair, then drew her hands down hard over her face. “You know, I really don’t give two pennies what you think as long as you go think it somewhere else.” Aunt Nattie had once remarked that the opposite of love was not hate, but indifference. Fawn felt she was beginning to see the point of that.