Lois Bujold - The Sharing Knife - Beguilement

“Wise Spark,” he murmured.

Her nose wrinkled in doubt. How seriously had he meant that lethal offer, to be so relieved that she hadn’t taken him up on it? Remembering, she fetched him his drink, which he accepted with a smile of thanks.

Nattie had drifted to the hearth to stir the apple butter which, by the smell, was on the verge of scorching. Now she tapped the wooden spoon on the pot rim to shake off the excess, set it aside, turned back, and said, “You’re a smart man, patroller.”

“Oh, Nattie,” said Fawn dolefully. “How much of that awfulness did you hear?”

“Pretty much all, lovie.” She sighed. “Is Sunny gone yet?”

That funny look Dag got when consulting his groundsense flitted over his face.

“Long gone, Aunt Nattie.”

Fawn breathed relief.

“Dag, you’re a good fellow, but I need to talk with my niece. Why don’t you take a walk?”

He looked down to Fawn, who nodded reluctantly. He said, “I expect I could stand to go check on Copperhead, make sure he hasn’t bitten anybody yet.”

“I ’spect so,” Nattie agreed.

He gave Fawn a last hug, bent down to touch his cider-scented lips to hers, smiled in encouragement, and left. She heard his steps wend through the house to the front door, and out.

Fawn wanted to put her head down in Nattie’s lap and bawl; instead, she busied herself raking the coals under the oven for the pies. Nattie sat on a kitchen chair and rested her hands on her cane. Haltingly at first, then less so, the story came out, from Fawn’s foolish tumble at the spring wedding to her growing realization and fear of the consequences to the initial horrid talk with Sunny.

“Teh.” Nattie sighed in regret. “I knew you were troubled, lovie. I tried to get you to talk to me, but you wouldn’t.”

“I know. I don’t know if I’m sorry now or not. I figured it was a problem I’d bought all on my own, so it was a problem to pay for all on my own. And then I thought my nerve would fail if I didn’t plunge in.”

For Nattie today, Fawn resolved to leave out nothing of her journey except the uncanny accident with Dag’s sharing knife—partly because she was daunted by the complicated explanations that would have to go with, partly because it made no difference to the fate of her pregnancy, but mostly because Lakewalker secrets were so clearly not hers to give away. No, not just Lakewalker secrets—Dag’s privacy. She grasped, now, what an intimate and personal possession his dead wife’s bone had been. It was the only confidence he’d asked her to keep.

Taking a breath, Fawn plunged in anew. She described her lonely trudge to Glassforge, her terrifying encounter with the young bandit and the strange mud-man. Her first flying view of the startled Dag, even more frightening, but in retrospect almost funny. The Horsefords’ eerie abandoned farm, the second abduction. The whole new measure for terror she’d learned at the malice’s hands.

Dag at the cave, Dag that night at the farm.

She did end up with her head in Nattie’s lap then, though she managed to keep her tears down to a choked sniffling. Nattie petted her hair in the old way she hadn’t done since Fawn had been small and weeping in pain for some minor hurt to her body, or in fury for some greater wound to her spirit. “Sh. Sh, lovie.”

Fawn inhaled, wiped her eyes and nose on her apron, and sat up again on the floor next to Nattie’s chair. “Please don’t tell Mama and Papa any of this.

They’re going to have to go on living with the Sawmans. There’s no point in making bad blood between the families now.”

“Eh, lovie. But it gars me to see Sunny get off free of all this.”

“Yes, but I couldn’t stand for my brothers to know. They’d either try to do something to Sunny and cause trouble, or they’d make a mock of me for being so stupid, and I don’t think I could bear that about this.” She added after a moment of consideration, “Or both.”

“I’m not sure even your brothers are thoughtless enough to make mock of this.”

Nattie hesitated, then conceded reluctantly, “Well, perhaps half-Whit.”

Fawn managed a watery smile at the old jibe. “Poor Whit, maybe it’s that old joke on his name that drives him to be such an awful thorn to everyone. Maybe should start calling him Whitesmith instead, see if it helps.”

“There’s a thought.” Nattie sat up, staring into her personal dark. “I think maybe you’re right about the bad blood, though. Oh my, yes. All right. This story will stop with me unless some other problem comes from it.”

Fawn breathed relief at this promise. “Thank you. Talking with you eases me, more than I expected.” She thought over Nattie’s last words, then said more firmly, “You have to understand, I’m going away with Dag. One way or another.”

Nattie did not immediately burst into objections and dire warnings, but said only, “Huh.” And then, after a moment, “Curious fellow, that Lakewalker. Tell me more.”

Fawn, busying herself once more about the kitchen, was only too glad to expand on her new favorite subject to an unexpectedly sympathetic, or at least not immediately outraged, ear. “I met his patrol in Glassforge…” She described Mari and Saun and Reela—if touching only lightly on Dirla and Razi and Utau—and Sassa’s proud tours to show off his town, and all the fascinating things folks found for work there that did not involve cows, sheep, or pigs. The bow-down, and Dag’s unexpected talents with a tambourine—a word picture that made Nattie laugh along with Fawn. At that point, Fawn came to a sudden stop.

“You’re heels-up in love with him, then,” Nattie said calmly. And, at Fawn’s gasp, “Come, girl, I’m not that blind.”

In love. It seemed too weak a term. She’d imagined herself in love back when she was mooning over Sunny. “More than that. I trust him… right down to the ground.”

“Oh, aye? After all that tale, I think I’m half in love with him myself.”

Nattie added after a thoughtful moment, “Haven’t heard such joy in your voice for a long, long time, lovie. Years.”

Fawn’s heart sprang up as though weights had been shifted from it, and she laughed aloud and gave Nattie a hug and a kiss that made the old woman smile foolishly. “Now, now. There’s still some provin’ to be done, you know.”

But then the pies were baked, and Fawn’s mother returned to start the rest of supper, sending Fawn to milk the cows so the boys could keep cutting hay while the light lasted. She went by the front porch on the way, but Dag had not yet returned to his thinking seat there. Dag made his way back to the house after a stroll around the lower perimeter of the farm, in part to stretch his legs and mind and in part to be certain Sunny had indeed packed off. Resentful and ripe for trouble, that boy, and his abrupt and satisfying removal from Fawn’s presence had likely been dangerously self-indulgent for a Lakewalker alone in farmer country, but Dag could not regret the act, despite the renewed throbbing of his jostled arm. Dag’s last veiled fear that, once back in the safety of her home, Fawn might repent her patroller and double back to her first love, faded altogether.

Once upon a time, Sunny had held star fire in his hand, and thrown it away in the mud of the road. He wouldn’t be getting that fortune back, ever. There seemed nothing in the wide green world Dag could do to him worse than what he had already done to himself. Smiling crookedly, Dag dismissed Sunny from his thoughts in favor of more urgent personal concerns.

In the kitchen, he found Fawn gone but her mother, Tril, buzzing about putting together supper for eight. A clicking and whirring from the next chamber proved to be Nattie at her spinning wheel, within sight and call of her sister, and he made sure to say how de’; she returned a friendly but unenlightening,