Lois Bujold - The Sharing Knife - Beguilement

She was definitely not ready for that again so soon, but it was hardly a prospect that filled her with horror. Perhaps her and Dag’s future children, if any, wouldn’t be saddled with being so blasted short—now, there was a heartening thought. She smiled softly to herself as Grace nudged her velvety nose into her hand and whuffled.

Rush went on, “He as much as said it was his plan to keep you till you were and then send you back to batten on us.”

“Only if he dies, Rush!”

“Yeah, well, how much longer can that be?”

“And what does it matter to you anyhow? You and Reed are going to go west and break land. You won’t even be here.” She let herself out of the stall and latched the door.

“On Fletch and Clover, then.”

“You two are so, so, so”—she groped for a sufficient word—“howling stupid.”

“Oh, yeah?” Rush shot back. “He claimed he wanted to marry you because you were smart, and how dumb do you have to be to believe that? You know it’s just so’s he can get his old hands on your young… self.”

“Hand,” she corrected coldly. And how she missed its touch on her young…

everything. Escape from West Blue, with or without a wedding, could not happen soon enough.

Rush imitated upchucking, with realistic noises. Fawn supposed stabbing him with the pitchfork was out, but maybe she could at least whack him over the head with it… ? He added, “And how d’you think we’ll feel in front of our friends, stuck with that fellow in the family?”

“Considering your friends, I can’t say as I’m real moved by that plea.”

“I can’t see as you’ve much considered anybody but yourself, lately!”

Reed said, more urgently and with a peculiar fearful tinge in his voice, “I see what it is. He’s magicked you up some way already, hasn’t he?”

“I don’t want to hear another word out of you two.”

“Or what?” said Rush. “You’ll never speak to us again?”

“I’m working on that one,” snarled Fawn, and stalked out of the barn.

Not all of the encounters were so aggravating. Fawn found an unexpected ally in Clover, with whom she’d never before much gotten along, and Clover brought Fletch right into line. The two girls were now in great charity with each other, feeling they could have been best friends forever and mistaken in all their prior judgments; Fletch was a bit dizzied. Dag made undaunted use of the news about his age to put himself rather above it all, and he mainly talked privately with Mama and Papa or Nattie. Whit continued to fire off barbs in blithe disregard for their aim, with the result that everybody grew furious with him except for Dag, who continued patient and determined.

“I’ve dealt with dissolving patrols down to and including breaking up knife fights,” he assured Fawn at one especially distraught moment. “No one here’s tried to stab each other yet.”

“It’s been a near thing,” Fawn growled. By supper of the second night after Dag’s proposal, Fawn’s parents had gone so far as to forbid discussion of the topic at the table, somewhat to Dag’s relief.

It did render the meal uncharacteristically quiet. Dag thought his plan to extract Fawn gracefully from the clutches of her kin was not going as well as he’d hoped. Whether it took two days or twenty or two hundred, he was determined to persevere, but it was plain Fawn was close to melting in this family crucible, and her strain communicated itself to him, open to her ground as he could not help being.

They’d taken too long on this journey already. Much more tarrying in West Blue, and he’d risk not beating Mari’s patrol back to Hickory Lake, and they would panic and think him missing again. And this time, he wouldn’t be dragging back in with another malice kill in his bag to buy forgiveness.

Bluefields were falling to him, slowly. Fletch and Clover were openly agreeable, Nattie quietly agreeable, and Tril mainly just quiet. Whit didn’t greatly care, and Papa Bluefield still sat on the fence.

Sorrel and Tril Bluefield reminded Dag a bit of patrol leaders, their heads stuffed with too many duties and details, too many people’s conflicting desires and needs. An unsolvable dilemma had a good chance of being invited to go away; he thought they might break simply because they could not afford to spend all their time and energy on one problem when so many more crowded upon them. Dag felt almost cruelly ruthless, but he steeled himself to keep up the blandishments and subtle pressure. Fawn took care of the unsubtle pressure.

Reed and Rush remained a stubborn reservoir of resistance. Dag was not sure why, as neither would talk to him despite several friendly lures. Separately, he thought he might have gotten somewhere, but together they stayed locked in a knot of disapproval. Fawn, when he asked her for guidance into their objections, just went tight-lipped. But their more hotheaded remarks at least served to drive their papa further and faster toward conciliation than he would have gone on his own, if only from sheer embarrassment. Some opposition was its own worst enemy.

Still… I should have liked to have made some real tent-brothers. Now, there was an unreasonable hope to flush from hiding. Dag frowned at himself. The gift of comradeship he’d once found with Kauneo’s brothers in Luthlia, so fine in the having, was all the more painful in the loss. Maybe it was better this way.

After the postsupper chores the family usually gathered in the parlor, cooler than the kitchen, to share the lamplight. Dag had walked out with Fawn to feed scraps to the chickens; as they came through the kitchen door and into the central hall, he heard raised voices from the parlor. By this time Dag cringed at opening his groundsense in this raucous company, not a one of them capable of a decent veiling; but he did prick his ears to hear Reed’s voice, rumbling, hostile, and indistinct, and then Tril’s, raised in sharp fear: “Reed! Put that down! Fawn brought me that all the way from Glassforge!”

Beside him, Fawn drew in her breath and hurried forward. Dag strode after, bracing himself.

In the parlor, Reed and Rush had more or less cornered their parents. Tril was sitting beside the table that held the bright oil lamp, some sewing in her lap; Nattie sat across the room in the shadows with the drop spindle that was rarely out of her hands, now stilled. Whit crouched by Nattie, a spectator on the fringe, for once not heckling. Sorrel stood facing Reed, with Rush pacing nervously around them.

Reed was holding up the glass bowl and declaiming, overdramatically in Dag’s view, “—sell your daughter to some bloody-handed corpse-eater for the sake of a piece of glass?”

“Reed!” Fawn cried furiously, dashing forward. “You give that back! It’s not yours!”

Dag thought it was sheer force of habit; when confronted with that familiar sisterly rise, Reed quite unthinkingly raised the bowl high out of Fawn’s hopping reach. At her enraged squeal, he tossed it to Rush, who just as unthinkingly caught it.

Tears of fury sprang in Fawn’s eyes. “You two are just a pair of yard dogs—”

“If you hadn’t dragged Useless here home with you—” Rush began defensively.

Ah, yet another new nickname for himself, Dag realized. He was collecting quite a set of them here. But his own fraying temper was not nearly such a grating goad to him as Fawn’s humiliated helplessness.

Sorrel glanced at his distraught wife, whose hands had flown to her mouth, and barked angrily, “Boys, that’s enough!” He strode forward and started to pull the bowl out of Rush’s grasp. Sorrel, unwilling to snatch, let go just as Rush, afraid to resist, did likewise.

It was no one’s fault, exactly, or at least no one’s intention. Dag saw it coming as did Fawn, and a desolate little wail broke from her lips even before the bowl hit the wooden floor edge on and burst, falling into three large pieces and a sparkling spray of splinters.