Lois Bujold - The Sharing Knife - Beguilement

No telling now. The boys were unlikely to cast slurs on her in her brother’s presence, surely.

They all climbed back into the cart, and Sorrel, clucking, backed his horse and turned the vehicle around. He slapped the reins against the horse’s rump, and it obligingly broke into a trot. West Blue fell behind.

Three days. There was no particular reason that simple phrase should make his stomach feel as though it wanted to flip over, Dag thought, but… three days. After the noon dinner, Dag dismissed the obscurities of farmer customs from his mind for a time in favor of his own. He and Fawn went out together on a gathering trip around the farm.

“What are we looking for, really?” she asked him, as he led off first toward the old barn below the house.

“There’s no set recipe. Spinnable things with some personal meaning to help catch our grounds upon. A person’s own hair is always good, but mine’s not long enough to use pure, and a few more hooks never hurt. The horsehair will give length and strength, I figure. It’s often used, and not just for wedding cords.”

In the cool shade of the barn, Fawn culled two collections of long sturdy hairs from the tails and manes of Grace and Copperhead. Dag hung on the stall partition, eyes half-shut, gently reminding Copperhead of their agreement that the gelding would treat Fawn with the tender concern of a mare for her foal or become wolf-bait. Horses did not reason by consequences so much as by associations, and the rangy chestnut had fewer wits than many, but by dint of repeated groundwork Dag had at length put this idea across. Copperhead nickered and nuzzled and lipped at Fawn, endured having hairs pulled out while scarcely flinching, ate apple slices from her hand without nipping, and eyed Dag warily.

There were no water lilies to be had on the Bluefield acres, and Dag was uncertain that their stems would yield up flax the way the ones at Hickory Lake did anyway, but to his delight they discovered a cattail-crowded drainage ditch up beyond the high fields that sheltered some red-winged blackbird nests. He held Fawn’s shoes on his hook and murmured encouragement, grinning at her expression of revulsion and determination, as she waded out in the muck and gathered some goodly handfuls of both cattail fluff and feathers. After that, they tramped all around the margins and crossed and recrossed the fallow fields.

It was not the season for milkweed silk, as the redolent flowers were just blooming, and the stems were useless, but at length they discovered a few dried brown sticks lingering from last fall whose pods hadn’t broken open, and Dag pronounced the catch sufficient.

They took it all back to Nattie’s weaving room, where Fawn stripped feathers and picked out milkweed seeds, and Nattie set out her own chosen mix of fibers: linen for strength, a bit of precious purchased cotton brought from south of the Grace River for softness and something she called catch, nettle flax for shine, all dyed dark with walnut stain. Fawn bit her lip and undertook the hair trimming, taking special care with Dag, not so much to avoid stabbing him with the scissors, he eventually realized, as to be sure his head wouldn’t look like a scarecrow’s on the day after tomorrow. She set up a small mirror to cautiously clip out some of her own curly strands. Dag sat quietly, enjoying watching her contort, counting the hours backward to when they’d last been able to lie together, and forward to the next chance. Three days…

Under her aunt’s close supervision Fawn then mixed the ingredients in two baskets until Nattie, plunging her arms in and feeling while frowning judiciously in a way that had Fawn holding her breath, pronounced them ready for the next step. Shaping such a disparate mass of fibers into the long rolls for spinning could only be done by the gentlest carding and a lot of handwork, and even Fawn’s willing fingers looked to be tiring by the end.

They went on to the spinning itself after supper. The male members of the family had some dim idea that the three were up to some outlandish Lakewalker project to please Dag, but they were well trained not to intrude upon Nattie’s domain, and Dag doubted they suspected magic, so subtle and invisible a one as this was.

They went off about their own usual pursuits. Tril drifted in and out from labors in the kitchen, watching but saying little.

After some debate, it was decided Fawn would be the spinner after all; she was certain Nattie would do it better, but Dag was certain that the more making she put into the task with her own hands, the better the faint chance of tangling her ground in the cord would be. She chose to spin on the wheel, a device Dag had never seen in operation before coming here, saying she was better at it than at the drop spindle. Once she’d finally settled and gathered up her materials and her confidence, the task went much more quickly than Dag had expected. At length she triumphantly handed over for Nattie’s inspection two hanks of sturdy if rather hirsute two-ply thread something between yarn and string in texture.

“Nattie could have spun it smoother and more even.” Fawn sighed.

“Mm,” said Nattie, feeling the bundles. She didn’t disagree, but she did say,

“This’ll do.”

“Shall we go on now?” Fawn asked eagerly. Full night had fallen, and they had been working by candlelight for the past hour.

“We’ll be more rested in the morning,” said Dag.

“I’m all right.”

“I’ll be more rested in the morning, Spark. Have some pity on an old patroller, eh?”

“Oh. That’s right. Groundwork drains you pretty dry.” She added after a cautious moment, “Will this be as bad as the bowl?”

“No. This is a lot more natural. Besides, I’ve done this before. Well…

Kauneo’s mother actually did the spinning that time, because neither of us had the skill.

Each of us had to do our own braiding, though, to catch our grounds.”

Fawn sighed. “I’m never going to be able to sleep tonight.”

In fact, she did, although not before Dag had heard through the closed door Nattie telling her to settle, it was worse than sleeping with a bedbug.

Fawn’s soft giggle was his last memory of the night. They met again in the weaving room right after breakfast, as soon as the rest of the family had cleared off. This time, Dag closed the door firmly. They’d set up a backless bench, filched from the porch, so that Fawn could sit astride it with Dag directly behind her. Nattie took a seat in a chair just beyond Fawn’s knee, listening with her head cocked, her weak groundsense trying to strain beyond its normal limit of the reach of her skin. Dag watched while Fawn practiced on some spare string; it was a four-stranded braiding that produced an extremely strong cord, a pattern called by Lakewalkers mint-stem for its square cross section, and by farmers, Dag was bemused to learn, the same.

“We’ll start with my cord,” he told her. “The main thing is, once I catch my ground in the braiding, don’t stop, or the ground-casting will break, and we’ll have to undo it all and start again from the beginning. Which, actually, we can do right enough, but it’s a bit frustrating to get almost to the end and then sneeze.”

She nodded earnestly and finished setting up, knotting the four strands to a simple nail driven into the bench in front of her. She spread out the wound-up balls that kept the loose ends under control, gulped, and said, “All right.

Tell me when to start.”

Dag straightened and slipped his right arm from its sling, scooting up behind her close enough to touch, kissing her ear for encouragement and to make her smile, succeeding perhaps in the first but not the second. He looked over her head and brought both arms around and over hers, letting his hand and hook touch first the fiber, then her fingers, then hover over her hands. His ground, flowing out through his right hand, caught at once in the thick threads.