Lois Bujold - Passage

She was shivering inside too much to growl at the old taunt. She labored up beside him, and the dry, sour malice-smell of the cave hit her full-face. How long till the rains and snows wash this clean? Horridly blithe, he strolled into the shadow of the overhang.

“What a great place to camp this would be! It really looks like it should be a bandit hideout.” He kicked at a broken old keg, part of a scattering of trash no one had bothered to cart away. “So where were you two, exactly? Where was this malice? How far did Dag have to throw his knife? He must not have known you then. It was a wonder you caught it.”

“Here…” Simplify. “The malice picked me up by my neck.” She fingered the dented scars. Here. Here, right here, the malice ripped the ground from my unborn child, poor half-wanted waif, here she died, here Dag was nearly torn apart by howling man-beasts, here I struck, right here the malice screamed and stank and shattered, here sacrifice tangled with sacrifice, here I miscarried, here I hurt, here I started bleeding… “I have to get out of here,” Fawn said aloud. She could not see clearly. She was shaking so badly she could scarcely breathe. There is no simple to be had, here.

“Hey, are you all right?” Whit called as she stumbled out into the air again. There wasn’t enough light in the wide green world to make that cave anything but a pit of darkness, to make her anything but stupid, stupid, stupid… She became aware she was weeping, not sobs, but weird dry gulps.

Whit, trotting after her, said, “Is the blight making you sick? Here, maybe I…I better take you back to Dag, all right?”

She nodded, trying and failing to steady her breathing, which seemed to stagger and stick. She tried to swallow between gulps of air, but her throat was too tight. Whit put a tentative, anxious arm around her waist and half-supported, half-hustled her back down and across the creek. She slipped and put one foot ankle-deep in the stream, gasping at the chill wet, which at least got some more air into her. By the time they reached the ravine’s top and Whit boosted her back up into her saddle, she was only wheezing. Her cheeks were wet, her nose beslimed; she dragged an arm fiercely across her face, and coughed.

When they reached the place where they’d sent Dag back, she looked up through the silver blur to see Copperhead cantering up the trail toward them. Dag pulled up with a jerk that made the gelding shake his head and snort. A black scowl, a brutal voice the like of which she’d never heard before from Dag’s mouth, demanded of Whit, “What did you do to her?”

“Nothing!” said Whit, alarmed. “I didn’t do nothing! She was nattering on about, about this and that, and then all of a sudden she took a fit o’ the vapors! I thought it might be the blight, though I didn’t feel anything like. Here, you take her!”

Dag discarded his menace as he turned a keen look on Fawn; searching her body and her ground both, she thought. He dropped his reins on Copperhead’s neck and leaned over to pull her from her saddle into his lap. She clutched him hard around the chest, burying her face in his shirt, inhaling the scents of linen and warm Dag-sweat to drive the deathly cellar-smell away. Arm and strong spread hand, his beautiful hand, clutched her in return.

“I’m sorry,” she mumbled into his shirt. “I didn’t think it would all pile back into my head like that. It was the smell of the cave. All of a sudden I couldn’t breathe. Stupid…”

“Shh, no,” he said into her hair. His understanding seemed to wrap her more warmly than his arms. He raised his chin, jerked it at Whit.

“Bring her horse. We need to get away from this bad ground. Maybe get everyone something to eat.”

Copperhead turned obediently at the pressure of Dag’s leg, or perhaps ground; in any case, the gelding seemed to grasp that this was no time for tricks. They all rode a good two miles back down the trail before Dag turned off. He led down over a bank and up to a little clearing with a spring seeping out of a rock overhang. A pretty picnic spot. Patroller groundsense at work? In any case, Dag said merely, “This’ll do.” He murmured in her ear, “Can you get down all right?”

“Yes. I’m better now.” Not all better, no, but at least she’d stopped sniveling.

He let her slide off Copperhead’s shoulder, and he and Whit bustled about pulling food packets from the saddlebags, finding the tin cups, loosening girths, and permitting the horses to browse. Dag kept a close eye on Fawn till she’d settled on a rock, drunk spring water, and taken a few bites of the rather dry cheese wrapped in bread left from yesterday’s supply. He finally sat down cross-legged beside her. Whit perched on a nearby fallen log that was not too damp with moss and rot.

“Sorry,” Fawn repeated, swallowing and straightening up. “Stupid.”

“Shh,” Dag repeated, gripping her calf in a reproving, heartening little shake. “None o’ that.”

Whit cleared his throat. “I guess that malice was pretty scary.”

“Yeah,” said Fawn. The spring water was welcomingly cool; why did her throat feel so hot? She scrubbed at her scars.

Whit added magnanimously, “Well, you’re just a girl, after all.”

Fawn merely grimaced. In his own way, she supposed Whit was trying. Very trying.

Dag’s brows drew in, as if he were struggling to parse what Whit meant; he clearly didn’t see the connection between the two statements. And then he did, and got a pretty odd look. He said, “I’ve seen the first encounter with a malice devastate fully trained patrollers. I was on sick leave for weeks after my first, though the thing never touched me.”

Whit cleared his throat, made a wise decision not to try to retrieve his remark, and asked instead, “How many have you seen? Altogether?”

“I’ve lost count,” said Dag. “That I’ve slain by my hand with a knife of my own, twenty-six.”

“Twenty-seven,” Fawn corrected.

He smiled at her. “Twenty-six and a half, then. My knife, your hand.”

Fawn watched Whit’s lips move, counting up kills. No—knives. Lakewalker lives, and deaths. His brow wrinkled.

Fawn put in hastily, “I told Whit about sharing knives. Tried to, anyhow. I’m not sure if he has it all straight.” Her anxious eyes quizzed Dag: Is that all right?

He ducked his head, answering her look as well as her words. “Oh. Good. Thank you.”

Whit scraped his boot toe across the moss. “Is that a lot of those knives to have had?”

“Yes, actually.”

“Did you…er…have a big family?”

Fawn resisted the urge to knock her head—or maybe Whit’s—into a tree. He was trying.

Dag was trying, too. He replied straightforwardly, “No. Folks—friends, kin of friends, other patrollers—gave them to me, because I seemed to have a knack for getting them used. A patroller can carry a primed knife for a long time and never encounter a malice, which makes the sacrifice seem—well, not vain. But folks like knowing when it all comes to something.”

“That makes sense, I guess,” Whit allowed. He remembered to take a bite of bread and cheese. “You don’t have—do you have—one of those, um. Suicide knives?”

“Unprimed knife, bonded to me?” Dag hazarded.

Whit said, “Well, it would have to be unprimed, wouldn’t it? Stands to reason. Because if it was primed you’d be, um.”

“I did have. Carried it with me for twenty years, in case. A lot of patrollers do.”

“Can I see—no, um. Did, right. What happened to it?”

Dag glanced at Fawn; she gave a small headshake, No, we didn’t get to that part. “It met with an accident.”

“Oh.” Whit blinked—daunted, Fawn prayed. But not quite enough, for he added curiously, “Whose bone was it?”