Lois Bujold - Passage

“Dag!” he cried, as Dag drew Copperhead to a halt and leaned on his saddlebow. “I was wondering when you was going to show up. I was just trying to figure how to find you. We’ve got the boat ride all fixed!”

Tanner climbed up onto his driver’s box, gathered up his reins, and regarded Whit with some bemusement. “No messages then, after all?”

“No, not now he’s here. Thanks! Oh, no—wait.” Whit went to the wheelers and gave Weft a pat and a hug around the neck, then ran around the wagon and repeated the gestures with Warp. “Good-bye, you two. You be good for Tanner now, you hear?” The horses flicked their ears at him; Warp gave him a soulful return nudge—unless he was just trying to use the boy as a scratching post—which made Whit blink rather rapidly.

“They’re real good, for such young ’uns,” Tanner assured him. “You take care, too.” He donned his hat and tugged the brim at Dag. “Lakewalker.” And, a little to Dag’s surprise, slapped his reins on the team’s rumps and drove off minus Whit. A quick look around located both Fawn’s and Whit’s saddlebags leaning against the porch steps of the goods-shed. A couple of idlers on the shaded bench, one whittling, the other just sitting with his hands slack between his knees, frowned curiously at Dag.

“Aren’t you going along to help him?” Dag asked Whit, nodding toward the wagon rumbling away.

“I just helped him load on about a ton of goods from Tripoint and upriver that he’s taking back to Glassforge. Mape was going to get up a load from downriver at the Bend—cotton and tea, he said, and indigo if they had any, if the price was right.”

“He did. I just saw him.”

“Oh, good.”

“Mape told me they mean to start home tomorrow morning, after they rest the horses,” said Dag. “You, ah, mean to catch up?”

“Not exactly.”

“So, what? Exactly?” Gods, he was sounding just like Sorrel. But Whit didn’t seem to notice.

“Oh, you have to come see, you have to come see. Come on, get our bags up on Copper and I’ll show you.”

Dag had no heart to dampen such enthusiasm, despite his own lingering foul mood. Dutifully, he dismounted and helped sling the bags across his saddle, wrapped the reins around his hook, and strolled after Whit, who strained ahead like a puppy on a leash. The idlers’ eyes followed them, narrowing in suspicion at Dag. Edgy, far from friendly, but not quite the hostility that might have been expected had any of Barr’s and Remo’s victims died during the night. Absent gods be thanked. Walking first forward, then backward, Whit waved and called good-bye to them as well, by which Dag reckoned they’d been briefly hired by Tanner as fellow-loaders, a typical way for such rivertown wharf rats to pick up a little extra coin.

“So if you’re not going back to Glassforge with Tanner and Mape and Hod, what are you going to do?” Dag probed.

“I’m gonna try me some river-trading. I spent some of my horse money on window glass, to sell off the Fetch. That’s Berry’s boat. Boss Berry,” Whit corrected himself with a lopsided grin.

“What about that promise to your parents about going straight home?”

“That wasn’t a promise, exactly. More like a plan. Plans change. Anyhow, if I get all my glass sold by the time we reach Silver Shoals, I could take the river road home and not get lost, and get back hardly late at all.”

There seemed a certain disquieting vagueness to this new plan. Well, Dag would find out what Fawn thought of it shortly. He returned his attention warily to his surroundings.

They passed along the scattered row of flatboats tied to the trees along the bank. A man sitting on a crate in one bow hunched and scowled as Dag went by. A woman frowned, clutched up a wide-eyed toddler, its thumb stuck in its mouth, and skittered inside her boat’s top-shed. A collection of flatties idling and laughing on a boat roof fell abruptly silent, stood, and stared across at Dag.

“Why are they starin’?” Whit asked, craning his head in return.

“They starin’ at you, Dag? I been by here twice and they never stared at me…”

“Just keep walking, Whit,” said Dag wearily. “Don’t turn your head. Turn around, blight it!”

Whit was walking backward again, but he obediently wheeled. “Huh?”

“I’m a Lakewalker, seemingly alone, in farmer country. Corpse-eater, grave-robber, sorcerer, remember? They wonder what I’m up to.” They wonder if I’m an easy target. They wonder if they could take me. He supposed they might also be wondering if he was some sort of consequence of last night, looking for retribution.

“But you aren’t up to anything.” Whit squinted over his shoulder.

“You sure it isn’t just the hook?”

Dag set his teeth. “Quite sure. Don’t you remember what you thought, first time Fawn brought me into your kitchen at West Blue?”

Whit blinked in an effort of recollection. “Well, I suppose I thought you were a pretty strange fellow for my sister to drag in. And tall, I do remember that.”

“Were you afraid?”

“No, not particularly.” Whit hesitated. “Reed and Rush were, I think.”

“Indeed.”

Whit’s eyes shifted; the mob of flatties on the boat roof was gradually settling back down. “This feels creepy, y’know?”

“Yes.”

“Huh.” Whit’s dark brows drew in. Thinking? Dag could hope.

“What did you hear up at the goods-shed about the fight last night?” Dag asked.

“Oh, yeah, that was lucky for us!”

“What?” said Dag, astonished. His steps slowed.

Whit waved a hand. “It seems two fellows from the Fetch got roped into it by some of their friends, jumping some local Lakewalker they were mad at. When the ferrywomen and a bunch of other Lakewalkers came to break it up, they run off scared, along with some girl and her beau. The other three was in no shape for runnin’ and are back on their boats now. But it means Boss Berry needs two stout fellows to pull the broad-oars.” Whit pointed to Dag and himself, grinned, and held up two fingers. “And Fawn to cook,” he added cheerily.

“Let me get this straight,” said Dag. “You’ve volunteered me—and Fawn—as flatboat crew?”

“Yeah! Isn’t it great?” said Whit. Dag was just about to blister him with an explanation of how not-great it was, when he added, “It was Fawn’s idea, really,” and Dag let his breath huff out unformed.

On his next breath, Dag managed, “Do you have any idea how to man a flatboat sweep?”

“No, but I reckoned you would, and Berry and Bo said they’d teach me.”

It wasn’t exactly Dag’s vision of the marriage trip he’d promised Fawn—or himself, for that matter. It wasn’t just the work, which Whit plainly underestimated. Dag was still dragging from his encounter with Hod, though it wasn’t his bodily strength that had suffered. But he remembered the recuperative effects of the harvest, and was given pause. He said more cautiously, “Did you tell this boat boss I’m a Lakewalker?”

“Uh…I don’t remember as it came up,” Whit admitted uneasily.

Dag sighed. “Was he wearing a pot on his head?”

“Her head, and no. What kind of pot? Why?”

Dag’s terse summary of Barr and Remo’s jape surprised a shout of laughter from Whit. “Oh, that’s ripe! No, the loaders at the goods-shed didn’t tell me that part! I wonder if they was some of the pot-pated ones?”

“Not so ripe in the result,” said Dag. “One of the patrollers was wearing his sharing knife last night, which he should not have been, and it was broken in the fight. The Pearl Riffle Lakewalkers are pretty upset about it today.”

Whit squinted. “Is that bad?”

Dag groped for a comparison. “Suppose…suppose you and Sunny Sawman and his friends got into a drunken brawl in the village square of West Blue, and in the tumble one of you knocked over your aunt Nattie and killed her. Gone in a moment. That’s just about how bad.”