Lois Bujold - Passage

“Oh,” said Whit, daunted.

“I expect those patrollers feel as bad as you would, the morning after.” Dag frowned. “I wouldn’t imagine the friends of those flatties who are laid up feel too kindly toward stray Lakewalkers just now, either.” He sighed. Well, one way or another, they needed a boat out of Pearl Riffle, come the rise. Which couldn’t come too soon.

And here, evidently, was the boat in question.

Fawn—at last! — stood in the bow talking with a tall, blond girl in a practical homespun shirt, skirt, and leather vest, her sleeves rolled up on slim but strappy-muscled arms. She had a nice wide smile, tinged, as she looked down at Fawn, with a touch of that same excited-to-be-making-new-friends air as Whit. Fawn looked equally pleased. Dag tried not to feel old. In a pen to one side of the bow, a boy knelt milking a goat. He had the same straw-straight hair as the tall girl, cut raggedly around his ears, and the same wide cheekbones flushed with sunburn. Too big to be her child, so likely a younger brother. A much older man, unshaven and a trifle seedy, leaned against the cabin wall looking on blearily but benignly.

Dag nodded to the blond girl. “That your Boss Berry?”

“Yep,” said Whit proudly.

Dag eyed him. So that’s the way his wind blows, does it?

“She ought to be Boss Clearcreek, but she says that’s her papa, so she goes by Boss Berry. Wouldn’t it be good for Fawn to have another woman aboard? You can see Berry likes that idea, too. They hit it off straightaway.”

Dag was getting a certain sense of inevitability about this boat. He let his groundsense flick out. At least the water all seemed to be on the outside of the hull. There was a coherence about its ground that said boat not boards. “It’s a good making, this boat,” he conceded.

Fawn saw him, and came dancing over the plank above the mud to hug him as if he’d been gone for days and not hours. He let Copperhead loose to nibble the grass clumps, reins trailing, and folded her in, permitting himself a brief, heartening ground-touch of her. After Pearl Riffle Camp, it felt like bathing a wound in some sweet medicine. He released her again as the boat boss began picking her way across to shore, her wide smile flattening out.

“Dag, I found the best boat!” Fawn un-hugged him just enough to lift her face to his. Like a morning-glory blossom. “Berry says we can have passage in exchange for being her crew, if you think that’d work out—”

“I already told him that part,” said Whit.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself—” began Dag.

The blond girl arrived and folded her arms tightly across her chest, frowning. She said to Fawn, “This your Dag?”

Fawn turned out of Dag’s one-armed embrace, but didn’t relinquish his hand. “Yes,” she said proudly.

The frown became tinged with dismay. “But he’s a Lakewalker!”

Though it seems there’s some question about that, today. Dag nodded politely at the boat boss. “Ma’am.”

The frown deepened to a scowl. “Fawn, I know Lakewalkers. A Lakewalker wouldn’t no more marry a farmer girl than—than he’d marry my Daisy-goat over there. I don’t know if you’re trickin’ me or if he’s trickin’ you, but I do know I don’t want no trickster-man on my boat!”

Fawn and Whit, in chorus, went into the usual explanation about the wedding braids and West Blue that was beginning to exhaust Dag. It wasn’t just Boss Berry, or the suspicious stares from the stirred-up flatties. It was all that atop the scene in the Pearl Riffle patrol headquarters. Dag felt suddenly like a swimmer caught in an eddy between two shores, unable to land on either. He braced himself: Nobody said this was going to be easy. But he hoped he wasn’t about to lose Fawn their boat-passage. Or her new friend.

Berry touched Fawn’s wedding cord, held out in demonstration; her face grew, if not wholly convinced, less tense. Her gaze flicked over the hook. “They say you know boats,” she said to Dag at last, the first words she’d spoken to him directly.

He repeated the polite nod. “I’ve never worked a flatboat or a keel. I’ve taken narrow boats, big and small, down both the Grace and the Gray, though never the whole length in one trip.”

“I’ve never had no Lakewalker as boat crew, before. Never even seen one doing that, on any farmer boat.” But her voice was growing more doubtful than hostile.

“I started out this trip to do a lot of things no one had done before.” Dag glanced at Fawn’s anxious, upturned face and bestirred himself. “I’ve been on high water and low, and I know a snag from a sawyer. And I could spot you the channel through the sand bars and shoals in water thick enough to plow, day or dark.”

“Oh, your groundsense can do that?” said Fawn in delight. “Yes, of course it would!”

“It’s true,” said Berry, “you don’t hardly ever see a narrow boat hung up. You Lakewalkers use your magic to pilot, do you?”

“In a way.” If Berry decided to let Dag and his party aboard, he would have days ahead to explain the subtleties of groundsense. Dag tilted his head at the grazing Copperhead. “Do you have room for my horse?”

“Your wife”—Berry’s mouth hesitated over the phrase, then went on—“Fawn mentioned the horse. Can he share the pen with Daisy?”

“He could be persuaded, yes.”

“Well, then.” The boat boss’s pale eyes were still flat with caution; Dag thought they would gleam more blue if she smiled. “I guess you’ll do.”

Whit whooped in triumph; Fawn grinned. Dag was infected by their enthusiasm to the extent of a crooked smile. Even Berry’s lips twisted a bit as she made her way back across the narrow board and down onto her deck.

The bleary man had been listening unmoved to the debate, his head canted; the boy had stopped milking the goat and hung over the bow, wide-eyed. “So, Bo,” said Berry to the bleary man, with a jerk of her head toward the three on the shore. “Looks like we got us a Lakewalker oarsman.”

One bushy gray eyebrow cocked up; he spat over the side, but only drawled, “Well, that’s different.” He followed her as she ducked indoors.

“How do we get Copper onto the boat?” asked Fawn suddenly, as if she’d only just noticed the problem. “He’s a lot bigger than Daisy-goat.”

“More planks,” said Dag succinctly.

“Oh.”

“Fawn, I got my glass goods!” Whit began excitedly, staring after Berry. Dag could only think, Pull in your tongue, boy, before you step on it.

Fawn’s brow wrinkled in worry; Dag guessed she was thinking much the same thing. She took Whit by the wrist and lowered her voice. “Come over here like we’re getting Copper.” Dag strolled after, till they were all out of earshot of the boat.

Fawn pretended to be fussing with her saddlebags. “Whit, you went chasing off before I had a chance to tell you something. Berry isn’t just taking the Fetch downstream for a trading boat. Her papa took a boat down last fall, and never came back. No word. She means to go look for him.”

“Oh, we can help—” Whit began.

Fawn overrode this: “Her papa, her big brother, and her betrothed. All gone missing.”

Whit’s face was suddenly wiped clean of expression. After a moment he said, “She’s betrothed?”

“Yes, or maybe bereaved. Even she don’t know which right now. So try for a little, a little…I don’t know. Just try not to be a blighted fool, all right?”

Whit blinked. “Um. Yeah. Well…” He gulped valiantly. “Well, we still need a boat. And she still needs a crew, right?”

“Right,” said Fawn, watching him carefully.

“Girl like that, in a fix like that, she deserves all the help she can get. A good pair of hands. Three pairs. Well, two and a half.” His grin was awkward, unfelt.