Lois Bujold: Passage

“I must warn Papa to watch and not let Dag overdo,” said Fawn in worry. “He won’t stop on his own.”

“Just exactly how was he hurt, again?” said Whit. “’Cause when we went down to wash up in the river last night, all I saw new was that little bitty cut on his left thigh.”

“It’s not long, but it’s deep,” said Fawn. “The knife blade that did it went straight to the bone and shattered. The Lakewalker medicine maker had an awful time getting all the pieces fished back out. But that’s not what’s dragging him down so.” Taking her lead from Dag, Fawn decided to stick with a much-simplified version of the truth. “The Raintree malice halfway ground-ripped him in the fight, tore up his ground all down his left arm and side. It nearly killed him. It’s like he’s walking around recovering from his own personal blight.”

“Well, how long does that take?”

“I’m not sure. I’m not sure he’s sure. Most folks who get ground-ripped just die on the spot. But Dag says when the Glassforge malice put these marks on my neck”—she rubbed at the ugly red dimples, one on the right side, four on the left—“it injured both flesh and ground. If the bruises had been just from a man’s hand, they’d have cleared up two or three months back, with nothing to show. Ground damage is nasty stuff.” Her hand crept to rub her belly as well, but she halted it, burying it in her skirt instead. Dag wasn’t the only one to carry the worst damage hidden inside.

“Huh,” said Whit, squinting at her neck. “I guess so!”

“The weakness and pain in his body don’t bother him near as much as the harm the ripping did to his groundsense, though.”

“That seeing-double thing he talks about?”

“Yes. Usually he can sense things out for near a mile away, which I gather is pretty amazing even for a Lakewalker. He says it’s down to less ’n a hundred paces right now. The medicine maker said that’s how he’ll know when his ground is better, when he can sense out far again.”

Whit blinked. “So…can he still do his groundwork? Like that bowl?”

Whit had been impressed by the bowl. Rightfully, Fawn thought. “Not yet. Not real well.” She thought of some of Dag’s other marvelous ground-tricks, still not regained, and sighed. When Lakewalkers made love they did it body and ground, with an ingenuity farmers never dreamed of, but she wasn’t about to explain that part to Whit.

Whit shook his head, frowning again at the reapers. “He looks so wrong.”

Fawn shaded her eyes with the edge of her hand. “Why? I think he’s doing pretty good with that scythe.”

“There’s that hat, for one.”

“I wove him that hat! Same as yours.”

“Ah, that explains why he won’t be parted from it. What that man does for you…! But—” Whit gestured inarticulately. “Dag looks all right up on his evil horse. He looks right with that bow of his, anyone can see—you’d think it grew there on his arm, even without how his arrows fly just where he wants. I’ve never seen him draw that big knife of his, but I sure wouldn’t want to be on the other side when he does.”

“No. You wouldn’t,” Fawn agreed.

“But stick him with a scythe or a pitchfork or a bucket, he looks as out of place as—as if you’d hitched that leggy silver mare to a plow.” He jerked his head toward the pasture fence.

Swallow, the dappled gray mare Dag had sent to West Blue as his Lakewalker-style bride-gift, pricked her curving ears alertly. She looked as elegant as moonlight on water, and as swift as a rippling stream even when she was standing still. Beyond, her black colt Darkling, as if proudly aware of collecting his due-share of admiration, kicked up his heels and danced past, tail flicking.

Grace was standing hipshot and bored along the fence line, dark bay coat looking warm and shiny in the sun. Copperhead of the uncertain temper had been left in exile in the small paddock below the old barn, but the two young plow horses Whit was bringing along, and known therefore as Whit’s team, cropped grass placidly a few paces off. Warp and Weft were nice, sturdy, useful-looking beasts, but…you would never imagine them with wings.

“Swallow was supposed to be a gift to Mama.” Fawn sighed. “I don’t suppose Mama rides her.”

Whit snorted. “Not hardly! She’s too terrified. Me, I’ve only taken that mare a few turns around the pasture, but the way she moves sure does make it look a long way to the ground.”

“Dag didn’t mean her to be idle. I thought you might train her to the cart.”

“Well, maybe. Papa means to breed her again, for sure. If we can find a stud around here worthy of her. He was talkin’ about Uncle Hawk’s Trustful, or maybe that flashy stallion of Sunny Sawman’s.”

Fawn said neutrally, “Trustful would be good.” She added, “Papa and Mama aren’t planning to cut Darkling, are they? Dag’s tent-sister Omba was worried about that.”

“Geld that colt? You’d have to be mad!” said Whit. “Just think of the stud fees, in a couple of years! He’ll support his mama in her old age, sure enough—and our mama, too.”

Fawn nodded in satisfaction on Omba’s behalf. “That’s all right, then.” She added, “Grace was bred to a real fine Lakewalker stallion named Shadow before we left.” Somewhat by accident, but that was another tale. “Dag expects her to throw a right lovely foal next spring, with his lines and her temper.”

Whit grinned. “As long as it’s not the other way around.”

“Hey! Grace is a very pretty horse, too, in her own way!”

“If you like ’em short and plump, which I admit is a popular style around here.”

Fawn gave him a suspicious scowl, but deciding he was referring to Clover and not herself, let the dig pass.

Whit lifted his brows and sniggered. “We’ll have to tell Clover your mare is going to beat her to the finish line in the baby race. I want to see the look on her face.”

I’m not in any baby race! Fawn was about to snap, but a loud, sharp whistle from the other end of the wheat field interrupted her. Papa took his hand from his mouth and jerked his thumb firmly toward the ground. His children, interpreting this without difficulty, shrugged in reply and crouched to their gleaning again.

When Mama, Clover, and Aunt Roper lugged lunch up to the wheat field, everyone took a break under the nearby apple trees. Fawn collected a skirt-load of the wormier groundfalls and carried them across to the pasture fence as a treat for the horses. They all clustered up, making the fence creak as they leaned over it, and nuzzled the aromatic fruit out of her hands, their thick, mobile lips tickling her palms. She liked watching the happy way their jaws moved beneath their sliding skins as they munched and crunched and sighed in appreciation, and how they rounded their big nostrils and blinked their deep brown eyes.

She wiped the mess of apple bits and horse slobber from her hands onto her skirt, and started back toward the orchard. Dag was sitting with Uncle and Aunt Roper and Fawn’s cousins, talking and gesturing. Trying to explain ground and groundsense to them, she guessed, partly from the way his hand touched the cord circling his left arm, and waved and closed and opened, but mostly by the way his desperately smiling listeners leaned back as if wishful to edge away, even while sitting cross-legged. Aunt Roper spotted Fawn, waved, and patted the ground beside her invitingly—come protect us from your wild patroller! Fawn sighed and trudged toward them.

The planned few days of rest in West Blue had slid instead into a few weeks of hard work, but Dag found himself oddly at ease despite the delay. The long days outdoors with the harvest-patrol had been laborious—that bean field, for one, had turned out to be much bigger than it looked, and before it was cleared Dag had started seeing cascades of beans in his sleep—but he was sleeping, and well, too. Indoors, every night, in a real bed, wrapped around Fawn. The food was not all dried-out to carry light, painstakingly rationed to the length of a pattern-walk, but gloriously, weightily abundant. There was no worse source of tension than an occasional clash of tempers, no deeper fear than of a splash of untimely rain.