Lois Bujold - Passage

By the time he’d barged through the last of the trees and the Fetch came into sight, Dag was so winded he had to stop and put his hands on his knees as black patterns swarmed in his vision. He raised his head as his eyes cleared. The big fellow with the knotty ground tossed the second of the two bow ropes over the side and retreated to the roof, unshipping a broad-oar. The man with the half-veiled ground shouldered through the front hatch, coming out onto the deck. He held Fawn. A knife blade gleamed against her neck; he wiggled it to make it wink and nibble into that soft flesh, and he looked up to lock Dag’s gaze, frozen not twenty feet away beyond the end of the gangplank. Whit came dashing up, his bow waving in one hand and an arrow in the other; with shaking hands, he tried to nock it.

“Your little friend can just drop that bow,” said the man dryly, shoving Fawn in front of him for a shield and tightening the bite of the knife. Dag thought he saw a line of red spring along its edge.

“Drop it, Whit,” said Dag, not taking his eyes off the stranger. Crane, without doubt. Whit’s lips moved in protest, but he let his bow fall to his feet. Fawn’s eyes shifted, and her feet; Dag prayed she would not try to break away. This one would slice her head off without a blink. A trio of boatmen, attracted at last by the ruckus, thumped down the creek bank toward the Fetch. Dag’s fear of no help coming gave way to terror that this help’s clumsy advance would crowd Crane into dreadful action.

Behind this tense tableau, Alder climbed to the roof and unshipped the second oar.

“Push off,” the leader called over his shoulder.

“What about Little Drum?” asked the big man.

The strange Lakewalker glanced up the hill. “Not coming.”

Alder’s oar swept backward, although the other oarsman still hesitated. The gangplank creaked as the boat began to pull away under it. Dag lurched forward.

“Ah!” Crane chided, lifting his knife under Fawn’s chin so she rose on her toes. “You really need to believe me.” He flicked open his ground to display his cold determination to Dag.

It wasn’t even a decision.

Dag raised his left arm, stretched out his ghost hand twenty feet, and ground-ripped a cross section as thick as a piece of boot leather from Crane’s spinal cord, just below his neck.

The man’s dark eyes opened wide, astounded, as the knife dropped from his nerveless fingers. He crumpled like a blanket folding, and his head, unsupported, hit the deck with a weird double thump. He did not cry out; it was more of a questioning grunt.

Fawn, after a gasping hesitation, leaned over, snatched up the knife, and pelted inside. The big oarsman trod forward to the edge of the roof to see what was happening. He met Whit’s arrow, released from his grabbed-up bow, square on. One hand lifted to grasp the shaft half-buried in his broad gut, but as the boat shifted, he stumbled and fell over the side with a cry and a smacking splash.

Dag leaped for the gangplank, but not before he glimpsed Berry jump up from the stern to grab the short end of the steering oar, jump down again to swing on it like a tree branch, and bring the long end around in a mighty arc, smashing into Alder’s hip and sweeping him over the opposite side of the roof and into the cold creek water.

What Dag most wanted to do was question Crane: Fawn knew this because, putting her back on her feet after grabbing her up in a breath-stopping hug and mumbling a lot of broken words into her hair, it was the first thing he said that she could actually make out. But after one glance at Bo he reordered his plan, dispatching the panting Whit to organize the boatmen who’d been drawn by the ruckus to fish Alder and Big Drum out of the water and secure them, preferably on some boat other than the Fetch.

“What about Crane?” Whit demanded.

“Just leave him lay. He’s not going anywhere.”

Dag had the queerest look on his face as he said this, but before Fawn could figure it out, she was drafted as his hands, helping to straighten out the groaning Bo atop a blanket on a hastily cleared stretch of kitchen floor, peel away his shirt, and wash around the stab wound. Dag sat cross-legged, irritably cast off his arm harness, and fell into the healing trance that was becoming increasingly familiar to Fawn—and, she thought, to him. He was in it for a long time, while the shaken Berry, cut ropes still dangling from her wrists, tended to an even more shaken Hawthorn, who was bleeding from a broken nose and crying. Hod helped everyone as best he could.

Whit took a long time to report back. The arrow-riddled Big Drum had been easy to capture, as he’d waded to shore and put up no fight when he got there. Alder had tried to swim away. Some boatmen chased him down in a skiff and wrestled him out of the water, beating him into submission. He’d almost drowned, and Fawn, glancing at Berry’s stiff face, thought it was a pity he hadn’t. Dragging out his existence one more miserable day seemed a great waste of time, emotion, and hemp. Both men had been tied up on the Snapping Turtle, the shaft in Big Drum’s belly cut off but left in, lest botching its removal keep him from his hanging.

Fawn was wondering if she should shake Dag’s shoulder, or send someone to find Barr or Remo to do whatever it was Lakewalkers did to break unintended groundlocks, when he at last drew a long breath and sat up, animation returning to his face. He stared around blinking, found her, and cast her the ghost of a smile. Emerging from his task, he looked much less wild and distraught, as though the effort had recentered him somehow. Except that Fawn hadn’t seen him look so drained since Raintree.

Bo had been conscious throughout, but silent, watching Dag with a brow furrowed as much in wonder as in pain. “Well, Lakewalker,” he breathed at last, then muffled a cough.

“That healin’ o’ his is a thing, ain’t it?” commiserated the hunkering Hod.

“Don’t try to talk,” whispered Dag. His dry voice cracked, and he cleared it; Fawn hustled to retuck the blanket she’d put around his shoulders and to fetch him a drink. He raised the tin cup to his lips with a trembling hand, swallowed, and went on more easily. “I’ve ground-glued together the two slices through your stomach walls where the blade punched in and out, and likewise some of the bigger blood vessels in there. Crane’s knife missed the biggest ones, or you’d have bled to death before I got here. Fawn’ll have to stitch up your skin.” Fawn nodded, carefully washing away the gory matter that Dag had drawn from the wound by ground projection. She had Dag’s medicine-kit needle already threaded, and bent to the task. Bo made little ow noises, but endured.

Dag went on cautiously, “Biggest danger now’s infection. I expect there’ll be some. Got to wait and see how that plays out.”

Truly. A gut-wound like this was more usually a death sentence, fever finishing what bleeding started, as Bo likely knew, because he nodded shortly. When Fawn tied off her last thread, Whit, Hod, and Berry combined to lift Bo carefully into his bunk. Dag simply lay back on the floor and stared up at the roof.

Fawn was just wondering if they should also unite to lift Dag to his bed, when Barr and Remo clumped in to apologize for killing what they sincerely hoped had been an escaping bandit up in the woods. Fawn nipped to the front hatch to peek out, and saw a couple of saddled horses beyond the gangplank. Over one was draped the body of a skinny, red-haired fellow, his sharp, contorted face pale in death.

Crane was still lying in a heap beside the animal pen; his chin moved and his eyes shifted to glare at her, and she flinched and fled back inside. Dag, what did you do to him? That was like no making I ever seen or heard tell of…