Lois Bujold - Passage

“I won’t be laughing.”

Lakewalkers, Fawn was reminded, seldom bothered trying to lie to each other. Could Crane even close his ground, in his disrupted state? Dag had to be partly open at least, and not enjoying it. Barr and Remo kept tensing, like people flinching from a scratched scab they couldn’t leave well enough alone, so Fawn guessed they were partly open, too.

Crane turned his head from side to side, frowning. “What the blight did you do to me, anyway? I can’t even feel most of my body. With sense or groundsense.”

“I once saw a fellow fall from a horse,” Dag answered not quite directly, “who broke his neck in about the same place as I broke yours. He lived for some months. We won’t inflict that on you.”

“But you never touched me! You were twenty feet off, over on the bank. It was some sort of evil groundwork you did!”

“It was,” said Dag impassively, not quibbling with the modifier. Remo and Barr looked disturbed. Crane’s startled gaze said, What are you? plain as plain, but he didn’t voice it.

Crane’s utter helplessness had been made clear during his cleanup. He must realize by now he was a dead man talking. Fawn knew how to feign indifference to torments one could not escape, but she’d never before seen real indifference used so. Crane seemed pained to have his mind roused from its sullen retreat.

More silence.

“So,” Dag probed again, “you were a mule-headed rule-breaker, and didn’t care to reform, so Log Hollow threw you out. Maybe a thief.”

“That was a lie!” said Crane. But added after a moment, “Then.”

“Was it?” said Dag mildly. “There was a farmer woman, I heard. Maybe youngsters. What happened to them? When your camp stripped you and booted you out, did you find your way back to her?”

“For a while,” said Crane. “She didn’t much care for what I brought her from hunting, compared to what I’d used to bring from patrol. Then the blighted strumpet died. I gave it all up for nothing!”

“How’d she die?”

“Fever. I was away. Came back to a blighted mess…”

Dag glanced at Fawn, his face set tight, and she touched the thin, drying scab on her neck left from Crane’s knife. Dag had been skin-close to losing her, last night. She’d sometimes worried what might happen to her if Dag were killed; never, she suddenly realized, what would happen to Dag if she died. His first widowing had nearly destroyed him, even with all the support of his kinfolk and familiar world around him. What would it be like with nothing around him?

“And the youngsters?” Dag said. His voice was very level, devoid of judgment. It would have to be, Fawn thought, to keep Crane talking at all. She bit her knuckle, picturing the lost children.

“Foisted them on her sister. She didn’t want half-bloods. We had an argument…then I left. After that I don’t know.”

Fawn suspected that had been an ugly argument. The death of either parent would be a disaster for young children, but the loss of a mother could be lethal for infants, even with near kin or dear friends to take up the burden. Crane had clearly owned no knack for keeping either. Dag did not pursue this, but led on. “Then what?”

“I knocked around Oleana for a while. When I got tired of living in the woods, I’d take what jobs some farmer would give me, or try the dice. Took to thieving when those didn’t play out. It was so easy, with groundsense. I could walk like a ghost right through their shops or houses. I ’specially liked doing places where they’d given me the evil eye and run me off, when I’d asked honest first.”

Remo said, in an outraged voice, “Oh, that’d make it good for the next patrol to go through, to have Lakewalkers suspected of stealing!” Dag waved him to silence. Crane’s lips turned in a mockery of a smile. How old was Crane? Older than Barr or Remo, to be sure, but younger than Dag, Fawn guessed. About halfway between? Remo was looking at Barr the rule-bender in a way that made him shift uncomfortably. Barr glared back at his partner as if to say, I would not have—! But Fawn thought both could see, Yes, how easy.

Crane continued, “One night, some farmer woke up before I was done gathering, and cornered me. I had to shut him up, but I hit him too hard. That’s when I decided to leave Oleana. Took myself down to the river, spent his money on passage on a farmer flatboat. I started to think—maybe if I got someplace far enough away, I could become somebody else. Shed my skin, my name, start over somehow. I was going to decide when I reached the Confluence, whether to go south to Graymouth or maybe north to Luthlia, though I’d no love of snow by then. It’s said they don’t ask too many questions up there, if a patroller can take the cold. But then the fool boat boss put in at the Cavern Tavern, and I met Brewer and his game.”

“What was his game?” Dag’s voice was curiously soft, now. Remo squinted at him in doubt. Crane’s words were flowing as if he’d half-forgotten his listeners, wound up in his tale and his memories. Dag did nothing visible to disrupt the flow; Fawn couldn’t tell if he was doing something invisible to channel it.

“It was how it amused Brewer to restock on bandits when he’d run low,” Crane said. “When he’d taken captives alive, two or more at a time—it worked best with at least four—he’d set them to fight each other, in pairs. If they refused to fight, they’d be slain outright. The second pair almost never refused. If he had more captives, he might make the winners fight each other, too, but anyway, the prize—besides being allowed to live—was to join his gang. He said he could turn most men that way—after they’d killed their friends for him, he’d own their minds.”

Alder, Fawn thought. Was that what had happened to Alder? In that case, what exactly had happened to Buckthorn, and Berry’s papa, and the rest of their crew? She shuddered, realizing Dag wasn’t keeping his voice low just for the menace of it. It was so his words would not carry to the top deck.

“His arithmetic was off, by my reckoning,” Crane continued. “But I was his prize, when I showed up. To turn a Lakewalker to thievery and murder! He thought he was the game-master, he did. I didn’t tell him I was ahead of him down that road.”

A strange brag. If Crane couldn’t be the best, he’d compete for being the baddest? Evidently so.

“I won my rounds, of course. It was too easy. I stayed on a few weeks, learned the trade, persuaded and beguiled a few fellows just to see what would happen. Then I took Brewer’s game to its logical conclusion. From behind. I was never quite sure if he was surprised, or not.”

“Once you’d won, you could have left, surely. However you were guarded before,” Dag said suggestively. “If you could walk past farmers like a ghost, why not bandits?”

“Go where? Farmers still wouldn’t have me, and Lakewalkers…would’ve been able to smell the blood in my ground, by then. So maybe Brewer won after all, eh?”

“Suicide?” said Dag mildly.

Crane stared at him in astonishment. “I didn’t have a bonded knife! Nor any way of getting one, once I was banished. The blighted camp council stripped mine from me along with everything else.” Crane turned his head away. The flow of his talk dried up for several minutes.

Fawn’s face screwed up in the slow realization that Crane—even Crane! — was taken aback at Dag’s suggestion not because he feared self-murder, but because he scorned to so waste a death, with no sharing knife to catch it. His response seemed quite unthinking and altogether sincere. And Remo and Barr looked as though they found nothing odd in this at all. She pounded her fist gently against her forehead. Lakewalkers! They’re all Lakewalkers! All mad.