Lois Bujold - Legacy

“No, he’s our walking map. And someone’s going to have to stay with the horses.” Dag cast Saun an apologetic look; the boy grimaced but subsided.

“And the rest of the company?” asked Obio Grayheron, one of the remaining patrol leaders.

Dag gave him a short nod. “You’ll give us a half-day start. At which point it will either be over—or command will pass to you and you’ll be free to try again, try something else, or circle to join forces however you can with the Raintree Lakewalkers.”

Obio settled back, digesting this unhappily. “And you’re going with…well. Yes, of course.”

Going with the veiled patrol, Dag finished for him. Because Dag was well-known to be one of the cleverest at that trick in camp. Which begged the question, in his own mind if not theirs, whether he had chosen this strategy because it was the best they could do, or because it played to his personal quirks. Well, if the gamble paid off, the subtle self-doubt would be moot. And also if it doesn’t. You can’t lose, old patroller. In a sense.

Saun was shoving shallow furrows in the drying mud with his boot heel. He looked up. “A little cruel on the folks fighting the retreat toward Farmer’s Flats. They don’t even get to know they’re the bait.”

“Neither did most of the folks up on Wolf Ridge,” said Dag dryly. And, before Saun could ask How do you know? continued, “Saun, Codo, Varleen, you’re all familiar with Bonemarsh. Stand up and give us a terrain tutorial.”

A customary task; Dag stepped back, the local knowledge stepped forth, and the other patrollers began pelting them with variously shrewd questions as the precious parchment maps were passed around, and annotations scribbled in the dirt with sticks, rubbed out, and redrawn. Dag listened as hard or harder than anyone else, casting and recasting tactical approaches in his head, glumly aware that nine-tenths of the planning would prove useless in the event.

There was enough brains and experience in this bunch that Dag scarcely needed to guide the detailed discussion from here; two bad ideas were knocked down, by Utau and Obio respectively, before Dag could open his mouth, and three better ones that Dag wouldn’t even have thought of were spat forth, to be chewed over, altered, and approved with only the barest shaping murmurs on his part. Mari, bless her, took over the problem of coaxing sharing knives from a couple of patrollers who were not going with the veiled patrol, as there were six pairs but only four knives among those here assembled. They even sorted themselves out in new partner-pairs before the group, growing quiet and thoughtful, broke up to seek their bedrolls. Dag hoped they would all sleep better than he seemed likely to.

He rolled on his back in his own bedroll, thin on the cold, damp ground, and searched the hazy sky for stars, trying to quiet the busy noise in his head. There was no point in running over the plans for tomorrow yet again, for the tenth, or was that the twentieth, time. He’d done all he could for tonight, except sleep. But when he forced the roiling concerns for his company out, the ache of missing Fawn crept back in.

He’d grown so accustomed to her companionship in so few weeks, as if she’d always been there, or had slotted into some hollow place within him just her shape that had been waiting for years. He’d come to delight not only in her sweet body, awakening appetites he’d imagined dulled by time, age, and exhaustion, but in the way her shining eyes opened wide in her endless questions, that determined set to her mouth when she faced a new problem, her seemingly boundless world-wonder. And if her hunger for life was a joy to him, his own, renewed, was an astonishment.

He considered the dark side of that bright coin uneasily. Had this marriage also reawakened his fear of death? For long, his inevitable end had seemed neither enemy nor friend, just there, accepted, to be worked around like his missing hand. If a fellow had nothing to lose, no risk held much alarm, and fear scarcely clogged thought. If that indifference had given him his noted edge, was that edge becoming blunted?

His right hand crept across his chest to trace the heavy cord wrapping his left arm above the elbow, calling up the reassuring hum of Spark’s live ground. Indeed, he had something to lose now. By the shadow of his fear, he began to see the shape of his desire, the stirrings of curiosity for a future not constrained and inevitable but suddenly containing a host of unknowns, places and people altogether unimagined, unconceived in all senses. Blight it, I want to live. Not the best time to make that discovery, eh? He snorted self-disdain.

Instead of letting his thoughts chase one another back around the circle, he folded his left arm in, rolled over around the absence of Spark, and resolutely closed his eyes. The summer night was short. They would head due south at dawn. And make sure your body and your wits are riding the same horse, old patroller.

T hree days gone, Fawn thought. Today would begin the fourth. Was it over, was it even begun, was Dag’s company there yet? Wherever there was. Somewhere to the west, yes, and he was still alive; so much her marriage cord now told her. Better than no news, but far, far from enough.

She watched across the campsite as Cattagus settled himself at a log table with knife, awl, and assorted deerhide scraps. His task of the morning was to make a new pair of slippers for his great-niece Tesy, judging by the fascinated way she danced around him, giggling when he tickled her feet after measuring them against his pieces. It might have been mere chance that his right hand rested for a moment on his left wrist before he leaned forward and began cutting.

Fawn stretched her back against the apple tree and forced herself to take up her knitting again. Without Sarri’s two children, the campsite would have fallen all too quiet these past days. Although the distraction they’d provided by disappearing for several hours day before yesterday didn’t exactly count as a help. They’d been found by a neighbor, pressed into aiding the search, in the woods nearly at the other end of the island—on a quest of their own, looking for their fathers. From their infant points of view, Fawn supposed, Razi and Utau were grand playmates who vanished as mysteriously as they arrived, and Sarri’s strained, carefully repeated explanations about gone on patrol as baffling as if she’d announced they had gone off to the moon.

Fawn’s monthly had begun the day after Dag had left, not a surprise, but an unpleasant reminder of too many regrets. Sarri had shown Fawn how Lakewalker women used cattail fluff as absorbent stuffing for their ragbags, which could be emptied into the slit trench instead of tediously washed out along with the bags, after. The consolation was slight. Fawn had spent two unhappy days sitting, spinning, and cramping, trying without success to decide if this was just a bad one, or some abnormal relic from the malice’s mishandling, and wishing Mari were here to ask; but the grinding pain had passed off at last, and her fears eased with her bleeding. Today was much better.

Last row. Fawn cast off neatly and laid the new pair of cotton-yarn socks out on her skirted thigh. They had come out well; the few dropped stitches had been properly recaptured, the heels turned at a natural angle and not something that her brothers would have threatened to dress the rooster in. She grinned in memory of the irate bird stalking around with those misshapen wool bags tied to its feet, though at the time she’d been even madder than it had.

She slipped into her tent and combed her unruly hair, tying it up with a ribbon, then rummaged in her scrap bag for a bit of colored yarn. She folded the socks neatly and made a bow around the bundle with the yarn, to help them look more like a present. Then she straightened up, put her shoulders back, and walked down the road toward Cumbia Redwing’s encampment.