Lois Bujold - Legacy

“I left you in Glassforge pretty near four weeks ago!” said Mari. “You were supposed to go straight home! Shouldn’t have taken you more than a week at most!”

“No,” Dag said in a tone of judicious correction, “I told you we’d be stopping off at the Bluefield farm on the way, to put them at ease about Fawn, here. I admit that took longer than I’d planned. Though once the arm was busted there seemed no rush, as I figured I wouldn’t be able to patrol again for nigh on six weeks anyway.”

Fairbolt scowled at this dodgy argument. “Mari said that if your luck was good, you’d come to your senses and dump the farmer girl back on her family, but if it ran to your usual form, they’d beat you to death and hide the body. Did her kin bust your bone?”

“If I’d been her kin, I’d have broken more of them,” Mari muttered. “You still got all your parts, boy?”

Dag’s smile thinned. “I had a run-in with a sneak thief in Lumpton Market, actually. Got our gear back, for the price of the arm. My visit to West Blue went very pleasantly.”

Fawn decided not to offer any adjustment to this bald-faced assertion. She didn’t quite like the way the patrollers—all three of them—kept looking right at her and talking right over her, but they were on Dag’s land here; she waited for guidance, or at least a hint. Though she thought he could stand to speed up, in that regard. Conscious of the officers’ eyes upon her—Fairbolt was leaning sideways slightly to get a view around Dag—she crept out from behind her husband. She gave Mari a friendly little wave, and the camp captain a respectful knee-dip. “Hello again, Mari. How de’ do, sir?”

Dag drew breath and repeated his blunt introduction: “Fairbolt, meet Missus Fawn Bluefield. My wife.”

Fairbolt squinted and rubbed the back of his neck, his face screwed up. The silence stretched as he and Mari looked over the wedding cords with, Fawn felt, more than just their eyes. Both officers had their sleeves rolled up in the heat of the day, and both had similar cords winding around their left wrists, worn thin and frayed and faded. Her own cord and Dag’s looked bright and bold and thick by comparison, the gold beads anchoring the ends seeming very solid.

Fairbolt glanced aside at Mari, his eyes narrowing still further. “Did you suspect this?”

“This? No! This isn’t—how could—but I told you he’d likely done some fool thing no one could anticipate.”

“You did,” Fairbolt conceded. “And I didn’t. I thought he was just…” He focused his gaze on Dag, and Fawn shrank even though she was not at its center. “I won’t say that’s impossible because it’s plain you found a way. I will ask, what Lakewalker maker helped you to this?”

“None, sir,” said Dag steadily. “None but me, Fawn’s aunt Nattie, who is a spinner and natural maker, and Fawn. Together.”

Though not so tall as Dag, Fairbolt was still a formidably big man. He frowned down at Fawn; she had to force her spine straight. “Lakewalkers do not recognize marriages to farmers. Did Dag tell you that?”

She held out her wrist. “That’s why this, I understood.” She gripped the cord tight, for courage. If they couldn’t be bothered to be polite to her, she needn’t return any better. “Now, I guess you could look at this with your fancy groundsense and say we weren’t married if you wanted. But you’d be lying. Wouldn’t you.”

Fairbolt rocked back. Dag didn’t flinch. If anything, he looked satisfied, if a bit fey. Mari rubbed her forehead.

Dag said quietly, “Did Mari tell you about my other knife?”

Fairbolt turned to him, not quite in relief, but tacitly accepting the shift of subject. Backing off for the moment; Fawn was not sure why. Fairbolt said, “As much as you told her, I suppose. Congratulations on your malice kill, by the way. What number was that? And don’t tell me you don’t keep count.”

Dag gave a little conceding nod. “It would have been twenty-seven, if it had been my kill. It was Fawn’s.”

“It was both ours,” Fawn put in. “Dag had the knife, I had the chance to use it. Either of us would have been lost without the other.”

“Huh.” Fairbolt walked slowly around Fawn, as if looking, really looking, at her for the first time. “Excuse me,” he said, and reached out to tilt her head and study the deep red scars on her neck. He stepped back and sighed. “Let’s see this other knife, then.”

Fawn fished in her shirt. After the scare at Lumpton Market she had fashioned a new sheath for the blade, single and of softer leather, with a cord for her neck to carry it the way Lakewalkers did. It was undecorated, but she’d sewn it with care. Hesitantly, she pulled the cord over her curls, glanced at Dag, who gave her a nod of reassurance, and handed it over to the camp captain.

Fairbolt took it and sat down in one of the chairs near a window, drawing the bone blade out. He examined it much the way Dag and Mari had, even to touching it to his lips. He sat frowning a moment, cradling it in his thick hands. “Who made this for you, Dag? Not Dar?”

“No. A maker up in Luthlia, a few months after Wolf Ridge.”

“Kauneo’s bone, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever have reason before to think the making might be defective?”

“No. I don’t think it was.”

“But if the making was sound, no one but you should have been able to prime it.”

“I am very aware of that. And if the making was unsound, no one should have been able to prime it at all. But there it sits.”

“That it does. So tell me exactly what happened in that cave, again…?”

First Dag, and then Fawn, had to repeat the tale for Fairbolt, each in their own words. They touched but lightly on how Dag had come upon Fawn, kidnapped off the road by bandits in the thrall of the malice. How he’d tracked her to the malice’s cave. And come—Dag bit his lip—just too late to stop the monster from ripping the ground of her two-months-child from her womb. Fawn did not volunteer, nor did Fairbolt ask, how she came to be alone, pregnant—and unwed—on the road in the first place; perhaps Mari, who’d had the tale from Fawn back in Glassforge, had given him the gist.

Fairbolt’s attention and questions grew keener when they described the mix-up with Dag’s malice-killing sharing knives. How Dag, going down under the malice’s guard of mud-men, had tossed the knife pouch to Fawn, how she’d stuck the monster first with the wrong, unprimed knife, then with the right one, shattering it in its use. How the terrifying creature had dissolved, leaving the first knife so strangely charged with the mortality of Fawn’s unborn daughter.

By the time they were half-through, Mari had pulled up a chair, and Dag leaned against the table. Fawn found she preferred to stand, though she had to lock her knees against an unwelcome trembling. Fairbolt did not, to Fawn’s relief, inquire into the messy aftermath of that fight; his interest seemed to end with the mortal knives.

“You are planning to show this to Dar,” Fairbolt said when they’d finished, nodding to the knife still in his lap; from his tone Fawn wasn’t sure if this was query or command.

“Yes.”

“Let me know what he says.” He hesitated. “Assuming the other matter doesn’t affect his judgment?” He jerked his head toward Dag’s left arm.

“I have no idea what Dar will think of my marriage”—Dag’s tone seemed to add, nor do I care, but he didn’t say it aloud—“but I would expect him to speak straight on his craft, regardless. If I have doubts after, I can always seek another opinion. There are half a dozen knife makers around this lake.”

“Of lesser skill,” said Fairbolt, watching him closely.