Lois Bujold - Legacy

Dag thought back to his too-few years with Kauneo, how a married man’s life got all wound about in these intimate rhythms, and how they had sometimes annoyed him—till he’d been left to wish for them back. He dealt serenely, wrapping hot stones, and coaxing some of Cattagus’s best elderberry wine out of him and into Fawn, and her pains eased.

At last, one bright, quiet morning, Dag hauled his trunk out under the canopy for a writing desk and took on the task of his letter to Luthlia. At first he thought he would keep it painlessly short, a sentence or two simply locating each bone’s malice kill. He was so much in the habit of concealing the complications of the unintended priming; it seemed so impossible to set it out clearly; and the tale of Fawn and her lost babe seemed too inward a hurt to put before strangers’ eyes. Silence was easier. And yet…silence would seem to deny that a farmer girl had ever had any place in all this. He weighed the smooth shards of Kauneo’s bone in his hand one last time before wrapping them up in a square of good cloth that Fawn had hemmed, and changed his mind.

Instead he wrote out as complete an account of the chain of events, focusing on the knives, as he could manage, most especially not leaving out his belief of how the babe’s ground had found refuge from the malice. It was still so compressed he wasn’t sure but what it sounded incoherent or insane, but it was all the truth as he knew it. When he was done he let Fawn read it before he sealed it with some of Sarri’s beeswax. Her face grew solemn; she handed it back with a brief nod. “That’ll do for my part.”

She helped him wrap up the packet carefully, with an outer cover of deer leather secured by rawhide strings for protection, and he addressed it to Kauneo’s kin, ready for Razi to take up to the courier at patroller headquarters. He fingered the finished bundle, and said slowly, “So many memories…If souls exist, maybe they lie in the track of time we leave behind us. And not out ahead, and that’s why we can’t find them, not even with groundsense. We’re lookin’ in the wrong direction.”

Fawn smiled wryly into his eyes, leaned up, and kissed him soft. “Or maybe they’re right here,” she said.

Fairbolt turned up the next day. Dag had been half-expecting him. They found seats on a pair of stumps out in the walnut grove, out of earshot from the busy campsite.

“Razi says you’re feeling better,” Fairbolt remarked, looking Dag over keenly.

“My body’s moving again, anyway,” Dag allowed. “My groundsense range still isn’t doing too well. I don’t think Hoharie’s notion that it has to come all the way back before I patrol again is right, though. Halfway would be good as most.”

“It’s not about you going back on patrol, for which judgment I’ll be relying on Hoharie and not you, thanks. It’s about your camp council summons. I’ve been holding ’em off on the word that you’re still too injured and ill after Raintree, which is harder to make stick when it’s seen you are up and about. So you can expect it as soon as that Heron Island dredging fracas is sorted out.”

Dag hissed through his teeth. “After Raintree—after all Fawn and I did—they’re still after a camp council ruling against us? Hoharie, and I, and Bryn and Mallora and Ornig would all be dead and buried right now in blighted Bonemarsh if not for Fawn! Not to mention five good makers lost. This, on top of the Glassforge malice—what more could they possibly want from a farmer girl to prove herself worthy?” His outrage was chilled by a ripple of cold reflection—in forty years he had never been able to prove himself worthy, in certain eyes. He’d concluded sometime back that the problem was not in him, it was in those eyes, and no doing of his could ever fix it. Why should any doing of Fawn’s be different?

Fairbolt scratched his ear. “Yeah, I didn’t figure that news would sit too well with you.” He hesitated. “I owe an apology to Fawn, for trying to stop her here when you were calling her from out of that groundlock. It seems right cruel, in hindsight. I had no idea it was you behind her restiness that day.”

Dag’s brows drew down. “You been talking to Othan about the Bonemarsh groundlock?”

“I’ve been talking to everyone who was there, as I had the chance, trying to piece it all together.”

“Well, just for the scribe, it wasn’t me who told Fawn to put that knife in my leg, like, like some malice riding a farmer slave. She figured it out by her own wits!”

Fairbolt held up both palms in a gesture of surrender. “Be that as it may, how are you planning to handle this council challenge? I’ve discouraged and delayed it about as much as I can without being bounced off your hearing myself for conflict of interest. And since I don’t mean to let myself get excluded from this one, the next move has to fall on you. Which is where it belongs anyway, I might point out.”

Dag bent, venting a weary sigh. “I don’t know, Fairbolt. My mind’s been working pretty slow since I got back. It feels like a bug stuck in honey, truth to tell.”

Fairbolt frowned curiously. “An effect of that peculiar blight you took on, do you think?”

“I…don’t know. It’s an effect of something.” Accumulation, maybe. He could feel it, building up in him, but he could not put a name to it.

“It wouldn’t hurt for you to tell more of your tale around, you know,” said Fairbolt. “I don’t think everyone rightly understands how much would be lost to this camp, and to Oleana, if you were banished.”

“What, brag and boast?” Dag made a face. “I should be let to keep Fawn because I’m special?”

“If you’re not willing to say it to your friends, how are you going to stand up in council and say it to your enemies?”

“Not my style, and an insult to boot to everyone who walks their miles all the same, without fanfare or thanks. Now, if you want me to argue that I should be let to keep Fawn because she’s special, I’m for it.”

“Mm,” said Fairbolt. If he was picturing this, the vision didn’t seem to bring him much joy.

Dag looked down, rubbing his sandal in the dirt. “There is this. If the continued existence of Hickory Lake Camp—or Oleana—or the wide green world—depends on just one man, we’ve already lost this long war.”

“Yet every malice kill comes, at the end, down to one man’s hand,” Fairbolt said, watching him.

“Not true. There’s a world balanced on that knife-edge. The hand of the patroller, yes. But held in it, the bone’s donor, and the heart’s donor, and the hand and eye and ground of the knife maker. And all the patrol backing up behind who got the patroller to that place. Patrollers, we hunt in packs. Then all the camp and kin behind them, who gave them the horses and the gear and the food to get there. And on and on. Not one man, Fairbolt. One man or another, yes.”

Fairbolt gave a slow, conceding nod. He added after a moment, “Has anyone said thank you for Raintree, company captain?”

“Not as I recollect,” Dag said dryly, then was a little sorry for the tone when he caught Fairbolt’s wince. He added more wistfully, “Though I do hope Dirla got her bow-down.”

“Yes, they had a great party for her over on Beaver Sigh, I heard from the survivors.”

Dag’s smile tweaked. “Good.”

Fairbolt stretched his back, which creaked faintly in the cool silence of the shade. Between the dark tree boles, the lake surface glittered in a passing breeze. “I like Fawn, yet…I can’t help imagining how much simpler all our lives could be right now if you were to take that nice farmer girl back to her family down in West Blue and tell them to keep the bride-gifts and her.”

“Pretty insulting, Fairbolt,” Dag observed. He didn’t say who to. It would take a list, he decided.