Lois Bujold - Sharing Knife 4 Horizon

Whit, in the meanwhile, had taken a long walk with Dag, and returned looking pale and terrified. Fawn took Dag aside, and whispered fiercely, “You know, if it was just Whit, I’d let you exercise your patroller humor to your heart’s content, but I won’t have any of it fall on Berry, you hear?”

“Don’t fret, Spark. I controlled myself,” Dag assured her, eyes glinting gold with his amusement. “I admit, it was a bit of a struggle. Two virgins, oh my.”

“Really?” said Fawn, with a surprised peek around Dag’s side at Whit, hunkering down to warm his hands at the fire. “I would have thought Tansy Mayapple… oh, never mind.”

“They’ll be fine,” he’d promised her.

Now, as they strolled away into the darkness after the rest of the crew, and Fawn turned to look over her shoulder at the glow of the lantern hung up on the Fetch’s bow, Dag repeated, “They’ll do fine, Spark.”

“I sure hope so.” Fawn reflected that it was likely just as well that everything about this wedding was as different as it could possibly be from the one that Berry had planned back in Clearcreek with her dead betrothed Alder. No reminders. Because while bad memories were plainly bad, it was the good memories, lost in them, that hurt the worst.

The tavern was crowded and noisy tonight, so after Dag had done his duty buying the first round, Fawn bequeathed her barely sipped tankard to the table and drew him back outside for a walk despite the dark. Partway up the steps to Uptown, Fawn found the lookout point that she’d spied earlier that day. She ducked under the rail around the landing and picked her way along the damp path, inadequately lit by the half-moon riding overhead between fitful clouds. At its end, a board propped up between two piles of stones made a smooth, dry seat, with a fine view over the serene river, all hazy silver in the night mist.

In summer, Fawn guessed couples came here to spoon. Even for northerners like themselves, this wasn’t quite outdoor spooning weather. She cuddled in gratefully under Dag’s right arm. Though the view was romantic, and Dag shared warmth generously, it was plain he was not in a romantic mood. He was in his worrywart mood, and he’d been stuck in it for days, if not weeks. Plenty long enough, anyhow.

Fawn fingered the walnut in her pocket, and said quietly, “What’s troubling your mind, Dag?”

He shrugged. “Nothing new.” After a long hesitation, while Fawn waited in expectant silence, he added, “That’s the trouble, I guess. My mind keeps looping and looping over the same problems, and never arrives anywhere different.”

“Same paths do tend to go to the same places. Tell me about them, then.”

His fingers wound themselves in her curls, as if for consolation or courage, then his arm dropped back around her and snugged her in; maybe she wasn’t the only one feeling the chill.

“When we two left Hickory Camp at the end of the summer-when we were thrown out-”

“When we left,” Fawn corrected firmly.

A conceding nod. “My notion was that if I walked around the world with my eyes new-open for a time, the way you’ve made them be, I could maybe see some way for farmers and Lakewalkers to work together against malice outbreaks. Because someday, the patrol won’t be perfect, and a malice will get away from us again, not in the wilderness or even by a village like Greenspring, but by a big farmer town. And then we’ll all be in for it. But if Lakewalkers and farmers were already working together before the inevitable happens… maybe we’d have a fighting chance.”

“I thought the Fetch was a good start,” Fawn offered.

“Good, but… so small, Spark! Eight people, and that’s counting you along-with. For six or so months of trying.”

“So, that’d be, um, sixteen folks a year. A hundred and sixty in a decade. In forty years, um…” A long hesitation while Fawn secretly tapped her fingers in her skirt. “Six or seven hundred.”

“And if the crisis breaks next year, and not forty years from now?”

“Then it won’t be any worse than if you hadn’t tried at all. Anyhow”-really, you’d think despair was his favorite corn-husk dolly, the way he clutches it-“I think your count is way off. There was all my kin in West Blue you talked to, and those teamsters from Glassforge, and Cress that you healed in Pearl Riffle and all her kin, and boatloads of boatmen along the river. And your show at the bandit cave with Crane; gods, Dag, they’ll be talking about that up and down these rivers for at least as many years as folks’ll be trying to wear those stupid pots of Barr’s. This river, I’ve figured out, is a village-one street wide and two thousand miles long.

It’s been a great place for you to tell your tale. Because river folks get around to gossip. And swap yarns like they were barter. And sometimes, change each other’s minds even when you aren’t looking on.”

Dag shook his head. “The absent gods may know what kind of path I blazed down the Grace Valley. I sure don’t. Did I light a fire, or was it all a damp sputter and right back to the gloom?”

“Why are all or nothing the only two choices, here?” Fawn asked tartly. “What I think is-”

Dag looked down, brows rising at the resolve in her voice.

“What I think is, you’re trying to carry a lazy man’s load. Inside your head, you’re trying to lift the whole world all by yourself, in one trip.

No wonder you’re exhausted. You’ve got to start smaller.”

“Smaller! How much smaller can I get?” Dag motioned down at the riverbank, by which Fawn guessed he meant to indicate their modest flatboat. A rhetorical reply in any case, so she paid no heed to it.

“Your own ground. I know it’s true because you told me so yourself, and you never lie to me: the first thing a maker has to make is himself. But nobody ever said he had to do it by himself.”

“Do you have a point, Spark?”

She ignored his stung tone and answered straight out. “Yes. It’s true for cooking or sewing or boatbuilding or harness making or crafting arrows-so I don’t guess it’s false for groundwork. Before you tackle any new job, first you have to get your own tools in order, clean and sharpened and tidy and laid out ready to hand. The main tool for groundwork is your own ground. And yours, from everything everyone has ever told me about such things, has got to be in the most awful mess right about now.

“What I think you need is another maker. Not a farmer girl, much as she loves you, and not just a couple of earnest patroller boys, as much as they want to help, because they don’t know beans about that trail, either, but instead someone like Hoharie or Dar.” Fawn took a breath, shaken by a moment of panic when she realized that Dag, unlike any member of her family ever, was actually listening to her. The notion that a man so strong might actually change or do something differently on the basis of something she’d blathered was alarming. Back when she’d longed in vain for any sign that she was heard, had she ever imagined also accepting responsibility for the results? Well, they’re in my lap now. She gulped.

“So… so I’ve been asking around. Every visiting Lakewalker I could get to talk to me up in the day market, I asked about the best medicine makers in these parts. They told me about a lot of different folks, but the one they all talked up is a fellow named Arkady Waterbirch. Seems he’s to be found at a Lakewalker camp called New Moon Cutoff, which is less’n thirty miles northeast of here, right off the Trace. Not much more’n a day’s ride away for ol’ Copperhead.” She added in anxious appeal, “They call him a groundsetter, whatever that means.”

Dag looked taken aback. “Really? That close? If…” But then he rubbed his forehead with his left arm and smiled ruefully. “Oh, gods, Spark. Wouldn’t I just… but it won’t work. It would be Dar and Hoharie all over again, don’t you see?” His teeth set in unfond memory.