Passage tsk-3

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “Whit?”

  “My brother. He’s just along for the ride as far as the Grace. He’ll go home with the glass-men tomorrow.” Fawn explained about Warp and Weft, and Whit’s financial schemes. With half her cider gone, Fawn felt bold enough to ask, “So how come you stayed home this past fall?” Fawn knew exactly how agonizing it was not to know what disaster had befallen one’s beloved, but she couldn’t help thinking Berry might have been lucky not to have shared it, whatever it had been.

  “You really got married this summer?” said Berry, in a wistful tone.

  Fawn nodded. Beneath the table, she touched Dag’s wedding cord wrapping her left wrist. The sense of his direction that he had laid in it, or in her, before Raintree had almost faded away. Maybe, with his ghost hand coming back, he could renew the spell? Groundwork, she diligently corrected her thought.

  “I thought I would be wed by then, too,” sighed Berry. “I stayed behind to fix up what was going to be my—our—new house, see, and so papa left my little brother with me, because I was going to be a grown-up woman. Alder, my betrothed, he went with papa too, because he’d never been down the river, and papa thought he ought to learn the boatman’s trade. We were to be married in the spring when they all came back with the profits. Papa said this was going to be his best run ever. ’Course, he says that every fall, whether it’s true or not.” She drank more cider. “Spring came back to Clear Creek, but they never did, not any of the three or their hired hands. I had everything ready, everything—” She broke off.

  Fawn nodded, not needing a list to picture it: linens and cooking gear all assembled, bride bed built and feather ticks stuffed and maybe all of it garnished with embroidered coverlets, curtains hung, food laid in, the house cleaned and repaired and all sprigged out. Wedding dress sewn. And then the waiting: first with impatience, then with anger, then with helpless fear, then with fading hope. Fawn shivered.

  “Strawberry season came and went, and I left off fussing with the house and started fussing with this boat instead. The only kinsman who’d give me a hand was my uncle Bo, who’s my mama’s older half-brother that never married. The rest of my cousins have got no time for him ’cause they say he drinks too much and is unreliable, which is true enough, but half-help’s better than none, I say. And none was what I got from the rest of ’em. They said I’d got no business going on the river by myself, as if I didn’t know ten times as much about it as any of them!”

  “Think you’ll find ’em? All your lost menfolk?” asked Fawn shyly.

  “They’d have to be stuck somewhere pretty tight, you’d figure.” She didn’t name the more likely possibilities: a boat broken on rocks or snags and all drowned, or eaten by bears or those appalling southern swamp lizards Dag had described, or bitten by rattlesnakes, or, even more likely and grimly, all dying of some sudden gut-wrenching illness, on a cold riverbank with no one left to bury the last in even an unmarked grave.

  “That’s why I named my boat the Fetch and not just the Finder, which was the first name I’d thought of. I’m no fool,” said Berry, in a lower tone. “I know what all might have been. But I scorned to go on living with the not-knowing-for-sure for one more week, when I had a boat to hand to go look for myself. Well, partly to hand.” She tilted up her tankard to drain the cider. Swallowing, she continued, “Which is why I want a crew to hand, as well. If the rise comes up sudden, I don’t want to be stuck waiting for those two scared-off fools to show themselves.”

  “If they turned up anyhow, would there still be room for us?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Berry grinned suddenly, making her wide mouth wider; not pretty, but, well, fetching was just the word, Fawn thought. “I don’t like cookin’.”

  “If you—” Fawn began, but was interrupted by a plaintive voice from outside.

  “Fawn? Hey, Fawn, where’d you go?”

  Fawn grimaced and drained her own tankard. “There’s Whit. He must be done unloading. I’d better go reassure him. Dag told me to watch after him.” She rose to make her way through the gloom out to the bow of the boat, calling, “Over here, Whit!”

  “There you are!” He strode down the bank, a trifle red in the face.

  “You gave me a turn, disappearing like that. Dag’d have my hide if I let anything happen to you.”

  “I’m fine, Whit. I was just having some cider with Berry.”

  “You shouldn’t be going on boats with strangers,” he scolded. “If you hadn’t—” His mouth stopped moving and hung half-open. Fawn glanced around.

  Berry, smiling, came up by her shoulder, leaned on the rail, and gave Whit a friendly-ferret wave. “That your husband?”

  “No, brother.”

  “Oh, yeah, he looks it.”

  Whit was still standing there at the end of the board gangplank. Why should he be so shocked that his sister was chatting with a boatwoman? But he wasn’t looking at Fawn at all. The gut-punched look on his face seemed strangely familiar, and Fawn realized she’d seen it there before. Recently.

  Ah. Ha. I’ve never seen a fellow fall in love at first sight twice in one day before.

  7

  The afternoon was waning when Dag at last caught up with Tanner’s wagon at the Possum Landing goods-shed. His roundabout chase had taken him first to Pearl Bend, where Mape had redirected him across the river. A long wait for the Lakewalker ferry, a short ride up the bank, a turn left to the Landing—Dag tensed as his sputtering groundsense, reaching out, found no spark of Fawn. But Whit was out front, waving eagerly at him.

  “Dag!” he cried, as Dag drew Copperhead to a halt and leaned on his saddlebow. “I was wondering when you was going to show up. I was just trying to figure how to find you. We’ve got the boat ride all fixed!”

  Tanner climbed up onto his driver’s box, gathered up his reins, and regarded Whit with some bemusement. “No messages then, after all?”

  “No, not now he’s here. Thanks! Oh, no—wait.” Whit went to the wheelers and gave Weft a pat and a hug around the neck, then ran around the wagon and repeated the gestures with Warp. “Good-bye, you two. You be good for Tanner now, you hear?” The horses flicked their ears at him; Warp gave him a soulful return nudge—unless he was just trying to use the boy as a scratching post—which made Whit blink rather rapidly.

  “They’re real good, for such young ’uns,” Tanner assured him. “You take care, too.” He donned his hat and tugged the brim at Dag. “Lakewalker.” And, a little to Dag’s surprise, slapped his reins on the team’s rumps and drove off minus Whit. A quick look around located both Fawn’s and Whit’s saddlebags leaning against the porch steps of the goods-shed. A couple of idlers on the shaded bench, one whittling, the other just sitting with his hands slack between his knees, frowned curiously at Dag.

  “Aren’t you going along to help him?” Dag asked Whit, nodding toward the wagon rumbling away.

  “I just helped him load on about a ton of goods from Tripoint and upriver that he’s taking back to Glassforge. Mape was going to get up a load from downriver at the Bend—cotton and tea, he said, and indigo if they had any, if the price was right.”

  “He did. I just saw him.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “Mape told me they mean to start home tomorrow morning, after they rest the horses,” said Dag. “You, ah, mean to catch up?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “So, what? Exactly?” Gods, he was sounding just like Sorrel. But Whit didn’t seem to notice.

  “Oh, you have to come see, you have to come see. Come on, get our bags up on Copper and I’ll show you.”

  Dag had no heart to dampen such enthusiasm, despite his own lingering foul mood. Dutifully, he dismounted and helped sling the bags across his saddle, wrapped the reins around his hook, and strolled after Whit, who strained ahead like a puppy on a leash. The idlers’ eyes followed them, narrowing in suspicion at Dag. Edgy, far from friendly, but not quite the hostility that might have been expected had any of Barr’s and Remo’s victims died during the night
. Absent gods be thanked. Walking first forward, then backward, Whit waved and called good-bye to them as well, by which Dag reckoned they’d been briefly hired by Tanner as fellow-loaders, a typical way for such rivertown wharf rats to pick up a little extra coin.

  “So if you’re not going back to Glassforge with Tanner and Mape and Hod, what are you going to do?” Dag probed.

  “I’m gonna try me some river-trading. I spent some of my horse money on window glass, to sell off the Fetch. That’s Berry’s boat. Boss Berry,” Whit corrected himself with a lopsided grin.

  “What about that promise to your parents about going straight home?”

  “That wasn’t a promise, exactly. More like a plan. Plans change. Anyhow, if I get all my glass sold by the time we reach Silver Shoals, I could take the river road home and not get lost, and get back hardly late at all.”

  There seemed a certain disquieting vagueness to this new plan. Well, Dag would find out what Fawn thought of it shortly. He returned his attention warily to his surroundings.

  They passed along the scattered row of flatboats tied to the trees along the bank. A man sitting on a crate in one bow hunched and scowled as Dag went by. A woman frowned, clutched up a wide-eyed toddler, its thumb stuck in its mouth, and skittered inside her boat’s top-shed. A collection of flatties idling and laughing on a boat roof fell abruptly silent, stood, and stared across at Dag.

  “Why are they starin’?” Whit asked, craning his head in return.

  “They starin’ at you, Dag? I been by here twice and they never stared at me…”

  “Just keep walking, Whit,” said Dag wearily. “Don’t turn your head. Turn around, blight it!”

  Whit was walking backward again, but he obediently wheeled. “Huh?”

  “I’m a Lakewalker, seemingly alone, in farmer country. Corpse-eater, grave-robber, sorcerer, remember? They wonder what I’m up to.” They wonder if I’m an easy target. They wonder if they could take me. He supposed they might also be wondering if he was some sort of consequence of last night, looking for retribution.

  “But you aren’t up to anything.” Whit squinted over his shoulder.

  “You sure it isn’t just the hook?”

  Dag set his teeth. “Quite sure. Don’t you remember what you thought, first time Fawn brought me into your kitchen at West Blue?”

  Whit blinked in an effort of recollection. “Well, I suppose I thought you were a pretty strange fellow for my sister to drag in. And tall, I do remember that.”

  “Were you afraid?”

  “No, not particularly.” Whit hesitated. “Reed and Rush were, I think.”

  “Indeed.”

  Whit’s eyes shifted; the mob of flatties on the boat roof was gradually settling back down. “This feels creepy, y’know?”

  “Yes.”

  “Huh.” Whit’s dark brows drew in. Thinking? Dag could hope.

  “What did you hear up at the goods-shed about the fight last night?” Dag asked.

  “Oh, yeah, that was lucky for us!”

  “What?” said Dag, astonished. His steps slowed.

  Whit waved a hand. “It seems two fellows from the Fetch got roped into it by some of their friends, jumping some local Lakewalker they were mad at. When the ferrywomen and a bunch of other Lakewalkers came to break it up, they run off scared, along with some girl and her beau. The other three was in no shape for runnin’ and are back on their boats now. But it means Boss Berry needs two stout fellows to pull the broad-oars.” Whit pointed to Dag and himself, grinned, and held up two fingers. “And Fawn to cook,” he added cheerily.

  “Let me get this straight,” said Dag. “You’ve volunteered me—and Fawn—as flatboat crew?”

  “Yeah! Isn’t it great?” said Whit. Dag was just about to blister him with an explanation of how not-great it was, when he added, “It was Fawn’s idea, really,” and Dag let his breath huff out unformed.

  On his next breath, Dag managed, “Do you have any idea how to man a flatboat sweep?”

  “No, but I reckoned you would, and Berry and Bo said they’d teach me.”

  It wasn’t exactly Dag’s vision of the marriage trip he’d promised Fawn—or himself, for that matter. It wasn’t just the work, which Whit plainly underestimated. Dag was still dragging from his encounter with Hod, though it wasn’t his bodily strength that had suffered. But he remembered the recuperative effects of the harvest, and was given pause. He said more cautiously, “Did you tell this boat boss I’m a Lakewalker?”

  “Uh…I don’t remember as it came up,” Whit admitted uneasily.

  Dag sighed. “Was he wearing a pot on his head?”

  “Her head, and no. What kind of pot? Why?”

  Dag’s terse summary of Barr and Remo’s jape surprised a shout of laughter from Whit. “Oh, that’s ripe! No, the loaders at the goods-shed didn’t tell me that part! I wonder if they was some of the pot-pated ones?”

  “Not so ripe in the result,” said Dag. “One of the patrollers was wearing his sharing knife last night, which he should not have been, and it was broken in the fight. The Pearl Riffle Lakewalkers are pretty upset about it today.”

  Whit squinted. “Is that bad?”

  Dag groped for a comparison. “Suppose…suppose you and Sunny Sawman and his friends got into a drunken brawl in the village square of West Blue, and in the tumble one of you knocked over your aunt Nattie and killed her. Gone in a moment. That’s just about how bad.”

  “Oh,” said Whit, daunted.

  “I expect those patrollers feel as bad as you would, the morning after.” Dag frowned. “I wouldn’t imagine the friends of those flatties who are laid up feel too kindly toward stray Lakewalkers just now, either.” He sighed. Well, one way or another, they needed a boat out of Pearl Riffle, come the rise. Which couldn’t come too soon.

  And here, evidently, was the boat in question.

  Fawn—at last! — stood in the bow talking with a tall, blond girl in a practical homespun shirt, skirt, and leather vest, her sleeves rolled up on slim but strappy-muscled arms. She had a nice wide smile, tinged, as she looked down at Fawn, with a touch of that same excited-to-be-making-new-friends air as Whit. Fawn looked equally pleased. Dag tried not to feel old. In a pen to one side of the bow, a boy knelt milking a goat. He had the same straw-straight hair as the tall girl, cut raggedly around his ears, and the same wide cheekbones flushed with sunburn. Too big to be her child, so likely a younger brother. A much older man, unshaven and a trifle seedy, leaned against the cabin wall looking on blearily but benignly.

  Dag nodded to the blond girl. “That your Boss Berry?”

  “Yep,” said Whit proudly.

  Dag eyed him. So that’s the way his wind blows, does it?

  “She ought to be Boss Clearcreek, but she says that’s her papa, so she goes by Boss Berry. Wouldn’t it be good for Fawn to have another woman aboard? You can see Berry likes that idea, too. They hit it off straightaway.”

  Dag was getting a certain sense of inevitability about this boat. He let his groundsense flick out. At least the water all seemed to be on the outside of the hull. There was a coherence about its ground that said boat not boards. “It’s a good making, this boat,” he conceded.

  Fawn saw him, and came dancing over the plank above the mud to hug him as if he’d been gone for days and not hours. He let Copperhead loose to nibble the grass clumps, reins trailing, and folded her in, permitting himself a brief, heartening ground-touch of her. After Pearl Riffle Camp, it felt like bathing a wound in some sweet medicine. He released her again as the boat boss began picking her way across to shore, her wide smile flattening out.

  “Dag, I found the best boat!” Fawn un-hugged him just enough to lift her face to his. Like a morning-glory blossom. “Berry says we can have passage in exchange for being her crew, if you think that’d work out—”

  “I already told him that part,” said Whit.

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself—” began Dag.

  The blond girl arrived
and folded her arms tightly across her chest, frowning. She said to Fawn, “This your Dag?”

  Fawn turned out of Dag’s one-armed embrace, but didn’t relinquish his hand. “Yes,” she said proudly.

  The frown became tinged with dismay. “But he’s a Lakewalker!”

  Though it seems there’s some question about that, today. Dag nodded politely at the boat boss. “Ma’am.”

  The frown deepened to a scowl. “Fawn, I know Lakewalkers. A Lakewalker wouldn’t no more marry a farmer girl than—than he’d marry my Daisy-goat over there. I don’t know if you’re trickin’ me or if he’s trickin’ you, but I do know I don’t want no trickster-man on my boat!”

  Fawn and Whit, in chorus, went into the usual explanation about the wedding braids and West Blue that was beginning to exhaust Dag. It wasn’t just Boss Berry, or the suspicious stares from the stirred-up flatties. It was all that atop the scene in the Pearl Riffle patrol headquarters. Dag felt suddenly like a swimmer caught in an eddy between two shores, unable to land on either. He braced himself: Nobody said this was going to be easy. But he hoped he wasn’t about to lose Fawn their boat-passage. Or her new friend.

  Berry touched Fawn’s wedding cord, held out in demonstration; her face grew, if not wholly convinced, less tense. Her gaze flicked over the hook. “They say you know boats,” she said to Dag at last, the first words she’d spoken to him directly.

  He repeated the polite nod. “I’ve never worked a flatboat or a keel. I’ve taken narrow boats, big and small, down both the Grace and the Gray, though never the whole length in one trip.”

  “I’ve never had no Lakewalker as boat crew, before. Never even seen one doing that, on any farmer boat.” But her voice was growing more doubtful than hostile.

  “I started out this trip to do a lot of things no one had done before.” Dag glanced at Fawn’s anxious, upturned face and bestirred himself. “I’ve been on high water and low, and I know a snag from a sawyer. And I could spot you the channel through the sand bars and shoals in water thick enough to plow, day or dark.”