Passage

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “Huh,” said Whit, squinting at her neck. “I guess so!”

  “The weakness and pain in his body don’t bother him near as much as the harm the ripping did to his groundsense, though.”

  “That seeing-double thing he talks about?”

  “Yes. Usually he can sense things out for near a mile away, which I gather is pretty amazing even for a Lakewalker. He says it’s down to less ’n a hundred paces right now. The medicine maker said that’s how he’ll know when his ground is better, when he can sense out far again.”

  Whit blinked. “So…can he still do his groundwork? Like that bowl?”

  Whit had been impressed by the bowl. Rightfully, Fawn thought. “Not yet. Not real well.” She thought of some of Dag’s other marvelous ground-tricks, still not regained, and sighed. When Lakewalkers made love they did it body and ground, with an ingenuity farmers never dreamed of, but she wasn’t about to explain that part to Whit.

  Whit shook his head, frowning again at the reapers. “He looks so wrong.”

  Fawn shaded her eyes with the edge of her hand. “Why? I think he’s doing pretty good with that scythe.”

  “There’s that hat, for one.”

  “I wove him that hat! Same as yours.”

  “Ah, that explains why he won’t be parted from it. What that man does for you…! But—” Whit gestured inarticulately. “Dag looks all right up on his evil horse. He looks right with that bow of his, anyone can see—you’d think it grew there on his arm, even without how his arrows fly just where he wants. I’ve never seen him draw that big knife of his, but I sure wouldn’t want to be on the other side when he does.”

  “No. You wouldn’t,” Fawn agreed.

  “But stick him with a scythe or a pitchfork or a bucket, he looks as out of place as—as if you’d hitched that leggy silver mare to a plow.” He jerked his head toward the pasture fence.

  Swallow, the dappled gray mare Dag had sent to West Blue as his Lakewalker-style bride-gift, pricked her curving ears alertly. She looked as elegant as moonlight on water, and as swift as a rippling stream even when she was standing still. Beyond, her black colt Darkling, as if proudly aware of collecting his due-share of admiration, kicked up his heels and danced past, tail flicking.

  Grace was standing hipshot and bored along the fence line, dark bay coat looking warm and shiny in the sun. Copperhead of the uncertain temper had been left in exile in the small paddock below the old barn, but the two young plow horses Whit was bringing along, and known therefore as Whit’s team, cropped grass placidly a few paces off. Warp and Weft were nice, sturdy, useful-looking beasts, but…you would never imagine them with wings.

  “Swallow was supposed to be a gift to Mama.” Fawn sighed. “I don’t suppose Mama rides her.”

  Whit snorted. “Not hardly! She’s too terrified. Me, I’ve only taken that mare a few turns around the pasture, but the way she moves sure does make it look a long way to the ground.”

  “Dag didn’t mean her to be idle. I thought you might train her to the cart.”

  “Well, maybe. Papa means to breed her again, for sure. If we can find a stud around here worthy of her. He was talkin’ about Uncle Hawk’s Trustful, or maybe that flashy stallion of Sunny Sawman’s.”

  Fawn said neutrally, “Trustful would be good.” She added, “Papa and Mama aren’t planning to cut Darkling, are they? Dag’s tent-sister Omba was worried about that.”

  “Geld that colt? You’d have to be mad!” said Whit. “Just think of the stud fees, in a couple of years! He’ll support his mama in her old age, sure enough—and our mama, too.”

  Fawn nodded in satisfaction on Omba’s behalf. “That’s all right, then.” She added, “Grace was bred to a real fine Lakewalker stallion named Shadow before we left.” Somewhat by accident, but that was another tale. “Dag expects her to throw a right lovely foal next spring, with his lines and her temper.”

  Whit grinned. “As long as it’s not the other way around.”

  “Hey! Grace is a very pretty horse, too, in her own way!”

  “If you like ’em short and plump, which I admit is a popular style around here.”

  Fawn gave him a suspicious scowl, but deciding he was referring to Clover and not herself, let the dig pass.

  Whit lifted his brows and sniggered. “We’ll have to tell Clover your mare is going to beat her to the finish line in the baby race. I want to see the look on her face.”

  I’m not in any baby race! Fawn was about to snap, but a loud, sharp whistle from the other end of the wheat field interrupted her. Papa took his hand from his mouth and jerked his thumb firmly toward the ground. His children, interpreting this without difficulty, shrugged in reply and crouched to their gleaning again.

  When Mama, Clover, and Aunt Roper lugged lunch up to the wheat field, everyone took a break under the nearby apple trees. Fawn collected a skirt-load of the wormier groundfalls and carried them across to the pasture fence as a treat for the horses. They all clustered up, making the fence creak as they leaned over it, and nuzzled the aromatic fruit out of her hands, their thick, mobile lips tickling her palms. She liked watching the happy way their jaws moved beneath their sliding skins as they munched and crunched and sighed in appreciation, and how they rounded their big nostrils and blinked their deep brown eyes.

  She wiped the mess of apple bits and horse slobber from her hands onto her skirt, and started back toward the orchard. Dag was sitting with Uncle and Aunt Roper and Fawn’s cousins, talking and gesturing. Trying to explain ground and groundsense to them, she guessed, partly from the way his hand touched the cord circling his left arm, and waved and closed and opened, but mostly by the way his desperately smiling listeners leaned back as if wishful to edge away, even while sitting cross-legged. Aunt Roper spotted Fawn, waved, and patted the ground beside her invitingly—come protect us from your wild patroller! Fawn sighed and trudged toward them.

  The planned few days of rest in West Blue had slid instead into a few weeks of hard work, but Dag found himself oddly at ease despite the delay. The long days outdoors with the harvest-patrol had been laborious—that bean field, for one, had turned out to be much bigger than it looked, and before it was cleared Dag had started seeing cascades of beans in his sleep—but he was sleeping, and well, too. Indoors, every night, in a real bed, wrapped around Fawn. The food was not all dried-out to carry light, painstakingly rationed to the length of a pattern-walk, but gloriously, weightily abundant. There was no worse source of tension than an occasional clash of tempers, no deeper fear than of a splash of untimely rain.

  This break in their journey had been good for him. The dark, sick pain in his bones from the blight was giving way to mere clean fatigue from well-used muscles. His left leg was not as weak—he hadn’t needed his stick for days. He felt less…unbalanced. He had not, admittedly, attempted to stray off the Bluefield acres to the village, where he might risk encountering certain young men who had reason to remember his last visit with disfavor. But however Dag was now discussed in village gossip, the bad boys dared not stray up here, either, and Dag was content to be surrounded wholly by farmers who wished him well for Fawn’s sake.

  “So, patroller.”

  Sorrel’s voice broke into Dag’s drift of thought, and he tilted his head forward, closed his mouth, and opened his eyes, hoping he hadn’t started to snore in his chair. As was their custom, the Bluefield clan had gathered in the parlor after dinner to share the working lights. Clover and Fletch had gone off to her folks this evening, but Tril sat in her usual place sewing; Nattie, though not needing the oil lamp, kept company plying her drop spindle; and Fawn and Whit had set up a table to make arrows, a skill Fawn had mastered this past summer.

  Whit’s awful marksmanship had turned out not to be merely from his complete lack of training; his little hoard of arrows, picked up for free somewhere, was ill-made and ill-balanced. When Whit had asked plaintively if Dag couldn’t fix them the way a Lakewalker would, Dag had thought about it, nodded, and, to W
hit’s temporary horror, broken them over his knee. He’d then donated Fawn and a dozen old flint points to their replacement, being wishful to conserve his best steel-tipped shafts for more urgent uses than target practice. Besides, it was good for Whit to suffer some instruction from his younger sister. He was still, in Dag’s view, too inclined to discount Fawn.

  Now Dag raised his brows, tried to look awake, and answered Fawn’s papa—my tent-father?—“Sir?”

  Sorrel was studying him. “I don’t believe I’ve said thank you for staying on through the harvest. You do more work with one hand than most men do with two.”

  Fawn, squinting to wrap a carefully cut trio of feathers to a shaft with fine thread, dimpled in an I-told-you-so sort of way.

  Sorrel continued, “I never thought much before about what Lakewalker patrollers do, but I suppose it is hard work, in its way. Harder than I rightly imagined, maybe, and not much comfort in it.”

  Dag tilted his head in acknowledgment. Sorrel seemed clumsy but sincere, sorting through these new notions.

  “But the thing is…I can’t help but wonder…have you ever worked for a living?”

  Fawn sat up indignantly, but Dag waved her back down. “It’s not an insult, love. I know what he means. Because in a sense, the answer’s no. Out on patrol, we might hunt, cure skins, collect medicines, trade a little, keep the trails clear, but that’s all second place to hunting malice. Patrollers don’t make and save like farmers do. My camp kin did that part. At home, my bed was always made for me. Not that I ever spent long in it.”

  Sorrel nodded. “But you don’t have your camp anymore.”

  “…No.”

  “So…how are you and Fawn planning to go on, then? Do you think to farm? Or something else?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Dag slowly—honestly. “I figured I was too old to learn a whole new way of life, but I will say, these past weeks have given me more to chew on than Tril’s good cooking. I guess I never pictured having friendly folks to show me the trail.”

  “A farmer Lakewalker?” murmured Tril, raising her brows. Whit made a face, though Dag was not sure why.

  “By myself, no, but Fawn knows her part. Maybe together, it wouldn’t be so unlikely as it once seemed.” His other potential skill, medicine maker, was far too dangerous to attempt in farmer country, he’d been told. Repeatedly. In any case, his weakened ground made the notion futile, for now.

  Sorrel said cautiously, “Would you be thinking to take up land here in West Blue?”

  Dag glanced at Fawn, who gave him a slight, urgent headshake. No, she had no desire to settle a mere three miles up the road from her disastrous first love, and first hate. Dag wasn’t the only one of them who had been avoiding the village. “It’s too early to say.”

  Tril looked up from her sewing, and said, “So what do you plan to do when a child comes along? They don’t keep to schedule, in my experience.” Her penetrating maternal look plainly wondered if he was simply being a male idiot, or if there was something he wasn’t saying.

  He wasn’t about to go into the variety of methods available to Lakewalkers for not having children till wanted, some of which he was fairly sure—make that, entirely certain—Fawn’s parents would not approve of. The secret of the malice-damage to Fawn’s womb, as slowly healing as his own inner blight, she had elected to keep to herself, a choice he respected, and—what was that farmer phrase for letting go of a regretted past? Water over the dam. He offered instead, weakly, “Lakewalker women have children on the move.”

  Tril gave that the fishy stare it deserved. “But it seems Fawn is not to be a Lakewalker woman, after all. And from what you say, Lakewalker mamas have kin and clan and camp to back ’em, in their need, even if their men are off chasing bogles.”

  He wanted to declaim indignantly, I will take care of her! But even he wasn’t that much of a fool. His eyelids lowered, opened; he said instead, merely, “That’s so, ma’am.”

  “We plan to travel, before we decide where to settle,” Fawn put in firmly. “Dag promised to show me the sea, and I mean to hold him to his word.”

  “The sea!” said Tril, sounding shocked. “You didn’t say you were fixing to go all that way! I thought you were just going to the Grace Valley. Lovie, it’s dangerous!”

  “The sea?” said Whit in an equally shocked but very different tone.

  “Fawn gets to go to the sea? And Raintree? I’ve never been past Lumpton Market!”

  Dag regarded him, trying to imagine a whole life confined to a space scarcely larger than a single day’s patrol-pattern. “By your age, I’d quartered two hinterlands, killed my first malice, and been down the Grace and the Gray both.” He added after a moment, “Didn’t see the sea for the first time till a couple years later, though.”

  Whit said eagerly, “Can I go with you?”

  “Certainly not!” Fawn cried.

  Whit looked taken aback. Dag muffled a heartless smile. In a lifetime of relentlessly heckling his sister, Whit had clearly never once imagined needing her goodwill for any aim of his own. So do our sins bite us, boy.

  “We’re not done harvest,” said Sorrel sternly. “You have work here, Whit.”

  “Yes, but they’re not leaving tomorrow. Are you?” He looked wildly at Dag.

  Dag did some rapid mental calculating. Fawn’s monthly would be coming on shortly, bloodily debilitating since her injuries, though slowly improving as she healed inside. They must certainly wait that out in the most comfortable refuge possible. “We’ll linger and help out for another week, maybe. But we can’t stay much longer. It’ll be near a week’s ride down to the Grace. If we want any choice of boats we have to get there in time to catch the fall rise, and not so late as to be caught by the winter freeze-up. Or just by the cold and wet and misery.”

  A daunted silence fell, for a while. Nattie’s spindle whirred, Whit went back to sanding a shaft smooth, and Dag considered the attractions of his bed upstairs, compared to dozing off and falling out of his chair onto his chin.

  Whit said suddenly, “What are you planning to do with your horses?”

  “Take ’em along,” said Dag.

  “On a keelboat? There’s hardly room.”

  “No, on a flatboat.”

  “Oh.”

  More busy silence. Whit set down the shaft with a click, and Dag opened one wary eye.

  Whit said, “But Fawn’s mare’s in foal. You wouldn’t want her to drop her foal along the trail somewheres. I mean…wolves. Catamounts. Delay. Wouldn’t it be better to leave her here all comfy at West Blue and pick her up when you got back?”

  “And what am I supposed to do, walk?” said Fawn in scorn.

  “No, but see…suppose you left her here for Mama to ride, since she can’t ride Swallow. And suppose we each rode one of my team, instead. I’d been meaning to sell them in Lumpton next spring, but I bet down by those rivertowns I’d get a better price. Also Papa and Fletch wouldn’t be put to the trouble of feedin’ them all winter. And you’d save the cost of taking your pregnant horse on a boat ride she wouldn’t hardly appreciate anyhow.”

  “How would I get back? Copper can’t carry us double, and my bags!”

  “You could pick up another horse when you get down there to Graymouth.”

  “Oh, so Dag’s supposed to pay for this, is he?”

  “You could sell it again when you got back. That, plus the savings for not shipping your mare, you’d likely come out pretty near even. Or even ahead!”

  Fawn huffed in exasperation. “Whit, you can’t come with us.”

  “Only as far as the river!” His voice went wheedling. “And see, Mama, I wouldn’t be going off by myself—I’d be with Dag and all. Going out, anyhow, and coming back I’d know how to find my way home again.”

  “With money burning a hole in your pocket till it dropped through onto the road, I suppose,” said Sorrel.

  “Unless you met up with bandits like Fawn did,” said Tril. “Then you’d lose your money and your l
ife.”

  “Fawn’s going. No, worse—Fawn’s going again.”

  Sorrel looked as if he wanted to say something like Fawn’s her husband’s business, now, but in light of his prior prying, couldn’t quite work up to it.

  His drowsy brain forced into motion, Dag found himself considering not money matters, but safety. A Lakewalker husband and his farmer wife, alone in farmer country, made an odd couple indeed, and they’d already met more than one offended observer who might, had there been time, have taken stronger exception to the pairing. But suppose it were a Lakewalker husband, a farmer wife, and her farmer brother? Might Whit be a buffer for Dag, as well as another pair of eyes to watch out for Fawn? Because absent gods knew Dag couldn’t stay awake all the time. Or even another half-hour. He swallowed a yawn.

  “You could fall into bad company, down on that big river,” Tril worried.

  “Worse ’n Dag?” Whit inquired brightly.

  Tactless, but telling. Sorrel and Tril gave Dag an appraising look; Dag shifted uncomfortably.

  He had been brooding about the problems of Lakewalker-farmer divisions for months, without results that he could see, and here was Whit practically volunteering to be a patrol partner and tent-brother. If Dag turned the boy down, would he ever get another such offer? Whit hasn’t the first idea what it would entail.

  Of course, neither do I.

  “Dag…” said Fawn uneasily.

  “Fawn and I will talk about it. As you say, we’re not leaving tomorrow.”

  “Dag could show me his blight patch, on the way past Glassforge,” Whit offered eagerly. “I could be—”

  Dag raised and firmed his voice. “Fawn and I will talk it over. We’ll talk to you after.”