“Ah.” All right, he’d hoped Lily would find lots of other Pearl Riffle folks to model her new self on, but Amma? That was mildly terrifying.
…It made him grin.
The headquarters building hove into view, quiet on this peaceful day. Two mounts were tied to the hitching rail out front, a horse and a pony; not tacked up like courier horses. Not Lakewalker at all. All his fretting about how to answer the next letter from Hackberry was wasted, it seemed. Barr recognized that pony.
So did Lily. She breathed an odd little Oh, and her steps faltered. He could feel her senses extend, then snap half-closed in the tightest shielding she’d yet achieved, but there was no time to praise her.
“Chin up,” he murmured. “You’ve seen a malice; nothing else can ever be as bad.”
She shot him a vexed look. “It’s not the same thing.”
Nor the same kind of courage needed? Maybe so. He reflected on his own earlier attempt to avoid Pearl Riffle and Tent Foxbrush, and how much he’d rather have had a malice. Of course, with his luck, he’d got both.
He opened the door for her and entered on her heels, his own deep sense reaching out into the dimmer interior while sight caught up.
Only four people present: Amma perched on her desk edge; her assistant Ryla, who was fussing about the hob with a kettle for tea; Fiddler Mason and his son Reeve, parked on stools facing Amma. All looked up as they entered.
Fid was still bandaged to the elbows, extra wrappings around his hands to protect them from the road dirt. The swathing seemed mostly for guarding the tender new scars from knocks, the bulk of the burns beneath near-healed, though a nasty suppuration troubled his right hand where the damage had dug deepest. He looked tired and strained.
Reeve had collected even more road dirt since whenever they’d started out from Hackberry Corner, although on a twelve-year-old it looked natural. He seemed tense, mistrustful, peeved. Right; Fid couldn’t have taken to the trail in his condition without a helper, and so his eldest son had presumably been conscripted. They seemed to be the only Masons in the delegation.
Fid rose as the door shut behind them. “Lily! You are here!”
Lily stopped short. “We sent the letter saying so.” She swallowed. “You must have got it. Why are you here?”
Fid blinked, one swathed hand going out. “To bring you home.”
“Oh.” It was the most uninviting syllable Barr had ever heard fall from a person’s lips, but her ground was in a roil of confusion, belying her still, set face.
“Why didn’t you come on your own?” demanded Reeve. “Since you aren’t dead in a ditch or anything after all.” He frowned at his sister as if her obviously uninjured state were a lapse on her part.
“I left. I’d think even you could make that out.”
“Well, you didn’t leave a note or anything, so how’s anyone s’pposed to know where you were going? Everybody was fussed something fierce.”
“I’d have figured they’d be relieved.”
“Yeah, they weren’t.” And that water had flowed downhill unfairly, Reeve apparently felt.
Fid made a weary, practiced motion of quashing toward his son. “Pipe down, Reeve.” His eyes searched Lily anxiously. “Lily, are you all right?” There was a world of dark under-meaning in that inflection which Barr wasn’t quite sure Lily got. Which was its own answer, he supposed.
“I said so in our letter. Barr ‘n I sat right there”—she pointed to the map table—“and wrote it out together.”
It was unhappily apparent that Bell had not yet done the hard work of straightening out Lily’s secrets with Fid. Hoo boy. Why Bell had let her husband take to the road still unknowing Barr couldn’t imagine. Maybe it had been a hot argument. Maybe it had been cold despair. Maybe it had been slithering-out, handing off the problem to Barr as a long-delayed slap.
Didn’t matter, Barr decided. It was here, and in his lap, and of all the people he had to take due care for in this, just one came first, jittering stiffly at his side.
Amma was watching all this with her arms tight-crossed. Barr hoped she hadn’t scared Fid too much, though he seemed little worse than normally wary for a farmer venturing uninvited into a patroller enclave. Absent gods, what all had she and Fid said to each other while the runner fetched Barr and Lily? Barr’s gaze flicked to her face, searching for a sign. Her ground was mostly closed, so no clue there. Though the You have dumped a mess on my desk and I’m not happy, Barr, and I’m about to share posture was all too readable.
There was no help for it; he asked her outright. “What all have folks told each other? So far?”
Amma rubbed one bony knuckle across her lips. “Not much, ‘cept that Lily was here safe and I’d fetch her out. And you.”
Fid turned to Barr, and added earnestly, “And I’m behindhand, Patroller, for thanking you for finding Lily. It wasn’t anything you had to go out of your way to do for us, and I’m grateful as I can be.”
“Ah, hm. Well.” Ouch. “Turns out there are some complications about that.” A quick glance at Amma, like a drowning man pleading for rescue, found no rope in sight.
Amma inhaled through her nose. “This one’s all yours, Barr. I can’t sit down and do your talking for you, though it’s plain it’s time.” She jerked her head to the map table, where Ryla was setting out mugs, and conceded, “You can use my table, though.”
Not sending them back to the overpopulated Foxbrush den to have the conversation, at least. Barr wasn’t sure if his own relatives would hold him out on tongs, or try to mix in, and he didn’t want to find out the hard way. He glanced at the rigid Lily; there was far too much at stake here to risk, as Verel put it, mucking this one up. He had never felt more ham-handed.
“Now we’ve got her, can’t we just leave?” whined Reeve. “Where’s Moon? If Lily’s here, that dumb horse has got to be around somewhere.”
“Aye,” said Fid, “now we’ve found her safe, we shouldn’t bother your camp with our troubles any further, Captain Osprey. I’m very grateful to you for sheltering her. But Lily, it’s time to collect your things.”
She glanced at Barr. “No,” she said slowly, “I don’t think it is.”
“Lil-ee,” said Reeve. “Come on. You’ve put Papa through enough trouble.”
Amma cut across Lily’s opening mouth. “Ryla, take young master Reeve here and lead their mounts down to the paddocks, let him water them and give them a rub-down, maybe some hay. Take your time.”
All right, one rope, but it was shrewdly thrown.
Fid’s eyes pinched, as he began to pick up the sense of something not right. He was not by any measure a stupid man, Barr was reminded.
“Yes, do that, Reeve,” Fid endorsed this, in a firm paternal tone that Barr envied. “They’ve carried us a long way, and they’ve still got to carry us back. And your poor pony’s legs had to move twice as much.”
“Aww…” But Reeve, at a reinforcing frown from his papa, allowed himself to be herded out. Despite the boy’s bellyaching, Barr imagined he must harbor at least some curiosity about his first visit to a Lakewalker camp.
Amma gestured to the table. “Carry on, Barr.” She moved around and sat behind her desk to upend a courier pouch and start sorting through its contents. Declining to be run out of her own headquarters for this? Silently backing Barr up? Determined to witness the drama first-hand? She opened the first letter and began to read, neatly managing to be there and not-there simultaneously. Pure smokescreen; she’d be listening to and judging his every word, he had no doubt.
Barr sighed and hauled another chair to the map table. He sorted mugs, putting Fid across the short side from himself, letting Lily pick her own position. She settled herself on the end between them.
While Barr was still scratching how to start, Fid said, “So what’s this all about, Mister Patroller?”
So many things. “Ah… did you ever suspect Lily might have Lakewalker blood? Lakewalker powers?” Not hinting how, yet.
Fid l
eaned back, lips parting, eyebrows going up. “No.” A hesitation. “Does she?” His tone was suddenly guarded. But… not shocked.
Hnh. Barr paused, trying to sort out what to say in the face of that.
Lily folded her arms in a rather Amma-like gesture. “I do, Papa. It seems they’ve been coming on for half a year now, but I didn’t know what to make of it. It was just strange and crazy-like, and scary. And then I met Barr, who has them too, and he did know. And a whole lot of things I could never figure out… got figured out.” Her lips pressed closed.
Fid cast her a cautious glance. “Did they.”
A short silence, while nobody went first. Barr’s neck prickled with the conviction that whatever Fid was choosing to conceal, it wasn’t going to make anything easier.
Lily blew air through her pursed lips, somewhere between a sigh and a frustrated hiss. And took the bit in her teeth. “Did you always know you weren’t my pa—father?”
She was starting to be able to read grounds too, Barr was reminded. Still working out what meaning the sensations conveyed, like a shifting light not seen but felt, mostly intuitive but partly learned. But Fid’s ground had to be among the most familiar to her.
Fid’s jaw set against some too-sudden reply. She had all his attention, now. Finally, cornered by her unwavering blue gaze, he settled on no-help-for-it simple. “Yes, I did. Couldn’t not know, really.” He flicked a male-sharing glance at Barr, I can count to nine, that tried to leave out Lily.
Which didn’t exactly work. Her face bunched in perplexity. “But you married Mama anyway?”
“‘Course I did. Some fool had himself a beautiful girl like Bell, and was stupid enough to throw her away? I may be some kinds of fool myself, but I was never fool enough for that.” He huffed out a scornful breath.
Lily unlocked her hand from her mouth to say, “Didn’t… Mama know you knew?”
Fid flinched uneasily. “It wasn’t something I was going to bring up in the beginning. I just wanted her to be happy, and stay with me. And then, as time went on, it mattered less and less.”
“Except now it does,” said Lily slowly. “On account of… these things in me.”
He frowned at her, but thoughtful, not displeased. Maybe relieved to have the burden of his secret lifted with so startlingly few conniptions? “Yeah, seems so. Lakewalker, huh, can’t say as I ever guessed that, though. I suppose it must have been some passing lout of a patroller. I didn’t think it could be anyone I knew in Hackberry Corner.”
Barr glanced aside to catch Amma eyeing him over her paper. He would rather have jumped into the Riffle while the ice was breaking up, but he could spot the opening as well as she could. Blight it.
Weakly, he raised his hand and waved his fingers. “Lout of a patroller. Ah, that would be me, happens. In my defense, I was only eighteen.”
That did get the first shocked rise out of the dauntingly level Fid. “You!” His eyes narrowed abruptly. Beneath the table edge, Barr thought his fists clenched. “Were you really riding past my brother-in-law’s farm on happenstance?”
Absent gods, Barr trusted he wasn’t imagining the affair had continued, because that sure wasn’t another cut anyone needed to deal Bell. Let him dismiss the notion swiftly, if so. …Which he seemed to be doing, judging by the easing from the tight twinge in his ground as he reviewed whatever memories of his marriage overrode it. Sensible man; what had anyone done to deserve him?
And then Barr’s heart broke a little more for Lily, and the smear of suspicion that had driven her out onto her lonely road. Blight, but he was beginning to hate this whole snarled cat’s cradle of secrets and lies they all seemed to be caught in.
“Ah, no,” he put in hastily. “But I only kept a watch on Lily, once I found out about her, which didn’t actually happen till she was two. In case just this chance of her throwing Lakewalker might arise, except I was up freezing my tail in Luthlia when the moment came by, and missed it till I was riding home.” He hesitated. “I’ve no idea how things would have gone if I’d spotted it earlier. I don’t guess there’s any way this could have come out easy. For anyone involved.”
A much longer silence, while each digested their separate stock of new revelations.
“I’m afraid your kindness kind of back-blew on Bell, Fid,” Barr offered at last. “It gave her a secret she was scared spitless of spilling, to this day. When you get home”—soon, by preference, and he hoped Fid was taking the hint—“you might want to straighten that out with her, give her ease.” Bell’s part of this knot was not Barr’s to unravel, but it appeared Fid had not been entirely blameless after all. It wasn’t culpability, certainly, but perhaps poor judgment—not from not caring, but from caring too much. Yeah, there’s a lot of that going around.
“Mama hated me,” Lily muttered, as if determined to get this out. “I figured that was why.”
“No, she doesn’t!” said Fid, taken aback. “Sure, you two fratch some, but families do.”
Lily scowled back at him in tight-lipped denial. Barr didn’t think they were going to see eye-to-eye on this one for maybe another decade. Or two. Or after Lily had children of her own. Or wait, no, that would make Barr a grandfather…
“If it’s about Edjer,” Fid sighed, “that’s just going to take some getting-over time. It can’t be helped.” And Barr was reminded that Fid, too, had buried a boy, and still grieved.
“Barr,” said Lily, and suddenly her ground was aflame, like last night’s embers flaring up at a sudden whistling draft, “believes me that I didn’t let that fire start, still less set it a’purpose.”
“Does he?” Fid’s glance across at Barr grew suddenly keen. “Do you guess, or do you know? Some Lakewalker magic?”
“Lakewalker magic,” Barr decided to simplify this. “Reading grounds, we call it. We can usually tell if someone is telling the truth or lying, or at least believes they are. Honestly mistaken being another problem, but that’s just as true for farmers.”
Fid sat back, briefly diverted. “Doesn’t that get, er, awkward, sometimes?”
“We have some work-arounds, if need drives.” And thanks be for groundshielding.
A snort from the desk, which Barr ignored. Amma hadn’t mixed in so far; Barr wasn’t sure if it was because she thought he was doing all right, or she was just letting him hang himself with that rescue-rope.
Fid clasped his hands on the table and stared down at them for a long moment. He finally looked up at Lily: “I did think the odds were in favor of your tale, but I was never sure, you know, one way or another, with how certain Edjer was carryin’ on. Didn’t see how we ever could be. So we just had to go on somehow.”
She stared back, all her old hurts bleeding in her eyes. “And now you still can’t be sure,” she realized. Her voice was dead level, despair stifled behind set teeth. “Because you can’t know if you trust this Lakewalker fellow, either. It doesn’t ever get better, does it? It just gets more, one level down.”
Barr bit back his belief that once word got out around Hackberry of Lily’s Lakewalker blood, there would be a whole new raft of slanderous gossip floated about how she could have started that fire. She didn’t need to deal with that crap today, though, so neither did he. At least she didn’t seem to be clutching any false optimism. At fourteen, gah.
Fid gave up, or let go of something. Of hope, of Lily, of any expectation about how things would be? “Lily, I am so sorry.” Not specifying for what, though it was certainly a true statement.
Lily leaned her head back in her chair and rubbed her eyes as if they ached. Or maybe it was her heart. Her lips moved to form some response, but then just blew out her breath in bleak frustration.
“It’s time, I think, to close this court,” said Barr. “Except… Lily, if you have anything more to say, it’s now or never. Because, see, ground reading goes deeper than a person sometimes wants.” To that cold little lump of guilt he’d spotted on their first meeting, hidden like a stone in the porridge. Waiting to break
teeth. Something about the night of the fire, yet not the fire, it didn’t take too many brains to guess. Fortunately for me. “Everybody else at this table’s taken their turn being rolled in the barrel. It’s only fair. If it’s making you sick, you need to barf it up.” Was that too blunt? But, curse it, if he was being put to shovel out this stable, he was blighted going to finish the job. Because he sure wasn’t up for doing it over.
A jerk, a startled-deer look. How did you know? What do you know? It hardly took groundsense to read that. Briefly, she sat rigid, stiff, resisting.
And broke, thank the absent gods. Because he didn’t think he could bear to hit her again for it.
She discovered a sudden fascination for the woodgrain on the tabletop, and spoke to it as if whispering secrets to a friend. “Edger did knock over the lamp in the loft, like I said, jumping around on the hay like you’d told him not to do ‘cause it spoils the hay. And I was down grooming Moon in his stall, just like I said. But… Mama, when she’d turned him out of the house to go make noise elsewhere, ‘d told me to watch him.” A long inhalation through her nose. “And I didn’t, for those few minutes, and then it was too late.” Her head came back up. “But I for sure didn’t knock over the lamp myself, like he said, and everyone believed just ‘cause he was coughing and crying and dyin’, and I wasn’t.”
Fid pressed his palms to his face and scrubbed. Barr didn’t think it helped any. “Nobody,” he sighed at last, “could ever control Edjer when he got in that wild mood. He’d go till he dropped, and we picked him up and stuffed him in his bed anyhow, unwashed. I just hoped he’d outgrow it, in time, before he got too big to hoist. Although if there was a one of you I figured for most likely to run away to the river someday, he was it.” He cradled his chin in his linked hands, looking depressed.
Forgiveness of a sort, Barr supposed, as good as anyone was going to gain out of the webbed tangle. At least the hard knot in Lily’s ground eased a trifle, like an overtight muscle giving up under the pressure of a thumb; aching better. She didn’t ask for more.
Knife Children (The Sharing Knife series) Page 15