Beguilement

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “But when I told Sunny… it wasn’t what I’d expected. I didn’t necessarily think he’d be delighted, but I did expect him to follow through. After all, I had to. But”—she took a deeper breath—“it seems he had other arrangements. His parents had made him a betrothal with the daughter of a man whose land bordered theirs. Did I say Sunny’s folks have a big place? And he’s the only son, and she was the only child, and it had been understood for years. And I said, why didn’t he tell me earlier, and he said, everyone knew and why should he have, if I was giving myself away for free, and I said, that’s fine but there’s this baby now, and it was all going to have to come out, and both our parents would make us stand up together anyhow, and he said, no, his wouldn’t, I was portionless, and he would get three of his friends to say they’d had me that night too, and he’d get out of it.” She finished this last in a rush, her face hot. She stole a glance at Dag, who was sitting looking down the lane with a curiously blank face but with his teeth pressed into his lower lip. “And at that point, I decided I didn’t care if I was pregnant with twins, I wouldn’t have Stupid Sunny for my husband on a bet.” She jerked up her chin in defiance.

  “Good!” said Dag, startling her. She stared at him.

  He added, “I’d been wondering what to make of Stupid Sunny, in all this tale. Now I think maybe a drum skin would be good. I’ve never tanned a human skin, mind you, but how hard could it be?” He blinked cheerfully at her.

  A spontaneous laugh puffed from her lips. “Thank you!”

  “Wait, I haven’t done it, yet!”

  “No, I mean, thank you for saying it.” It had been a joke offer. Hadn’t it? She remembered the bodies strewn in his wake yesterday and was suddenly less sure. Lakewalkers, after all. “Don’t really do it.”

  “Somebody should.” He rubbed his chin, which was stubbled and maybe itchy, and she wondered if shaving was something he didn’t do one-handed, either, or if it was just that his razor was in the bottom of his lost saddlebags along with his comb. “It’s different for us,” he went on. “You can’t lie about such things, for one. It shows in your ground. Which is not to say my people don’t get tangled up and unhappy in other ways.” He hesitated. “I can see why his family might choose to believe his lie, but would yours have? Is that why you ran off?”

  She pressed her lips together, but managed a shrug. “Likely not. It wasn’t that, exactly. But I’d have been lessened. Forever. I would always be the one who… who had been so stupid. And if I got any smaller in their eyes, I was afraid I’d just disappear. I don’t suppose this makes any sense to you.”

  “Well,” he said slowly. “No. Or maybe yes, if I broaden the notion from just having babies to living altogether. I am put in mind of a certain not-so-young patroller who once moved the world to get back on patrol, for all that there were plenty of one-handed tasks needing doing back in the camps. His motives weren’t too sensible at the time, either.”

  “Hm.” She eyed him sideways. “I figured I could learn to deal with a baby, if I had to. It was dealing with Stupid Sunny and my family that seemed impossible.”

  In the exact same distant tone that he’d inquired about Sunny and rape, he asked, “Was your family, um… cruel to you?”

  She stared a moment in some bewilderment, trying to figure out what he was picturing. Beatings with whips? Being locked up on nothing but bread and water? The fancy seemed as slanderous of her poor overworked parents and dear Aunt Nattie as what Sunny had threatened to say of her. She sat up in mortified indignation. “No!" After a reflective moment she revised this to, “Well, my brothers can be a plague. When they notice me at all, that is.” Justice served, but it brought her back to the depressing notion that it was all something wrong with her. Well, maybe it was.

  “Brothers can be that,” he conceded. He added cautiously, “So could you go home now? There no longer being a”—his gesture finished, baby, but his mouth managed—“an obstacle.”

  “I suppose,” she said dully.

  His brows drew down. “Wait. Did you leave some word, or did you just vanish?”

  “Vanished, more or less. I mean, I didn’t write anything. But I would think they could see I’d taken some things. If they looked closely.”

  “Won’t your family be frantic? They could think you were hurt. Or dead. Or taken by bandits. Or who knows what—drowned, caught in a snare. Won’t Stu—Sunny confess and turn out to help search?”

  Fawn’s nose wrinkled in doubt. “It’s not what I’d pictured.” Not of Sunny, anyway. Now relieved of the driving panic of her pregnancy, she thought anew of the baffling scene she’d likely left behind her at West Blue, and gulped guilt.

  “They have to be looking for you, Spark. I sure would be, if I were your”—He bit off the last word, whatever it was, abruptly. Chewed and swallowed it, too, as if uncertain of the taste.

  She said uneasily, “I don’t know. Maybe if I went back now, Stupid Sunny would think I had been lying. To trap him. For his stupid farm.”

  “Do you care what he thinks? Compared to your kin, anyway?”

  Her shoulders hunched. “Once, I cared a lot. He seemed… he seemed splendid to me. Handsome…” In retrospect, Sunny’s face was round and bland, and his eyes far too dull. “Tall…” Actually, short, she decided. He was as tall as her brothers, true. Who would come up maybe to Dag’s chin. “He had a good horse.” Well, so it had appeared, until she’d seen the long-legged beasts the patrollers all rode. Sunny had shown off his horse, making it sidle and step high, making out that it was a restive handful only an expert might dare bestride. Patrollers rode with such quiet efficiency, you didn’t even notice how they were doing it. “You know, it’s odd. The farther away I get from him, the more he seems to… shrink.”

  Dag smiled quietly. “He’s not shrinking. You’re growing, Spark. I’ve seen such spurts in young patrollers. They grow fast, sometimes, in the crush, when they have to get strong or go under. Takes some adjusting after, be warned—like when you put on eight inches of height in a year and nothing fits anymore.”

  An example not, she suspected, pulled out of the air. “That was what I wanted. To be grown-up, to be real, to matter.”

  “Worked,” he said reflectively. “Roundaboutly.”

  “Yes,” she whispered. And then, somehow, finally, the dam cracked, and it all came loose. “Hurts.”

  “Yes,” he said simply, and put his arm around her shoulders, and snugged her in tight to him, because she had not cried all that night or day, but she was crying now.

  Dag studied the top of Fawn’s head, all he could see as she pressed her face into his chest and wept. Even now, she choked her sobs half to silence, shuddering with their suppression. His certainty that she needed to release the strain in her ground was confirmed; if he’d been forced to put it into words for her, he might have said that the fissures running through her seemed to grow less impossibly dark as her sorrow was disgorged, but he wasn’t sure if that would make sense to her. Sorrow and rage. There was more erosion of spirit here, going back further, than the malice’s destruction of her child.

  His instinct was to let her weep the grief out, but after a time his worry roused anew as she clutched her belly once more, a sign of physical pain returning. “Sh,” he whispered, hugging her one-armed. “Sh. Don’t be making yourself sick, now. Would you like your hot stone again?”

  Her clutch transferred to his sleeve and tightened. “No,” she muttered. She briefly raised her face, mottled white and flushed where it was not dark with bruises. “ ‘M too hot now.”

  “All right.”

  She ducked back down, gaining control of her breathing, but the tight stress in her body didn’t ease. He wondered if her abandonment of her family without a word was as appallingly ruthless as it seemed, or if there was more to the tale, but then, he came from a group that watched out for each other systematically, from partnered pairs through linkers to patrols to companies and right on up in a tested web. I sure would be loo
king for you, Spark, if I were your—and then his tongue had tangled between two choices, each differently disturbing: father or lover. Leave it alone. You are neither, old patroller. But he was the only thing she had for a partner here. So.

  He lowered his lips toward her ear, nestled in the black curls, and murmured, “Think of something beautifully useless.”

  Her face came up, and she sniffed in confusion. “What?”

  “There are a lot of senseless things in the world, but not all of them are sorrows. Sometimes—I find—it helps to remember the other kind. Everybody knows some light, even if they forget when they’re down in the dark. Something”—he groped for a term that would work for her—“everyone else thinks is stupid, but you know is wonderful.”

  She lay still against him for a long time, and he started to muster another explanation, or perhaps abandon the attempt as, well, stupid, but then she said, “Milkweed.”

  “Mm?” He gave her another encouraging hug, lest she mistake his query for objection.

  “Milkweed. It’s a just a weed, we have to go around and tear it out of the garden and the crops, but I think the smell of its flowers is prettier than my aunt’s climbing roses that she works on and babies all the time. Sweeter than lilacs. Nobody else thinks the flower heads are pretty, but they are, if you look at them closely enough. Pink and complicated. Like wild carrot lace gone plump and shy, like a handful of bitty stars. And the smell, I could breathe it in…” She uncurled a little more, unlocking from her pain, pursuing the vision. “In the fall it grows pods, all wrinkled and ugly, but if you tear them open, beautiful silk flies out. The milkweed bugs make houses and pantries of them. Milkweed bugs, now, they aren’t pests. They don’t bite, they don’t eat anything else. Bright burnt-orange wings with black bands, and shiny black legs and feet... they just tickle, when they crawl on your hand. I kept some in a box for a while. Gathered them milkweed seeds, and let them drink out of a bit of wet cloth.” Her lips, which had softened, tightened again. “Till one of my brothers upset the box, and Mama made me throw them out. It was winter by then.”

  “Mm.” Well, that had worked, till she’d reached the tailpiece. But nonetheless her body was relaxing, the lingering shudders tamping out.

  Unexpectedly, she said, “Your turn.”

  “Uh?”

  She poked his chest with a suddenly determined finger. “I told you my useless thing, now you have to tell me one.”

  “Well, that seems fair,” he had to allow. “But I can’t think of…” And then he did. Oh. He was silent for a little. “I haven’t thought of this in years. There’s a place we went—still go—every summer and fall, a gathering camp, at a place called Hickory Lake, maybe a hundred and fifty miles northwest of here. Hickory nuts, elderberries, and a kind of water lily root, which is a staple of ours—harvesting and planting in one operation. Lakewalkers farm too, in our way, Spark. A lot of wet work, but fun, if you’re a child who likes to swim. Maybe I can show… anyway. I was, oh, maybe eight or nine, and I’d been sent out in a pole-boat to collect elderberries in the margins, around behind the islands. Forget why I was by myself that day. Hickory Lake sits on clay soil and tends to be muddy and brown most of the time, but in the undisturbed back channels, the water is wonderfully clear.

  “I could see right to the bottom, bright as Glassforge crystal. The water weeds wound down and around each other like waving green feathers. And floating on the top were these flat lily pads—not the ones whose roots we eat. Not planted, not useful, they just grew there, probably from before there ever were Lakewalkers. Deep green, with red edges, and thin red lines running down the stems in the water. And their lily flowers had just opened up, floating there like sunbursts, white as… as nothing I had ever seen, these translucent petals veined like milky dragonfly wings, glowing in the light reflecting off the water. With luminous, powdery gold centers seeming flowers within flowers, spiraling in forever. I should have been gathering, but I just hung over the edge of the boat staring at them, must have been an hour. Watching the light and the water dance around them in celebration. I could not look away.” He gulped a suddenly difficult breath. “Later, in some very dry places, the memory of that hour was enough to go on with.”

  A hesitant hand reached up and touched his face in something like awe. One warm finger traced a cool smear of wet over his cheekbone. “Why are you crying?”

  Responses ran though his mind: I’m not crying, or, I’m just picking up reverberations from your ground, or, I must be more tired than I thought. Two of which were somewhat true. Instead, his tongue found the truth entire. “Because I had forgotten water lilies.” He dropped his lips to the top of her head, letting the scent of her fill his nose, his mouth. “And you just made me remember.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “In a way, Spark. But it’s a good way.”

  She cuddled down thoughtfully, her ear pressed to his chest. “Hm.”

  The smell of her hair reminded him of mown hay and new bread without being quite either, mingled now with the fragrance of her soft warm body. A faint mist of sweat shimmered on her upper lip in the afternoon’s heat. The notion of lapping it off, followed up with a lingering exploration of the taste of her mouth, flashed through his mind. He was suddenly keenly aware of how full his arm was of round young woman. And how the heat of the hour seemed to be collecting in his groin.

  If you’ve a brain left in your head, old patroller, let her go. Now. This was not the time or the place. Or the partner. He had let his groundsense grow far too open to her ground, very dangerous. In fact, to list everything wrong with the impulse he would have to sit here wrapped around her for another hour, which would be a mistake. Grievous, grievous mistake. He took a deep breath and reluctantly unwound his arm from her shoulders. His arm protested its cooling emptiness. She emitted a disappointed mew and sat up, blinking sleepily.

  “It’s getting hotter,” he said. “Best I’d see to those dogs.” Her hand trailed over his shirt, falling back as he creaked to his feet. “You’ll be all right, resting here a while? No, don’t get up…”

  “Bring me that mending basket, then. And your shirt and sleeve off that fence, if they’re dry enough. I’m not used to sitting around doing nothing with my hands.”

  “It’s not your mending.”

  “It’s not my house, food, water, or bedding, either.” She raked her curls out of her eyes.

  “They owe you for the malice, Spark. This farm and everything in it.”

  She wriggled her fingers and looked stern at him, and he melted.

  “All right. Basket. But no bouncing around while my back is turned, you hear?”

  “The bleeding’s really slowed,” she offered. “Maybe, after that first rush, it’ll tail off quick, same way.”

  “Hope so.” He gave her an encouraging nod and went inside to retrieve the basket.

  Fawn watched Dag trudge off around the barn, then bent to his ripped-up shirt. After that, she sorted through the mending basket for other simple tasks that she could not spoil. It was hazardous to mess with another woman’s system, but the more worn and tattered garments seemed safe to attempt. This stained child’s dress, for example. She wondered how many people had lived here and where they had got off to. It was unsettling to think that she might be mending clothes for someone no longer alive.

  In about an hour, Dag reappeared. He stopped by the well to strip off his ill-fitting scavenged shirt and wash again with the slice of brown soap, by which she concluded that the burial must have been a hot, ugly, and smelly job. She could not picture how he had managed a shovel one-handed, except slowly, apparently. He was pretty smooth at getting the bucket cranked up from the well and poured out into the trough, though. He ended by sticking his whole head in the bucket, then shaking his hair out like a dog. He had no linens to dry himself with, but likely the wetness beading on his skin felt cooling and welcome. She imagined herself drying his back, fingers tracing down those long muscles. Speaking of keeping one�
��s hands busy. He hadn’t seemed to mind her washing his hand last night, but that had been by way of medical preparation. She’d liked the shape of his hand, long-fingered, blunt-nailed, and strong.

  He sat on the edge of the porch, accepted his own shirt from her with a smile of thanks, rolled up the sleeves, and pulled it back on once more. The sun was angling toward the treetops, west where the lane vanished into the woods. He stretched. “Hungry, Spark? You should eat.”

  “A little.” She set the mending aside. “So should you.” Maybe she could sit at the kitchen table and at least help fix the dinner, this time.

  He sat up straight suddenly, staring down the lane. After a minute, the horse at the far end of the pasture raised its head too, ears pricking.

  In another minute, a motley parade appeared from the trees. Four men, one riding a plow horse and the others afoot; some cows in a reluctant string; half a dozen bleating sheep held in a bunch by desultory threats from a tall boy with a stick.

  “Think someone’s made it home,” said Dag. His eyes narrowed, but no more figures came out of the woods. “No patrollers, though. Blight it.”

  Wordlessly, still eyeing the men and animals in the distance, he rolled down his left sleeve and let it hang over his stump. But not the right sleeve, Fawn noticed with a pinch of breath. All the lively amusement faded out of his bony face, leaving it closed and watchful once more.

  Chapter 7

  The farm folk spotted the pair on the porch about the time they exited the lane, Fawn guessed by the way they paused and stared, taking stock. The stringy old man on the horse stayed back. Under his eye, the boy made himself busy taking down some rails and urging the sheep and cows into the pasture. Once the first few animals spread out in a lumbering burst of bawled complaint, quickly converted to hungry grazing, the rest followed willingly. The three adult men advanced cautiously toward the house, gripping tools like weapons: a pitchfork, a mattock, a big skinning knife.