Knife Children

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “Sounds like she’s had a pretty intense tutorial for only three days.” Verel peeled the shirt off him and set it aside to await a soak. “You know, I’ve never witnessed a malice, not even a sessile, in my whole life.”

  “Well, sure.” Barr shrugged. “With your groundwork talents, they’d have nailed you down for a maker before you were out of your teens, I expect. Kept you safe in camp.” Insofar as camps were safe, and that was Barr’s job, wasn’t it? “They taught you basic patrolling before then, though, right? Every youngster gets that.”

  “Oh, yes. Point is…”

  But Barr didn’t find out what the point was, because Quen came bouncing in, and Verel promptly drafted him to work the pump handle. There followed contortions to get the patroller wet but keep the stitches dry, strong soap, and a bonus debate on whether Barr’s bruises, purpling impressively, counted as injuries or not. Quen was assigned the picking-up-after, and Verel led Barr, in a nightshirt that could have stood to be a mite bigger, off to the promised bunk in the men’s chamber.

  Barr wanted to keep arguing, but the sight of that clean, soft bed in the yellow lamplight was almost enough to make him burst into tears. He took possession before he could disgrace himself. Further.

  * * *

  In the deep night, Barr lurched awake to a loud and heartbroken whinny seeming to come from right outside his window. A staccato thumping of shod hooves trailed away, circling the medicine tent. This was followed by another whinny, even longer and more reverberant, and a knocking from the other side of the building like someone trying to bash in the wall with a sledgehammer. Lily’s startled, muffled voice sounded from somewhere over in the women’s bunkroom. The knocking stopped, but then began again from the side stoop.

  Barr rolled his sleep-stiffened body out of bed, cursing as his bad leg twinged something fierce. He limped through the shadows to the side door. Lily’s pale form dodged ahead of him. Had she developed dark vision yet? Which wasn’t so much vision, as ground awareness of the hazards before you tripped over them, Ow, blight it! The door banged open as Lily ran through, which at least stopped the ruckus before Verel’s door was kicked in, plus whatever damage a panicked horse barging around inside might do.

  Barr rubbed his shin and pushed through the door that had slammed in his face, taking in the scene. Which had all the overwrought emotion of a reunion after six years, not six hours, ugh. Not enough sleep. In the light of the westering moon, the gelding lived up to his name, looking an astral sort of being. Lily in her fluttering nightshirt matched him for ethereal glow. Barr cringed for her bare toes so near those dancing hooves, but the horse quieted right down as she hugged him around the neck and crooned, “Oh, clever, clever Moon! You came to find me, didn’t you? Were you afraid, all alone?”

  Barr thought him a fool beguiled beast with the brains of a rabbit, but this did not seem the time to say so. Lily embraced him as if he was her only friend in all the world, which… was sadly true right now, wasn’t it? The only piece of her home she still possessed. Because she’d abandoned whatever human friends she’d had along with her family, leaving all bonds equally broken in her wake. Save this one. Were you afraid, all alone…?

  Barr sighed deeply and leaned against a porch post flanking the steps, waiting till the two had calmed each other down.

  “Or trying to rescue me? Dear Moon! But it’s no good to have a horse to ride and nowhere to go.” She rubbed his flopping ears, and he leaned into her hand. “Not even you can fix that.”

  “He didn’t exactly come to you on his own, you know,” Barr observed from his prop. “You called him. Maybe not quite on purpose. Some patrollers do that, with their mounts. I can. If you aren’t set to grow powers at least equal to the average patroller, Lily, I’ll eat my saddle.”

  Releasing a last pent breath, she turned his way, leaning against Moon’s shoulder and folding her arms in an unwitting echo of Barr’s pose. Or maybe she was just as exhausted as he was. “Are you an average patroller?”

  Barr cleared his throat. “Maybe a mite better.” He contemplated those words for a moment. “No—stronger. Stronger’s just born. Better’s learned. Which is a long road with a lot of hard knocks. I suppose it’s a bit crazy to want you to learn in a week what took me decades.”

  Is it? She was a smart child, or she couldn’t have got herself this far, beguiled horse be hanged. All tense lips and straight spine, cloaking a bristling bundle of terror, hurt, month-old outrage, betrayal, and loneliness—it would be safer to try to pet an injured porcupine.

  “Lakewalkers aren’t built to be alone,” Barr went on. “Because these are real powers, mage powers, although no one calls them that, the old mages having given themselves a bad name. Talent needs training, or it’s a danger to yourself and everyone around you. Farmer or Lakewalker.”

  His tired mind brought up again the nightmare memory of Crane, the renegade Lakewalker who Barr had once helped put down, and his bandit gang with him. Which had for-sure shown young Barr that Lakewalker affinity with malices was no myth. “At least you’ve done nothing worse so far than beguile your horse.”

  “I didn’t either magic Moon!” she shot back, sounding incensed as if at an accusation. Threatened? “He loves me!”

  “It doesn’t have to be one or t’other, you know,” Barr pointed out mildly. “It can be both.” Any applicability to Barr and her mother was not something he cared to suggest to her. Or think about. Too late for that.

  She leaned against the horse, combing through the long mane with her fingers. A surly mumble: “Moon’s the only one who ever did love me. Mama hates me, always did. Even before Edjer.” She cast Barr a slightly poisonous glance, her face pale in the colorless light. “And now I know why, I guess.”

  He’d kept this knowledge in his pack for a dozen years, the edges wearing blunt with the abrasion of time and thought. Lily hadn’t even held it for a dozen hours, fresh and cutting-sharp. Patroller field-aid, eh. Barr blew out his breath, sinking to a seat on the steps and dangling his hands between his knees. “If that were true, she could have handed you to me when you were two. Or thrown you away some other how. But she kept you. Took care of you.” Though Bell might simply be one of those women who didn’t know any other way to be than taking care, like Barr didn’t know any other way to be than patroller. “Try this idea—that she was just afraid of you.”

  “Scared of me?” Lily’s brow furrowed. “That I’d get powers?”

  “Maybe some of that, but mostly because keeping the secret of your birth from Fid was a sore in her heart. Which your getting powers would reveal, true. She does love Fid in her way, I could see that, and there’s no question he loves her. A gift she believes maybe she didn’t deserve, but is deathly afraid of losing, and all her life that depends on it along-with.”

  Lily’s face remained set, but by the churning in her ground he could tell she was thinking hard.

  “That’s a right heavy load for your mama to carry around for all those years. I’m not surprised she was rigid to you. But, you know, that’s for her to fix. Not for you.”

  More mane-fiddling. “Reeve and Edjer… were always a spiteful misery to me. And she always took their parts, and never mine.” She considered. “The littler ones are still too small to copy them much, but they’re getting there.”

  This seemed pretty likely, really, that her siblings would pick up such cues and run with them, but not know why. “Was Fid more even-handed?”

  “Yeah…” The admission was not so much reluctant as reflecting. “But you say he didn’t know. Maybe…” Maybe Fid would have rejected her too, was she wondering? Barr wondered as well.

  But he could just about watch as one more prop was pulled out from under her, as her spine slumped a little more. Absent gods, I’m doing this all wrong. “Holding secrets and lies like that isn’t good. They blister in your hands like a coal. Not you, but her lie, was the secret waiting to burn down your mama’s life.”

  Her glance flicked up. “A
nd yours?”

  Ouch. If he ever got a bow into her hands, she was going to be a hawk-eye, if that was a sample. “I think we’ve established that I was a fool when I was a youngling.”

  “Are you sorry I was ever born, too? Like Mama?” Her jaw set.

  Ouch, ouch. He had no idea what to say to this, except the most truth he could muster. He flung out words as if over a cliff, with no guess as to where they would land. “I think… just maybe you have come upon me at the right time of my life. Because you are the most amazing person I have ever met, to show up and redeem so much old foolishness.” His hands clenched each other.

  She’d made it through all these past grueling days—the mortal slander, the flight, the painful disappointment of Glassforge, the strange journey through the woods with the stranger man, the malice sighting and the fight with the mud-man, the long sick ride, the devastating revelations at the end of it—without once giving in. But she crumpled now, sinking to the stoop as far from Barr as she could, bending over her knees, shoulders shaking like a woman with an ague. All she’d endured, and that one little random bit of praise stove in her hull and left her wrecked on the riverbank?

  Maybe Barr shouldn’t have been trying to take her anger away, if that was all that had been holding her upright.

  She hadn’t been abused, as far as he could tell, in the sense that she’d had food, had clothes, had a place to sleep safe and warm. She hadn’t been worked harder than any other farm child, or camp child, when the labor of all hands, no matter how small, was needed to make sure all would survive the next winter, or the next malice. Was praise-starved a thing you could die of?

  Just how long a winter famine had it been? It seemed she’d handed him the key to her, all unknowing, and it wouldn’t even take magery. He wasn’t sure he should ought’a have that much power.

  “Don’t… don’t do that!” she mumbled to her knees.

  Ah. Not so unknowing as all that. “Sorry. Porcupine.” The nickname fell too aptly from his mouth to do anything but stick, and his lips twitched up. All fierce bristling spines curled around a soft, vulnerable underbelly? Yeah.

  Her shoulders shook again, but in a different way. “Don’t make me laugh like that,” she snapped, still into her lap. “Makes me mad.”

  Good?

  Moon moved over and lipped her hair, and she raised her face and stroked his soft nose. He snorted a light spray of horse slobber on her, which disgusted her not at all. She rubbed it off with the back of her hand, disguising the other silver tracks. Sniffed and straightened.

  A slim figure was advancing in the moonlight; Barr recognized her from her ground before he could see her face.

  “There you are, you bad thing!” the horse-girl chided, her tone not as irate as her words. “At least you didn’t get far.”

  Lily blinked in brief bewilderment, then recognized, as Barr had, that the other girl was talking to Moon.

  “I’m sorry, your”—a little ground flick, and she changed her address from Barr to Lily—“your horse got out. My word, that is the most beguiled beast I’ve ever seen. You might want to do something about that.”

  Barr put in, “Lily, this is Jena, one of our horse-girls, works at the patrol paddocks. Women run the river ferry, too. You’ll have to see that come daylight. Night duty, is it, Jena?” The Tent Whiteheron girl must be, hm, sixteen by now?

  “Hello, Barr, sir. They said you were back. Yes, all month.” She yawned, and patted Moon’s dappled haunch in a friendly way.

  “And this is Miss Lily Mason”—who owns Moon, he could say, unexceptionably. “My daughter,” he finished instead. “She owns Moon.”

  A startled ripple in Jena’s ground was quickly eclipsed by what to her were more pressing concerns. “That is one pretty little horse you have, Lily!”

  “Oh… thank you,” said Lily faintly.

  “But, um… maybe you could come with me to settle him? Or he’s just like to be getting out again. Jumped right over the paddock fence, he did. A heavier horse couldn’t have cleared it, I think.”

  “Good idea, Jena,” said Barr, beginning to grin. “You can show Lily your work. But put shoes on first, Lily.” Somewhere inside, Verel kept a keg of walking sticks of assorted lengths, but Barr was not inspired to go hunt it up. Boots. His boots would be a challenge right now, too.

  After a hesitant look at him, Lily darted within, back in a moment with her own boots shoved on, pushing her nightshirt into her dirty trousers. “It’s you who was taking care of Moon and Briar?” she asked Jena.

  “They’d arrived before I come on night duty, but I was told all about them.” Jena turned and waved her, and Moon, into her wake. The gelding, calming down in echo of his mistress, followed the girls amiably.

  Barr should likely get up and escort them. “Make sure Lily gets back here all right,” he called instead. “She doesn’t know her way around the camp yet.”

  “Right, sir!”

  “Do you take care of a lot of horses?” Lily’s voice drifted through the moist night air.

  “Oh, yes, Pearl Riffle’s got nearly two hundred patrol horses, and about twenty-five broodmares. You’ve come at the right time of year—about half the new foals are born already, so darling…!”

  Voices and figures faded away into the shadows.

  The porch post was not all that comfortable a prop. He should hoist himself up and go back to bed. Maybe when Lily returned. Real soon now…

  * * *

  “…ake up. Ba—you—just wake up!”

  A hand was poking his shoulder. “Huh…?” Barr blinked haze from his eyes.

  “You shouldn’t fall asleep sitting all crooked like that,” Lily said sternly. “I’m sure it’s bad for your neck.”

  Still on the stoop, oh. “You’re likely right.” Ow, gods. Moving was a penance, yes indeed. He stretched and cracked the neck in question, the muffled popping making Lily recoil.

  “Eew, don’t do that, either! It sounds horrible!”

  “Unh.” Barr started to rise, then switched to using the post to pull himself up.

  “…What should I call you anyways?” Lily went on, frowning at him. “I’m not going to call you Papa.”

  “No, that’s Fid’s title. He earned it. Didn’t he.”

  A hunched sort of shrug of agreement. A small voice. “Yeah.”

  Which reminded Barr, they needed to get a courier letter off to Hackberry Corner soon, to assure the Masons that Lily was found safe. But not right this minute, gods. Verel had been right, blight him. Barr wasn’t riding anywhere tomorrow… later this morning. A hint of steel was growing along the edge of the starry vault, and the moon was flirting with the western hills. Pale fog wisped above the river.

  Barr drew a breath, which also hurt. “I think… given how complicated both our lives have got, we should keep one thing simple. Just call me Barr, like you have been.”

  “If you say so,” Lily replied doubtfully.

  “I do.”

  And then back inside, to stagger off to their respective beds. Again. Was Lily’s ground less dark and curdled, now? The patrol paddocks had been a good distraction, maybe. Barr wasn’t sure he had any cause to feel so oddly heartened, but as he pulled the blessed sheet up and tried to find a position for his pillow that didn’t catch on any prickly stitches, he had to allow he did.

  * * *

  “Well,” said a raspy voice. “Aren’t you pretty this morning. Dancing with bears, were you?”

  Barr pried open his eyes and stared through blear at the grizzled face of Fin Kingfisher, looming over him. Ah. Amma’d sent to roust him out last night—reserve patrol leader this rotation, right. It scarcely needed the sight of the deerskin parchment map rolled in his hand to tell Barr why he was the day’s first visitor. Of course Fin would want an eyewitness report before he led his patrol off to deal with the malice. Pink dawn light was reflecting through the bunkroom window, muting the oil lamp Fin had set on the table. Over at the paddocks, the place would be bust
ling as people saddled up.

  “Think that mud-man”—Barr heaved himself into a sitting position in his bunk, every muscle feeling like a rusty gate hinge—“might’ve been a wolverine. It was so underripe you could hardly tell, all slimy and slippery. And you think they stink when they’re dry and fluffy.” He rolled his shoulders and stretched his neck, and immediately regretted doing so. Ow.

  “Guess you won’t be riding out as a guide with us,” said Fin, looking him over.

  “‘d rather not…”

  “No,” said a firm voice. Maker Yina, bless her and keep her, stepped in to hand Barr a mug of hot, strong tea. He had to take it in both hands to keep it from slopping all over. “Verel’s ordered camp rest for this one. You can’t have him.”

  “You’d have to arm-wrestle Mother for him, and you’d lose,” said another voice. Barr almost choked on the tea he was sluicing down his gullet, and looked up as another patroller leaned around Fin’s shoulder: Barr’s middle brother, Bay. Both men were geared up to ride out, so it was an easy guess he must be in Fin’s patrol today. Bay shared the Foxbrush looks, average height and stocky, though with light brown hair to Barr’s blond. In a sawed-off braid down his back today, no mourning knot, oh good. Courier letters from home, rare and sporadic, had reached Barr in Luthlia, but he’d been on the road quite a while. Things could happen while a man’s back was turned. As he’d lately been reminded.

  Bay’s grin was crooked and confused. And worried. “I only just found out from the horse girls that you were back. Why didn’t you come home last night?”

  “We got in late, and then kept Verel busy for a while,” Barr said evasively.

  “You haven’t busted another leg all to blight and gone, have you?” Because Bay, too, knew the walking wounded were routinely sent to their families’ tents.

  “Not this time, though I wrenched it pretty good dancing with that mud-man. I’ll be hobbling around on a stick for a few days.”

  Yina nodded confirmation. “Some beautiful bruises, too, if you like purple.”