Knife Children

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Barr stood straight on his stick and wrapped his free arm around Lily’s cringing shoulders. “This here’s Miss Lily Mason of Hackberry Corner. My daughter. She’s fourteen.”

  Shirri took in the implications and emitted a faint, familiar wail: “Oh, Baarrr.”

  Kiska Foxbrush stared at Lily in stillness for a moment, perhaps doing the arithmetic, plus a number of other calculations, in her head. But she only bit her lip, then said, “Indeed. And was this a surprise to you, too, Miss Lily Mason?”

  Lily stared back at this unexpected grandmother and gulped, “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I see.” The narrow blue eyes were all for Barr, now. “And how long have you known?”

  He shrugged uncomfortably. “About twelve years. But that she’d grow Lakewalker, just since I swung by Hackberry Corner on my way home last week.”

  “Huh.” A contemplative pause, while Barr held his breath. And then, “Breakfast, eh? Long rides leave a patroller hungry. A thousand miles worth, is it? You two’d better come inside. Shirri, get your youngsters to put up the flap.”

  Barr motioned Quen to unload their bags from the barrow, releasing him to return to the medicine tent. He gave Lily’s stiff shoulders another encouraging squeeze and led her into Tent Foxbrush. “It’s not a bear’s den,” he whispered.

  “You sure?” she murmured back.

  He thought of his formidable grandmother Nura Foxbrush, long-time tent matriarch, and lied, “Yep.” And where was she, this morning? A furtive check with his groundsense did not find her in the rambling, connected clutch of cabins that was the main kin tent.

  Several of the old parchment-covered windows had been replaced with glass, brightening the big main room that was kitchen and dining hall and workroom together. The space lightened further as, under Shirri’s direction, her two eldest children lifted the heavy tent flap on its poles to create an awning half the width of the cabin. Spring air wafted in, replacing the night’s fug of cooking and leatherwork and too many people.

  Further questions and comments were, thankfully, shelved for a time as the two adult women bustled about the routine of finding a fast meal. Between commands from the cooks, Shirri’s children, a few years younger than Lily and caught between curiosity and shyness, stared at their strange new cousin. Raki and Azio were both dark-haired and whippy like their father, Barr’s senior tent-brother from north Raintree, breaking the run of sturdy blonds in the Foxbrush kin-hold. Their grounds were noisy and unshielded, as open as a meadow, the ordinary inevitable chaos of children; confused but not hostile, so all right so far.

  Lily’s was not quite as open, but every adult Lakewalker present could read her dark anxiety, as if her tight, strained stance and thin voice were not hint enough. No one here, Barr thought with relief, was inclined to be mean to her, however awkward they found her presence. And it seemed Barr was partially spared by his welcome-home status, which, if he’d planned it, would have been right clever of him.

  They settled as directed on either side of a long table not much different from the one in the Tamaracks’ farm kitchen. No iron cookstove here, though, just the hearth and spark-spitting fireplace. If Tent Foxbrush had advanced to a pump shed and window glass, it couldn’t just be camp conservatism holding up progress, so the lack was more likely due to a flat tent-purse. Barr wondered if he could do anything about that. He was afraid the place looked pretty crude to Lily’s eyes, used to less harried and hurried farmer craftsmanship. Or was it his own eyes that had changed?

  Lily eased a trifle in surprise as a small mountain of food was plunked down in front of them: ham, eggs fried in drippings, smoked venison, dried apple and plum and plunkin not flavored with saddlebag, abundant hot sassafras tea, corncakes, hard cheese and goat cheese, and a big pot of Shirri’s good honey. Barr elected not to explain that this was not some special hello-there feast, just the provender normally slung in front of famished, tired patrollers. His aches and Lily’s tension kept them from actually wolfing it, though he was pleased to see her appetite revive and posture unfold with each new bite.

  He caught his mama, too, checking the effect of her cooking on Lily, and nodding in satisfaction. Her narrow-eyed look at him grew a trifle grim, though. He made a helpless hand gesture out of sight of Lily, Later. Mama sniffed.

  Between bites, he managed to decant the immediate tale of the malice-sighting and their tangle with the mud-man. Even Lily contributed a cautious mite, if mainly descriptions of Barr not at his best. He thought it pushed up her standing in his mother’s eyes, at least, and he didn’t even have to stretch the truth.

  When Lily volunteered to help with the washing-up, Shirri let her; ah, another chink in the Foxbrush walls. It was clear enough the Foxbrush women wanted more words with him, and not in front of Lily, which was both good and ominous. At least they’d had the charity not to blame Lily for her own existence, but that left only one target.

  “Well.” Barr sluiced down the last of his tea and wiped his lips. “I’ll just put my bags away, then.” He had a few real souvenirs from Luthlia to unpack, as well.

  “Ah,” said his mother. “Azio has your bunk now, since he graduated from the truckle. I guess you can use Bay’s bunk until he gets back.”

  “Oh.” He hesitated. “And for Lily?”

  The female gazes upon him were a mix of calculating and worried. Shirri allowed, “We can fix up a bedroll for her in the girls’ room, for now.”

  His mother went on, “We’ve some catching up to do. It’s been quite a while since our last letter.”

  No one was wearing new mourning knots, Barr reminded himself.

  “Raki,” Shirri called, “why don’t you show Lily around the camp a bit. It looks to rain later on.”

  Obviously getting her out of the way so’s the grownups could talk frankly. A good idea? Not? He decided to back this: “Yeah, she’s only seen the patroller stables and the medicine tent, so far. And the outside of patrol headquarters, and that after dark.”

  Shirri raised her eyebrows and lowered her voice. “Aye? And what does Amma think of all this?”

  “Hnh.”

  But Raki seemed to cotton to the idea of being appointed trailmaster, bouncing up and instantly tossing out a few ideas for a tour, and absent gods where did youngsters get so much energy? After a glance at Barr for, he hoped, permission and not rescue, Lily followed Raki out.

  Her voice, wary but curious, wafted back, “Are you Shirri—Aunt Shirri’s daughter, then?”

  “Yep. I’m oldest, so I’ll be tent-heiress someday.”

  “So we’re first cousins, I guess.” Cousins were not a novelty in Lily’s world, nor in Raki’s, but surprise new cousins had to be equally a challenge to both. Though only one of them was on her home ground. And wasn’t it odd to reflect that the youngest child of his generation, himself, had fathered the oldest child of the next?

  Raki went on, with a rather dramatic hush, “Are you really a farmer?”

  A hesitation. “I always thought I was…”

  Their footsteps faded.

  Barr went to stow his saddlebags. The space underneath Bay’s bunk was packed with its owner’s belongings, so he ended up dumping his gear at the foot, leaving the top of Bay’s trunk for laying things out. Lightly, like a visitor at an inn. He came back to the main room to find Azio had evidently been sent as a runner to find his grandmother Nura, because the three Foxbrush women were now seated around the end of the table, catching up the news in low murmurs. The descending generations of faces all swung toward him as he entered.

  There was this for it; he’d only have to tell the whole tale once, again. He took a seat below his mother, as potentially a better shield than Shirri. She shoved a fresh mug of tea his way, half welcome, half threat, You’d better not stop talking.

  “Well,” said his grandmother, chief judge of this panel, “make no doubt I’m glad to have you back in one piece, Barr.” Yeah, he wouldn’t have figured that from her dubious tone, so perhaps it needed say
ing. “But I think you’d better start this story at the beginning. About fifteen years ago, you say?”

  Barr sighed. I was eighteen… He was sure they all remembered. A bit woodenly, he unloaded it all. The detail that he’d not just seduced but actively beguiled Bluebell went over just about as well as he’d expected. Since he’d had his head thoroughly washed for that at the time by Remo, and then Dag and Fawn, them wanting to do it all over again seemed redundant, but he supposed the Foxbrush women had to get it out of their systems. He hunkered down and endured.

  At least the Lakewalker custom of training every youth to patrolling, regardless of what tasks they took up after, meant that every one of the women at the table had been out in the wider world as he had, seen the great duty through her own eyes. Felt the grueling discomfort of the endless trail in all weathers, the itch and scrape of having to work with the same people with no escape for week after week, the long boredom of a search repeated over and over with no results. Not that you’d want a malice, but the horror of missing one that was actually there was always enough to keep everyone on edge, bleeding into each other.

  And each of the women also knew that it was not unknown for a passing female Lakewalker to sometimes beguile a cute farmer lad, a transgression equally fiercely frowned-upon if for slightly different reasons. At least farmer lads couldn’t get pregnant, but Barr had been around the hinterlands enough by now to see how their lives could be wrecked in subtler ways. Keep it buttoned up wasn’t near as arbitrary a demand as it seemed to youngsters when they were just unbuttoning it in the first place, and he winced for his younger self.

  Barr had the wits to let the tongue-lashings run down on their own before putting in, “And I agree with you. It’s not even an argument anymore. But it wasn’t Bluebell that changed my mind. It was that blighted monster Crane, running his bandit gang down the river those years back. That’s where I saw what unrestrained Lakewalker powers could really do to farmers, driven by active cruelty and not just youthful spirits. I never want to help bury that many bodies again.”

  His grandmother, at least, nodded understanding. Shirri stirred and frowned. Mama clasped her hands and rested her mouth on them.

  “Which brings me around again to Lily. She has the beginnings of ground control, and some range already, though I don’t know yet if that will top out to full patroller. She’s already beguiled her horse, not on purpose. But it wouldn’t take much for her to figure out how to do it to other animals, and from there it’s a step to people. Verel says she likely has enough affinity to share, someday.” Barr stifled his twinge at that thought. “She can’t be let go back to her farm, or anywhere else, untrained. Not that she wants to, and that’s another whole tale. She can only get what she needs at a camp. Here or elsewhere.” He let that last hint sit out, there on the table.

  His mama lifted her chin. “And that brings me to another question. How in the world did you persuade her farmer family to let her go off with you?” The hint of a suspicion that Barr might still be using illicit powers on farmers was galling. It was only for mortal emergencies, he understood that.

  “That,” he sighed, “is the other whole tale. She’d run off from her farm on her own a few days before I got there. On an unrelated matter. Well… mostly unrelated,” he allowed. Blight, he really had to get that letter on its way back to Fid and Bluebell, didn’t he…

  And then it was time to unload Lily’s side of the story, as far as he knew it: the family secrets, the fire, the false accusations, the flight, the finding. At least his judges took it in with the seriousness he thought it deserved, frowns deepening all around at each added complication. Not his wounds, to be sure, but it would be downright cruel to make Lily bare it all herself to a table full of untrusted strangers. If he was to get what he wanted out of the Foxbrush women for Lily, he couldn’t be leaving holes in the road to break legs later. Because he’d been learning some hard lessons about that, this past week.

  His mama rubbed her jaw. “Seem’s the girl’s had quite a time of it. There’s no help for it for the moment, but news you likely hadn’t got yet is that Toshi is getting string-bound next month. We’d figured to give the girls’ room over to her and her young man.”

  A new tent-brother, moving in? Barr supposed it was an inevitability, and not before time. He wondered if his middle sister Toshi had managed to get pregnant yet, a duty her tent-kin had been hinting her toward since before Barr had left for Luthlia. To the point she’d got pretty prickly about it, since it evidently wasn’t for lack of trying. Too bad they couldn’t transplant some of whatever magic Bluebell had… “Who’d she pick?”

  “Tona Sunfish. Seems to be a nice, steady fellow, what we’ve seen of him so far.”

  “Don’t know him…?”

  “He’s a patroller out of Cub Run Camp. They met when she was exchanging down that way. A temporary lend for them being short-handed.”

  Not unusual, for neighboring camps to share such help; Cub Run covered a territory across the Grace upriver. “Doesn’t sound like Cub Run came out ahead, then.”

  His grandmother grinned, fox-like. “Their loss, our gain.”

  “Any sign of Bay being taken off your hands?”

  A glum silence spread around the table. Shirri sighed, “He’s still not over Hana, I think.”

  A Pearl Riffle ferry girl Bay’d fancied for years, drowned in a bad spring flood just as he was fixing to join her tent. She hadn’t even had a chance to share. Not every mortal hazard a Lakewalker faced was out on patrol, yet coming home to such news seemed a wrench and a wrongness, as if the world had flipped over topside-to. Bay didn’t talk about it.

  His mother eyed Barr. “I feel sorry enough for your Miss Lily, but have you quite thought through what bringing her back to camp like this is going to do for your own chances of getting string-bound? You’d just about lived down your reputation as a wild lad, and now this.”

  I hadn’t meant to bring her here at all. Barr shifted uneasily. “I thought girls liked me well enough.”

  “You made ‘em laugh, I’ll grant. That’s not the same thing as being reliable enough for one to pack home to her tent.”

  Pricked, Barr replied, “What patroller ever is, when he or she rides out?”

  “Leaving aside all your japes and jokes and crazy starts,” said Shirri, “I don’t know another patroller that’s half the malice-bait as you seem to be. Sector Six, really!”

  Barr offered, after a moment’s thought, “Dag.”

  A general, conceding silence. Barr’s tent kin didn’t dislike Dag, insofar as they’d met him, but Barr suspected they still blamed him for the half-year-long unauthorized scarper to the sea, when they weren’t blaming Remo or, more cogently, Barr himself. Desertion, or apparent desertion: that was another old grudge on his head, right up there with that horrible night he’d accidentally got Remo’s new primed knife broke. Nobody talked about that one, either, the way nobody talked about Bay’s girl Hana to him: a silence that grieved too much to poke at. Not that there hadn’t been plenty said at the time. Maybe they’d all learned their lessons about saying too much, back then.

  “Speaking of, where’s Dad?” Barr asked.

  “Running patrol in Sector Three,” Kiska replied. “They should be back soon, though.”

  One of the close-in sectors; Barr’s father was likely training young patrollers, a task that usually brought him home in a ruffled state of mind. Wonderful; Barr’d get to get his head washed all over again, again.

  His grandmother leaned back in her seat and crossed her arms, studying him. Giving nothing away. “So just what exactly were you trying to get, bringing that girl home?”

  “Breakfast,” he answered honestly, controlling his irritation. “For which I thank you.” But it wasn’t an unfair question, for all that his life had been tumbled tail over teakettle worse’n that mud-man had rolled him down the ravine yesterday. Blight, had it only been one day since they’d found that sessile?

  The convict
ion was creeping up on him, hour by hour: if what Lily needed most was to learn how to be a Lakewalker, and it was plain to him she did, she could learn it best how every other Lakewalker did, embedded in a camp, in a tent. And his best chance—no, her best chance—could well be this tent right here.

  So giving in to his temper—or, even more spineless, his embarrassment—by threatening they were going to ride off to Clearcreek, or Luthlia, or any other such ultimatum or taking-of-offense, was exactly the wrong way of going about it. Even if he won such an arm-wrestle with his tent-kin, grudging acceptance wasn’t going to be good enough. Not for Lily, wounded porcupine that she was. He had to gain more whole-hearted support for her. Somehow.

  Hunting tactics seemed not a very useful guide, nor fishing, neither. Maybe this had to be more like gardening, planting the seed and waiting, not quite helplessly, for something good to grow out of its inner potential. You could weed and water, and not tread on the new leaves, but you couldn’t force anything. Very farmerish; how apt.

  In which case, what he most needed to solve this dilemma was not fiercer argumentation, but patience and time. And, perhaps, Lily herself. Seed of her own future. Or, wait, didn’t lilies grow from bulbs? Stop thinking, Barr, you’re going to hurt yourself.

  But in his younger days, he had perfected slithering-out. Was there such a thing as slithering-in?

  “Verel’s put me on camp rest anyway,” he declared. Bless his little black heart. “We can’t go anywhere else for a while.”

  “Well,” said his grandmother, frowning, “nobody’s arguing with Verel.”

  Shirri’s toddler woke up and wailed from the trundle in the next room, and the inquest broke up in a flurry of household chores. Barr dutifully admired his squirming nephew, the latest addition to Tent Foxbrush, and as reward, or punishment, was set to keep him from vigorously trying to kill himself in novel ways while his mother went out to deal with her bees. Wheezing a bit, Barr wondered how this was classed as a light duty, suitable for a convalescent. “No, kid, we don’t eat leather scraps. And not awls either, good grief… No, nor candles, though I don’t suppose beeswax would poison you…”