“Oh.” Lily hesitated. “I didn’t know that.” She eyed Barr sideways. He shifted uncomfortably. What was that vile Hackberry rumor, that patrollers were making some kind of mind-slaves of their farmer volunteers, the way a blighted malice did? He supposed it would have to be the job of the returning volunteers to put a bung in that nonsense. He couldn’t be everywhere.
“I’m a good tent-woman,” said Amma, “so I purely hate waste. Which haste makes, they say. Verel says you’re on camp rest till those stitches come out. That’s when he decides they do, not when you get impatient and start picking at them, Barr, he told me to mention for some reason that you would know.” She snorted. “So I’m not going to be saying anything one way or another about your future as a patroller till I need to. And I’m Tent Osprey, not Tent Foxbrush, so it’s not my place to be telling them how to go on.”
Barr considered how tight-braided Amma was with his grandmother, and thought, Yeah, right. He rubbed his gritty eyes, in lieu of scratching his neck. “About Lily’s place. In the camp, not just my tent.”
“Mm?”
“She’s trained up to do most of the everyday tasks of a tent-woman already. She could be a horse-girl as she stands.”
Lily perked in sudden attention.
“I suspect she could make a patroller when she’s older, and not just as a shielded farmer-helper. Verel thinks”—Barr swallowed—“she could even be bonded to a sharing knife, in time. Thing is, she’s not some helpless tiny orphan. She only has to learn the Lakewalker parts. She could be an asset, to any tent willing to see and think clear.”
“But she’s not independent yet, neither,” observed Amma.
“Who of us is?”
A conceding nod. She was watching him struggle with disturbing shrewdness, Barr thought, and he didn’t think she was only timing how long it took him to drown himself. And Lily, he was reminded, roped together as they were.
Even as a youngster he’d dimly recognized that Amma’d wanted him to be not so much good, as a good patroller. He saw that more keenly now. She was not his adversary in this, though she was surely his judge. He’d planted the ideas in her head about Lily he wanted to have grow there. Now, clumsy paws off; wait.
“Barr,” said Amma, swinging off her desk, “you’re cluttering up my busy headquarters. Go along and get out from under my feet, until you are back on yours. Ain’t no fun trying to spar with a man who looks like a lump of wet mud.”
“Hey! I had a bath at Verel’s last night.”
“Not what I was talking about, and you know it.” Her sharp gaze could have skinned a deer. “I’ll find you when I’m ready.”
Barr didn’t need to be told again. He towed Lily out.
Wondering what Amma had been planting right back in him, all along.
* * *
On the limp back to tent Foxbrush, Lily asked, “What happens to orphans around here? And”—her voice caught, forged on—“and bastards?”
“We don’t exactly have either, not the way farmers do. All children born, no matter who their fathers are, are counted as members of their mother’s tent. Girls forever—they become the tent—boys till they go out and get string-bound.”
“What if a woman has all boys?”
“Sometimes, one’ll bring in a tent-sister to be heiress.” Sometimes, the tent goes dark.
“What if a tent was wiped out all but one?”
“That wouldn’t likely happen except maybe in case of a bad malice attack, like that one over in Raintree, and even then, most of the camp got out. Or a fi—flood. In which case, folks would cut and sew as needs be. No one gets left.” He hesitated. “Yours is a trickier coat to stitch, because you really don’t have a mother’s tent. Doesn’t mean it can’t be done, nor never has before. …Also, I’ve learned more’n a few things about never been done before.”
Lily’s face pinched in thought as they stumped along. “Could we be our own tent?”
“With the one dependent on the one out on the trail? Hard to see how to hold up a tent with only two pegs.” His brows knotted. “Thing is, everything patrollers need to ride out is made by their kin-tents, from clothes to gear to food to, well, people themselves. And anything the tent can’t supply has to be traded for, so the kin also need to make a surplus to sell, like Shirri’s honey and candles.
“Also…” He mulled, trying to figure how to say this to her. “I never learned all I learned from just one person, such as, say, my dad.” And wasn’t that going to be a bracing exchange of views, once Oris Foxbrush returned from patrol. “I learned from everybody around me, tent kin and camp mates and patrol partners, and, yeah, farmers, and rivermen, and I suppose bandits—those were some sharp lessons—and on and on.” And now from you. Huh. “For years. It’s never stopped.” He was beginning to suspect it wasn’t going to, and was that bad or good?
Her shoulders hunched. “It’s discouragin’ hard to start a job when you know it won’t ever be finished.”
“Welcome to patrolling,” he murmured dryly. “You don’t finish. You just pass it on.”
“Like being a farmwife, I guess.” She gave a short nod, as if driving in some new peg to brace the tent of her understanding.
Barr blinked. “Uh…” It took him a minute to see her point, another to reluctantly agree. “Same jobs over and over, all have to be done again tomorrow or something dies? Despite the weather or the hurting, or, or whatever. Yeah, I guess there are some parallels.” While he was weighing this, his mouth kept moving without him. “Or maybe it’s just called being a grownup.” He frowned at the words that had fallen out, but felt no urge to call them back.
“Huh,” echoed Lily.
* * *
Barr spent the trailing remains of the day puttering around the tent in a sodden sort of haze. That was the trouble with slowing down. It let things catch up with you. Though he dutifully, if sluggishly, applied himself to whatever sit-down task someone bothered to shove into his hands. Lily, he was pleased to see, was let to help out too, each in the series of small tasks deftly done another little chink in the Foxbrush walls. Proud principles were all very well, but they tended to make way when so much work needed to be got through somehow. He suspected that wasn’t just a Lakewalker trait.
In the early evening, when he was about to give up and crawl into Bay’s bunk, Yina Mink came around to check on her patients. Even Lily was wilting by then, and won a touch of ground reinforcement against any lingering blight burn. Yina made Barr sit up on the sawn-log stool in his bunk room for some more concentrated attention.
“Yes, these are trying to go hot,” she remarked, her fingers trailing over the snags of stitches and leaving a coolness in their wake. “You’ll need a few more treatments to keep them from suppurating. For your strained leg, tent rest will do.”
“Can’t you give that a boost, speed things along?”
“Tent rest means at your tent, not thumping all over camp, so some built-in hobbles are more help than hindrance.” She flashed a Verel-like smirk. “The first thing I was taught as a medicine maker was not to waste my reserves on anything that will get better on its own.”
“Mm,” he allowed, glumly.
“How are things settling in otherwise? With you and your tent kin and your surprise farmer girl.”
Was she still feeling apologetic for her blunder of last night? She shouldn’t, Barr decided. There were worse ways the truth could have come out.
“Better than I’d feared,” Barr admitted. Apart from his own embarrassments, which were about what he’d expected and which, it seemed, he was just going to have to eat. “Not yet as well as I hope.” He considered. “No one here has insulted Lily for being what she is, thanks be. Though I suppose she’s bound to strike some mouthy fool somewhere in camp sometime. I should likely talk to her about that hazard. Shirri’s youngsters take her for a novelty, Shirri is too run off her legs to say much, and my grandmother, well, I never could read her. She must have been able to put up a whopping gro
undshield back in her patroller days. My mother seems mainly worried this’ll ruin my chances of getting string-bound.” If Kiska brought it up again, he should just say he could clear her tent by riding back to Luthlia, ha, now there was the right place for that bluff. All thousand miles, shuddering gods, talk about an empty threat.
“I don’t know,” said Yina, moving around behind him to treat his other side. “It could be a benefit. The challenge might simply filter out women who weren’t up to your weight.”
Barr wasn’t just sure how to take that. Yina seemed too grave a woman to be flirting, though he did flick a glance to her left wrist, where no binding braid circled. Hnh. Why not?
“Verel said you’d spent some time training upriver?” he asked instead. “With Dag and Arkady?”
“Yes, they’re amazing groundsetters, aren’t they? The medicine work they’re doing on farmers was a revelation to me. Your name was mentioned there, by the way.”
With a heroic effort, Barr managed not to ask what had been said, but other gossip about these mutual friends filled the rest of his treatment, and then some. He was feeling pretty heartened by the time Yina took her leave. Clearly, she was good at her work.
* * *
Over the next few days, as Barr gradually emerged from his fatigue fog and his leg stopped throbbing as much, one of his problems was solved as Raki launched Lily into the mob of her Foxbrush cousins. There were at the moment about five of the cubs, including Raki and her next brother Azio, close enough in age to move as their own little patrol. Raki was the natural ringleader, a position unthreatened by the somewhat older Lily due to her off-balance diffidence from being thrust into this strange new world. Lily might seem more prize or pet or patrol souvenir to Raki than tent-sister, so far, but it occurred to Barr, watching them all thump by, that he needn’t start only at the top on his scheme of easing Lily into his tent. As a Foxbrush possession, if not yet member, Lily fell naturally within a certain boundary of protection.
He’d run with a similar posse at about that age, he recalled, most from neighboring tents as he’d been a little too young to trail after his siblings, the eldest of whom had already passed into the sphere of the grownups. Some were friends still, like Remo. The adults in this realm had existed mostly as taken-for-granted furniture, to be routed around as the evasion of chores was refined to a skill, and the finding of trouble to an art form. He wondered now if all the crap they’d got away with was due to their own luck, or just the fact that the grownups were too blighted busy or tired to ride them down.
The first expected incident of insult for Lily’s farmer-ness was relayed to him, indignantly, not from Lily but from Raki.
“He called her a farmer bastard!” complained Raki. “I kicked him in the knee, and we tried to push him into the river, but he ran away.”
Having ascertained that the miscreant was eleven, and not some unpleasant grownup, Barr mentally excused himself from the duty of tracking him down and vigorously adjusting his thinking. He tried not to feel too thankful.
Lily, listening to this field report more in embarrassment than outrage, made a motion of denial. “It wasn’t that big a deal. I am, aren’t I? It wasn’t not true.”
Ah. Yes. Being bitten by a squirrel might not seem like such an important injury when you were still recovering from being gutted by a bear. Words won’t break bones seemed like the lying-est lie Barr had ever been told, as a child. Bones knit eventually, he knew from close personal experience. The scars of slander, an insult not just delivered but believed, might never heal in a lifetime. Best you could do was bury the stitches under a load of fresh experiences, drop in so much new there was no time left to brood over the old.
And then he wondered if he was accidentally doing something very right for Lily, after all.
* * *
Lily’s repeated visits to Moon, at the patrol paddocks, also slid naturally into acceptance among the horse-girls. Because who among them would turn down a volunteer that regarded currying out mud from coats, combing manes, picking hooves, and mucking stalls as just as high a treat as they did? Lily spent more and more hours over there, and Barr, after observing a few times from a careful distance, left her to it. When she returned, happily reeking of horse—an aroma to which no one in Tent Foxbrush had objections—and checked in with Barr, her confident tales told finally began to outnumber her anxious questions asked.
And so, in this hesitant balance, five days slid by. Barr was keeping count.
Looking up from that afternoon’s chore of tending the whole roasting pig that the tent had gone together on, Barr was still taken aback when he saw Lily trooping home from the direction of the paddocks flanked by Bay on one side and Oris Foxbrush on the other. Oris was another sturdy-built Foxbrush of middle height, braided blond hair barely silvering; Tent Grayjay by birth, but looks blending in so well some joked Kiska had picked him like matching a wagon horse.
From her gestures, Lily was retelling the tale of Barr versus the mud-man. Both men were listening closely, Bay smirking, Oris with a sort of bemused professional interest. Clearly, Bay’s foray against the sessile must have concluded successfully, and their father’s more routine patrol likewise. As patrol leader, Oris would have reported in first to Amma. And received a report in return, urgh. Something blunt and forceful, no doubt, but, Barr conceded, honest—as Amma saw things.
How Oris saw things, well, Barr was about to find out. He felt a fresh pang for the forfeited goal of Clearcreek.
The homecoming was expected, hence the pig. But Barr hadn’t imagined both patrols arriving atop each other, nor his father meeting Lily before he could explain. All the careful introductions he’d mentally rehearsed were knocked from their saddle. He’d have to scramble to catch a trailing rein.
Lily was casting wary, fascinated glances up at this unexpected grandfather, and Barr realized he didn’t actually know what grandfather had meant to her at Hackberry Corner. Oris was being polite back at her, near as Barr could tell with the man’s ground almost closed. Bay walked half-disregarded at her other elbow, not as an assumed support but perhaps as a known non-threat, and wasn’t that interesting.
Barr waved a welcome as they all ambled up to the smoking fire pit; Bay sniffed in hungry appreciation. His glance at Barr was oddly reflective, but a first malice kill would do that to a fellow, even one more of a pest than his middle brother. Barr was reminded that there was more than one homecoming here as his father stepped back and looked him up and down.
“Well. You made it back in one piece after all. There were side bets, you know.”
“Did you win or lose?”
Oris grinned. “Not telling you.”
But they both dropped their groundshielding briefly, which for a Lakewalker might be as good as a hug. Oris surveyed Barr with that swift patrol-leader summation; what he made of it, Barr couldn’t tell, but if he’d been a horse he thought he might have been approved for saddling up. Oris’s glance caught briefly on the stitches still embroidering his neck, and his grin dropped to grimace, tilting. “Still up to your old tricks, I see.”
“It’s… not my fault?”
Oris puffed a laugh. “So I heard tell.” He jerked his head toward Lily, who’d been drawn into a discussion of their impending supper by Bay, and lowered his voice. “And that?”
“That one’s all mine,” Barr sighed.
“Baarrrr…”
That familiar intonation dragged like a rake over his nerves. Don’t you start. He growled under his breath, “I’ve had the lecture from Remo, Dag, Fawn, mother, grandmother, Shirri, and Amma. So far. Not to mention what all Bluebell had to say.” Still fiercely painful in his memories, old and more recent. “D’you really think it needs repeated?”
“Don’t know. Did you ever do it again?”
“No!”
“Then I guess not.”
Silence. Barr gaped a little. “That’s it?”
Oris’s eyebrows went up. “You want more? I could oblige you, b
ut I’m tired.”
“No, not… yeah, that’s fine, more than fine, but I mean, about Lily.”
He followed Barr’s gaze to his surprise granddaughter. Pursed his lips. Murmured, “I believe that wants some thinking before talking. We’ll take her up later.”
I just had to ask… And then, more soberly: Yeah. I did. I do.
Oris turned away into the oncoming rush of the Foxbrush women and children who had spotted his arrival and pelted from the tent, variously shrieking, yelling welcome, grinning, or just smirking in satisfaction depending on their ages. From Kiska, Oris got an actual hug. Lily stepped back a few paces and watched this with guarded, flicking eyes, maybe trying to sort out who meant what to each other. Observant, apart. Lonely in a crowd?
Barr stepped over to her and tried the shoulder-hug, which only got brushed off with a halfhearted prickle.
“I’m all right,” she muttered. “It’s just a lot.”
“I ‘spect so.”
“Though you should’ve seen the patrol paddocks, with sixty horses coming in at once.” She brightened. “It was an uproar like a, a, I don’t know what. Nothing I ever seen.”
Barr had, often enough in the past. Maybe a different mood when patrols were bringing in injured or dead or other bad news, or a new primed knife, a gift everyone and no one wanted. But they seemed to have escaped all that today; good. “Exciting?”
“I guess! And all those patrollers making noise. I thought you people were quiet.”
“When running a pattern-sweep, sure. Silent as death. When we finally get done with duty someplace safe, the lid comes off. Pretty rowdy, were they?”
“The ones from Bay’s patrol were. The ones from your father’s patrol seemed kind of envious, by the way they were razzing the others.” She reflected. “They insulted each other something fierce, but nobody got mad. They were mainly laughing.”
Knife Children Page 13
