The Sharing Knife: Beguilement

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “Yes,” said Fawn shortly, scrunching back down. “It was the bogle.” Were these too-close questions? Not yet, she decided. Even Dag had offered some explanations, just enough to satisfy without begging more questions. “It was ugly. Uglier than the mud-men, even. Bogles kill everything they touch, seemingly. You should go look at its lair, later. The woods are all dead for a mile around. I don’t know how long it will take for them to grow back.”

  “Hm.” Petti busied herself unsealing jars, sniffing for wholesomeness and fishing out the broken wax to be rinsed and remelted, later. “Them mud-men was ugly enough. The day before we was brought to the digging camp, seems there was a woman had a sick child, who went to them and insisted on being let go to get him help. She tried carrying on, weeping and wailing, to force them. Instead, they killed her little boy. And ate him. She was in a state by the time we got there. Everybody was. Even them bandits, who I don’t think was in their right minds either, wasn’t too easy about that one.”

  Fawn shuddered. “Dag said the mud-men ate folks. I wasn’t sure I believed him.

  Till after… afterwards.” She hitched her shoulders. “Lakewalkers hunt those things. They go looking for them.”

  “Hm.” The woman frowned as she kept trying to assemble the meal by her normal routine and coming up short against missing tools and vessels. But she improvised and went on, much as Fawn had. She added from across the room after a while, “They say Lakewalkers can beguile folk’s minds.”

  “Look, you.” Fawn lurched back up on her elbow, scowling. “I say, that Lakewalker saved my life yesterday. At least twice. No, three times, because I’d have bled to death in the woods trying to walk out if he’d died in the fight.

  He fought off five of those mud-men! He took care of me all last night when I couldn’t move for the pain, and carried out my bloody clouts with never a word of complaint, and he cleaned up your kitchen and he fixed your fence and he buried your dogs nice in the shady woods, and he didn’t have to do any of that.”

  And his heart breaks for the memory of water lilies. “I’ve seen that man do more good with one hand in a day than I’ve seen any other man do with two in a week.

  Or ever. If he’s beguiled my mind, he sure has done it the hard way!”

  The farmwife had both her hands raised as if to ward off this hot, pelting defense, half-laughing. “Stop, stop, I surrender, girl!”

  “Huh!” Fawn flopped back again. “Just don’t you give me any more they says.”

  “Hm.” Petti’s smile dwindled to bleakness, but whatever shadowed her thoughts now, she did not confide to Fawn. Fawn lay quietly on her pallet till dusk drove the men indoors. At that point, Tad was made to carry off the feather tick, and the space was used for a trestle table. Makeshift benches—boards placed across sawed-off logs—were brought in to serve for the missing chairs. Petti allowed to Dag as how she thought it all right for Fawn to sit up long enough to take the meal with the family. Since the alternative appeared to be having Petti bring her something in bed in some lonely nook of the house, Fawn agreed decisively to this.

  The meal was abundant, if makeshift and simple, eaten by the limited light of candle stubs and the fire at the end of the long summer day. Everyone would be going to bed right after, not just her, Fawn thought. The room was hot and the conversation, at first, scant and practical. All were exhausted, their minds filled with the recent disruptions in their lives. Since everyone was mostly eating with their hands anyhow, Dag’s slight awkwardness did not stick out, Fawn observed with satisfaction. You wouldn’t think his missing hand bothered him a bit, unless you noticed how he never raised his left wrist into sight above the table edge. He spoke only to encourage Fawn, next to him, to eat up, though about that he was quite firm.

  “Kind o’ you to help Tad with all that busted glass,” the farmwife said to Dag.

  “No trouble, ma’am. You should all be able to step safe now, leastways.” Sassa offered, “I’ll help you to get new windows in, Petti, soon as things are settled a bit.”

  She gave her brother-in-law a grateful look. “Thankee, Sassa.”

  Grandfather Horseford grumbled, “Oiled cloth stretched on the frames was good enough in my day,” to which his gray-haired son responded only, “Have some more pan bread, Pa.” The land might still be the old man’s, in name at least, but it was plain that the house was Petti’s.

  Inevitably, Fawn supposed, the talk turned to picking over the past days’

  disasters. Dag, who looked to Fawn’s eye as though he was growing tired, and no wonder, was not expansive; she watched him successfully use his diversion trick of answering a question with a question four times running. Until Sassa remarked to him, sighing, “Too bad your patrol didn’t get there a day sooner. They might’ve saved that poor little boy who got et.”

  Dag did not exactly wince. It was merely a lowering of his eyelids, a slight, unargumentative tilt of his head. A shift of his features from tired to expressionless. And silence.

  Fawn sat up, offended for him. “Careful what you wish after. If Dag’s patrol had got there anytime before I—we—before the bogle died and the mud-men ran off, there’d have been a big fight. Lots of folks might have gotten killed, and that little boy, too.”

  Sassa, brow furrowed, turned to her. “Yes, but—et? Doesn’t it bother you extra?

  It sure bothers me.”

  “It’s what mud-men do,” murmured Dag.

  Sassa eyed him, disconcerted. “Used to it, are you?”

  Dag shrugged.

  “But it was a child.”

  “Everyone’s someone’s child.”

  Petti, who’d been staring wearily at her plate, looked up at that.

  In a tone of cheery speculation, Jay said, “If they’d have been five days faster, we’d not have been raided. And our cows and sheep and dogs would still be alive. Wish for that, while you’re at it, why don’t you?”

  With a grimace that failed to quite pass as a smile, Dag pushed himself up from the table. He gave Petti a nod. “ ‘Scuse me, ma’am.”

  He closed the kitchen door quietly behind him. His booted steps sounded across the porch, then faded into the night.

  “What bit him?” asked Jay.

  Petti took a breath. “Jay, some days I think your mama must have dropped you on your head when you was a baby, really I do.”

  He blinked in bewilderment at her scowl, and said less in inquiry than protest,

  “What?”

  For the first time in hours, Fawn found herself chilled again, chilled and shaking. Her wan droop did not escape the observant Petti. “Here, girl, you should be in bed. Horse, help her.”

  Horse, mercifully, was much quieter than his younger relations; or perhaps his wife had given him some low-down on their outlandish guests in private. He propelled Fawn through the darkening house. The loss of light was not from her going woozy, this time, though her skull was throbbing again. Petti followed with a candle in a cup for a makeshift holder.

  The ground floor of one of the add-ons consisted of two small bedrooms opposite each other. Horse steered Fawn inside to where her feather tick had been laid across a wooden bed frame. The slashed rope webbing had been reknotted sometime recently, maybe by Dag and Tad. A moist summer night breeze wafted through the small, glassless windows. Fawn decided this must be a daughter’s bedchamber; the girls would likely be arriving home tomorrow with the wagon.

  As soon as the transport was safely accomplished, Petti shooed Horse out.

  Awkwardly, Fawn swapped out her dressings, half-hiding under a light blanket that she scarcely needed. Petti made no comment on them, beyond a “Give over, here,” and a “There you go, now.” A day ago, Fawn reflected, she would have given anything to trade her strange man helper for a strange woman. Tonight, the desire was oddly reversed.

  “Horse ‘n me have the room across,” said Petti. “You can call out if you need anything in the night.”

  “Thank you,” said Fawn, trying to feel gra
teful. She supposed it would not be understood if she asked for the kitchen floor back. The floor and Dag. Where would these graceless farmers try to put the patroller? In the barn? The thought made her glower.

  Long, unmistakable footfalls sounded in the hall, followed by a sharp double rap against the door. “Come in, Dag,” Fawn called, before Petti could say anything.

  He eased inside. A stack of dry garments lay over his left arm, the laundry Fawn had seen draped over the pasture fence earlier, Fawn’s blue dress and linen drawers; underneath were his own trousers and drawers that had been so spectacularly bloodied yesterday. He had her bedroll tucked under his armpit.

  He laid the bedroll down in a swept corner of the room, with her cleaned clothes atop. “There you go, Spark.”

  “Thank you, Dag,” she said simply. His smile flickered across his face like light on water, gone in the instant. Didn’t anyone ever just say thank you to patrollers? She was really beginning to wonder.

  With a wary nod at the watching Petti, he stepped to Fawn’s bedside and laid his palm on her brow. “Warm,” he commented. He traded the palm for the inside of his wrist. Fawn tried to feel his pulse through their skins, as she had listened to his heartbeat, without success. “But not feverish,” he added under his breath.

  He stepped back a little, his lips tightening. Fawn remembered those lips breathing in her hair last night, and suddenly wanted nothing more than to kiss and be kissed good night by them. Was that so wrong? Somehow, Petri’s frowning presence made it so.

  “What did you find outside?” she asked, instead.

  “Not my patrol.” He sighed. “Not for a mile in any direction, leastways.”

  “Do you suppose they’re all still looking on the wrong side of Glassforge?”

  “Could be. It looks like it’s fixing to rain; heat lightning off to the west. If I really were stuck in a ditch, I wouldn’t be sorry, but I hate to think of them running around in the woods in the dark and wet, in fear for me, when I’m snug inside and safe. I’m going to hear about that later, I expect.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “Don’t worry, Spark; another day it will be the other way around. And then it will be my turn to be, ah, humorous.” His eyes glinted in a way that made her want to laugh.

  “Will we really go to Glassforge tomorrow?”

  “We’ll see. See how you’re doing in the morning, for one.”

  “I’m doing much better tonight. Bleeding’s no worse than a monthly, now.”

  “Do you want your hot stone again?”

  “Really, I don’t think I need it anymore.”

  “Good. Sleep hard, then, you.”

  She smiled shyly. “I’ll try.”

  His hand made a little move toward her, but then fell back to his side. “Good night.”

  “G’night, Dag. You sleep hard too.”

  He gave her a last nod, and withdrew; the farmwife carried the candle out with her, closing the door firmly behind. A faint flash of the heat lightning Dag had mentioned came through the window, too far away even to hear the thunder, but otherwise all was darkness and silence. Fawn rolled over and tried to obey Dag’s parting admonishment. “Hold up,” murmured the farmwife, and since she carried the only light, the stub melting down to a puddle in the clay cup, Dag did so. She shouldered past and led him to the kitchen. Another candle, and a last dying flicker from the fireplace, showed the trestle table and benches taken down and stowed by the wall, and the plates and vessels from dinner stacked on the drainboard by the sink, along with the bucket of water refilled.

  The farmwife looked around the shadows and sighed. “I’ll deal with the rest of this in the morning, I guess.” Belying her words, she moved to cover and set aside the scant leftover food, including a stack of pan bread she had apparently cooked up with breakfast in mind.

  “Where do you want me to sleep, ma’am?” Dag inquired politely. Not with Fawn, obviously. He tried not to remember the scent of her hair, like summer in his mouth, or the warmth of her breathing young body tucked under his arm.

  “You can have one of those ticks that little girl mended; put it down where you will.”

  “The porch, maybe. I can watch out for my people, if any come out of the woods in the night, and not wake the house. I could pull it into the kitchen if it comes on to rain.”

  “That’d be good,” said the farmwife.

  Dag peered through the empty window frame into the darkness, letting his groundsense reach out. The animals, scattered in the pasture, were calm, some grazing, some half-asleep. “That mare isn’t actually mine. We found it at the bogle’s lair and rode it out. Do you recognize it for anyone’s?”

  Petti shook her head. “Not ours, anyways.”

  “If I ride it to Glassforge, it would be nice to not be jumped for horse thieving before I can explain.”

  “I thought you patrollers claimed a fee for killing a bogle. You could claim it.”

  Dag shrugged. “I already have a horse. Leastways, I hope so. If no one comes forward for this one, I thought I might have it go to Miss Bluefield. It’s sweet-tempered, with easy paces. Which is part of what inclines me to think it wasn’t a bandit’s horse, or not for long.”

  Petti paused, staring down at her store of food. “Nice girl, that Miss Bluefield.”

  “Yes.”

  “You wonder how she got in this fix.”

  “Not my tale, ma’am.”

  “Aye, I noticed that about you.”

  What? That he told no tales?

  “Accidents happen, to the young,” she went on. “Twenty, eh?”

  “So she says.”

  “You ain’t twenty.” She moved to kneel by the fire and poke it back for the night.

  “No. Not for a long time, now.”

  “You could take that horse and ride back to your patrol tonight, if you’re that worried about them. That girl would be all right, here. I’d take her in till she’s mended.”

  That had been precisely his plan, yesterday. It seemed a very long time ago.

  “Good of you to offer. But I promised to see her safe to Glassforge, which was where she was bound. Also, I want Mari to look her over. My patrol leader—she’ll be able to tell if Fawn’s healing all right.”

  “Aye, figured you’d say something like that. I ain’t blind.” She sighed, stood, turned to face him with her arms crossed. “And then what?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Do you even know what you’re doing to her? Standing there with them cheekbones up in the air? No, I don’t suppose you do.”

  Dag shifted from cautious to confused. That the far m wife was shrewd and observant, he had certainly noticed; but he did not understand her underlying distress in this matter. “I mean her only good.”

  “Sure you do.” She frowned fiercely. “I had a cousin, once.”

  Dag tilted his head in faint encouragement, torn between curiosity and an entirely unmagical premonition that wherever she was going with this tale, he didn’t want to go along.

  “Real nice young fellow; handsome, too,” Petti continued. “He got a job as a horse boy at that hotel in Glassforge where your patrols always stay, when they’re passing through these parts. There was this patroller girl, young one, came there with her patrol. Very pretty, very tall. Very nice. Very nice to him, he thought.”

  “Patrol leaders try to discourage that sort of thing.”

  “Aye, so I understood. Too bad they don’t succeed. Didn’t take too long for him to fall mad in love with the girl. He spent the whole next year just waiting for her patrol to come back. Which it did. And she was nice to him again.”

  Dag waited. Not comfortably.

  “Third year, the patrol came again, but she did not. Seems she was only visiting, and had gone back to her own folks way west of here.”

  “That’s usual, for training up young patrollers. We send them to other camps for a season or two, or more. They learn other ways, make friends; if ever we have to combine forces in a hurry, it m
akes everything easier if some patrollers already know each other’s routes and territories. The ones training up to be leaders, we send ‘em around to all seven hinterlands. They say of those that they’ve walked around the lake.”

  She eyed him. “You ever walk around the lake?”

  “Twice,” he admitted.

  “Hm.” She shook her head, and went on, “He got the notion he would go after her, volunteer to join with you Lakewalkers.”

  “Ah,” said Dag. “That would not work. It’s not a matter of pride or ill will, you understand; we just have skills and methods that we cannot share.”

  “You mean to say, not pride or ill will alone, I think,” said the woman, her voice going flat.

  Dag shrugged. Not my tale. Let it go, old patroller.

  “He did find her, eventually. As you say, the Lakewalkers wouldn’t have him.

  Came back after about six months, with his tail between his legs. Bleak and pining. Wouldn’t look at no other girl. Drank. It was like, if he couldn’t be in love with her, he’d be in love with death instead.”

  “You don’t have to be a farmer for that. Ma’am,” Dag said coolly.

  She spared him a sharp glance. “That’s as may be. He never settled, after that.

  He finally took a job with the keelboat men, down on the Grace River. After a couple of seasons, we heard he’d fallen off his boat and drowned. I don’t think it was deliberate; they said he’d been drunk and had gone to piss over the side in the night. Just careless, but a kind of careless that don’t happen to other folks.”

  Maybe that had been the trouble with his own schemes, Dag thought. He had never been careless enough. If Dag had been twenty instead of thirty-five when the darkness had overtaken him, it might have all: worked rather differently…

  “We never heard back from that patroller girl. He was just a bit of passin’

  fun to her, I guess. She was the end of the world to him, though.”

  Dag held his silence.

  She inhaled, and drove on: “So if you think it’s amusin’ to make that girl fall in love with you, I say, it won’t seem so funny down the road. I don’t know what’s in it for you, but there’s no future for her. Your people will see to that, if hers won’t. You and I both know that—but she don’t.”