Knife Children (The Sharing Knife series)

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  There was no handy cover overlooking the Tamarack place, but the core buildings were close to the road. Barr stopped Briar in the speckled shade of a big elm tree flanking the farm lane, opening his perceptions wide. This farm was busy with life: chickens, cows, sheep, goats, horses, dogs, cats, all easily sensed and dismissed. A man and, yes, a boy were in the barn. Another three adults and what he guessed might be a couple of toddlers were at the back of the house, likely the kitchen. More youngsters upstairs, but not the sole one he sought.

  He bit his lip and tried running through the inventory of humans once more, sorting out Masons from Tamaracks as best he could. Five or six each, maybe? Still no Lily. Two years older might have changed her, but not out of all recognition, not to him. That Lakewalker tinge should still color her. Maybe she’d been sent on an errand—not toward the village, or Barr would have passed her, but, say, up to the woods on the hill behind to gather fiddlehead ferns and other spring greens? A likely task to set a nimble-fingered youngster to, this time of year. Should he ride a pattern around the perimeter of the place?

  As he mulled, the man and the boy came riding out of the barn on a horse and a pony respectively. Barr hesitated a little too long to pretend he was just riding by; the man spotted him and pressed his horse forward, pulling up by Barr’s side. The searching look he treated Barr to was not quite what he was used to receiving from farmers, if still nothing warm. Not wary suspicion, but… anxiety?

  The boy followed, staring more openly. “Uncle Jay!” he whispered. “Ain’t that a Lakewalker?”

  Thus pegging the man as Jay Tamarack, and the boy as Lily’s next-down sibling—half-brother—Reeve, yes. Around twelve years old. Edjer had been what, nine? Ten? Barr touched his hand to his temple, and tried a tentative, “Aye. How de’.”

  “You patrolling?” asked Jay, and then, oddly eager, “Is your patrol around?”

  “Not at present. I’m just passing through. Heading home to Pearl Riffle.” In which case he should be riding east from the crossroads, not west to this place, Barr belatedly realized, but the man didn’t seem to notice.

  “Which way did you come from?”

  “Down the north road.”

  “In the past, what, two days I guess, did you chance to pass a girl about fourteen riding a little gray gelding?” He peered at Barr. “Hair about your color but a shade lighter, blue eyes.”

  Barr kept his hand from reaching back to touch the sandy-blond braid at his nape, bound by the cord with the shark teeth on it, souvenir of his long-ago trip to the sea. “Can’t say as I have. But I only turned onto the north crossroad this morning, about six miles up from the Corner. I was on the patroller trails before then.”

  The man rubbed his forehead. “Oh, yeah, the trails, too. Not just the roads. This is a nightmare.” He turned to the boy. “Reeve, ride on to your place, check it again. And anywhere around it where you kids hide to duck chores. Then the neighbors. Then anywhere else you can think of.”

  “I did that yesterday.”

  “She might have come back. If not here, that’s still the most likely place for her to den up. Go on, git.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” the boy sighed, kicking his pony into a trot.

  “You folks missing a youngster?” Barr said, as neutrally as he could manage.

  “My niece.” Jay nodded. “There was a, a bad situation. We think she must have run off, on account of her taking her things and Moon. Though we did check down the wells, yesterday, both of them, here and there. There at her family’s house that burned last month, I should say. I didn’t think that likely, but you never know, and poor Fid insisted. Her pa. I’d say he’s fit to be tied, except he already sort of is, with his hands so hurt.”

  Barr concealed a shudder. Wells. Yes, farmer children did accidentally fall and drown in wells, time to time. And sometimes not so accidentally… He considered the distance between a laughing roll in the hay on a bright summer afternoon, and probing a dark well for a young body, finding it oddly foreshortened.

  Swallowing hard, Barr tried, “You know, I’m not in a hurry. I could lend you some help in your hunt for a bit, if you wanted me.”

  The man’s lips parted in surprise, then a hesitant sort of thrill. “You Lakewalkers—you do find things. Blight bogles, they say.”

  “Malices—blight bogles, as you call ‘em—are hard to miss, once you get anywhere near. Their blight looks like a forest fire touched down. And they stay put, through their first molt or three, anyway. One little farmer girl would be more skittery.” He was briefly torn between promising nothing he did not know he could deliver, and selling himself like a river merchant, then realized it had better be the latter. “But yes. I’m a good hunter.” The number of malice kills he could boast by now was not exactly relevant to the present problem. Explaining his groundsense range would be more to the point, but then he’d likely have to stop and explain groundsense. “I’d need more information to guess where to start, though.” With a two, three day lead, mounted, Lily could be fifty miles down the road by now. But which road? The worst thing he could do was pick the wrong direction to start out, and he only stood one chance in four of getting it right by guess.

  “Come in, come in, then.” Jay Tamarack turned his horse and gestured Barr ahead of him into the lane. “Fid would be so relieved. And Bell too, I imagine.”

  Wait, what? “No… I shouldn’t trespass.”

  “You’re invited.” Jay gestured harder.

  Oh, blight. It was obvious the secret of Lily’s non-Mason-ness could not be generally known to the rest of her family. Though Bell knows. And Iris. So if they all three kept their heads, and their mouths shut… Leaving wells aside, Barr’s imagination could provide a long list of lethal hazards a young woman might encounter, alone on the roads. He expected everyone else’s could, too. The choice wasn’t happy, but it was plain. Apprehensively, Barr let himself be shepherded onto the lane.

  Jay Tamarack led him around to the back of the house, where they tied their horses. Barr gulped and followed him up the stoop and into the kitchen. It was a long room running the width of the house, with a fireplace and a new-style iron cookstove on one end, and a big table lined with benches to feed a crowd on the other. The morning’s bread loaves, still warm and yeasty-smelling, stood in rows on a shelf below a back window.

  Two women were at work chopping vegetables and topping up a soup kettle. A man occupying an end chair by the table, his arms and hands bandaged, gingerly balanced a toddler on his lap and kept it distracted with bread bits. Another child clumsily bashed a wooden horse and blocks around at his feet. All three grownups looked up at their entry, but only two reacted.

  Bell’s faded blue eyes widened in shock as she took Barr in. She was a little taller, a little thinner, than the girl he’d once known, her hair darkened to a drab tawny knot at her nape. Her ground was profoundly changed, shot through with recent stress and grief. Pregnant, yes, about four months gone, thickening at the waist under her apron. The bright new life within her seemed healthy enough, though.

  Iris had always been taller than her younger sister, brown-haired to her blond, cautious to her boldness. More mature, not much change there; drained by fewer pregnancies. It took her a longer moment to recognize Barr, and that mostly from following her sister’s jerk and stare. She recoiled, then stepped forward protectively.

  “You!” cried Bell, cutting across Barr’s vague opening mumble as he strove to act as if they’d never met before. “Did you take Lily?”

  “What? No!”

  “Bell—!” said Jay, startled by this out-of-the-blue accusation. Barr hoped he’d put it down to his sister-in-law’s distraught state of mind.

  “Did you bring her back?” Iris said more urgently.

  “Not yet,” Barr said. He gestured at Iris’s husband, and hastily filled in, “I just met this fellow out on the road, where he stopped me and asked if I’d seen a missing girl, since I’d come down the north crossroad this morning. Which I was so
rry to say I had not, but since I’m not on a patrol, I thought I could pause for a bit and help you all to look.” He went on steadily, trying to recover the play-act if they wanted it, “Name’s Barr, of Tent Foxbrush out of Pearl Riffle Camp, down on the Grace River. And you folks might be…?” He blinked, trying to convey his good intention.

  Iris at least caught on. She grasped her sister’s arm rather hard as Bell started forward; Barr hoped the kitchen knife clutched in her hand was merely forgotten. “That’s right kindly of you, Lakewalker,” Iris got out through only slightly gritted teeth. “What do you think you could do?”

  Barr feigned a shrug. “Ride farther, look faster. Extend the range of the search.” He added, “I’m thinking, though, that not all the powers at my command will do a mite of good if I’m not looking in the right direction. I was hoping we might sit down and try to work out which one that would be.” He added prudently, “And then I could be on my way.” No, see, I’m not trying to burn down your life. …Again.

  Fid put down the toddler and rose a bit painfully from his seat. He limped over to Barr with a hoping look on his face that was downright alarming. “Really? You would do that, lad?”

  We’re the same age, Fid. Best not to point that out.

  “I’m Fid Mason, Lily’s papa, by the way,” he added, extending a bandaged hand, then venting a rueful laugh as if to apologize for his incapacity and letting it drop.

  Barr ducked his head in acknowledgment of it all. “How de’ y’ do, sir.” Not well, Barr could see; the burns under those bandages were deep and ugly, oozing with inflammation.

  Thinking that he’d better not reveal his prior conversation with the smith, nor that this visit wasn’t by chance, Barr then plunged the room into an abrupt and unintended silence by asking the next obvious question: “Why d’you suppose the girl ran off, does anyone know?”

  Lots of set jaws: Bell angry, Fid distressed, Jay glum, Iris closed like a river mussel. Or she would be, if Barr couldn’t read all their grounds like a patrol report page.

  Barr pressed on: “Because if I knew why, it would be the first step in guessing where to.”

  Jay said, “At first we thought she’d hole in with a friend or a neighbor till she got over her mad, or hide out back home, but we’ve not found her in any of those places so far.”

  “You folks will be better at covering all your local patch,” Barr allowed. “But if she picked a direction and kept on going, I’ve a better chance of catching up to her. So which way?” And, a little frustrated, “Doesn’t anyone talk to the girl? Can’t you tell me anything at all about how she thinks?”

  Bell crossed her arms tight and glowered at the floor. “She’s a liar,” she muttered.

  “Now, Bell, we can’t know that,” said Jay, in a tone of wearied placation.

  “Not anymore, for sure,” said Iris grimly. Since little Edjer had gone into the ground, Barr guessed she meant, and any chance of recanting his testimony buried with him. Bell flinched. Iris set an apologetic arm around her sister’s shoulders.

  After a glance at his wife, Fid picked his words carefully. “Lily was accused of not telling the truth about something, and took it in bad part. Rode off in a huff, I daresay.”

  He made it sound like some youthful fib, not the mortal mess Barr knew it to be.

  “Or rode off guilty and ashamed,” grumbled Bell.

  “And which was it?” said Barr.

  Jay cast a glance at Iris, who said, “We just can’t tell.”

  A Lakewalker could. Despite all his boundless duties, and the ritual of death he not just knew but hoped lay at the end of them, Barr was suddenly glad to be one. His hand brushed the unprimed bone knife concealed in its sheath at his side, his constant companion and final promise.

  “She has a temper,” Fid offered. “And never liked injustices.”

  “Who does?” said Jay.

  This was getting circular, like a ring of reproach and concern with a Lily-shaped blank in the middle. And you’re part of that blind ring too, aren’t you, patroller? “All right,” Barr sighed, “try this. Every away contains a toward. Did she ever talk of any place she dreamed of going? Some place she wanted to see? I mean, before all this blew up. Or did anyone talk to her of places to go, tell exciting stories?”

  Jay scratched his head. “Well, everybody around here talks about the river. It’s not only where I’d go, it’s where I did go, when I was a youngster. Though I came back when I’d got it out of my system.” His mouth twisted up at his wife. “Plus there was this girl. That’ll anchor your boat.”

  Iris’s return lip-twitch suggested this was an old joke, without a sting.

  Barr’s ground survey, opening him uncomfortably to all the pain in the room, wasn’t helping much. Everyone here was telling the truth as they knew it, and no one was telling him what he needed to know. He massaged his neck under his braid, steeling himself. “Miz Mason, Miz Tamarack, could I talk to you both private for a bit?”

  The two sisters looked at each other; reluctantly, Bell nodded. “Come out to the front porch. Fid, keep an eye on the childers.” Intervention would be needed soon, as a squabble was brewing at knee level over the wooden horse. “Keep them”—her voice caught—“away from the fireplace.”

  “Aye,” said Fid, a twinge echoing through his ground at this last. He limped over to lower himself to the floor and mediate between the two chubby-fisted cousins.

  “Jay, weren’t you going to ride out?” said Iris.

  “I’ll fetch the Lakewalker a sack of grain to take along for his horse, first,” said Jay. “Seems the least we can do. You feed him, too, before he goes, eh?” He departed out the back door as Iris led Barr and her sister through her house to the front.

  Barr leaned against one porch post in the shade of its roof. Bell took the other, as if in mirror to him. Iris sat herself down on the step between, part guardian, part buffer, and turned toward Barr.

  He took a breath. “First thing. I didn’t ride by here on accident.”

  “I didn’t think you did,” murmured Bell darkly.

  “I’d stopped in and talked to Smith back at the Corner. He told me about your barn and house, and Edjer.” Barr took refuge from the impossible-to-encompass in formality. “I am sorry for your loss.”

  Bell curled in on herself as if around a knife wound. That lip movement might have been an attempt at a Thank you.

  Barr’s fingers fiddled again with his bone hilt, long-time consolation for any nerves or distress. People who knew him well, like Remo or Dag, would have spotted it for the sign it was right off. But here, his anxious spirit was safely cocooned in his audience’s ignorance. “Smith also told me how Lily and Edjer accused each other of letting the fire start.”

  “We just can’t know,” Iris repeated, whether to Bell or Barr he wasn’t sure.

  Bell stared away over the sunlit field, but there was no light in her eyes. “She shouldn’t have spoke ill of the dead. Anyhow.”

  Barr thought that if Bell had a year, or three, she might get over her grief for her lost child enough to be fair to the other one again. Or at least to forgive her. Although if Lily were actually the innocent party, he could see where forgiveness would be the most searing insult imaginable. And Lily didn’t have three years to wait out this heart-storm, not at her fast-moving age.

  “Did you get along all right with Lily? Before this?”

  “She was an obedient child, most t’ time,” said Bell, a muscle twitching in her jaw. Iris nodded confirmation of this tepid praise.

  “Ever tell her about me?”

  Bell looked up sharply. “No!”

  “Let it slip on accident?” His glance swept Iris as well, who shook her head.

  “No.” Bell’s voice firmed up on this one. “It couldn’t do her, nor Fid, nor anyone else any good by now. No.” Her glance under her lashes suggested she would erase Barr from the whole world if she could; but erasing him from Lily’s world would have to do.

  �
�So this running away can’t have to do with her finding out all sudden who she is?”

  Bell shook her head. “I shouldn’t think so.”

  “If she’s inherited any of my Lakewalker powers, they should be starting to rise just about now. You see any sign? Or word?”

  “No…” This denial sounded less certain. “But if so, her mother’d be the last person she’d tell. It’s not like we clashed more than our fair share, mind. This’s got nothing to do with her and me, but a whole lot to do with being fourteen. It’s never a good age, for a girl.”

  Iris nodded wry confirmation. Remembering who-knew-what from their shared farmer girlhoods? Barr didn’t have a farmer girlhood to draw on for insight, and wasn’t sure how much of the notable and prolonged head-butting he’d done with his own Lakewalker parents could fill in. Maybe some…

  And all this could be as true as both women thought it was, but he still needed a direction.

  “Do you have any relatives or friends she knows about in other towns?” He did not add, Or camps? Lily might have two grandparents, a handful of aunts and uncles, and a clutch of young cousins in Pearl Riffle Camp, not to mention a passel of more remote tent-kin, but they could not enter into this calculation. He was part relieved, and part glumly thinking that at least it would be something. “Glassforge, Silver Shoals, Lumpton Market, anyplace smaller?”

  “I suppose we must, but none we’ve ever visited nor kept in touch with,” said Iris. “Our people came from south of the Grace, originally.”