Knife Children (The Sharing Knife series)

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Which was true of nearly every farmer in Oleana, so not much help there. Maybe he really was going to have to ride back to the Corner and flip a coin.

  Half-a-dozen more probing questions got Barr no further. How could these people have been with Lily all her life, yet know so little about her? It seemed too cruel a thing ask out loud. Well, they were busy, absent gods knew, that was part of it. Farm life was work from sunup to sunset. And the lack of groundsense would make anyone seem blind. Barr sighed and let himself be led back to the kitchen for a hasty, if wholesome, meal.

  Fid and the toddlers had disappeared upstairs, but the man came outside as Barr was stowing his gift rations in his saddlebags and tightening the girth. Barr eyed him sideways. Fid seemed the next most likely after Bell to have noticed any sign of Lily manifesting Lakewalker powers, but he was the last person Barr could ask.

  Hesitantly, Fid shook out a wad of cloth to reveal a worn blouse. “I wondered if you could use something of Lily’s. To find or recognize her.”

  Barr snorted. “Patrollers aren’t scent hounds. It doesn’t work like that.” He frowned at the pathetic garment. “Though it might be good to have something to prove my tale. Because she isn’t going to know me from a hole in the ground.”

  Fid nodded. “That had crossed my mind, too.” He held out a letter, fastened with a wax seal. “If—when—you find her, give her this from me.”

  “Ah. Better thinking.”

  “How will you recognize her, then?” asked Fid.

  “Besides her general description, groundsense. From, urm, seeing you and Bell. There’s a family look.” Which was true, if not in the way Barr implied. Barr took both proffered talismans, wrapping the letter in the blouse and stashing them in his saddlebag. Lily’s name on the outside of the folded paper had been painstakingly but clumsily inked. “How are your arms and hands doing?”

  Fid shrugged. “Burns are slow to heal.”

  No lie. The man was in throbbing pain even yet. “I could do a spot of patroller field aid on them, before I go. If you like.”

  Fid looked surprised. “I thought Lakewalkers weren’t supposed to share their healing magic with farmers.”

  Groundwork, not magic. Barr did not bother trying to correct the common miswording. “Yeah, well, Lakewalkers do a lot of things they aren’t supposed to do. Turns out.”

  “I… yes, then. Please. Seems worth trying.”

  A touch warily, Fid took a seat on the stoop, and Barr knelt next to him. He cradled first one arm and then the other in his hands, laying in the simplest possible ground reinforcement to fight infection and speed healing. He wasn’t up to fancy groundwork like Dag, or Dag’s groundsetter kinsman Arkady Redwing, whose healing work went, it sometimes seemed, beyond magic to miracle. But Barr could do his share, and had, many times out on patrol.

  Simple, but not weak. He poured out all the strength he could spare, which had grown over the years to be far more than his callow, shallow younger self could ever have mustered, or even imagined. As Dag had trained him, he took care to allow the ground backflow that undercut inadvertent beguilement, though it made him flinch. The last thing he wanted was Fid fixating on him, becoming obsessed, for good or ill. Though some stray spill of amity might do no harm…

  Fid looked nonplussed as he gingerly patted his bandages. “Feels warm. But not bad. Like the opposite of fever.”

  “You’ll want to change out those bandages often, for clean and dry.”

  “We been doin’ that regular already, yes.”

  Barr grunted to his feet. Like a diligent host, Fid rose after him, watching him as he mounted up.

  “Any last thoughts on which way?” Barr asked.

  Fid shook his head. “All I can guess is that she’ll be hurtin’. And angry. Not the best state of mind for thinking straight.”

  “So I observed,” said Barr dryly.

  Fid took his meaning without effort. “Aye.” He swallowed, lifting his chin. “If you can’t find her… stop back and let us know that as well, can you?”

  “I promise you, I will search with everything in my powers.” The limits of which Barr had not tested lately. That might be about to change.

  He gave Fid a vague salute, much as he might bid farewell to a camp friend when starting out on a patrol, and reined his horse back to the road.

  * * *

  Barr sat atop Briar at the Hackberry Corner crossroads and flipped a coin, over and over. It was a trick that worked sometimes to flush out his opinions from the back of his own head, but none of its outcomes here either drew or deterred him. And he tried them all, twice.

  A cautious voice interrupted his tail-chasing: “You all right, Mister Lakewalker?”

  He glanced down in surprise to see Meggie, the smith’s daughter, minus her leather apron and with a basket on her arm, regarding him with the air of someone studying a sick, strange animal.

  “Thank you, Miss Smith, I’m…” He looked down at her again. For a Lakewalker, Barr was pretty well-versed in guessing farmer ages. “Aren’t you about as old as Lily Mason?”

  A wary nod.

  “Are you friends?”

  “Some…”

  “Have you heard that she’s run off from her home?”

  Nod. “Her brother Reeve came around looking for her.”

  “Her family’s asked me to help hunt for her.”

  “Oh, I see.” She considered this gravely. “What if she don’t want to be found?”

  Barr felt as if he’d just rolled the winning number at dice. He smiled blindingly and dismounted, preparing to pour out all the charm he possessed. She blinked and backed up a step. “No one in her family could guess which way she’d gone, but I’m thinking maybe she’d have been more open with a friend. Miss Smith, might you be so kind as to spare me a moment of talk?”

  Not giving her a chance to refuse, he took her arm and steered her to the bench beside the village well at the center of the square, settling them both down in the noon sun. She hitched away, but didn’t spring up and run. It would do for a start.

  “I really don’t know anything either,” she said. “Lily didn’t talk to me before she lit out. I guess she wasn’t much talking to anyone by then.”

  Barr nodded. “I’ve been thinking it through. She didn’t take more than what food and fodder her horse could carry, along with herself, and I gather she didn’t have much coin. Only enough for a few days’ ride.” Not like the hundreds of miles an experienced patroller expected to cover between rests. “She’ll have to stop and regroup, somehow. Find work, maybe. D’you think she’d go for a hired girl?” Which would only give him, absent gods, about ten thousand farms at which to ask after her. In any direction.

  Meggie, unexpectedly, scoffed. “Not likely, not Lily. That’s the work she’s been doing all her life. Come with being oldest, which I’m glad I’m not. Fetch and carry at the word of the farmwife, do the chores and mind the children? I’m not saying she’d starve first, or me neither, but there’s better work out there if you’re going.”

  “But not on a farm. In a town?”

  A deflecting shoulder-hitch, but with that flicker of assent in her ground, Barr didn’t have to bully her into revelations.

  “Which town d’you think she’d favor? A big river crossing like Silver Shoals, or Lumpton Market to the north, or Glassforge, east?”

  A bigger flicker. “Hah. If I were running away, I’d pick Glassforge in a heartbeat. They say they’re doing ironwork around there that makes a village smithy look no-how. Water-powered hammers! But Lily ain’t me. Not so fond of fire.” A pensive look crossed her face. “‘Specially not now, I expect.”

  “Mm,” Barr agreed. “So what does she like?”

  “Horses,” said Meggie, with some certainly. “She sure loves her Moon. I’d swear he loves her right back. You’d think they talked to each other in people. I shod him, last time. Good manners.”

  That… did not narrow it down. Half the girls that age that Barr had ever
met, Lakewalker or farmer, were horse-mad. “Anything else?”

  “She likes the woods, and being outside.”

  That did not point to a town, either. Still less a specific town.

  “Though you can’t live in the woods,” Meggie mused. “…Well, I suppose you Lakewalkers do.”

  “For all we spend more time patrolling than in camp, the trail isn’t home, no.” He frowned. “So what about the river? She ever talk about it?”

  Meggie wrinkled her nose. “River’s where boys run off to if they’ve made too much trouble at home, and girls if they’re ruined. Lily ain’t ruined, just mad.”

  Putting Barr all too swiftly in mind of the bed boats, enterprises that he’d never thought of as a hazard, before. Er.

  “Not that being ruined wouldn’t make you mad, too, on top of it,” Meggie went on thoughtfully.

  Barr pictured Bell, and barely kept himself from grunting glum assent. “Well, thank you for your time, Miss Smith.”

  She rose with him. “Was I any help?”

  “Mm, maybe. I’ll find out as I go, I expect.”

  “Lily,” she began, then stopped.

  Barr raised his brows at her. “Hm?”

  She frowned at her feet. “She might not want to come back. Then what?”

  “We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it, I guess.” He meant it for a joke, but she shot him a startled look, not altogether disapproving, and he wondered if he might have said more than he meant. Or meant to.

  Meggie hoisted her basket and went on her way, and Barr returned to Briar, waiting patiently, and mounted up once more. He let out a long, uncertain breath, then turned east.

  He’d just have to keep asking along the way if anyone had seen Lily. If someone had, he could press ahead with speed and certainty. If he picked up no farmer-girl spoor by the time he reached Glassforge, he’d need to turn around and start retracing his steps. Conscripting the entire Pearl Riffle patrol cadre to keep a spare eye out for her as they quartered the countryside hunting for new-hatched malices was… very much a last resort, for all it would vastly increase his coverage.

  He wondered if bringing Lily back safe would go some way to make up to Bell for the hurt he’d dealt her, all those years ago, or if it was just plain stupid to hanker for forgiveness. Maybe so. Doing this for Lily, well, that made more sense. Though it didn’t sound as though she’d be happy with his efforts, either. You’re a blighted patroller, Barr. Riding forever for no reward is what you do. Get on with it.

  The sun seemed to be racing across the sky. He put his back to it, and his heels to Briar’s sides, urging her into that long-legged patrol jog that ate the miles.

  * * *

  Barr didn’t guess that Lily was likely to stop her journey within a day’s ride of her home, so he concentrated that afternoon on speed, not side-casts. Riding at double patrol pace, with his groundsense stretched to its widest just in case, proved exhausting by the time dusk overtook him well east of Hackberry Corner. He picked an empty old campsite a few paces off the road that had a glimmering creek running by it, then set to the calming routine of unsaddling and tending to his mount.

  He was grateful for Jay Tamarack’s gift of grain, a hearty mixture of oats and dried shelled corn, that would cut the time Briar would need to spend grazing. He curried her down—she was still shedding clouds of winter hairs—checked her legs for botfly eggs, ears and stern for any new parasites, and tended to her hooves. Then he took the opportunity to lead her to a chest- and barrel-deep pool down the stream and wash both her and himself, which she seemed to enjoy. They splashed each other vigorously.

  The foal within her was still doing fine. Briar was of the hardiest of Luthlian patrol stock, with a leg length to match his own, bred up to the best stallion his exchange camp had boasted. She and her offspring were at once part payment for his late labors, and a gift of fresh bloodlines to the herd of his own camp. He’d been taking the thousand-mile-trek home in gentle stages for the past two months, but it seemed she’d be well up to the challenge of his new hunt.

  No malice sign sensed today, but he didn’t expect any this close to the roads that both farmers and Lakewalkers shared. Such routes got checked too often, as few Lakewalkers, patroller or camp-folk, went anywhere without habitually keeping their extra sense alert much as he just had today. Except in farmer towns; too much painful noise there. Any patrol working this area would be up beyond the rolling hills, checking hidden and difficult patches seldom visited.

  He dried and dressed again, then munched on a portion of the cold food from the Tamarack farm that would save him as much time as it saved Briar. He needed neither the light nor, absent gods knew, the heat in this muggy spring evening, but he nonetheless busied himself making a tiny campfire. He set his steel hunting knife to the flame, then, thoughtfully, dug Fid’s letter out of his saddlebag.

  The hot blade, held briefly to the backside of the letter, was enough to loosen the wax seal without breaking it. He gently folded the paper open to the crabbed writing inside. Not hardly even the most dodgy thing he’d ever done, but there was honest need, here. He wasn’t about to risk handing Lily what might be a piece of poison, all unaware.

  The stilted wording that he slowly made out was… heartbreaking, really. Assurance that this Lakewalker fellow Barr was sent for her. A plea to return home, an affirmation that her father believed her side—which seemed late off the mark, frankly—an entreaty for merciful understanding of her mother’s distress, a prediction that all would be well again in time, just give it time. Which seemed to Barr more an expression of Fid’s hope than a likely event, and he wondered if it would seem that way to Lily, too. Barr could sense how the love that shone between the awkward lines, so obvious to his own eyes, might not be so plain to her anger-clouded ones.

  No accusations of bastardy, certainly. No renewed reproach. No obvious pit-traps dug around Barr’s task of returning her home. Which was all he needed to know. He refolded the letter and applied his knife again to reseal it, wrapping it up carefully to put away once more.

  * * *

  By late the next morning, Barr was growing anxious about his direction. Half-a-dozen pauses to query people who might have been keeping watch on the road netted nothing. But then, as he was passing through a straggling hamlet, his eye was caught by a sign on the gate of a shabby clapboard house with bright flowers set in pots around its porch. Rooms and meals for decent travelers. Ask inside. He thought Lily’s eye might have been caught, too.

  And so it turned out. The widow who earned a little coin on this roadside venture remembered the blond girl with the neat gray gelding very well, on what Barr calculated could have been the first or second night of her flight. She was going to Glassforge, she’d said, to visit an aunt, and maybe find work as a hired girl. She’d given the name of Rue, turning her hand to helping with chores in return for a markdown on her board, working courteously and with unusual thoroughness. If not very cheerfully; the girl’d been on the quiet side, really. The widow hoped the patroller fellow, tasked with delivering an urgent message for her to turn around and come home on account of her mother falling ill, would find her soon.

  Proving Barr as glib as evolving fibs as… a fourteen-year-old girl, right, he reflected moodily as he rode on. Or maybe it was in the blood? Let’s not think about that. Not that Lily couldn’t dart off in some other direction at any crossroad, but he pressed eastward with renewed hope and speed.

  Either one alone might not have been memorable, but along his afternoon’s ride he found the combination of the girl and the gray gelding had been noted twice more. So far so good. He grew more confident about Glassforge, although finding Lily in that busy town was going to be a groundsense nightmare. I’ve stood as much and more before, he told himself sternly. No whining from the pillion seat.

  * * *

  The next day, a few miles short of where his easterly track crossed the big north-south straight road that ran from the Grace River up through Glassforg
e, Barr found some luck at last. He sat up in his saddle and reined in his horse as an approaching woman, clad and armed as a Lakewalker patroller, did the same. She was closely trailed by, yes, a farmer youth wearing one of the new-fangled groundshields.

  The design of the pendant around his neck was the standard one that Dag and Arkady had worked out some years ago, dense groundwork anchored in a walnut inside its shell, contained in a little net bag hung on a cord. It masked that painful, uncontrolled farmer flare to next to nothing, making the wearer not only tolerable to—and, less touted, protected from—Lakewalkers, but shielded from the much stronger mind-invasion of malices. And, thus, potential help instead of pure risk on a patrol. Barr had partnered and helped train up some of the first farmer volunteers himself, in the early stages down at Pearl Riffle. This lad was not one Barr recognized, though.

  Barr and the patroller woman, who looked to be about fifty, exchanged salutes across their saddlebows. The farmer lad watched with strong interest.

  “How de’, ma’am,” Barr began. “I’m doing a favor for a farmer friend, a ways west of here.” And what a mark of progress it was that this statement sounded plausible, though the friend part was stretching it. “The daughter of the house ran off, and I said I’d help find her. Have you chanced across a girl of about fourteen, blond, riding a choice little gray gelding? Probably heading up to Glassforge.” Although by Barr’s estimate, she should have reached the town yesterday. “Her name’s Lily, but she might be calling herself Rue.” Or any number of other tales; Barr, collecting them in her wake, was becoming loth to underestimate Lily’s inventiveness.

  The patroller woman’s brows climbed. She exchanged a look with her lad.

  “We saw a blond girl riding a pretty gray when we were coming up the old straight road earlier this morning, but she wasn’t going north. She passed us going south. We turned off here soon after, so I don’t know where she went beyond that. But she wasn’t a farmer.”

  “What?” said Barr.