Beguilement

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “It’s all strange to me.” Fawn frowned, staring at the blue-hilted knife. “I have no happy memories about this to balance the sorrows. But they’re my memories, all the same. I’d rather they weren’t… wasted.”

  Mari raised both hands in a gesture of frustrated neutrality.

  “So could I have leave from the patrol to travel on this matter?” asked Dag.

  Mari grimaced. “You know how short we are, but once this Glassforge business is settled, I can’t very well refuse you. Have you ever drawn leave? Ever? You don’t even get sick!”

  Dag thought a moment. “Death of my father,” he said at last. “Eleven years ago.”

  “Before my time. Eh! Ask again when we’re ready to decamp. If there’s no new trouble landed in our laps by then.”

  He nodded. “Miss Bluefield’s not fit to travel far yet anyway. You can see by her eyelids and nails she’s lost too much blood, even without how her knees give way. No fever yet, though. Please, Mari, I did all I could, but could you look her over?” His hand touched his belly, making his meaning clear.

  Mari sighed. “Yes, yes, Dag.”

  He stood expectantly for a moment; she grimaced and sat up, waving to a set of saddlebags leaning in the corner. “There’s your gear, by the by. Luckily your fool horse hadn’t got round to scraping it off in the woods. Go on, now.”

  “But will you… can’t I… I mean, it’s not as though you have to undress her.”

  “Women’s business,” she said firmly.

  Reluctantly, he made for the door, though he did scoop up his arm harness and recovered belongings. “I’ll see about getting you a room, Spark.”

  Fawn smiled gratefully at him.

  “Good,” said Mari. “Scat.”

  He bit his lip and nodded farewell. His boot steps faded down the hall.

  Fawn tried not to be too unnerved by being left alone with Mari. Scary old lady or not, the patrol leader seemed to share some of Dag’s straightforward quality. She had Fawn sit quietly on the bed while she ran her hands over her. She then sat behind Fawn and hugged her in close for several silent minutes, her hands wrapped across Fawn’s lower belly. If she was doing something with her groundsense, Fawn could not feel it, and wondered if this was what being deaf among hearing people was like. When she released Fawn, her face was cool but not unkind.

  “You’ll do,” she said. “It’s clear you were ripped up unnatural, which accounts for the suddenness of the bleeding, but you’re healing about as quick as could be expected for someone so depleted, and your womb’s not hot. Fever’s a commoner killer in these things than bleeding, though less showy. You’ll have some blight-scarring in there, I guess, slow to heal like the ones on your neck, but not enough to stop you having other children, so you be more careful in future, Miss Bluefield.”

  “Oh.” Fawn, looking back through clouds of regret, had not even thought ahead to her future fertility. “Does that happen to some women, after a miscarriage?”

  “Sometimes. Or after a bad birth. Delicate parts in there. It amazes me the process works at all, when I think about all the things I’ve seen can go wrong.”

  Fawn nodded, then reached to put away Dag’s blue-hilted knife, still lying on her bedroll atop her spare clothes.

  “So,” said Mari in a carefully bland tone, “who’s the other half owner sides you of that knife’s priming? Some farm lout?”

  Fawn’s jaw set. “Just me. The lout made it very clear he was giving it all to me. Which was why I was out on the road in the first place.”

  “Farmers. I’ll never understand ‘em.”

  “There are no Lakewalker louts?”

  “Well…” Mari’s long, embarrassed drawl conceded the point.

  Fawn reread the faded brown lettering on the bone blade. “Dag meant to drive this into his own heart someday. Didn’t he.” This Kauneo had intended that he should.

  “Aye.”

  Now he couldn’t. That was something, at least. “You have one, too.”

  “Someone has to prime. Not everyone, but enough. Patrollers understand the need better.”

  “Was Kauneo a patroller?”

  “Didn’t Dag say?”

  “He said she was a woman who’d died twenty years ago up northwest someplace.”

  “That’s a bit close-mouthed even for him.” Mari sighed. “It’s not my place to tell his tales, but if you are to have the holding of that knife, farmer girl, you’d better understand what it is and where it comes from.”

  “Yes,” said Fawn firmly, “please. I’m so tired of making stupid mistakes.”

  Mari twitched a—provisionally—approving eyebrow at this. “Very well. I’ll give you what Dag would call the short tale.” Her long inhalation suggested it wasn’t going to be as short as all that, and Fawn sat cross-legged again, intent.

  “Kauneo was Dag’s wife.”

  A tremor of shock ran through Fawn. Shock, but not surprise, she realized. “I see.”

  “She died at Wolf Ridge.”

  “He hadn’t mentioned any Wolf Ridge to me. He just called it a bad malice war.” Though there could be no such thing as a good malice war, Fawn suspected.

  “Farmer girl, Dag doesn’t talk about Wolf Ridge to anyone. One of his several little quirks you have to get used to. You have to understand, Luthlia is the biggest, wildest hinterland of the seven, with the thinnest population of Lakewalkers to try to patrol it. Terrible patrolling—cold swamps and trackless woods and killing winters. The other hinterlands lend more young patrollers to Luthlia than to anywhere, but they still can’t keep up.

  “Kauneo came from a tent of famously fierce patrollers up that way. She was very beautiful I guess—courted by everyone. Then this quiet, unassuming young patrol leader from the east, walking around the lake on his second training tour, stole her heart right out from under all of them.” A hint of pride colored her voice, and Fawn thought, Yes, she’s really his aunt. “He made plans to stay. They were string-bound—you farmers would say, married—and he got promoted to company captain.”

  “Dag wasn’t always a patroller?” said Fawn.

  Mari snorted. “That boy should have been a hinterland lieutenant by now, if he hadn’t… agh, anyway. Most of our patrols are more like hunts, and most turn up nothing. In fact, it’s possible to patrol all your life and never be in on a malice kill, by one chance or another. Dag has his ways of improving those odds for himself. But when a malice gets entrenched, when it goes to real war… then we’re all making it up as we go along.”

  She rose, stalked across the bedchamber to her washstand, poured a glass of water, and drank it down. She fell to pacing as she continued.

  “Big malice slipped through the patrol patterns. It didn’t have many people to enslave up that way, no bandits like the malice you slew here. There are no farmers in Luthlia, nor anywhere north of the Dead Lake, save now and then some trapper or trader slips in that we escort out. But the malice did find wolves. It did things to wolves. Wolf-men, man-wolves, dire wolves as big as ponies, with man-wits. By the time the thing was found, it had grown itself an army of wolves. The Luthlian patrollers sent out a call-up for help from neighbor hinterlands, but meanwhile, they were on their own.

  “Dag’s company, fifty patrollers including Kauneo and a couple of her brothers, was sent to hold a ridge to cover the flank of another party trying to strike up the valley at the lair. The scouts led them to expect an attack of maybe fifty dire wolves. What they got was more like five hundred.”

  Fawn’s breath drew in.

  “In one hour Dag lost his hand, his wife, his company all but three, and the ridge. What he didn’t lose was the war, because in the hour they’d bought, the other group made it all the way through to the lair. When he woke up in the medicine tent, his whole life was burned up like a pyre, I guess. He didn’t take it well.

  “In due course his dead wife’s tent folk despaired of him and sent him home. Where he didn’t take it well some more. Then Fairbolt Crow, bl
ess his bones—our camp captain, though he was just a company captain back then—got smart, or desperate, or furious, and dragged him off to Tripoint. Got some clever farmer artificer he knew there to make up the arm harness, and they went round and round on it till they hit on devices that worked. Dag practiced with his new bow till his fingers bled, pulled himself together to meet Fairbolt’s terms, and let me tell you Fairbolt didn’t cut him any slack, and was let back on patrol. Where he has been ever since.

  “Some ten or twelve sharing knives have passed through Dag’s hand since—people keep giving them to him because they’re pretty sure to get used—but he always kept that pair aside. The only mementos of Kauneo I know of that he didn’t shove away like they scorched him. So that’s the knife now in your keeping, farmer girl.”

  Fawn held it up and drew it through her fingers. “You’d think it would be heavier.” Did I really want to know all this?

  “Aye.” Mari sighed.

  Fawn glanced curiously at Mari’s gray head. “Will you ever be a company captain? You must have been patrolling for a long time.”

  “I’ve had far less time in the field than Dag, actually, for all I’m twenty years older. I walked the woman’s path. I spent four or five years training as a girl—we must train up the girls, for all that fellows like Dag disapprove, because if ever our camps are attacked, it’ll be us and the old men defending them. I got string-bound, got blood-bound—had my children, that is—and then went back to patrolling. I expect to keep walking till my luck or my legs give out, five more years or ten, but I don’t care to deal with anything more fractious than a patrol, thank you. Then back to camp and play with my grandchildren and their children till it’s time to share. It will do, as a life.”

  Fawn’s brow wrinkled. “Did you ever imagine another?” Or being thrown into another, as Fawn had been?

  Mari cocked her head. “Can’t say as I ever did. Though I’d have my boy back first if I were given wishes.”

  “How many children did you have?”

  “Five,” Mari replied, with distinct maternal pride that sounded plenty farmerish to Fawn, for all she suspected Mari would deny any such thing.

  A rap on the door was followed by Dag’s plaintive voice: “Mari, can I please come back in now?”

  Mari rolled her eyes. “All right.”

  Dag eased himself around the door. “How is she doing? Is she healing at all? Could you match grounds? Or do a little reinforcement, even?”

  “She’s healing as well as could be expected. I did nothing with my ground, because time and rest will do the job every bit as well.”

  Dag took this in, seeming a bit disappointed, but resigned. “I have you a room, Spark, down one floor. Tired?”

  Exhausted, she realized. She nodded.

  “Well, I’ll take you down and you can start in on the resting part, leastways.”

  Mari rubbed her lips and studied her nephew through narrowed eyes. Groundsense. Fawn wondered what the patrol leader had seen with hers that she wasn’t saying. Did closed mouths run in the Redwing family like golden eyes? Fawn rolled up her bedroll and let Dag shoo her out.

  “Don’t let Mari scare you,” Dag said, letting his left arm drift along at her back, whether protectively or for subtle concealment Fawn could not tell, as they descended the stairs. They turned into the adjoining corridor.

  “She didn’t, much. I liked her.” Fawn took a breath. Some secrets took up too much space to keep tiptoeing around. “She told me a little more about your wife, and Wolf Ridge. She thought I needed to know.”

  Silence stretched for three long footfalls. “She’s right.”

  And that, evidently, was all Fawn was going to get for now.

  Fawn’s new room was narrow like Mari’s, except this one overlooked the main street instead of the stable yard. A washstand with ewer already filled, piecework curtains and a quilt in a matching pattern, and rag rugs on the floor made it fine and homey to Fawn’s eyes. A door in the side wall apparently led into the next chamber. Dag swung the bar across and shoved it down into its brackets.

  “Where is your room?” Fawn asked.

  Dag gestured at the closed door. “Through there.”

  “Oh, good. Will you take a rest? Don’t tell me you aren’t owed some healing too. I saw your bruises.”

  He shook his head. “I’m going out to find a harnessmaker. I’ll come back and take you down to dinner later, if you’d like.”

  “I’d like that fine.”

  He smiled a little at that and backed himself out. “Seems all I do in this place is tell folks to go to sleep.”

  “Yes, but I’m actually going to do it.”

  He grinned—that grin should be illegal—and shut the door softly.

  On the wall beside the washstand hung a shaving mirror, fine flat Glassforge glass. Reminded, Fawn slid up to it and turned down the collar of her blue dress.

  The bruise masking most of the left side of her face was purple going greenish around the edges, with four dark scabs from the mud-man’s claws mounting to her cheekbone, still tender but not hot with infection. The pattern of the malice’s hand on her neck, four blots on one side and one on the other, stood out in sharp contrast to her fair skin. The marks had a peculiar black tint and an ugly raised texture unlike any other contusion Fawn had ever seen. Well, if there was any special trick to their healing, Dag would know it. Or might have experienced it himself, if he had got close enough to as many malices as Mari’s inventory of his past knives suggested.

  Fawn went to the window and just caught a glimpse of Dag’s tall form passing below, arm harness tossed over his shoulder, striding up the street toward the town square. She gazed out at Glassforge after he’d made his way out of sight along the boardwalk, but not for long; yawning uncontrollably, she slipped off her dress and shoes and crawled into the bed.

  Chapter 10

  Dag returned at dinnertime as promised. Fawn had put on her good dress, the green cotton that her aunt Nattie had spun and woven; she followed him downstairs. The raucous noises coming out of the room where they’d eaten their quiet lunch gave her pause.

  Seeing her hesitate, Dag smiled and bent his head to murmur, “Patrollers can be a rowdy bunch when we all get together, but you’ll be all right. You don’t have to answer any questions you don’t want. We can make out you’re still too shaken by our fight with the malice and don’t want to talk about it. They’ll accept that.” His hand drifted to her collar as if to arrange it more tidily, and Fawn realized he was not covering up the strange marks on her neck, but rather, making sure they showed. “I think we don’t need to mention what happened with the second knife to anyone besides Mari.”

  “Good,” said Fawn, relieved, and allowed him to take her in, his arm protective at her back.

  The tables this evening were indeed full of tall, alarming patrollers, twenty-five or so, variously layered with road dirt. Given Dag’s warning, Fawn managed not to jump when their entrance was greeted with whoops, cheers, table pounding, and flying jibes about Dag’s three-day vanishing. The roughness of some of the jests was undercut by the real joy in the voices, and Dag, smiling crookedly, gave back: “Some trackers! I swear you lot couldn’t find a drink in a rain barrel!”

  “Beer barrel, Dag!” someone hooted in return. “What’s wrong with you?”

  Dag surveyed the room and guided Fawn toward a square table on the far side where only two patrollers sat, the Utau and Razi she’d met earlier. The two waved encouragement as they approached, and Razi shoved out a spare chair invitingly with his boot.

  Fawn was not sure which patrollers were Mari’s and which were Chato’s; the two patrols seemed to be mingled, not quite at random. Any sorting seemed to be more by age, as there was one table with half a dozen gray heads at it, including Mari; also two other older women Fawn had not seen at the well-house, so presumably from the Log Hollow patrol. The young woman with her arm in the sling was at a table with three young men, all vying to cut her m
eat for her; she was presently holding them off with jabs of her fork and laughing. The men patrollers seemed all ages, but the women were only young or much older, Fawn noticed, and remembered Mari’s account of her life’s course. In the home camps would the proportions be reversed?

  Breathless serving maids and boys weaved among the tables lugging trays laden with platters and pitchers, rapidly relieved by reaching hands. The patrollers seemed more interested in speed and quantity than in decorum, an attitude shared with farmhouse kitchens that made Fawn feel nearly comfortable.

  They sat and exchanged greetings with Razi and Utau; Razi leaped up and acquired more plates, cutlery, and glasses, and both united to snag passing food and drink to fill them. They did ply Dag with questions about his adventures although, with cautious glances, spared Fawn. His answers were either unexcitingly factual, vague, or took the form that Fawn recognized from the Horsefords’ table of effectively diverting counterquestions. They finally desisted and let Dag catch up with his chewing.

  Utau glanced around the room, and remarked, “Everyone’s a lot happier tonight. Especially Mari. Fortunately for all of us downstream of her.”

  Razi said wistfully, “Do you suppose she and Chato will let us all have a bow-down before we go back out?”

  “Chato looks pretty cheerful,” said Utau, nodding across the room at another table of patrollers, although which was the leader Fawn could not tell. “We might get lucky.”

  “What’s a bow-down?” asked Fawn.

  Razi smiled eagerly. “It’s a party, patroller-style. They happen sometimes, to celebrate a kill, or when two or more patrols chance to get together. Having another patrol to talk to is a treat. Not that we don’t all love one another”—Utau rolled his eyes at this—“but weeks on end of our own company can get pretty old. A bow-down has music. Dancing. Beer if we can get it…”

  “We could get lots of beer, here,” Utau observed distantly.

  “Lingerrrring in dark corners—” Razi trilled, catching up the tail of his braid and twirling it.

  “Enough—she gets the idea,” said Dag, but he smiled. Fawn wondered if it was in memory. “Could happen, but I guarantee it won’t be till Mari thinks the cleanup is all done. Or as done as it ever gets.” His eye was caught by something over Fawn’s shoulder. “I feel prophetic. I predict chores before cheer.”