Beguilement (17 page)

Up they climbed once more. Fawn settled herself with both dainty feet to one side, and both dainty hands wrapped around his waist in a firm, warm grip.

And all Dag’s stern resolve melted in the unbidden thought: Lower. Lower!

He set his teeth and dug his heels into the blameless mare’s sides to urge her to a brisker walk. Fawn balanced herself, wondering if she laid her head to Dag’s back if she could hear his heartbeat again. She’d thought she’d been recovering well this morning, but the little accident reminded her of how tired she yet was, how quickly the least exertion stole her breath. Dag was more tired than he looked, too, it seemed, judging by his long silences.

She was embarrassed by how close she’d come to trying to kiss him, after their clumsy fall. She’d probably landed an elbow in his gut, and he’d been too kind to say anything. He’d even grinned at her, helping her up. His teeth were a trifle crooked, but nothing to signify, strong and sound, with a fascinating little chip out of one of the front ones. His smile was too fleeting, but it was probably safer for her tattered dignity that his grin was even rarer. If he’d grinned at her so kissably while they were still flat on the grass, instead of giving her that peculiar look—maybe it had been suppressed pain?—she’d likely have disgraced herself altogether.

The nasty name that Sunny had called her during their argument over the baby stuck in her craw. With one mocking word, Sunny had somehow turned all her love-in-intent, her breathless curiosity, her timid daring, into something ugly and vile. He’d been happy enough to kiss her and fondle her in the wheatfield in the dark, and call her his pretty thing; the slur came later. Dubious therefore, but still… was it typical for men to despise the women who gave them the attention they claimed to want? Judging from some of the rude insults she’d heard here and there, maybe so.

She did not want Dag to despise her, to take her for something low. But then, she would never apply the word typical to him.

So… was Dag lonely? Or lucky?

He didn’t seem the lucky sort, somehow.

So how would you know? Her heart felt as if it knew him better than any man, no, any person she’d ever met. The feeling did not stand up to inspection. He could be married, for all he’d said to the contrary. He could have children. He could have children almost as old as her. Or who knew what? He hadn’t said. There was a lot he hadn’t talked of, when she thought about it.

It was just that… what little he’d talked about had seemed so important. As though she’d been dying of thirst, and everyone else had wanted to give her piles of dry gimcrackery, and he’d offered her a cup of plain pure water.

Straightforward. Welcome beyond desire or deserving. Unsettling…

The valley they were riding down opened out, the creek ran away through broad fields, and the farm lane gave onto the straight road at last.

Dag turned the mare left. And whatever opportunity she had just wasted was gone forever.

The straight road was busier today, and grew more so as they neared the town.

Either the removal of the bandit threat had brought more people out on the highway, or it was market day. Or both, Fawn decided. They passed sturdy brick-wagons and goods-wagons drawn by teams of big dray horses pulling hard going out, and rode alongside ones returning, not empty, but loaded with firewood or hitchhiking county folk taking produce and handcrafts to sell.

She caught snatches of cheerful conversation, the girls flirting with the teamsters when no elders rode with them. Farm carts and haywains and yes, even that manure wagon she’d wished for in vain the other day. The scent of coal smoke and woodsmoke came to Fawn’s nose even before they rounded the last curve and the town came into sight.

Nothing about this arrival was like anything she had pictured when she’d started out from home, but at least she’d got here. Something that she’d begun, finally finished. It felt like breaking a curse. Glassforge. At last.

Fawn leaned precariously around Dag’s shoulder and gazed down the main street, lined with older buildings of wood and stone or newer ones of brick. Plank sidewalks kept people’s feet out of the churned mud of the road. A block farther on, the mud gave way to cobblestones, and beyond that, brick. A town so rich they paved the street with brick! The road curved away to follow the bend in the river, but she could just glimpse a town square busy with a day market. Most of the smokes that smudged the air seemed to be coming from farther downstream and downwind. Dag turned the mare into a side street, jerking his chin at the brick building rising to their left, blunt and blocky but softened by climbing ivy.

“There’s our hotel. Patrols always stay there for free. It was written into the will of the owner’s father. Something about the last big malice we took out in these parts, nigh on sixty years ago. Must’ve been a scary one. Good thinking on someone’s part, because it gets the area patrolled more often.”

“You looked for sixty years without finding another?”

“Oh, there’ve been a couple in the interim, I believe. We just got them so small, the farmers never knew. Like, um… pulling a weed instead of chopping down a tree. Better for us, better for everyone, except harder to convince folks to chip in some payment. Farsighted man, that old innkeep.”

They turned again under a wide brick archway and into the yard between the hotel and its stable. A horse boy polishing harness on a bench glanced up and rose to come forward. He did not reach for the mare’s makeshift bridle.

“Sorry, mister, miss.” His nod was polite, but his look seemed to sum up the worth of the battered pair riding bareback and find it sadly short. “Hotel’s full up. You’ll have to find another place.” The twist of his lips turned slightly derisive, if not altogether without sympathy. “Doubt you could make the price of a room here anyways.”

Only Fawn’s hand on Dag’s back felt the faint rumble of—anger? no, amusement pass through him. “Doubt I could too. Happily, Miss Bluefield, here, has made the price of all of them.”

The boy’s face went a little blank, as he tried to work this out to anything that made sense to him. His confusion was interrupted by a pair of Lakewalkers hobbling out of the doorway into the yard, staring hard at Dag.

These two looked more like proper patrollers, neat in leather vests, with their long hair pulled back in decorated braids. One had a face nearly as bruised as Fawn’s, with a strip of linen wrapped awkwardly around his head and under his jaw not quite hiding a line of bloody stitches. He leaned on a stick. The other had her left arm, thickened with bandages, supported in a sling. Both were dark-haired and tall, though their eyes were an almost normal sort of clear bright brown.

“Dag Redwing Hickory… ?” said the woman cautiously.

Dag swung his right leg over the mare’s neck and sat sideways a moment; smiling faintly, he touched his hand to his temple in a gesture of acknowledgment.

“Aye.

You all from Chato’s Log Hollow patrol?”

Both patrollers stood straighter, despite their evident hurts. “Yes, sir!”

said the man, while the woman hissed at the hotel servant, “Boy, take the patroller’s horse!”

The boy jumped as though goosed and took the halter rope, his stare growing wide-eyed. Dag slid down and turned to help Fawn, who swung her legs over.

“Ah! Don’t you dare jump,” he said sternly, and she nodded and slid off into his arm, collecting something pleasantly like a hug as he eased her feet to the ground. She stifled her longing to lean her head into his chest and just stand there for, oh, say, about a week. He turned to the other patrollers, but his left arm stayed behind her back, a solid, anchoring weight.

“Where is everyone?” Dag asked. The man grinned, then winced, his hand going to his jaw. “Out looking for you, mostly.”

“Ah, I was afraid of that.”

“Yeah,” said the woman. “Your patrol all kept swearing you’d turn up like a cat, and then went running out again anyway without hardly stopping to eat or sleep.

Looks like the cat fanciers had the right of it. There’s a fellow upstairs name of Saun’s been fretting his heart out for you. Every time we go in, he badgers for news.”

Dag’s lips pursed in a breath of relief. “On medicine tent duty, are you?”

“Yep,” said the man.

“How many carrying-wounded have we got?”

“Just two—your Saun and our Reela. She got her leg broke when some mud-men spooked her horse over a drop.”

“Bad?”

“Not good, but she’ll get to keep it.”

Dag nodded. “Good enough, then.”

The man blinked in belated realization of Dag’s stump, but he added nothing more awkward. “I don’t know how tired you are, but it would be kindly done if you could step up and put Saun’s mind at ease first thing. He really has been fretting something awful. I think he’d rest better for seeing you with his own eyes.”

“Of course,” said Dag.

“Ah…” said the woman, looking at Fawn and then, inquiringly, at Dag.

“This here’s Miss Fawn Bluefield,” said Dag.

Fawn dipped her knees. “How de’ do?”

“And she is… ?” said the man dubiously.

“She’s with me.” Something distinctly firm in Dag’s voice discouraged further questions, and the two patrollers, after civil if still curious nods at Fawn, led the way inside.

Fawn had only a glimpse of the entry hall, featuring a tall wooden counter and archways leading off to some big rooms, before she followed the patrollers up a staircase with a time-polished banister, cool and smooth under her hesitant fingertips. One flight up, they turned into a hallway lined with doors on either side and a glass window set in the end for light.

“You partner’s mostly lucid today, although he still keeps claiming you brought him back from the dead,” said the man over his shoulder.

“He wasn’t dead,” said Dag.

The man shot a look at the woman. “Told you.”

“His heart had stopped and he’d quit breathing, was all.”

Fawn blinked in bafflement. And, she was heartened to see, she wasn’t the only one.

“Er…” The man stopped outside a door with a brass number 6 on it. “Pardon, sir?

I’d always been taught it was too risky to match grounds with someone mortally injured, and unworkable to block the pain at speed.”

“Likely.” Dag shrugged. “I just skipped the extras and went in and out fast.”

“Oh,” said the woman in a voice of enlightenment that Fawn did not share. The man blurted, “Didn’t it hurt?”

Dag gave him a long, slow look. Fawn was very glad it wasn’t her at the focus, because that look could surely reduce people to grease spots on the floor.

Dag gave the other patroller a moment more to melt—precisely timed, she was suddenly certain—then nodded at the door. The woman hastened to open it.

Dag passed in. If the two patrollers had been respectful before, the look they now exchanged behind his back was downright daunted. The woman glanced at Fawn doubtfully but did not attempt to exclude her as she slipped through the door in Dag’s wake.

The room had cutwork linen curtains, pushed open and moving gently in the summer air, and flanking the window two beds with feather ticks atop straw ticks.

One was empty, though it had gear and saddlebags piled on the floor at its foot.

So did the other, but in it lay an—inevitably—tall young man. His hair was light brown, unbraided, and spread out upon his pillow. A rumpled sheet was pulled up to his chest, where his torso was wrapped around with bandages. He stared listlessly at the ceiling, his pale brow wrinkled. When he turned his head at the sound of steps and recognized his visitor, the pain in his face transformed to joy so fast it looked like a flash flood washing over him.

“Dag! You made it!” He laughed, coughed, grimaced, and moaned. “Ow. Knew you would!”

The patroller woman raised her eyebrows at this broad claim but grinned indulgently.

Dag walked to the bedside and smiled down, adopting a cheerful tone. “Now, I know you had six broken ribs at least. I ask you, is this the time for speeches?”

“Only a short one,” wheezed the young man. His hand found Dag’s and grasped it.

“Thank you.”

Dag’s brows twitched, but he didn’t argue. Such sincere gratitude shone in the young man’s eyes, Fawn warmed to him at once. Finally, somebody seemed to be taking Dag at his worth. Saun turned his head to peer somewhat blearily at her, and she smiled at him with all her heart. He blinked rapidly and smiled back, looking a bit flummoxed.

Dag gave the hand a little shake from side to side, and asked more softly,

“How’re you doing, Saun?”

“It only hurts when I laugh.”

“Oh? Don’t let the patrol know that.” The dry light in Dag’s eyes was mirth, Fawn realized.

Saun sputtered and coughed. “Ow! Blast you, Dag!”

“See what I mean?” He added more sternly, “They tell me you haven’t been sleeping. I said, couldn’t be—this is the patroller we have to roll out of his blankets by force in camp in the morning. Feather beds too soft for you now?

Shall I bring you a few rocks to make it more homelike?”

Saun held a hand to his bandaged chest and carefully refrained from chuckling.

“Naw. All I want is your tale. They said”—his face grew grave in memory, and he moistened his lips—“they found your horse yesterday miles from the lair, found the lair, found half your gear and your bow abandoned in a pile. Your bow.

Didn’t think you’d ever leave that on purpose. Two rotting mud-men and a pile of something Mari swore was the dead malice, and a trail of blood leading off to nothing. What were we supposed to think?”

“I was rather hoping someone would think I’d found shelter at the nearest farm,”

Dag said ruefully. “I begin to suspect I’m not exciting enough for you all.”

Saun’s eyes narrowed. “There’s more than that,” he said positively.