Beguilement (35 page)

“Did it work?”

“Never had occasion to find out while I had it. I saw another turn a mud-man’s spear, though. Iron tip left nothing but a scratch in the hide. Of the coat, not of the patroller,” he clarified.

“Had? What happened to it?”

“Lent it to my oldest nephew when he began patrolling. He handed it on to his sister when she started. Last I knew my brother’s youngest took it with him when he went out of the hinterland. I’m not sure the coats are all that useful, for they’re like to make you careless, and they don’t protect the face and legs.

But, you know… you worry for the youngsters.” His shudders were easing, but his expression remained strained and distant. “That bowl just now, though… I pushed its ground back to purest bowl-ness, and the glass just followed. I felt it so clear. Except that, except that…” He leaned his forehead down against hers, and whispered fearfully, “I pushed with the ground of my left hand, and I have no left hand and it has no ground. Whatever was there, for that minute, is gone again now. I’ve never heard of anything like that. But the best makers don’t speak of their craft much except to their own. So I don’t know. Don’t… know.”

The door swung open; Whit edged out into the shadows of the porch. “Um… Fawn…

?”

“What, Whit?” she said impatiently.

“Um. Aunt Nattie says. Um. Aunt Nattie says she’s had enough of this nonsense and she’ll see you and the patroller in her rooms and be having the end of it one way or another as soon as the patroller is up to it. Um. Sir.”

Behind the fringe of his hair, Dag’s lips twitched slightly. He raised his face.

“Thank you, Whit,” he said gravely. “Tell Aunt Nattie we’ll be along soon.”

Whit gulped, ducked his head, and fled back indoors.

They rose and went around the north side of the house to the kitchen, Dag resting his left arm heavily across Fawn’s shoulders. He stumbled twice. She made him sit by the hearth while she fixed him a cup of hot water with some peppermint leaves crushed in, holding it to his lips while he drank it down.

By then he’d stopped shivering, and his clammy skin had dried and warmed again.

She saw her parents and Fletch peeking timidly from the darkness of the hall, but they said nothing and did not venture in.

Aunt Nattie appeared at the door to her shadowed weaving room. “Well, patroller.

You were flyin’ there for a bit, I guess.”

“Yes, ma’am, I was,” Dag agreed wryly.

“Fawn, you fetch in the patroller and what lights you want.” She turned back into the dark, scuffing feet and cane over the floorboards, not wearily, but just for the company of the sound, as she sometimes did.

Fawn looked anxiously at Dag. The firelight she’d poked up glimmered red-orange over his skin, yellow on his coarse white shirt and the sling, and his eyes were dark and wide. He looked tired, and confused, and as if his arm was hurting, but he smiled reassuringly at her, and she smiled back. “You ready?” she asked.

“Not sure, but I’m too curious to care. Possibly not a trait helpful to longevity in a patroller, but there you go.”

She took down the candle lamp with the chipped glass sleeve from the mantel and lit it, grabbing the unlit iron holder with the three stubs while she was at it, and led off. With a muffled eh, he levered himself up out of his chair and paced after her.

Nattie called from their bedroom, “Close both doors, lovie. It will keep the noise out.”

And in, Fawn reflected. She pushed the door to the kitchen closed with her foot and picked her way around the loom and the piles of Dag’s gear. In the bedroom, Nattie seated herself on the side of her narrow bed and motioned to the one across from it. Fawn set the lamp and the iron ring on the table between and lit the other candles, and went back and closed the bedroom door. Dag glanced at her and sat down facing Nattie, the bed ropes creaking under his weight, and Fawn eased down at his left. “Here we are, Aunt Nattie,” she announced, to which Dag added, Ma’am.

Nattie stretched her back and grimaced, then leaned forward on her cane, her pearly eyes seeming to stare at them in a disturbingly penetrating fashion.

“Well, patroller. I’m going to tell you a story. And then I’m going to ask you a question. And then we’ll see where we’re goin’ on to.

“I’m at your disposal,” Dag said, with that studied courtesy Fawn had learned concealed caution.

“That’s to be seen.” She sniffed. “You know, you’re not the first Lakewalker I’ve met.”

“I sensed that.”

“I lead a dull life, mostly. Lived in this house since Tril married Sorrel nigh on thirty years ago. I hardly get off this farm ‘cept down to West Blue for the market day or a little sewing bee now and then.”

Actually, Nattie did both regularly, being a chief supplier of fine cloth and having a deep ear for village gossip, but Fawn forbore to intrude on the stream of… whatever this was going to be. Reminiscence?

Apparently so, for Nattie went on, “Now, the summer before Fawn was born was a tough time. Her mama was sick, and the boys were rambunctious, and her papa was overworked as usual. I wasn’t sleeping so good myself, so I did my gathering in the north woods at night after they’d all gone to bed. The boys being less help than more in the woods at that stage of their lives.”

Ages three to ten, roughly; Fawn could picture it, and shuddered.

“Roots and herbs and plants for remedies and dyes, you know. Night’s not only more peaceful, the scents are sharper. I especially wanted some wild ginger for Tril, thought I might make a tea to settle her poor stomach. Anyhow, I was sorry for the peaceful that night, because I fell and twisted my ankle something fierce. I tried callin’ for a bit, but I was too far from the house to be heard.”

Truly, the woods on the steep valley slope to the north of their place extended for three miles before the next farm. Fawn made an encouraging noise in lieu of a nod.

“I figured I was doomed to lie in the dew till morning when I’d be missed, but then I heard a sound in the leaves—I was afraid it was a wolf or bear come to eat me, but instead it was a Lakewalker patroller. I was thinking at first I’d rather a bear, but he turned out to be a nice young fellow.

“He laid hands on my foot and eased me amazingly, and picked me up and carried me back to the house. I was skinnier back then, mind, bit of a dab, really.

He was not near so tall as you”—she nodded in Dag’s general direction—“but right stout. Nice voice, almost as deep as yours.

“He explained all about how he was on exchange from some camp way out east, and this was his first patrol in these parts—lonely and homesick, I was thinking.

Anyhow, I fed him quiet in the kitchen, and he did a real fine job bandaging my ankle up nice and firm.

“I don’t know if he decided I was his adopted aunt, or if he was more like a boy picking up a bird with an injured wing and making a pet of it, but late the next night there came a tapping on my window. He was back with some medicine, some for my foot and some for Tril’s tummy, which he handed in—he wouldn’t stay that time, though. The powders worked wonderful well, I must say.” She sighed in fond recollection.

“Off he went and I thought no more of it, but next summer, about the same time of year, there came that tapping at my window again. We had a bit of a picnic on the back porch in the dark, and talked. He was glad to hear Tril had delivered you safe, Fawn. He gave me some little presents and I gave him some food and cloth. The next summer the same; I got to looking out for him.

“The next year he came back one more time, but not alone. He brought his new bride, just to show her off to me I think, he was that proud of her. He showed me their Lakewalker marriage-bracelets, string-bindings they called ‘em, knowin’

I had a maker’s interest in all things to do with the craft, thread and cords and braids as well as the weaving and knitting. They let me hold them in my hands and feel them. Gave me a turn, they did. They weren’t just fancy cord.

They were magical.”

“Yes,” said Dag cautiously, and at Fawn’s curious look expanded, “Each betrothed puts a tiny bit of their ground into their own cord. The string-binding ceremony tangles the two grounds, then they exchange, his for hers.”

“Really?” said Fawn, fascinated, trying to remember if she’d noticed such bracelets on the patrollers at Glassforge. Yes, for Mari’d had one, and so had a couple of other older patrollers. She had thought them merely decorative. “Do they do anything? Can you send messages?”

“No. Well, only that if one spouse dies, the other can feel it, for the ground drains out of their binding cord. They’re often put safe away to save wear, although they can be remade if they’re damaged. But if one spouse is out on patrol, the other back in camp usually wears theirs. Just… to know. To the one out on patrol, it comes as more of a shock, because you don’t expect… I’ve seen that happen twice. It’s not good. The patroller is dismissed at once to ride home if it’s at all possible. There’s a special terror to knowing what but not how, except that you are too late, and a thought that, you know, maybe the string just got burned up in a tent fire or some freak thing—enough hope for agony but not enough for ease. When I woke up in the medicine tent after…”

The room grew so quiet, Fawn thought she could hear the candles burning.

She lifted her face to his and said a little wryly, “You know, you’ve either got to finish those sorts of sentences or not start them.”

He sighed and nodded. “I think I can say this to you. If I can’t I’ve no business… anyway. I was about to say, when I woke up in the medicine tent after Wolf Ridge with my hand gone, so was Kauneo’s binding string, which I wore on that side. Lost on the ridge. I guess I made some difficulties trying to find it, being fairly mixed up in the head right about then. They hadn’t wanted to tell me she was gone till I was stronger, but they pretty much had to, and then I wouldn’t believe them. It was like, if I could just find that binding string, I could prove them wrong. I got over it in due course.”

He was looking away from her as he said this. Fawn drew her breath in and let it out gently between her teeth. He looked back down at her and smiled, sort of, and tried to move his hand to grasp hers in reassurance, wincing as the sling brought him up short in painful reminder. “It was a long time ago,” he murmured.

“Before I was born.”

“Indeed.” He added after a moment, “I don’t know why I find that an easing thought, but I do.”

Nattie had her head cocked to one side with the intensity of her listening; when he did not go on, she put in, “Now, I do know this, patroller. Without those binding strings, you aren’t married in Lakewalker eyes.”

He nodded cautiously, then remembered to say aloud, “Yes. That is to say, they are a visible proof of a valid marriage, like your village clerk’s record and writing your name in the family book with all the witnesses’ signatures below.

The string-binding is the heart and center of a wedding. The food and the music and the dancing and the arguments among the relatives are all extra.”

“Uh-huh,” said Nattie. “And there’s the problem, patroller. Because if Fawn and you stand up in the parlor before the family and all like you say you want, and sign your names and make your promises, seems to me she’d be getting married, but you wouldn’t. I said I had a question, and this is it. I want to know exactly what you are about, that you think this won’t twist around somehow and leave her cryin’.”

Fawn wondered for a moment why he was being held responsible for her future tears but not her for his. She supposed it was the, the blighted age thing again. It seemed unfairly unbalanced, somehow.

Dag was silent for several long breaths. He finally raised his chin, and said,

“When I first rode in here, I had no thought of a farmer wedding. But it didn’t take long to see how little her family valued Spark. Present company excepted,”

he added hastily. Nattie nodded grimly, not disagreeing. “Not that they don’t love her and try to look out for her, in a sort of backhanded, absentminded way.

But they don’t seem to see her, not as she is. Not as I see her. Of course, they don’t have groundsense, but still. Maybe the past fogs the present, maybe they just haven’t looked lately, maybe they never have looked, I don’t know. But marriage seems to raise a woman’s standing in a farmer family. I thought I could give her that, in an easy way. Well, it seemed easy at the time. Not so sure now.” He sighed. “I was real clear about the widowhood business, though.”

“Seems like a hollow gift, patroller.”

“Yes, but I can’t do a string-binding here. I can’t make the string, for one; it takes two hands and I’ve got none, and I’m not sure Fawn can make one at all, and we’ve no one to do the blessing and the tying. I was thinking that when we reached Hickory Lake I might try for a string-binding there, despite the difficulties.”

“Think your family will favor this idea?”

“No,” he said frankly. “I expect trouble about it. But I’ve outstubborned everything my life has thrown at me so far.”

“He’s got a point there, Aunt Nattie,” Fawn dared to say.

“Mm,” said Aunt Nattie. “So what happens if they pitch her out on her ear?

Which Lakewalkers have done to farmer suitors before, I do believe.”

Dag fell very quiet for a little, then said, “I’d walk with her.”

Nattie’s brows went up. “You’d break with your people? Can you?”

“Not by choice.” His shrug failed to conceal deep unease. “But if they chose to break with me, I couldn’t very well stop them.”

Fawn blinked, suddenly disquieted. She’d dreamed only of what joy they might bring to each other. But that keelboat seemed to be towing a whole string of barges she hadn’t yet peeked into. Dag had, it seemed.

“Huh-huh-hm,” said Nattie. She tapped her cane gently on the floorboards.

“I’m thinkin’ too, patroller. I got two hands. So does Fawn, actually.”