Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [118]
The next day the last of the company’s scouts returned, having hooked up with another gaggle of Bonemarsh refugees returning to check on their quick and their dead. With the extra hands on offer, it was decided to move the recovering makers to better shelter that day, and the Raintree cavalcade moved off in midafternoon. The camp fell quiet. At this point, Dag’s remaining patrol realized that the only barrier between them and a ride for home was their convalescent captain. The half dozen patrollers who were capable of giving minor ground reinforcements either volunteered or were volunteered to contribute to his speedier recovery. Dag blithely accepted them all, until his left foot began to twitch, his speech slurred, and he started seeing faint lavender halos around everything, and Hoharie, with some dire muttering about absorption time, blight it, cut off the anxious suppliers.
The miasma of homesickness and restlessness that permeated the air was like a fog; by evening, Dag found it easy to persuade Mari and Codo to split the patrol and send most of them home tomorrow with Hoharie, leaving Dag a suitable smaller group of bodyguards, or nursemaids, to follow on as soon as he was cleared to mount a horse again.
Mari, after a consultation with Hoharie out of Dag’s earshot, appointed herself chief of their number. “Somebody’s got to stand up to you when you get bored and decide to advance Hoharie’s timetable by three days,” she told Dag bluntly, when he offered a reminder of Cattagus. “If we leave you nothing but the children, you’ll ride right over ’em.”
Despite his pains and exhaustion, Dag was wholly satisfied to lie with Fawn that night in their little shelter, as if he’d entered some place of perfect balance where all needs were met and no motion was required. He wasn’t homesick. On the whole, he had no desire at all to think about Hickory Lake and what awaited him there…no. He stopped that slide of thought. Be here. With her.
He petted her, letting her dark hair wind and slide through his fingers, silky delight. In her saddlebags she had brought candles, of all things, of her own making, and had stuck one upright in a holder made from a smooth dented stone she’d found in the stream. He was unaroused and, in his current condition, likely unarousable, but looking at her in this gilded light he was pierced with a pure desire, as if he were gazing at a running foal, or a wheeling hawk, or a radiant, melting sunset. Wonder caught up in flight that no man could possess, except in the eye and impalpable memory. Where time was the final foe, but the long defeat was not now, now, now…
Fawn seemed content to cuddle atop the bedroll and trade kisses, but at length she wriggled up to do off her boots and belt. They would sleep in their clothes like patrollers, but she drew the line at unnecessary lumps. With a thoughtful frown, she pulled her sharing knife cord over her head.
“I reckon I can put this away in my saddlebags, now.” She slid the haft out of its sheath and spilled the three long shards of the broken blade out on the bedroll, lining them up with her finger.
Dag rolled over and up on his elbow to look. “Huh. So, that explains what Othan was doing down there, fishing all those out of me. I wondered.”
“So…now what do we do with it?” Fawn asked.
“A spent knife, if it’s recovered, is usually given back to the kin of the bone’s donor, or if that can’t be done, burned on a little pyre. It’s been twenty years, but…Kauneo should have kin up in Luthlia who remember her. I still have her uncle Kaunear’s bone, too, back home in my trunk—hadn’t quite got round to arranging for it when this Raintree storm blew in on us. I should send them both up to Luthlia in a courier pouch, with a proper letter telling everyone what their sacrifices have bought. That would be best, I think.”
She nodded gravely and extended