Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [131]
Dag poked at a particularly intractable nutshell. “Do you like making arrows better than making trousers?”
She shrugged. “It just feels more important. Patrollers need arrows.”
He sat back and contemplated this. “And we don’t need trousers? I think you have that the wrong way round, Spark. It’s poison ivy country out there, you know. Not to mention the nettles, thistles, burrs, thorns, and bitey bugs.”
She pursed her lips as she poked her needle slowly through the sturdy cloth. “For going into a fight, though. When it counts.”
“I still don’t agree. I’d want my trousers. In fact, if I were waked up out of my bedroll in a night attack, I think I’d go for them before my boots or my bow.”
“But patrollers sleep in their trousers, in camp,” she objected. “Although not in hotels,” she allowed in a tone of pleasurable reminiscence.
“That gives you a measure of importance, then, doesn’t it?” He batted his eyes at her. “I can just picture it, a whole patrol riding out armed to the teeth, all bare-assed. Do you have any idea what the jouncing in those saddles would do to all our tender bits? We’d never make it to the malice.”
“Agh! Now I’m picturing it!’ She bent over, laughing. “Stop! I’ll allow you the trousers.”
“And I’ll thank you with all my heart,” he assured her. “And with my tender bits.” Which made her dissolve into giggles again.
He could not remember when she’d last laughed like this, which sobered him. But he still smiled as he watched her take up her sewing once more. He decided he would very much like to thank her with his tender bits, if only they would get around to reporting for duty again. He sighed and took aim at another hickory shell.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, while he was still recuperating, Fawn’s monthly came on—a bad one, it seemed, alarmingly bloody. Dag, concerned, dragged Mari over to Tent Bluefield for a consultation; she was reassuringly unimpressed, and rattled off a gruesome string of what Dag decided were the female equivalent of old-patroller stories, about Much Worse Things She Had Seen.
“I don’t recall the young women on patrol having this much trouble,” he said nervously, hovering.
Mari eyed him. “That’s because girls with these sorts of troubles gener’lly don’t choose to become patrollers.”
“Oh. Makes sense, I guess…”
Softening, Mari allowed as how Fawn was likely still healing up inside, which from the state of the scars on her neck Dag guessed to be exactly the case, and that the problems should improve over the next months, and even unbent enough to give Fawn a tiny ground reinforcement in the afflicted area.
Dag thought back to his too-few years with Kauneo, how a married man’s life got all wound about in these intimate rhythms, and how they had sometimes annoyed him—till he’d been left to wish for them back. He dealt serenely, wrapping hot stones, and coaxing some of Cattagus’s best elderberry wine out of him and into Fawn, and her pains eased.
At last, one bright, quiet morning, Dag hauled his trunk out under the canopy for a writing desk and took on the task of his letter to Luthlia. At first he thought he would keep it painlessly short, a sentence or two simply locating each bone’s malice kill. He was so much in the habit of concealing the complications of the unintended priming; it seemed so impossible to set it out clearly; and the tale of Fawn and her lost babe seemed too inward a hurt to put before strangers’ eyes. Silence was easier. And yet…silence would seem to deny that a farmer girl had ever had any place in all this. He weighed the smooth shards of Kauneo’s bone in his hand one last time before wrapping them up in a square of good cloth that Fawn had hemmed, and changed his mind.
Instead he wrote out as complete an account of the chain of events, focusing on the knives, as he could manage, most especially not leaving out his