Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [132]
She helped him wrap up the packet carefully, with an outer cover of deer leather secured by rawhide strings for protection, and he addressed it to Kauneo’s kin, ready for Razi to take up to the courier at patroller headquarters. He fingered the finished bundle, and said slowly, “So many memories…If souls exist, maybe they lie in the track of time we leave behind us. And not out ahead, and that’s why we can’t find them, not even with groundsense. We’re lookin’ in the wrong direction.”
Fawn smiled wryly into his eyes, leaned up, and kissed him soft. “Or maybe they’re right here,” she said.
Fairbolt turned up the next day. Dag had been half-expecting him. They found seats on a pair of stumps out in the walnut grove, out of earshot from the busy campsite.
“Razi says you’re feeling better,” Fairbolt remarked, looking Dag over keenly.
“My body’s moving again, anyway,” Dag allowed. “My groundsense range still isn’t doing too well. I don’t think Hoharie’s notion that it has to come all the way back before I patrol again is right, though. Halfway would be good as most.”
“It’s not about you going back on patrol, for which judgment I’ll be relying on Hoharie and not you, thanks. It’s about your camp council summons. I’ve been holding ’em off on the word that you’re still too injured and ill after Raintree, which is harder to make stick when it’s seen you are up and about. So you can expect it as soon as that Heron Island dredging fracas is sorted out.”
Dag hissed through his teeth. “After Raintree—after all Fawn and I did—they’re still after a camp council ruling against us? Hoharie, and I, and Bryn and Mallora and Ornig would all be dead and buried right now in blighted Bonemarsh if not for Fawn! Not to mention five good makers lost. This, on top of the Glassforge malice—what more could they possibly want from a farmer girl to prove herself worthy?” His outrage was chilled by a ripple of cold reflection—in forty years he had never been able to prove himself worthy, in certain eyes. He’d concluded sometime back that the problem was not in him, it was in those eyes, and no doing of his could ever fix it. Why should any doing of Fawn’s be different?
Fairbolt scratched his ear. “Yeah, I didn’t figure that news would sit too well with you.” He hesitated. “I owe an apology to Fawn, for trying to stop her here when you were calling her from out of that groundlock. It seems right cruel, in hindsight. I had no idea it was you behind her restiness that day.”
Dag’s brows drew down. “You been talking to Othan about the Bonemarsh groundlock?”
“I’ve been talking to everyone who was there, as I had the chance, trying to piece it all together.”
“Well, just for the scribe, it wasn’t me who told Fawn to put that knife in my leg, like, like some malice riding a farmer slave. She figured it out by her own wits!”
Fairbolt held up both palms in a gesture of surrender. “Be that as it may, how are you planning to handle this council challenge? I’ve discouraged and delayed it about as much as I can without being bounced off your hearing myself for conflict of interest. And since I don’t mean to let myself get excluded from this one, the next move has to fall on you. Which is where it belongs anyway, I might point out.”
Dag bent, venting a weary sigh. “I don’t know, Fairbolt. My mind’s been working pretty slow since I got back. It feels like a bug stuck in honey, truth to tell.”
Fairbolt frowned curiously. “An effect of that peculiar blight you took on, do you think?”
“I…don’t know. It’s an effect of something.” Accumulation, maybe. He could feel it, building up in him, but he could not put a name to it.
“It wouldn’t hurt for you to tell more of your tale around, you know,” said Fairbolt.