Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [20]
Mother-in-law versus daughter-in-law friction was common coin in Fawn’s world; she had no trouble following this. She wondered if Cumbia’s thwarted thirst for daughters would extend itself to a little farmer girl, dragged in off patrol like some awkward souvenir. She had taken in one daughter-in-law, quite against custom, after all. Some hope there?
“Dag,” she said suddenly, “where am I going to live?”
He looked over and raised his eyebrows at her. “With me.”
“Yes, but when you’re gone on patrol?”
Silence. It stretched rather too long.
“Dag?”
He sighed. “We’ll just have to see, Spark.”
They were nearly back to his family tent-cabins when Dag paused at a path leading into the woods. If he was checking anything with his groundsense, Fawn could not tell, but he jerked his chin in a come-along gesture and led right. The high straight boles, mostly hickory, gave a pale green shade in the shadowless light, as though they were walking into some underwater domain. The scrub was scant and low on the flat terrain. Fawn eyed the poison ivy and stuck to the center of the well-trodden path, lined here and there with whitewashed rocks.
About a hundred paces in, they came to a clearing. In the center was a small cabin, a real one with four sides, and, to Fawn’s surprise, glass windows. Even the patrol headquarters had only had parchment stretched on window frames. More disturbingly, human thighbones hung from the eaves, singly or in pairs, swaying gently in the air that soughed in the papery hickory leaves overhead. She tried not to imagine ghostly whispering voices in the branches.
Dag followed her wide gaze. “Those are curing.”
“Those folks look well beyond cure to me,” she muttered, which at least made his lips twitch.
“If Dar’s busy with something, don’t speak till he speaks to us,” Dag warned in a quiet voice. “Actually, the same applies even if it looks like he’s doing nothing.”
Fawn nodded vigorously. Putting the picture together from Dag’s oblique descriptions, she figured Dar was the closest thing to a real Lakewalker necromancer that existed. She could not picture being foolish enough to interrupt him in the midst of some sorcery.
A hickory husk, falling from above, made a clack and a clatter as it hit the shingle roof and rolled off, and Fawn jumped and grabbed Dag’s left arm tightly. He smiled reassuringly and led her around the building. On the narrower south side was a porch shading a wedged-open door. But the man they sought was outside, at the edge of the clearing. Working a simple sapling lathe, so ordinary and unsorcerous-looking as to make Fawn blink.
Dar was shorter and stockier than Dag, a solid middle-aged build, with a more rectangular face and broader jaw. He had his shirt off as he labored; his skin was coppery like Dag’s but not so varied in its sun-burnishing. His dark hair was drawn back in a Lakewalker-style mourning knot, which made Fawn wonder who for, since his wife Omba’s hadn’t been. If there was gray in it, she wasn’t close enough to see. One leg worked the lathe; the rope to the sapling turned a clamp holding a green-wood blank. Both hands held a curved knife and bore it inward, and pale yellow shavings peeled away to join a kicked-about pile below. Two finished bowls sat on a nearby stump. In the shavings pile lay discarded a partially carved, cracked blank, and another finished bowl that looked to Fawn perfectly fine.
His hands most drew her eye: strong and long-fingered like Dag’s, quick and careful. And what