Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [25]
Fawn thought back on Dag’s offer of the same act, way back at the Horsefords’ farmhouse. We could have saved a lot of steps. How could two such apparently identical suggestions feel like utter opposites? Trust and untrust. She hoped she could get Dag alone soon, and ask him whether he accepted his brother’s judgment, or only some part of it, or none, or if they should seek another maker. There was no clue in his face. She hid the knife away again in her shirt.
Dag stood and stretched, rolling his shoulders. “It’s about dinnertime, I expect. You want to come watch, Dar, or hide out here?”
Fawn began to wish she and Dag could hide out here. Well—she eyed the bones hung from the eaves swinging in the freshening breeze—maybe not just here. But somewhere.
“Oh, I’ll come,” said Dar, rising to collect his carving knife and the finished bowls and take them inside. “Might as well get it over with.”
“Optimist,” said Dag, stepping aside for him as he trod up the steps.
Fawn caught a glimpse of a tidy workroom, a very orderly bench with carving tools hung above it, and a small fieldstone fireplace in the wall opposite the door. Dar came back out fastening his shirt, entirely insensible of the ease with which his buttons cooperated with his fingers, latched the door, and passed efficiently around the shack closing the shutters.
The green light of the woods was growing somber as scudding dark clouds from the northwest filled the sky above. The staccato pop of falling nuts sounded like Dag’s joints on a bad morning. Fawn clung to Dag’s left arm as they started back up the path. His muscles were tight. She lengthened her steps to match his, and was surprised to find she didn’t have to lengthen them very much.
4
Beyond the clearing with the two tent-cabins, the gray of the lake was darkening, waves starting to spin off white tails of spume. Fawn could hear them slapping the shore beneath the nearby bank, where a stand of cattails bent and hissed in the rising wind. Only a single narrow boat was still in view, with two men paddling like mad for a farther shore. In the slate-colored air to the north, dazzling forks of lightning snaked from sky to earth, their thunder still laggard in arriving. The pearl of the sun, sinking toward Mare Island, disappeared behind a darker cloud even as she watched, turning the light gloomy.
Under the awning of the cabin on the right, a thin, straight, rigid figure in a skirt stood beside their piles of saddles and gear, watching anxiously up the path they were descending. Omba in her riding trousers lurked in the shadows behind, leaning against a support post with her arms crossed.
“What are you going to say?” Fawn whispered urgently to Dag.
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“On what she says. If the rumors have run ahead of me, she’ll have had time to get over being happy I’m alive and move on to other concerns. Depending on who all ’sides Omba got to her with the rumors, she could be pretty well stirred up.”
“You left our gear in plain sight—she’d have to know you’re back even without Omba.”
“There is that.”
Did he even have a plan? Fawn was beginning to wonder.
As they neared, the woman in the skirt stood bolt upright. Her hands twitched out once, then she planted them firmly on her hips. Cumbia Redwing wore her silvery-gray hair pulled back in the simple mourning knot. Her skin had less of the burnished copper in it than Dag’s—darker, more leathery, more worn—if striking in contrast with the hair. Fawn might have guessed her age as a healthy seventy, though she knew she was two decades beyond that. Her eyes were the clear tea color, narrowing under pinched-in streaks of silver brows as they swept over Fawn; in a better light, Fawn suspected they would be bright gold like Dag’s.
As they came up to the edge of the awning, Cumbia thrust out her chin, and snapped, “Dag Redwing Hickory, I’m speechless!”
Behind them, Dar muttered, “Bet not.” Dag’s brows barely twitched acknowledgment of this.
Proving Dar right, she went on, “Whatever you patrollers do out on the road, the