Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [26]
As if he hadn’t heard her, Dag pulled the shrinking Fawn forward, and said, “Mama, this is my wife, Fawn Bluefield.”
“How de’ do, ma’am.” Fawn dipped her knees, frantically searching amongst the hundred rehearsed speeches in her mind for something to follow. She hadn’t imagined doing this in a thunderstorm. She hadn’t imagined most of this.
Dag forestalled her. Now standing behind her, he slid his hook, carefully turned downward, under her left wrist and elevated it. “See? Wife.” He shrugged his left shoulder to display his own marriage cord.
Cumbia’s eyes widened in horror. “You can’t have—” With a hic-cough of breath, she choked out, “Cut those things.”
“No, ma’am,” said Dag in a weirdly affable tone. Flying, Fawn thought. Off in that other place he went to when things turned deadly sour, when action moved too fast for thought, and he turned it all over to some other part of himself that could keep up. Or not…
“Dag, if you do not burn those abominations and take that girl right back where you found her, you are never entering my tent again.” Had Cumbia been rehearsing too? Coached by excited rumormongers? There seemed something deeply awkward about her, as if her mouth and eyes were trying to say two different things. Dag might know with his groundsense, if he hadn’t obviously closed it down as hard as a hickory shell.
Dag smiled, or at any rate, his mouth curved sunnily, though his eyes stayed tight, making him look, for a moment, oddly like his mother. “Very good, ma’am.” He turned to his stunned listeners. “Omba, Dar, good to see you again. Fawn, get your bags and bedroll. We’ll send someone back for the saddles tomorrow. Omba, if she throws them out in the rain, could you put them under cover for me?”
Omba, staring wide-eyed, nodded.
Wait, what? “But Dag—”
He bent and hooked up Fawn’s saddlebags and handed them to her, then hooked his own over his shoulder. She clutched the heavy load awkwardly to her chest as he put his arm around her back and turned her toward the clearing. The first big raindrops spattered down, batting the hickory leaves and hitting the dirt with audible plops.
“But Dag, no one—she hasn’t—I haven’t—”
Reversing herself abruptly, Cumbia said, “Dag, you can’t go out there now, it’s coming on to storm!”
“Come along, Spark.” He hustled her out.
A few fat drops plunked onto the top of her head like hard finger-taps, soaking cold down to her scalp. “But Dag, she’s not hardly—I didn’t even get a chance to—” Fawn turned back to dip her knees again and call a desperate, “Nice to meet you, ma’am!” over her shoulder.
“Where are you going?” cried Cumbia, echoing Fawn’s thoughts exactly. “Come back out of the rain, you fool!”
“Keep walking,” Dag muttered out of the corner of his mouth. “Don’t look back, or it’ll be all to do over again.” As they passed a big basket leaning against a stump, piled high with dark round shapes, he thunked his hook into one, snatching it up in passing. His stride lengthened. Fawn scurried to keep up.
As they reached the road, Dag hesitated, and Fawn panted, “Where are we going?”
He glanced over his shoulder. Through the trees, the far shore of the lake had disappeared behind a thick gray curtain of rain; Fawn could hear the oncoming hiss of it. “I have some folks who owe me favors, but that’ll best be for tomorrow, I think. Right now we just need shelter. This way.”
To Fawn’s considerable dismay, he turned down the path leading to the bone shack. She grappled her saddlebags around over her shoulder and trotted after. The fat raindrops gave way, in a cold gust, to little hailstones, slicing down through the leaves and bouncing off the path, and, more painfully, off her. The pebble-sized ice triggered a heavier and even more alarming hail of hickory husks as the trees creaked in the wind, and Fawn pictured heavy branches coming down on them like huge hammers. Both she and Dag ducked and ran through the ominous shadows.
She was gasping and even Dag was out of breath when they