Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [28]
“So what you’re actually saying is, you won. Some tactics, Dag!”
He grimaced. “Learned ’em at my mother’s knee.”
“What has got into you? I’ve seen you in some moods, but I never saw you in a mood like this one! Can’t say as I much like it.”
He lay back and stared up at the peeled-log ridgepole. None of the support timbers for the roof were squared off or dressed, being just slim bare trunks of the right length fitted into triangles. “I don’t much like the way I get here, either. It’s like I lose myself when I get mixed up with my closest kin. Dar and Mama mostly—my father when he was alive less so, but some. Mari I can stand. It’s part of why I touch down here lightly, or not at all if I can help it. A mile away, or better yet a hundred, I can go back to being me.”
“Huh,” said Fawn, mulling this over. She didn’t find it nearly as inexplicable as she might once have, remembering how vast new possibilities had seemed to open for her in Glassforge, and close down chokingly when she returned to West Blue. It was just that at Dag’s age she figured folks ought to be long over that sort of thing. Or maybe they’d just had more time to work down into a rut. Deep, deep rut. “Funny sort of exile.”
“Indeed it is.” But he wasn’t laughing.
The air was chilling fast as the storm rumbled through. The small stone fireplace was clearly there more for warming pots of work supplies than for heating the far from tight building, presumably not used in winter, but Dag bestirred them to lay a fire. “Have to replace that in the morning,” he muttered at the neat pile of deadfall standing ready on the porch just outside the door. But once the flames caught—Dag did seem to have a peculiar lucky knack for getting fires going—the yellow light, the scent of woodsmoke, and the occasional orange spark popping out onto the slate hearth lent some much-needed cheer to the room. Their hair and clothes began to dry, and Fawn’s skin lost its clamminess.
Fawn set a pot of rain-barrel water on an iron hook to boil for tea, swung it over the fire, and poked at the new coals with a stick, pushing more underneath her pot. “So,” she said, in what she hoped did not sound too desperate a tone, “where do we go tomorrow?”
“I figure to draw our own tent from Stores.”
They owned a tent? “Where will we set it up?”
“I have an idea or two. If they don’t work out, I’ll find a third.”
Which seemed to be all she was going to get right now. Was this clash with his family over, or not? It wasn’t that she thought Dag was lying to her, so much as that she was beginning to suspect his idea of a comfortable outcome did not match hers. If Lakewalkers didn’t marry farmers—or at least, didn’t do so and then take the farmers home—she wouldn’t expect the feeling here against her to be trifling or easily set aside. If this was something no one had successfully done before, her faith that Dag will know what to do was…if not misplaced, more hope than certainty. She wasn’t afraid of hard, but when did hard shade over into insurmountable?
Her stomach growled. If Dag was half as fatigued as she was, it was no wonder nobody seemed able to think straight. Food would help everything. She rolled the mysterious plunkin across in front of the hearth and stared at it. It still looked disconcertingly like a severed head. “What do we do with this?”
Dag sat cross-legged and smiled—not much of a smile, but a start. “Lots of choices. They all come down to plunkin. You can eat it raw in slices, peel it and cut it up and cook it alone or in a stew, boil it whole, wrap it in leaves and cook it in campfire coals, stick a sword through it and turn it on a spit, or, very popular, feed it to the pigs and eat the pigs. It’s very sustaining. Some say you could live forever on plunkin and rainwater. Others say it would just seem like forever.” He gestured to her belt knife, one of his spares that he’d insisted she wear since they’d left West Blue. “Try a slice.”
Dubiously, she captured