Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [3]
“Oh, that’s all right, then.” She sat for a moment, adjusting. It would likely not be a good idea at this point to screech and convulse and beg for motion; that would just alarm her. He didn’t want her alarmed. She might jump up and run off, which would be tragic. He wanted her relaxed and confident and…there, she was starting to smile again. She observed, “You have a funny look on your face.”
“I’ll bet.”
Her smile widened. Too gently and tentatively, she at last began to move. Absent gods be praised. “After all,” she said, continuing a line of thought of which he had long lost track, “Mama had twins, and she isn’t that much taller than me. Though Aunt Nattie said she was pretty alarmin’ toward the end.”
“What?” said Dag, confused.
“Twins. Run in Mama’s side of the family. Which made it really unfair of her to blame Papa, Aunt Nattie said, but I guess she wasn’t too reasonable by then.”
Which remark, of course, immediately made his reeling mind jump to the previously unimagined idea of Spark bearing twins, his, which made his eyes cross. Further. He really hadn’t even wrapped his mind around the notion of their having one child, yet. Considering just what you’re doing right now, perhaps you should, old patroller.
Whatever this peculiar digression did to him—his spine felt like an overdrawn bow with its string about to snap—it seemed to relax Fawn. Her eyes darkening, she commenced to rock with more assurance. Her ground, blocked earlier by the discomfort and uncertainty, began to flow again. Finally. But he wasn’t going to last much longer at this rate. He let his hips start to keep time with hers.
“If I only had a working hand to get down there, we would share this turn…” His fingers twitched in frustration.
“Another good reason to leave it be to heal faster,” she gasped. “Put that poor busted arm back on the blanket.”
“Ngh!” He wanted to touch her so much. Groundwork? A mosquito’s worth was not likely to be enough. Left-handed groundwork? He remembered the glass bowl, sliding and swirling back together. That had been no mere mosquito. Would she find it perverse, frightening, horrifying, to be touched so? Could he even…? This was her wedding night. She must not recall it with disappointment. He laid his left arm down across his belly, pointed at their juncture. Consider it a strengthening exercise for the ghost hand. Beats scraping hides all hollow, doesn’t it? Just…there.
“Oh!” Her eyes shot wide, and she leaned forward to stare into his face. “What did you just do?”
“Experiment,” he gritted out. Surely his eyes were as wide and wild as hers. “Think the broken right has been doing something to stir up my left ground. Like, not like?”
“Not sure. More…?”
“Oh, yeah…”
“Oh. Yeah. That’s…”
“Good?”
Her only reply was a wordless huff. And a rocking that grew frantic, then froze. Which was fine because now he did drive up, as that bowstring snapped at last, and everything unwound in white fire.
He didn’t think he’d passed out, but he seemed to come to with her draped across his chest wheezing and laughing wildly. “Dag! That was, that was…could you do that all along? Were you just saving it for a wedding present, or what?”
“I have no idea,” he confessed. “Never done anything like that before. I’m not even sure what I did do.”
“Well, it was quite…quite nice.” She sat up and pushed back her hair to deliver this in a judicious tone, but then dissolved into helpless laughter again.
“I’m dizzy. Feel like I’m about to fall down.”
“You are lying down.”
“Very fortunate.”
She tumbled down into the cradle of his left arm and snuggled in for a wordless time. Dag didn’t quite nap, but he wouldn’t have called it being awake, either. Bludgeoned, perhaps. Eventually, she roused herself enough to get them cleaned up and dressed in clothes to sleep in, because the blue twilight shadows were cooling as night slid in, seeping through the woods from the east. By the time she cuddled down again beside him, under the blanket this time, he was fully