Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [42]
Fawn looked unconvinced. “Do you suppose Dar and your mama will be speaking to you again by then?”
Dag shrugged. “The next move is up to them. It’s plain Dar doesn’t like this marriage, but he detests rows. He’ll let it pass unless he’s pressed to act. Mama…had her warning. She has ways of making me crazy, and I suppose the reverse is true, but she’s not stupid. And she’d be the last person on the lake to invite the camp council to tell her what to do. She’ll keep it in the family. All we need do is let time go by and not borrow trouble.”
She eased back in reassurance, but there remained a dark streak in her spirit, interlaced with the fresh brightness from her recovering body. Dag suspected the strangeness of it all was beginning to accumulate. He’d seen homesickness devastate young patrollers far less dislocated than Fawn, and he resolved to find familiar tasks for her hands tomorrow. Yes, let her be as busy as she was used to being, till her balance grew steadier.
Meanwhile—here inside Tent Bluefield—the task to hand was surely growing less frantic and more familiar, but no less enchanting for all of that. Back to taking turns. He sought her tender lips in a kiss, opening his heart to all the intricacy of her ground, dark and light together.
Dag vanished for a couple of hours the next morning, but returned for lunch—plunkin again, but he didn’t seem to mind. Then, as promised, he took Fawn to the mysterious Stores. This proved to be a set of long sheds tucked into the woods, down the road past the patroller headquarters. Inside one, they found what appeared to be a woman clerk; at any rate, she sat at a table scratching in a ledger with a quill, surrounded by shelves crammed with more ledgers. A toddler lay asleep in a sort of wooden pen next to her. More sets of shelves, ceiling-high, marched back in rows the length of the building. The dim air smelled of leather and herbs and less-identifiable things.
While Fawn walked up and down the rows of shelves, staring at the goods with which they were crammed, Dag engaged the woman in a low-voiced consultation, which involved dragging out several more ledgers and marking off and initialing lists therein. At one point Dag said, “You still have those?” in a voice of surprise, laughed, and dipped the quill to mark some more. His splints, Fawn noticed, hardly seemed to slow him down today, and he was constantly taking his arm out of the sling.
Dag then led Fawn up and down the rows and had her help him collect furs and other leather goods according to some scheme of his own. A half dozen beautiful dark brown pelts looking like the coats of some extraordinary ferret-shaped creature he explained as coming from mink, small woodland predators from north of the Dead Lake; an exquisite white pelt, soft as whipped cream, was from a winter fox, but it was like no fox fur Fawn had ever seen or touched. These, he said, could be bride-gifts for Mama and Aunt Nattie, and Fawn had to agree they were marvelously better than the local hides they’d rejected back at Lumpton Market.
“Every patrol usually brings back something,” Dag explained. “It varies with where they’ve been and what opportunities they’ve found. Whatever part of his or her share a patroller doesn’t want or can’t use is turned over to Stores, and the patroller gets a credit for them, either to draw the equivalent item out later or trade for something of use. Excess accumulations are taken down to farmer country to trade for other things we need. After all my years of patrolling, I have a long credit at Stores. You be thinking about what you want, Spark, and chances are we can find something like.”
“Cooking ware?” she said hopefully.
“Next building over,” he promised.
One at a time, he pulled three more folded hides from dusty back shelves, and Fawn staggered under the weight of each as they took them to the clerk’s table to be