Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [52]
At her eyebrows raised in question, Dag shook his head, adding an unfelt smile to show his scowl was not for her. He sat on the ground, picked up a stick, and dug it into the dirt, his face drawn in thought.
“So what did Dar want?” Fawn asked. “Is he coming around to us?” She busied herself with the bass, gutted, cleaned, stuffed with herbs begged from Sarri’s garden, and ready to grill. It sizzled gently as she laid it on the rack above her coals, and she stirred the pot of mashed plunkin with onions she’d fixed to go with. Dag looked up at the enticing smells pretty soon, his eyes growing less pinched, although he was still a long time answering.
“Not yet, anyway,” Dag said at last.
Fawn pursed her lips. “If there’s some trouble, don’t you think I need to know?”
“Yes,” he sighed. “But I need to talk to Fairbolt first. Then I can say more certainly.”
Say what? “Sounds a little ominous.”
“Maybe not, Spark.” Attracted by his supper, he got up and sat again by her, giving her neck a distracting nuzzle as she tried to turn the fish.
She smiled back, to show willing, but thought, Maybe so, Dag. If something wasn’t a problem, he usually said so, with direct vigor. If it was a problem with a solution, he’d cheerfully explain it, at whatever length necessary. This sort of silence, she had gradually learned, betokened unusual uncertainty. Her vague conviction that Dag knew everything about everything—well, possibly not about farms—did not stand up to sober reflection.
As she’d hoped, feeding him did brighten him up considerably. His mood lightened still further, to a genuine grin, when she came out from their tent after supper with her hands behind her back, and then, with a flourish, presented his new cotton socks.
“You finished them already!”
“I used to have to help make socks for my brothers. I got fast. Try them under your boots,” she said eagerly. “See if they help.”
He did so at once, walking experimentally around the dying fire, looking pleased, if a little mismatched in the boots with the truncated trousers that Lakewalker men seemed to wear here in hot weather, when they weren’t called on to ride.
“These should be better in summer than those awful lumpy old wool things you were wearing—more darns than yarn, I swear. They’ll keep your feet dryer. Help those calluses.”
“So fine! Such little, smooth stitches. I’ll bet my feet won’t bleed with these.”
“Your feet bleed?” she said, appalled. “Eew!”
“Not often. Just in the worst of summer or the worst of winter.”
“I’ll spin up some of that wool for winter later. But I thought you could use these first.”
“Indeed.” He sat again and removed his boots, drawing the socks off carefully, and kissed her hands in thanks. Fawn glowed.
“I’m going to help Sarri start to spin her plunkin stem flax tomorrow, now the retting’s all done,” she said. “These women need a wheel to speed things up, they really do. Surely a little one wouldn’t be so hard to cart back and forth, and we could all share it around the camp. I could teach them how to use it, give something back for all the help Sarri and Mari have been giving me. Do you think you could bring one back next time you patrol around Lumpton or Glassforge—or West Blue, for that matter? Mama and Nattie could make sure you got a good one,” she added in a burst of prudence.
“I could sure try, Spark.” And won her heart anew by not protesting a bit about the sight he would present hauling such an unwieldy object atop Copperhead.
She drew him into a promissory sort of cuddle for a time, but at length he recalled whatever Dar had brought to trouble him, and stood up with a sigh.
“Will you be gone long?” she asked.
“Depends on where Fairbolt’s got off to.”
She nodded, struggling to be content with the vague answer and what all it left out. The dark mood seemed to settle over his shoulders again like a cloak as he strode out to the road and vanished beyond the trees.
Dag tracked Fairbolt down at