Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [61]
“No. Someone will come for me. I’ll try to go out quiet.”
“Don’t you dare go sneaking off without waking me,” she said, a little fiercely, and led him inside, where the contents of his saddlebags were laid out in neat stacks. His bow lay next to them, its quiver stuffed with arrows. “I was going to pack up your gear, but then I thought I’d better have you check first, see if I got everything right.”
He nodded, knelt, and began handing her stacks, briefly inspected; she tucked them into the bags as tidily as she could. The only thing he set aside was his tambourine in its leather case. Fawn wanted to ask Won’t you need that to celebrate the kill? but then thought perhaps he wanted to protect it, this riding-out being out of the routine. The other possibilities she refused to contemplate. She closed the flaps, buckled them, and turned to pick up the last item, laid out on the trunk beside the flickering stub.
“You’ve got no sharing knife. You want to take this one?” She held her—their—knife out to him, tentatively.
His face grew grave. Still kneeling, he took it from her and drew it from its sheath, frowning at the faded writing on the bone blade. “Dar thinks it won’t work,” he said at last.
“I wasn’t thinking of it for your first pick. Only to keep by you just…just in case. If there were no other choices.”
“There will be a dozen and more other knives among my company.”
“How many patrollers are going?”
“Seventy.”
“Will it be enough?”
“Who knows? One is enough, but it can take all the rest to get that one to the right place at the right time. Fairbolt will hold all the regular patrols going out, and fold in the ones coming home, but he has to think not only of sending help, but of defense.”
“I’d think sending help would be the best defense.”
“To a point. Things might go badly in Raintree, but also another malice could pop up here in Oleana. Since this commotion will put everyone behind schedule—again—it’s just that more likely. That’s the problem with malices emerging so randomly. Nice when we go months and months at a time without one, but when they come up in a bunch, we can get overwhelmed.” His brows drew in; slowly, he resheathed the knife, handing it back to her with a somewhat apologetic grimace. “Better not. I have an old bad habit of jumping into things feetfirst, and that’s not my job this time.”
She accepted his words, and the knife, with a little nod, although her heart ached.
“I have some ideas,” he went on, his mind clearly elsewhere. Or perhaps several elsewheres. “But I’m going to need more recent news than what that courier brought. She near rode her horse to death, but she was still two days getting here. Part of what went wrong at Wolf Ridge was due to, hm, not so much bad, as old information. Though for whatever consolation, I’m not sure but what we’d have done just the same if we had known what was coming down on us. If we’d spared a few more to the ridge, it would just have been that many more dead. And a few was all we had.” His mouth set in irony. “The help from out of the hinterland not having arrived yet.”
Fawn didn’t think Dag’s company would be dawdling on their road tomorrow.
There seemed so little she could do for him. Socks. Arrows. Packing. It all felt so trivial. All things he had accomplished perfectly well for himself for years before she’d come along to so disrupt his life. She might help by putting him to bed and sitting on him, maybe; it was clear his body needed its rest, and equally clear his mind would scarcely allow it. She raised her hands and began tenderly unbuttoning his shirt. As her wrist moved, her eye was caught by the gold beads of her marriage cord. He needs to be thinking about his task, not about me. But time was growing desperately short.
“Dag…”
“Mm, Spark?” His fingers in turn gently twisted themselves in the curls of her hair, letting the locks flow over and between them.
“You can feel me through your wedding cord, right? And all the other married Lakewalkers, Mari