Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [67]
“Neither did most of the folks up on Wolf Ridge,” said Dag dryly. And, before Saun could ask How do you know? continued, “Saun, Codo, Varleen, you’re all familiar with Bonemarsh. Stand up and give us a terrain tutorial.”
A customary task; Dag stepped back, the local knowledge stepped forth, and the other patrollers began pelting them with variously shrewd questions as the precious parchment maps were passed around, and annotations scribbled in the dirt with sticks, rubbed out, and redrawn. Dag listened as hard or harder than anyone else, casting and recasting tactical approaches in his head, glumly aware that nine-tenths of the planning would prove useless in the event.
There was enough brains and experience in this bunch that Dag scarcely needed to guide the detailed discussion from here; two bad ideas were knocked down, by Utau and Obio respectively, before Dag could open his mouth, and three better ones that Dag wouldn’t even have thought of were spat forth, to be chewed over, altered, and approved with only the barest shaping murmurs on his part. Mari, bless her, took over the problem of coaxing sharing knives from a couple of patrollers who were not going with the veiled patrol, as there were six pairs but only four knives among those here assembled. They even sorted themselves out in new partner-pairs before the group, growing quiet and thoughtful, broke up to seek their bedrolls. Dag hoped they would all sleep better than he seemed likely to.
He rolled on his back in his own bedroll, thin on the cold, damp ground, and searched the hazy sky for stars, trying to quiet the busy noise in his head. There was no point in running over the plans for tomorrow yet again, for the tenth, or was that the twentieth, time. He’d done all he could for tonight, except sleep. But when he forced the roiling concerns for his company out, the ache of missing Fawn crept back in.
He’d grown so accustomed to her companionship in so few weeks, as if she’d always been there, or had slotted into some hollow place within him just her shape that had been waiting for years. He’d come to delight not only in her sweet body, awakening appetites he’d imagined dulled by time, age, and exhaustion, but in the way her shining eyes opened wide in her endless questions, that determined set to her mouth when she faced a new problem, her seemingly boundless world-wonder. And if her hunger for life was a joy to him, his own, renewed, was an astonishment.
He considered the dark side of that bright coin uneasily. Had this marriage also reawakened his fear of death? For long, his inevitable end had seemed neither enemy nor friend, just there, accepted, to be worked around like his missing hand. If a fellow had nothing to lose, no risk held much alarm, and fear scarcely clogged thought. If that indifference had given him his noted edge, was that edge becoming blunted?
His right hand crept across his chest to trace the heavy cord wrapping his left arm above the elbow, calling up the reassuring hum of Spark’s live ground. Indeed, he had something to lose now. By the shadow of his fear, he began to see the shape of his desire, the stirrings of curiosity for a future not constrained and inevitable but suddenly containing a host of unknowns, places and people altogether unimagined, unconceived in all senses. Blight it, I want to live. Not the best time to make that discovery, eh? He snorted self-disdain.
Instead of letting his thoughts chase one another back around the circle, he folded his left arm in, rolled over around the absence of Spark, and resolutely closed his eyes. The summer night was short. They would head due south at dawn. And make sure your body and your wits are riding the same horse, old patroller.
10
Three days gone, Fawn thought. Today would begin the fourth. Was it over, was it even begun, was Dag’s company there yet? Wherever there was. Somewhere