Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [68]
She watched across the campsite as Cattagus settled himself at a log table with knife, awl, and assorted deerhide scraps. His task of the morning was to make a new pair of slippers for his great-niece Tesy, judging by the fascinated way she danced around him, giggling when he tickled her feet after measuring them against his pieces. It might have been mere chance that his right hand rested for a moment on his left wrist before he leaned forward and began cutting.
Fawn stretched her back against the apple tree and forced herself to take up her knitting again. Without Sarri’s two children, the campsite would have fallen all too quiet these past days. Although the distraction they’d provided by disappearing for several hours day before yesterday didn’t exactly count as a help. They’d been found by a neighbor, pressed into aiding the search, in the woods nearly at the other end of the island—on a quest of their own, looking for their fathers. From their infant points of view, Fawn supposed, Razi and Utau were grand playmates who vanished as mysteriously as they arrived, and Sarri’s strained, carefully repeated explanations about gone on patrol as baffling as if she’d announced they had gone off to the moon.
Fawn’s monthly had begun the day after Dag had left, not a surprise, but an unpleasant reminder of too many regrets. Sarri had shown Fawn how Lakewalker women used cattail fluff as absorbent stuffing for their ragbags, which could be emptied into the slit trench instead of tediously washed out along with the bags, after. The consolation was slight. Fawn had spent two unhappy days sitting, spinning, and cramping, trying without success to decide if this was just a bad one, or some abnormal relic from the malice’s mishandling, and wishing Mari were here to ask; but the grinding pain had passed off at last, and her fears eased with her bleeding. Today was much better.
Last row. Fawn cast off neatly and laid the new pair of cotton-yarn socks out on her skirted thigh. They had come out well; the few dropped stitches had been properly recaptured, the heels turned at a natural angle and not something that her brothers would have threatened to dress the rooster in. She grinned in memory of the irate bird stalking around with those misshapen wool bags tied to its feet, though at the time she’d been even madder than it had.
She slipped into her tent and combed her unruly hair, tying it up with a ribbon, then rummaged in her scrap bag for a bit of colored yarn. She folded the socks neatly and made a bow around the bundle with the yarn, to help them look more like a present. Then she straightened up, put her shoulders back, and walked down the road toward Cumbia Redwing’s encampment.
Rain had blown through from the west last night, and the tall hickory trees shed sparkling drops as a fresh breeze stirred them. Dag’s company must have ridden through the same broad storm, Fawn calculated, though whether it had caught them on the road or in shelter she could not guess. Despite the lingering damp, when Fawn came to the Redwing site she spotted Cumbia working outside, sitting on a leather cushion atop the inevitable upended log seat at one of the crude plank tables. She was wearing the sleeveless calf-length shift that seemed usual for women in summer here, this one a faded bluish-red that spoke of some berry dye. The lean, upright posture was slightly bent, the shining silver head turned down over her task. Skeins of the long-fibered plunkin flax yarn lay out on the table; with a four-pronged lucet, Cumbia was looping them into the strong, light cord Lakewalkers used. As Fawn had hoped, Dar and Omba were nowhere in sight—off to the bone shack and Mare Island, presumably.
Cumbia looked up and scowled as Fawn approached. Her hands, as gnarled with work and age as any farmwife’s, went on expertly braiding.
Fawn dipped her knees, and said, “How de’. Nice morning.”
Silence.
Unpromising, but Fawn hadn’t expected