Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [70]
“The family is united in trying to rescue Dag from this—I grant, self-inflicted—disaster.”
“Because I think Dar knows better. And if he’s telling you something else, he’s lying.”
Cumbia looked faintly bemused. “Farmer girl, I’m a Lakewalker. I know when someone is lying.”
“Fooling himself, then.” Fawn tried another tack. “All this is hurting Dag. I can see the strain in him. It wasn’t right to send him off to war with all this mess on his mind.”
Cumbia’s brows rose. “So whose fault was that? It takes two sides to tear a man apart. The solution is simple. Go back to your farm. You don’t belong here. Absent gods, girl, you can’t even veil your ground properly. It’s as if you’re walking around naked all the time, do you even know that? Or did Dag not tell you?”
Fawn flinched, and Cumbia looked briefly triumphant. In sudden panic, Fawn wondered if her mother-in-law was reading her ground the way Dag did. If so, she’ll know how to split me up the middle easy as splitting a log with a wedge and mallet.
Cumbia’s head cocked curiously; her eyes narrowed. As if in direct response to this thought, she said, “What use to him is a wife so stupid and ignorant? You’ll always be doing the wrong thing here, a constant source of shame to him. He might be too stiff-necked to admit it, but inside, he’ll writhe. You’d bear children with weak grounds, incapable of the simplest tasks. If your blighted womb can bear at all, that is. You’re pretty now, I admit, but that won’t last, either—you’ll age fast, like the rest of your kind, growing as fat and distracted as any other fool of a farmwife, while he goes on, rigid with regret.”
She’s probing. Shooting not at any facts that could possibly be known to her, and certainly not blind, but at Fawn’s fears. A vision of her mama and Aunt Nattie, both grown downright dumpy in their middle age, nonetheless assaulted Fawn’s imagination. Half a dozen barbs, half a dozen direct hits—no, not blind. Still…I must have hit her somewhere, too, for her to be counterattacking so cruelly.
Fawn remembered a description she’d heard down in Glassforge of how the rougher keelboat men fought duels. Their wrists were strapped together with rawhide thongs, and their free hands given knives. So they were forced to circle close, unable to disengage or get out of their enemy’s stabbing range. This fight with Cumbia felt like that. Driven to her wits’ end by her own family, Fawn had not believed Dag when he’d said his would be worse, but if her people fought to bruise and tumble, his aimed to slice to the bone. Maybe Dag was right about the best contact being none. I didn’t come here to fight this old woman, I came to try for some peace. Why am I letting her have her war?
Fawn took a deep breath, and said, “Dag is the most truthful man I ever met. If we have a problem, he’ll tell me, and we’ll fix it.”
“Huh.” Cumbia sat back. Fawn could sense another shift in her mood, away from the sudden, sharp attack, but it did not reassure her. “Then let me tell you the truth about patrollers, girl. Because I was married to one. Sister, daughter, and mother to the breed—walked with them, too, when I was your age, ’bout a thousand years ago. Men, women, old, young, kind or mean-minded, in one thing they are all the same. Once they’ve seen their first malice, they don’t ever give up patrol unless they’re crippled or dead. And they don’t ever put anyone else before it. Mari—by all right reason, she should be staying in camp taking care of Cattagus, but off she goes. And he sends her, being just as bad. Dag’s father was another. All of ’em, the whole lot. Don’t you be thinking I imagine