Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [90]
Reluctantly, she decided Dar was telling the truth. So would the Glassforge malice have stolen her mind and will from her if it had been given a bit more time? Or would it simply have ripped out her ground on the spot as it had her child’s? No telling now. It did cast a disturbing new light on what she had assumed to be farmer slander against Lakewalkers and their beguilements. But if—
Cattagus’s oblique warning about the camp council returned to her mind with a jerk. “How, forbidden?” How fiercely forbidden, with what penalties? Had she just handed Dag’s brotherly enemy another weapon against him? Oh, gods, I can’t do anything right with these people!
“Well, it’s discouraged, certainly. A Lakewalker couldn’t use the technique on another Lakewalker, but farmers are wide-open, to a sufficiently powerful”—he hesitated—“maker,” he finished, puzzlement suddenly tingeing his voice. He shook it off. His eyes narrowed; Fawn suddenly did not like his sly smile. “It does rather explain how Dag has you following him around like a motherless puppy, eh?”
Dismay shook her, but she narrowed her eyes right back. “What does that mean?” she demanded.
“I should think it was obvious. If not, alas, to my brother’s credit.”
She strove to quell her temper. “If you’re tryin’ to say you think your brother put some kind of love spell on me, well, it won’t wash. Dag didn’t fix my cord, or my ground, or whatever, till the night before he left with his company.”
Dar tilted his head, and asked dryly, “How would you know?”
It was a horrible question. Was he reading her ground the way Cumbia had, to so narrowly target her most appalling possible fears? Doubt swept through her like a torrent, to smack to a sudden stop against another memory—Sunny Sawman, and his vile threats to slander her about that night at his sister’s wedding. That ploy had worked admirably well to stampede Fawn. Once. I may be just a little farmer girl, but blight it, I do learn. Dag says so. She raised her face to meet Dar’s eye square, and suddenly the look of doubt was reversed from her to him.
She drew a long breath. “I don’t know which of you is using malice magic. I do know which of you is the most malicious.”
His head jerked back.
Yeah, that stings, doesn’t it, Dar? Fawn tossed her head, whirled, and stalked out of the clearing. She didn’t give him the satisfaction of looking back, either.
Out on the road again, Fawn first turned right, then, in sudden decision, left. In the time it took her to walk the mile down the shore to patroller headquarters, her courage chilled. The building appeared quiet, although there was a deal of activity across the road at the stables and in the paddocks, some patrol either coming in or going out, or maybe folks getting ready to send the next company west to the war. Maybe Fairbolt won’t be here, she told herself, and climbed the porch.
A strange patroller at the writing table pointed with his free hand without looking up from his scratching quill. “If the door’s open, anyone can go in.”
Fawn swallowed her rehearsed greetings, nodded, and scuttled past. Blight this naked-ground business. She peeked around the doorjamb to the inner chamber.
Fairbolt was sitting across from his pegboard with his feet up on another chair and a shallow wooden box in his lap, stirrings its contents with one thick finger and frowning. A couple more chairs pulled up beside him held more such trays. He squinted up at his board, sighed, and said, “Come in, Fawn.”
Emboldened, she stepped to his side. The trays, unsurprisingly, held pegs. He looked, she thought, very much like a man trying to figure out how to fill eight hundred holes with four hundred pegs. “I don’t mean to interrupt.”
“You’re not interrupting much.” He looked up at last and gave her a grimace that was possibly intended to be a smile.
“I had a question.”
“There’s a surprise.” He caught her faint wince and shook his head in apology. “Sorry. To answer you: no, I’ve had no courier from Dag since his company left. I wouldn’t expect one yet. It’s still early