Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [93]
Fawn nodded, if a bit uncertainly, to show willing.
“So is my company captain hurt or not?” said Fairbolt, shifting in impatience. “What’s going on over there in Raintree, Hoharie?”
Hoharie shook her head again. “You’re asking me to tell you what something looks like from a glimpse in a piece of broken mirror held around a corner. In the dark. Am I looking at all of it, or just a fragment? Does it correspond to anything?” She turned to Fawn. “What hurts, exactly?”
Fawn stretched and clenched her fingers. “My left hand, mostly. Up the arm it fades. Except I feel a little shivery all over.”
Fairbolt muttered, “But Dag hasn’t got a…” His face screwed up, and he scowled in a confusion briefly greater than Fawn’s.
“It’s…how shall I put this,” said Hoharie in some reluctance. “If the rest of his ground is as stressed as the bit I feel, his body must be in a pretty bad way.”
“How bad, how?” snapped Fairbolt. Which made Fawn rather glad, because she was much too frightened to yell at the medicine maker herself.
Hoharie opened her hands in a wide, frustrated shrug. “Well, not quite enough to kill him, evidently.”
Fairbolt bared his teeth at her, but then sat back in a glum slump. “If I get any sleep at all tonight, Hoharie, it won’t be your doing.”
Fawn leaned forward and stared at her hand. “I was kind of hoping you would tell me I was a stupid little farmer girl imagining things. Everybody else used to, but now that I want it…” She looked up, and added uneasily, “Dag’s not going to get in some kind of trouble for this making, is he?”
“Well, if—when he gets back I guarantee I’ll be asking him a few questions,” said Hoharie fervently. “But they won’t have anything to do with this argument before the camp council.”
“It was all my fault, truly,” said Fawn. “Dar made me afraid to tell. But I thought—I thought Fairbolt had a need and a right to know, on account of the company.”
Fairbolt pulled himself together, and said gravely, “Thank you, Fawn. You did the right thing. If you feel any changes in this, please tell me or Hoharie, will you?”
Fawn nodded earnestly. “So what do we do now?”
“What we generally have to do, farmer girl,” Fairbolt sighed. “We wait.”
13
Dag woke well after dark, to roll his aching body up, pull on his boots without lacing them, and stagger to the slit trench. The night air was chill and dank, but the two patrollers on duty had kept the campfire burning with a cheery orange glow. One waved to Dag as he wandered past, and Dag returned the silent salute. The scene looked deceptively peaceful, as though they watched over comrades merely sleeping.
After relieving himself, Dag considered more sleep. His bone-deep grinding fatigue of earlier seemed scarcely improved. The marsh remained silent—this hour should have been raucous with frogs, insects, and night birds—and eerily odorless. Either the reek of its normal life or the stench of death should have saturated this foggy air. Well, the rot would come in time, a week or a month or six or next spring. Which, while it would doubtless smell repulsive enough to gag anyone for a mile downwind, would be a first sign of life beginning its repair of the blight—rot had a lively ground of its own.
Dag stared at the grove, the campfire seeming like a lantern among the trees, remembering his patrol’s first approach…only yesterday? If this was after midnight—he glanced at the wheel of the stars—he could call it two days ago, though that seemed scarcely more reasonable. Frowning thoughtfully, he counted a careful two hundred paces away from the grove and found a stump to sit upon. He stretched out his aching legs. If he had opened his groundsense at this distance before without triggering the trap, presumably