Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [120]
“Ma’am.” Barr ducked his head at her. “I could pay my passage. Partway, at least.”
“I wouldn’t have you on my boat for any money,” said Berry.
“I could work? Like Remo?”
“You?” She snorted. “I ain’t seen you lift a hand yet.”
“You wouldn’t have to pay me…Look, I’m sorry, all right?”
Dag’s lips twitched; he gave Fawn’s shoulder a squeeze and climbed up onto the Fetch’s roof. Bending his head, he murmured to Berry. She shot him a startled frown, then a slow, respectful look that started at his boots and traveled to his serious face, and said, “I don’t know, patroller. I suppose you can try.”
He nodded and dropped back down to the rear deck. “Barr, bring your boat alongside. You and I need to have a private talk about some things.”
He motioned Barr closer. When Barr brought his boat clumping up to the hull, Dag climbed down and lowered himself into it, facing Barr, and shoved them away. Barr stroked slowly backward till they were well out of earshot, then set his paddle across his lap. Only then did Dag lean grimly forward and start talking.
Fawn scrambled up onto the roof to stand in the line with Remo, Whit, and Berry, watching.
“What’s Dag doing?” asked Whit, craning his neck.
“Well,” said Berry, “he said he wanted to talk to the boy, patroller-to-patroller like. And then we’d see what we’d see.”
Barr waved his hands; Dag’s spine straightened in skepticism. He leaned forward and spoke again, and Barr rocked backward.
“I think that may be more like company captain to patroller,” Fawn allowed.
“Was he a—oh, yes, in Raintree,” began Remo. “I suppose the famous Fairbolt Crow wouldn’t have given Dag that command if he hadn’t thought he could handle it.”
“Fairbolt didn’t just think,” said Fawn. “He knew. Dag’d been a company captain before, when he patrolled up in Luthlia.”
“Luthlia!” said Remo. “That’s tough country. I met a couple of patrollers from there once, came across our ferry. They scared me.” He eyed Dag in new speculation.
Barr, perhaps inadvisably, vented some protest. Dag gestured at his hook and spoke more fiercely.
“Uh-oh,” said Fawn. “If Dag’s bringing up Wolf Ridge, that boy’s in bigger trouble than he can guess.”
“Wolf Ridge?” said Remo. “The Wolf Ridge? Dag was there?”
“That’s where the hand went,” said Whit, waving his left. “Torn off by one of them dire wolves that malice made, he says. He doesn’t much talk about it. But he sent the skin to Papa as one of Fawn’s bride-gifts. Big as a horse hide. The twins swore it had to be faked, but Papa and I didn’t think so.”
Remo’s breath trickled out through pursed lips. “There were only a handful of survivors—wait, company captain at Wolf Ridge?”
“Yeah, which is why he don’t care to talk about it,” said Fawn, “so don’t you let on I told you. It gave him an aversion to captaining. Despite beating that malice.”
“Absent gods,” said Remo. He watched the pair in the narrow boat. Dag was saying more. Barr was saying much less. By the time Dag’s hand clenched in a venomous fist—for some emphasis rather than threat, Fawn judged—Barr had shrunk to half his former size. Crouching in his seat, really, but the effect from this angle of view was pretty startling. And if Barr backed up any more, he risked falling off the stern.
Barr’s lips had stopped moving altogether. It was just head bobs, now, or sometimes head shakes. At length, Dag sat back. Barr straightened his slumped shoulders, picked up his paddle, and aimed his narrow boat back toward the Fetch. As they pulled alongside again, Dag sat with his hand on his knee, waiting. Barr looked up and cleared his throat.
“Miss Clearcreek—Boss Berry, that is,” Barr corrected himself as her frown deepened. “First off, I apologize for what I tried with you the other morning. What I was trying, see, I was trying to put a persuasion in your ground to get you mad at Remo so’s you’d fire him and he’d have to come back with me. That was wrong. I also didn’t quite have a strong enough—” he caught Dag’s rising brows, and finished hastily, “I was just plain wrong, is all.”
He drew a long breath and continued, “And I