Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [141]
“Does Alder have to hang? I mean, he was beguiled by this Lakewalker Crane, wasn’t he? Is he guilty, if he did what he did under compulsion? Is Skink? Isn’t that going to be a real problem to figure out, come…come morning?”
Dag was silent for a long time, staring out across the river. “I’m not planning to bring it up if the others don’t. Please don’t you, either. They’re all guilty enough.”
“Dag…” she said reproachfully.
“I know! I know.” He sighed. “No matter what, first we have to capture the bandits. We need to get through that with a single mind. Argue after, when it’s safe to.”
Her lips twisted in doubt.
He held her, bent his face to her hair, and murmured into it, “I thought when I quit the patrol this sort of work would all be behind me, and I could turn my whole heart and ground to fixing folks instead of killing them.” And even lower-voiced: “And once I’d fixed as many as I’d ever killed, I’d be square. And then start to get ahead.”
“Does it work like that?”
“I don’t know, Spark. I’m just hoping.”
She gave him a hug for support and turned her face up. “Can’t you at least unbeguile Alder, before you boys go off tonight? It’ll be horrible for Berry to watch him fall to pieces like that Skink fellow, but at least he mightn’t be so dangerous.”
“I can’t unbeguile Alder.”
“Why not? You did the other. It’s not like ground-gifting, is it, where you can only give so much before you collapse yourself? Or is it like that piece of pie, too much at once?”
“No,” he said in slow reluctance. “I can’t unbeguile Alder because he’s not beguiled in the first place.”
A silence. “Oh,” said Fawn at last. Oh, gods. Poor Berry… “Just when were you planning to mention this to her?”
“I don’t know. I have way too much tumbling through my head right now to trust my judgment on that. Get the bandits, first. And their leader Crane especially. I know that much. It may well be the only thing in the world I know for sure, right this minute.”
It seemed old-patroller thinking to her: Get the malice first. Everything else after. She didn’t think he was wrong. But after was starting to loom in a worrisome way. She settled on reaching up to give a heartening shake to his shoulders and say, “You get those bandits good, then.”
He gifted her back a grateful smile and a jerky nod.
In the afternoon, another flatboat arrived, but it proved to hold a family. The papa and the eldest son volunteered, along with two boat hands, to the dismay and fright of the mama who was left with four youngsters and a grandpa. No one expected arrivals after nightfall, when most sensible boats tied to the banks, but at the last glimmering of dusk one more keelboat came, almost slipping past in the shadows. Its crew of tough-looking Silver Shoals men, when the awful litany of deceit, murders, and boat-burnings was recited yet again, made no bones about joining up. Then there was nothing to do but feed folks, talk over plans in more detail, and keep the men quiet and sober till midnight.
There was little work to getting Dag’s war kit ready, as he planned to be gone for mere hours, not weeks. Fawn had thought they were done with these partings in the dark when he’d quit the patrol; the returning memories unnerved her. But the crowd of river men assembled on the bank was encouraging in its numbers and bristle. Dag had set Barr and Remo and some of the Raintree hunters out ahead as scouts. The rest tramped away over the hill by the light of a few lanterns, doubtless noisier than a company of stealthy Lakewalker patrollers, but with determination enough.
Sleep was out of the question. Fawn and Berry turned to assembling on the kitchen table what bandages and medicines the Fetch offered, in readiness for the men’s return—at dawn,