Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [155]
Crane looked away, as much as he could. “Crane will do,” he said. His first words.
“So it will,” said Dag. “So I have the start of you, and I have the end. What’s in between?”
“What difference does it make?”
“To your fate? Not much, now. But if you mean to tell your own tale and not just leave others to tell it for you—or on you—you’ve got maybe two more hours while we go ’round the Elbow. After that you’ll be out of my hand.”
Crane’s black brows drew down, as though this argument unexpectedly weighed with him, but he said only, “You’ll look pretty funny dragging a man who can’t move off to be hanged.”
“I won’t be laughing.”
Lakewalkers, Fawn was reminded, seldom bothered trying to lie to each other. Could Crane even close his ground, in his disrupted state? Dag had to be partly open at least, and not enjoying it. Barr and Remo kept tensing, like people flinching from a scratched scab they couldn’t leave well enough alone, so Fawn guessed they were partly open, too.
Crane turned his head from side to side, frowning. “What the blight did you do to me, anyway? I can’t even feel most of my body. With sense or groundsense.”
“I once saw a fellow fall from a horse,” Dag answered not quite directly, “who broke his neck in about the same place as I broke yours. He lived for some months. We won’t inflict that on you.”
“But you never touched me! You were twenty feet off, over on the bank. It was some sort of evil groundwork you did!”
“It was,” said Dag impassively, not quibbling with the modifier. Remo and Barr looked disturbed. Crane’s startled gaze said, What are you? plain as plain, but he didn’t voice it.
Crane’s utter helplessness had been made clear during his cleanup. He must realize by now he was a dead man talking. Fawn knew how to feign indifference to torments one could not escape, but she’d never before seen real indifference used so. Crane seemed pained to have his mind roused from its sullen retreat.
More silence.
“So,” Dag probed again, “you were a mule-headed rule-breaker, and didn’t care to reform, so Log Hollow threw you out. Maybe a thief.”
“That was a lie!” said Crane. But added after a moment, “Then.”
“Was it?” said Dag mildly. “There was a farmer woman, I heard. Maybe youngsters. What happened to them? When your camp stripped you and booted you out, did you find your way back to her?”
“For a while,” said Crane. “She didn’t much care for what I brought her from hunting, compared to what I’d used to bring from patrol. Then the blighted strumpet died. I gave it all up for nothing!”
“How’d she die?”
“Fever. I was away. Came back to a blighted mess…”
Dag glanced at Fawn, his face set tight, and she touched the thin, drying scab on her neck left from Crane’s knife. Dag had been skin-close to losing her, last night. She’d sometimes worried what might happen to her if Dag were killed; never, she suddenly realized, what would happen to Dag if she died. His first widowing had nearly destroyed him, even with all the support of his kinfolk and familiar world around him. What would it be like with nothing around him?
“And the youngsters?” Dag said. His voice was very level, devoid of judgment. It would have to be, Fawn thought, to keep Crane talking at all. She bit her knuckle, picturing the lost children.
“Foisted them on her sister. She didn’t want half-bloods. We had an argument…then I left. After that I don’t know.”
Fawn suspected that had been an ugly argument. The death of either parent would be a disaster for young children, but the loss of a mother could be lethal for infants, even with near kin or dear friends to take up the burden. Crane had clearly owned no knack for keeping either. Dag did not pursue this, but led on. “Then what?”
“I knocked around Oleana for a while. When I got tired of living in the woods, I’d take what jobs some farmer would give me, or try the dice. Took to thieving when those didn’t