Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [156]
Remo said, in an outraged voice, “Oh, that’d make it good for the next patrol to go through, to have Lakewalkers suspected of stealing!” Dag waved him to silence. Crane’s lips turned in a mockery of a smile. How old was Crane? Older than Barr or Remo, to be sure, but younger than Dag, Fawn guessed. About halfway between? Remo was looking at Barr the rule-bender in a way that made him shift uncomfortably. Barr glared back at his partner as if to say, I would not have—! But Fawn thought both could see, Yes, how easy.
Crane continued, “One night, some farmer woke up before I was done gathering, and cornered me. I had to shut him up, but I hit him too hard. That’s when I decided to leave Oleana. Took myself down to the river, spent his money on passage on a farmer flatboat. I started to think—maybe if I got someplace far enough away, I could become somebody else. Shed my skin, my name, start over somehow. I was going to decide when I reached the Confluence, whether to go south to Graymouth or maybe north to Luthlia, though I’d no love of snow by then. It’s said they don’t ask too many questions up there, if a patroller can take the cold. But then the fool boat boss put in at the Cavern Tavern, and I met Brewer and his game.”
“What was his game?” Dag’s voice was curiously soft, now. Remo squinted at him in doubt. Crane’s words were flowing as if he’d half-forgotten his listeners, wound up in his tale and his memories. Dag did nothing visible to disrupt the flow; Fawn couldn’t tell if he was doing something invisible to channel it.
“It was how it amused Brewer to restock on bandits when he’d run low,” Crane said. “When he’d taken captives alive, two or more at a time—it worked best with at least four—he’d set them to fight each other, in pairs. If they refused to fight, they’d be slain outright. The second pair almost never refused. If he had more captives, he might make the winners fight each other, too, but anyway, the prize—besides being allowed to live—was to join his gang. He said he could turn most men that way—after they’d killed their friends for him, he’d own their minds.”
Alder, Fawn thought. Was that what had happened to Alder? In that case, what exactly had happened to Buckthorn, and Berry’s papa, and the rest of their crew? She shuddered, realizing Dag wasn’t keeping his voice low just for the menace of it. It was so his words would not carry to the top deck.
“His arithmetic was off, by my reckoning,” Crane continued. “But I was his prize, when I showed up. To turn a Lakewalker to thievery and murder! He thought he was the game-master, he did. I didn’t tell him I was ahead of him down that road.”
A strange brag. If Crane couldn’t be the best, he’d compete for being the baddest? Evidently so.
“I won my rounds, of course. It was too easy. I stayed on a few weeks, learned the trade, persuaded and beguiled a few fellows just to see what would happen. Then I took Brewer’s game to its logical conclusion. From behind. I was never quite sure if he was surprised, or not.”
“Once you’d won, you could have left, surely. However you were guarded before,” Dag said suggestively. “If you could walk past farmers like a ghost, why not bandits?”
“Go where? Farmers still wouldn’t have me, and Lakewalkers…would’ve been able to smell the blood in my ground, by then. So maybe Brewer won after all, eh?”
“Suicide?” said Dag mildly.
Crane stared at him in astonishment. “I didn’t have a bonded knife! Nor any way of getting one, once I was banished. The blighted camp council stripped mine from me along with everything else.” Crane turned his head away. The flow of his talk dried up for several minutes.
Fawn’s face screwed up in the slow realization that Crane—even Crane!—was taken aback at Dag’s suggestion not because he feared self-murder, but because he scorned to so waste a death, with no sharing knife to catch