Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [170]
Remo rubbed his lips. Barr undid another burr. Neither argued.
I’ve taken everything Dag was, and thought the trade fair because he did. But he needs more than just me. She stood straighter and said, “Still, I really think having you two along has been good for him. An anchor in the old when he’s straining and reaching for something so new no one has ever grasped it before. Because he’s not really a patroller anymore, not in his ground. He’s trying to turn into something else.”
Remo nodded. “Yes, medicine maker.”
“Or knife maker,” said Barr more doubtfully. “And if he’s going to be that, we sure enough have a duty to guard him. Camp or no camp!”
Fawn shook her head, though not in disagreement with that last. “First thing a new maker has to do is make himself. I think it’s hard for any youngster to do that, even apprenticed to a mentor in a chosen craft, but Dag’s trying to do it all on his own, somewhere in midair. I’ve seen him mend a busted glass bowl, and a lot of hurt people, and a lost sharing knife, and what he did in Raintree I can’t begin to describe, but what he really wants to mend is the world.”
Remo stared at her, appalled. “No one can do that!”
“No one, no. I ’spect Dag would say the world’s big and we’re small and I guess we all break in the end. But when all the old arguments about farmers and Lakewalkers have gone ’round and ’round ’bout sixteen times and plowed into exhaustion, the problem of Greenspring will still be sitting there.” Fawn swallowed. “We may not be able to win that toss, either, but it’d sure be nice to have some company while we’re losin’. That’s one.”
Remo’s lips moved, but no sound came out. He blinked rapidly.
Fawn drew breath and went on: “Cracking that beguilement mystery open was worth your coming along all on its own. That’s two. And I don’t know how many more boats and lives those bandits would have destroyed before the end if we hadn’t chanced along to stop them. That’s three. Three good reasons are good enough for going on with, Dag says.”
She glanced aside. I could wish it was less hard on Berry. But the boat boss was sitting on the log next to Whit, finally beginning to talk a bit. Whit was listening attentively. He had an arm around her waist in a comforting sort of way, and she was making no move to shrug it off. Berry’s strength still impressed Fawn, but she was glad that maybe she didn’t have to be strong so all-by-herself, now. Because that could be wearing on a woman.
“I don’t know,” said Remo. “I don’t think I know anything anymore.”
“Blight, I never did,” said Barr. “It hasn’t stopped me!” He blinked cheerily, and fell into his old, wheedling voice. “You’ve got to come along, Remo, to keep me from falling into the sea. Or to push me in, whichever.”
Remo scratched his head, and said wryly, “Hard choices.”
“Hey…!”
Leaving them to take up their comfortable, habitual squabbling, Fawn made her way back to Dag, satisfied.
A while after the last unnerving noises stopped drifting over the ridge, they all made their way back to the Fetch the long way around, back of the cave, avoiding both the woods and the new poles down by the shore. Fawn expected she’d go peek at those gruesome standards later, and then be sorry she had. She definitely wasn’t going to venture into the winter-bare woods until the crop hanging there had been harvested and planted. And maybe not even then.
Dag thought Berry would have been glad to shove off that very afternoon, as the Fallowfield family’s flatboat did, but they were all held there by the boatmen’s demands on Dag for medicine work. Yet by the following morning Chicory was doing better than Dag had anticipated, sitting up and eating, if wincing at his tender skull and throbbing headache. The Raintree men made plans to camp at the cave for a few more days, then ride home in gentle stages, taking the bandits’ horses and horse gear for their salvage share. Fawn opined