Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [180]
“Amongst Lakewalkers, there would be others to keep me in line.”
“Well…Wain didn’t defer so easy, for one.”
“Oh, yeah, Wain. I sure settled him down, didn’t I?” His hand waved and clenched in a gesture of disgust—or self-disgust?
“Um…before the attack, you mean, when the boat bosses were all arguing?”
“You spotted that, did you? Yes, I persuaded him. What Barr tried to do to Berry but was too clumsy to bring off.” His face seemed to set in a permanent grimace, contemplating this. “Though at least I didn’t leave him beguiled.”
“It was an emergency,” Fawn offered.
“There will always be another emergency along. How long before a need becomes a habit becomes a corruption? Lordship comes too easy, for some. And it was lordship near slew the world.”
His stride, scrunching through the sand, had lengthened. Fawn quickened her steps to keep up. He continued, “Unless we keep separate lives. Did we come all this way down that long river just to find out the folks we were arguing with back at Hickory Lake were right all along?”
“Slow down, Dag!” Fawn panted.
He stopped. She gripped his sleeve and turned him to face her, looking up into his troubled gold eyes. “If that’s the truth, then that is what we came all this way to find, yes. And we’ll need to face it square. But I can’t believe it’s a truth so solid that there’s no cracks at all with space left for us to fit in.”
“As long as malices exist, then the patrol must be maintained, and everything that backs it.”
“Nobody’s arguing with that. But making farmers less ignorant and Lakewalkers less obnoxious doesn’t have to mean turning the whole world tail over teakettle. You made a good start on the way down here, I thought!”
“Yeah?” He dug his toe in the sand, bent, scooped up a smoothed rock lying there, swung back, and flung it out over the waves. It vanished with a faint plop. “I made a start like throwing a rock into this sea. I could stand here and throw for years and never make a difference you could tell.”
Fawn straightened her spine and scowled up at him. “You’re not fretting because you couldn’t keep your promise to show me the sea. You’re fretting because somewhere in that murky head of yours you were hoping to have the whole problem solved by now, and hand it to me tied up in a bow for my birthday present!”
His long silence after that broke in a rueful chuckle. “Oh, Spark. I’m afraid so.”
“I should have thought a patroller would be more patient.”
He snorted. “You should have met me at age nineteen. I was going to save the whole world that year, I was. Patience and exhaustion turn out to have a lot in common.”
“Well, then, you ought to be real patient right now!”
He laughed out loud, a real laugh finally, and hugged her in tight. “You would think so, wouldn’t you?”
They turned around and started walking back toward the distant carcass. Fawn was pleased to see that Barr and Remo had finally taken their boots off and were wading around in the surf with Hawthorn, even if they were only washing up after the fish-butchery. But there was a suspicious amount of splashing going on for such a practical purpose.
They collected the boys and their prizes—Fawn was fascinated to handle the sculpted teeth with their strange serrated edges, once the blood and smelly gristly bits had been cleaned off—and made their way back to their cache, where the men built a driftwood fire. Hawthorn made Dag light it while he watched closely, venting hoots of delight. Fawn was grateful for the orange heat on her face, because the breeze was still chilly and damp. Even the patrollers thought the colors licking up around the bleached wood—blues, greens, spurts of deep red—were magical.
At length, Berry and Whit came back. Only now they walked up the wet sand not just side by side, but holding hands tightly. As they came near, Fawn saw that Berry looked wistful, and Whit looked sappy. She and Dag, sharing a blanket like a cloak, glanced at each other and grinned in recognition.
As the pair came up to the fire, Dag leaned back,