Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [19]
Fawn thought of the long rows of wax-sealed glass jars she and Mama had filled and sealed and set in the pantry only last week. The domestic comparison was apt, but, oh dear. “Pretty much. But I’m not sure you should say that to Dag. Lakewalkers keep their knives private and treat ’em as sacred. It’s their kin, you see. And their grief. But that’s what sharing knives share. Deaths.”
Whit blinked some more, then frowned across the ravine and said, “How far back does that cave go?”
“It’s not deep.”
“Can we go in?”
Fawn wrinkled her nose. “I guess so, if we don’t stay long.”
Whit glanced down the steep drop, nodded, and slid off and tied his horse to a tree. Fawn did the same and followed him in a scramble down the slope. Black shale cracked and slid under her feet. Even the clay dirt in the gully-washes, which should have been dull brown, had that same drained gray tinge. Whit picked his way across the stream on stones, not looking back till he reached the cave mouth, when he turned around to watch her puffing and lagging after him. “Keep up, Runt.”
She was shivering inside too much to growl at the old taunt. She labored up beside him, and the dry, sour malice-smell of the cave hit her full-face. How long till the rains and snows wash this clean? Horridly blithe, he strolled into the shadow of the overhang.
“What a great place to camp this would be! It really looks like it should be a bandit hideout.” He kicked at a broken old keg, part of a scattering of trash no one had bothered to cart away. “So where were you two, exactly? Where was this malice? How far did Dag have to throw his knife? He must not have known you then. It was a wonder you caught it.”
“Here…” Simplify. “The malice picked me up by my neck.” She fingered the dented scars. Here. Here, right here, the malice ripped the ground from my unborn child, poor half-wanted waif, here she died, here Dag was nearly torn apart by howling man-beasts, here I struck, right here the malice screamed and stank and shattered, here sacrifice tangled with sacrifice, here I miscarried, here I hurt, here I started bleeding… “I have to get out of here,” Fawn said aloud. She could not see clearly. She was shaking so badly she could scarcely breathe. There is no simple to be had, here.
“Hey, are you all right?” Whit called as she stumbled out into the air again. There wasn’t enough light in the wide green world to make that cave anything but a pit of darkness, to make her anything but stupid, stupid, stupid… She became aware she was weeping, not sobs, but weird dry gulps.
Whit, trotting after her, said, “Is the blight making you sick? Here, maybe I…I better take you back to Dag, all right?”
She nodded, trying and failing to steady her breathing, which seemed to stagger and stick. She tried to swallow between gulps of air, but her throat was too tight. Whit put a tentative, anxious arm around her waist and half-supported, half-hustled her back down and across the creek. She slipped and put one foot ankle-deep in the stream, gasping at the chill wet, which at least got some more air into her. By the time they reached the ravine’s top and Whit boosted her back up into her saddle, she was only wheezing. Her cheeks were wet, her nose beslimed; she dragged an arm fiercely across her face, and coughed.
When they reached the place where they’d sent Dag back, she looked up through the silver blur to see Copperhead cantering up the trail toward them. Dag pulled up with a jerk that made the gelding shake his head and snort. A black scowl, a brutal voice the like of which she’d never heard before from Dag’s mouth, demanded of Whit, “What did you do to her?”
“Nothing!” said Whit, alarmed. “I didn’t do nothing! She was nattering on about, about this and that, and then all of a sudden she took a fit o’ the vapors! I thought it might be the blight, though I didn’t feel anything like. Here, you take her!”
Dag discarded his menace as he turned a keen look on Fawn; searching