Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [20]
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled into his shirt. “I didn’t think it would all pile back into my head like that. It was the smell of the cave. All of a sudden I couldn’t breathe. Stupid…”
“Shh, no,” he said into her hair. His understanding seemed to wrap her more warmly than his arms. He raised his chin, jerked it at Whit.
“Bring her horse. We need to get away from this bad ground. Maybe get everyone something to eat.”
Copperhead turned obediently at the pressure of Dag’s leg, or perhaps ground; in any case, the gelding seemed to grasp that this was no time for tricks. They all rode a good two miles back down the trail before Dag turned off. He led down over a bank and up to a little clearing with a spring seeping out of a rock overhang. A pretty picnic spot. Patroller groundsense at work? In any case, Dag said merely, “This’ll do.” He murmured in her ear, “Can you get down all right?”
“Yes. I’m better now.” Not all better, no, but at least she’d stopped sniveling.
He let her slide off Copperhead’s shoulder, and he and Whit bustled about pulling food packets from the saddlebags, finding the tin cups, loosening girths, and permitting the horses to browse. Dag kept a close eye on Fawn till she’d settled on a rock, drunk spring water, and taken a few bites of the rather dry cheese wrapped in bread left from yesterday’s supply. He finally sat down cross-legged beside her. Whit perched on a nearby fallen log that was not too damp with moss and rot.
“Sorry,” Fawn repeated, swallowing and straightening up. “Stupid.”
“Shh,” Dag repeated, gripping her calf in a reproving, heartening little shake. “None o’ that.”
Whit cleared his throat. “I guess that malice was pretty scary.”
“Yeah,” said Fawn. The spring water was welcomingly cool; why did her throat feel so hot? She scrubbed at her scars.
Whit added magnanimously, “Well, you’re just a girl, after all.”
Fawn merely grimaced. In his own way, she supposed Whit was trying. Very trying.
Dag’s brows drew in, as if he were struggling to parse what Whit meant; he clearly didn’t see the connection between the two statements. And then he did, and got a pretty odd look. He said, “I’ve seen the first encounter with a malice devastate fully trained patrollers. I was on sick leave for weeks after my first, though the thing never touched me.”
Whit cleared his throat, made a wise decision not to try to retrieve his remark, and asked instead, “How many have you seen? Altogether?”
“I’ve lost count,” said Dag. “That I’ve slain by my hand with a knife of my own, twenty-six.”
“Twenty-seven,” Fawn corrected.
He smiled at her. “Twenty-six and a half, then. My knife, your hand.”
Fawn watched Whit’s lips move, counting up kills. No—knives. Lakewalker lives, and deaths. His brow wrinkled.
Fawn put in hastily, “I told Whit about sharing knives. Tried to, anyhow. I’m not sure if he has it all straight.” Her anxious eyes quizzed Dag: Is that all right?
He ducked his head, answering her look as well as her words. “Oh. Good. Thank you.”
Whit scraped his boot toe across the moss. “Is that a lot of those knives to have had?”
“Yes, actually.”
“Did you…er…have a big family?”
Fawn resisted the urge to knock her head—or maybe Whit’s—into a tree. He was trying.
Dag was trying, too. He replied straightforwardly, “No. Folks—friends, kin of friends, other patrollers—gave them to me, because I seemed to have a knack for getting them used. A patroller can carry a primed knife for a long time and never encounter a malice, which makes the sacrifice seem—well, not vain. But folks like knowing when it all comes to something.”
“That makes sense, I guess,” Whit allowed. He remembered to take a bite of bread and cheese. “You don’t have—do you