Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [27]
Darkness overtook them several miles short of the village that was the teamsters’ usual stopping point on this route, a mishap that the one called Mape blamed, grumblingly, on their late start, but which the more tolerant Tanner chalked up to the shortening of the daylight. Everyone pulled out their dinner packets and drank from the roadside spring that had prompted the halt while the two men debated whether to rest the horses and continue on slowly—more slowly—by lantern light, or stop here and sleep under the wagons. No rain threatened, but the chill creeping from the hollows pushed consensus toward the lantern scheme; Whit blithely volunteered Dag to ride ahead with a lantern suspended from his hook, a suggestion that made Fawn grimace. The prospect of combining a burning and maybe drippy oil lantern with a cranky Copperhead, tired and bored from the day’s plod, made Dag say merely, “I’ll think about it.”
Dag walked around the spring, stretched his back, and sat down against a buckeye tree, extending both his legs and his groundsense. He’d kept closed all day in the presence of strangers and their chaotic farmer grounds. His reach was out to two hundred paces tonight, maybe? He still felt half-blinded. After pulling off Copper’s bridle and loosening the girth, Dag had turned him loose to browse under light ground contact. In the deepening shadows, Dag could better hear the ripping and munching than see with his eyes, but in his groundsense the gelding was an old familiar brightness, almost brighter than the boy Hod. Hod had gone to relieve himself up in the bushes and was now circling back. Keeping to the shadows, easing up toward Copperhead…
Dag came alert, though he did not open his eyes. Was the dimwitted boy contemplating a little attempted filching? Dag considered his responsibilities. Hod was no young patroller of Dag’s; still, if the boy was to learn a sharp lesson not to go riffling in a Lakewalker’s saddlebags, it might be better all around to be sooner than later, with Dag and not with another. It would doubtless be an embarrassing scene, but it might save Hod much worse later on. Dag withdrew his ground contact from Copperhead and settled back to let nature take its course.
Dag was expecting Copperhead’s angry squeal, head-snake, and cow-kick. He wasn’t expecting the ugly thunk or a scream of pain so loud, sharp, and prolonged. Blight it, what—? He yanked his ground-sense wide, then recoiled as the hot flush of injury swamped back in on him. Drawing breath, he wallowed to his feet.
The two teamsters pelted past him, with Whit on their heels crying warning for them to swing wide around the horse, who was snorting and backing. Fawn followed, having had the sense to pause and grab a lantern. Trying not to limp on his right leg, Dag stumbled after.
Hod was lying on the ground on his back, writhing from side to side, clutching and clawing at his leg and openly bawling. His face was screwed up in pain, mottled red and pale and popping out cold sweat. And no wonder. By whatever evil chance, Copperhead’s shod hoof had scored a direct hit on the boy’s right kneecap, shattering the bone and pulping the flesh behind it. Blight it, blight it, blight it…!
Tanner gasped. “What happened?”
Dag said, “Horse kicked him when he went to poke in my bags for grub.” Which won him a sharp look upwards from Fawn—You knew? They would deal with that aspect later. Dag surged forward.
To find himself blocked by the gray-haired and very solid Mape. “Don’t you touch him,