Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [44]
“I could cook, sure,” said Fawn valiantly, stirred by the thought of the savings on their purse. Which, to her mind, was none too fat for a trip of this length, though she’d shied from confiding her money doubts to Dag. “I used to help cook for eight every night, back home. Dag, well…” Dag did not exactly fit Berry’s description of the sort of crewman she was looking for, though Fawn had no doubt he could man any sweep made. “Dag’ll have to speak for himself, when he comes.”
Berry ducked her head. “Fair enough.”
An awkward silence followed this, which Berry broke by saying lightly, “Fancy a mug of cider? We’ve got lots. It’s all going hard in the warm. I’ve been selling some to the boatmen here, who like it better fizzy, so I’ve not lost my whole trouble, but even they won’t drink it after it goes vinegar.”
“Sure,” said Fawn, happy for the chance to maybe sit and talk more with this intriguing riverwoman. Fawn had been stuck on one farm her whole life, till this past spring. She tried to imagine instead traveling the length of the Grace and the Gray not once, but eight or ten—no, sixteen or twenty—times. Berry seemed very tall and enviably competent as she led Fawn back inside, picked up a couple of battered tankards in passing, and turned the barrel’s spigot. The cider was indeed fizzy and fuzzy, but it hadn’t lost quite all its sweetness yet, and Fawn, who had been growing hungry, smiled gratefully over the rim of her mug. Berry led her back to the folding table, and they both pulled up stools.
“I wish it would hurry up and rain,” said Berry. “I was done asking around here the first day, but I’ve been stuck for ten days more. I need at least eighteen inches of rise to get the Fetch over the Riffle, and that’d be scraping bottom.” She took a pull and wiped her mouth on her sleeve, and said more diffidently, “You haven’t been long on the river, I take it?”
Fawn shook her head, and answered the real question. “No, we wouldn’t have heard anything of your people.” She added conscientiously, “Well, Whit and I wouldn’t. Can’t speak for Dag.”
“Whit?”
“My brother. He’s just along for the ride as far as the Grace. He’ll go home with the glass-men tomorrow.” Fawn explained about Warp and Weft, and Whit’s financial schemes. With half her cider gone, Fawn felt bold enough to ask, “So how come you stayed home this past fall?” Fawn knew exactly how agonizing it was not to know what disaster had befallen one’s beloved, but she couldn’t help thinking Berry might have been lucky not to have shared it, whatever it had been.
“You really got married this summer?” said Berry, in a wistful tone.
Fawn nodded. Beneath the table, she touched Dag’s wedding cord wrapping her left wrist. The sense of his direction that he had laid in it, or in her, before Raintree had almost faded away. Maybe, with his ghost hand coming back, he could renew the spell? Groundwork, she diligently corrected her thought.
“I thought I would be wed by then, too,” sighed Berry. “I stayed behind to fix up what was going to be my—our—new house, see, and so papa left my little brother with me, because I was going to be a grown-up woman. Alder, my betrothed, he went with papa too, because he’d never been down the river, and papa thought he ought to learn the boatman’s trade. We were to be married in the spring when they all came back with the profits. Papa said this was going to be his best run ever. ’Course, he says that every fall, whether it’s true or not.” She drank more cider. “Spring came back to Clear Creek, but they never did, not any of the three or their hired hands. I had everything ready, everything—” She broke off.
Fawn nodded, not needing a list to picture it: linens and cooking gear all assembled, bride bed built and feather ticks stuffed and maybe all of it garnished with embroidered coverlets, curtains