Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [46]
“No, not now he’s here. Thanks! Oh, no—wait.” Whit went to the wheelers and gave Weft a pat and a hug around the neck, then ran around the wagon and repeated the gestures with Warp. “Good-bye, you two. You be good for Tanner now, you hear?” The horses flicked their ears at him; Warp gave him a soulful return nudge—unless he was just trying to use the boy as a scratching post—which made Whit blink rather rapidly.
“They’re real good, for such young ’uns,” Tanner assured him. “You take care, too.” He donned his hat and tugged the brim at Dag. “Lakewalker.” And, a little to Dag’s surprise, slapped his reins on the team’s rumps and drove off minus Whit. A quick look around located both Fawn’s and Whit’s saddlebags leaning against the porch steps of the goods-shed. A couple of idlers on the shaded bench, one whittling, the other just sitting with his hands slack between his knees, frowned curiously at Dag.
“Aren’t you going along to help him?” Dag asked Whit, nodding toward the wagon rumbling away.
“I just helped him load on about a ton of goods from Tripoint and upriver that he’s taking back to Glassforge. Mape was going to get up a load from downriver at the Bend—cotton and tea, he said, and indigo if they had any, if the price was right.”
“He did. I just saw him.”
“Oh, good.”
“Mape told me they mean to start home tomorrow morning, after they rest the horses,” said Dag. “You, ah, mean to catch up?”
“Not exactly.”
“So, what? Exactly?” Gods, he was sounding just like Sorrel. But Whit didn’t seem to notice.
“Oh, you have to come see, you have to come see. Come on, get our bags up on Copper and I’ll show you.”
Dag had no heart to dampen such enthusiasm, despite his own lingering foul mood. Dutifully, he dismounted and helped sling the bags across his saddle, wrapped the reins around his hook, and strolled after Whit, who strained ahead like a puppy on a leash. The idlers’ eyes followed them, narrowing in suspicion at Dag. Edgy, far from friendly, but not quite the hostility that might have been expected had any of Barr’s and Remo’s victims died during the night. Absent gods be thanked. Walking first forward, then backward, Whit waved and called good-bye to them as well, by which Dag reckoned they’d been briefly hired by Tanner as fellow-loaders, a typical way for such rivertown wharf rats to pick up a little extra coin.
“So if you’re not going back to Glassforge with Tanner and Mape and Hod, what are you going to do?” Dag probed.
“I’m gonna try me some river-trading. I spent some of my horse money on window glass, to sell off the Fetch. That’s Berry’s boat. Boss Berry,” Whit corrected himself with a lopsided grin.
“What about that promise to your parents about going straight home?”
“That wasn’t a promise, exactly. More like a plan. Plans change. Anyhow, if I get all my glass sold by the time we reach Silver Shoals, I could take the river road home and not get lost, and get back hardly late at all.”
There seemed a certain disquieting vagueness to this new plan. Well, Dag would find out what Fawn thought of it shortly. He returned his attention warily to his surroundings.
They passed along the scattered row of flatboats tied to the trees along the bank. A man sitting on a crate in one bow hunched and scowled as Dag went by. A woman frowned, clutched up a wide-eyed toddler, its thumb stuck in its mouth, and skittered inside her boat’s top-shed. A collection of flatties idling and laughing on a boat roof fell abruptly silent, stood, and stared across at Dag.
“Why are they starin’?” Whit asked, craning his head in return.
“They starin’ at you, Dag? I been by here twice and they never stared at me…”
“Just keep walking, Whit,” said Dag wearily. “Don’t turn your head. Turn around, blight it!”
Whit was walking backward again, but he obediently wheeled. “Huh?”
“I’m a Lakewalker, seemingly alone, in farmer country. Corpse-eater, grave-robber, sorcerer, remember? They wonder what I’m up to.” They wonder if I’m an easy target. They wonder if they could take me. He supposed they might also be wondering