Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [59]
9
Fawn kept an eye out, but Dag did not return to the scavenging site before the coal boat boss came by with a barrow and bought back their pile. Berry scrupulously divided the scanty handful of coins five ways. On the walk back upstream to the Fetch, Bo silently split off and disappeared up the hill in the lengthening shadows toward Possum Landing village.
Berry just shook her head. At Fawn’s noise of inquiry, she explained, “Bo and I have a pact. He don’t drink the boat’s money. He’s kept to it pretty good, so far.” She sighed. “Don’t suppose we’ll see him again till morning.”
Still huffing with the chill despite dry clothes, Whit and Hawthorn built up the fire in the Fetch’s hearth while Fawn and Berry dodged around each other whipping together a hot meal. Dag, looking troubled, strolled in as Fawn was dishing out beans and bacon. He met her questioning look with a headshake.
“Maybe a walk after supper?” she murmured to him as he sat at the table.
“That’d be good,” he agreed.
A walk and a talk. There was something pressing on Dag’s mind, sure enough. Fawn was distracted keeping her good food coming, happy just to have a real, if cramped, kitchen to cook in after a summer of smoking herself as well as her meals over an open fire. She encouraged the hesitant Hod to eat up, and then he lurched to the opposite extreme and gobbled as if someone were going to snatch his food away. Whit chided him, and Fawn bent her head and grinned to watch Hod earnestly taking Whit for an authority—on table manners, of all things. Hawthorn chattered on about all the different ways he might spend his coal-salvaging coins. Berry encouraged him to save them; Whit advised him to invest them in something he might resell for a higher price downstream.
“Something nonbreakable would be smart,” Fawn suggested, winning an irate look from Whit. Dag smiled a little in his silence, and Fawn’s heart was eased. A nippy night was falling beyond the cabin’s square glass windows—frost might lace them by morning—but inside it seemed cozy and bright in the light of the oil lantern. Comfortable. It felt like friends in here, and Fawn decided she liked the feeling very well.
Dag’s head turned toward the bow; he laid down his fork. In a moment, heavy feet sounded crossing the gangplank, and then a thump as someone jumped to the deck. The boat rocked a trifle. A fist pounded on the front door—hatch, Fawn corrected her thought—and a male voice bellowed, “Boss Berry, send out that long Lakewalker you got hiding in there!”
“What?” said Whit, as Dag grimaced. “Someone for you, Dag?”
“Quite a few someones, seems like,” sighed Dag.
“Bother Bo for not being here,” muttered Berry, and stood up from her bench. Whit and Fawn followed her through the cabin; she motioned Hawthorn back. Hod hunched fearfully, and Dag did not rise, though he ran his hand through his hair and then leaned his chin on it.
“Berry!” shouted the voice again. “Out with him, we say!”
“Hush, Wain, you’ll wake all the catfishes’ children with your bawling,” Berry shouted back irritably. “I can hear you fine, I ain’t deaf.” She pushed open the hatch and strode through. “What’s this ruckus, then?” Whit followed at her elbow, and Fawn at Whit’s.
One of the big keelers loomed on the front deck between the goat pen and the chicken coop. Dag had left Copperhead tethered for the night to a tree up on shore, well away from the path, with an armload of hay to keep him occupied, but Daisy-goat bleated nervously at the noisy visitor. The man—Wain?—held a torch aloft. The orange light flickered over his broad face, flushed not with exertion or cold but beer, judging by the rich smell wafting from him.
On the shore, a mob of perhaps twenty people had gathered. Fawn stared in alarm. She recognized some of the keelers who had passed them going down to Pearl Bend earlier—you couldn’t forget those red-and-blue striped trousers, more’s the pity. The others might be townsmen, with