Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [65]
The gray fog did not burn off as the sun climbed, but rather, thickened. Fawn’s stomach was growling when Dag spotted a huge old tulip tree fallen with its roots in the air, sheltering a scooped-out depression blown full of dry leaves. With their blankets atop and below, they soon arranged a hidey-hole as cozy as a fox’s den, and settled down to share a late, cold breakfast—Dag declined to light a fire, lest the smoke betray their refuge. His burst of energy departed him as abruptly as it had seemed to come on, and he fell into a drained doze. Happily, he woke sufficiently refreshed after a few hours to while away the leaden afternoon in the best slow lovemaking they’d had for weeks. The mist outside turned to drizzle, but did not penetrate their nest. After, they curled up around each other, Fawn thought, like hibernating squirrels.
Dag woke from another doze with a laugh on his lips. It was the most joyful sound she’d heard from him in a long time. She rolled up on one elbow and poked him. “What?”
He pulled her to him and kissed her smile. “I really saved that woman’s life!”
“What, hadn’t you noticed?” She kissed his smile back. “Like this medicine making, do you? I think it suits you.” She added after a moment, “I’m right proud of you, you know.”
His smile faded into seriousness. “My people are full of warnings about this sort of thing. It’s not that they think it can’t be done, and it’s not the beguilement problem—they hardly mentioned that. It’s that farmers think it’s magic, and that magic should always work perfectly. I won Hod, and I won Cress, but only because I was lucky that she had something I was pretty sure I could get around. I can think of half a dozen illnesses I couldn’t have touched.”
She curled his chest hair around one finger and set her lips to the hollow at the base of his throat. “What would you have done then?”
“Not started, I suppose. Been a good boy just as Captain Osprey wanted. Watched that poor woman die.” His brows knotted in thought. “Some young medicine makers get very troubled when they first lose patients, but I’m surely past that. Absent gods help me, I used to kill people on purpose. But the greatest danger Lakewalkers fear is that if they try to help and fail, the farmers will turn on them. Because they have, you know. I’m not the first to be tempted down this road. And I don’t know how to handle it. Heal and run? Amma’s complaint wasn’t made-up.”
“Or maybe,” Fawn said slowly, “if you stayed in one place for a long time, folks would get to know and trust you. And then it would be safe to fail, sometimes.”
“Safe to fail.” He tasted the phrase. “There’s a strange idea, to a patroller.” He added after a long moment, “It’s never safe to fail hunting malices. Someone has to succeed, every time. And not even at any cost, because you have to have enough left afterward to succeed tomorrow, too.”
“It’s a good system,” agreed Fawn, “for malices. Not so sure about it as a system for people.”
“Hm.” He rolled over and stared at the tiny pricks of light coming through the holes in their blanket-tent, held up by the ragged roots. “You do have a way of stirring up the silt in my brain, Spark.”
“You saying I cloud your thinking?”
“Or that you get to the bottom of things that haven’t been disturbed in far too long.”
Fawn grinned. “Now, who’s going to be the first one to say something rude and silly about the bottom of things?”
“I was always a volunteerin’ sort of fellow,” Dag murmured, and kissed his way down her bare body. And then there was some very nice rudeness indeed, and giggling, and tickling, and another hour went away.
They arrived back at the Fetch well after dark in a cold drizzle that the boat folk plainly thought a great disappointment, inadequate to the purpose of putting anything bigger than a barrel over the Riffle. Whit reported four visits from tight-lipped Lakewalkers looking for Dag, two from the camp captain, one from the ferry boss, and one from the furtive medicine maker,