Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [88]
A scullion interrupted then, clearing the odd plate and asking if they’d like anything. Fawn shook her head warily, and Berry, intent on Cutter, waved the offer away, but Whit ordered a plate of mussels and a beer to go with.
“My papa was twenty years and more on the river,” Berry said after the scullion departed. “A good boat-builder, and his crew was all local fellows who’d gone down and back with him before. I usually went along myself, ’cept this last time.”
Cutter’s eyes opened. “Say, do you play the fiddle?”
Berry nodded. “I got good pay, playing the keeler boys upstream.”
His smile turned a shade more respectful, not that he’d been at all rude before. Some kind of river fellowship at work, Fawn guessed. “I’ve heard tell of you! Yellow-headed gal who travels with her daddy and scrapes real lively, has to be.” He sucked out the contents of another mussel shell, and went on, “My keel tied up down the bank is the Tripoint Steel, and I picked my crew special. Big fellows all, and we’ve come pretty well-armed, this time. Some of them were missing friends or kin, too, and volunteered when they heard what I was up to. Whatever this trouble is, we’re hoping to find it.”
Berry rubbed her nose. “Steel won’t help if it was sickness or shipwreck, but I admit it sounds right heartening. Are you thinking it was some kind o’ boat bandits? Boatmen’s been robbed before, it’s true, but usually word gets out pretty quick.”
Cutter scratched his short beard in doubt. “There would be the hitch in it. So many gone, so quiet-like…Some of us think there’s something uncanny about it.” His mouth tightened. “Like maybe sorcery. Or worse. Thing is, not only are the boats and bodies not showing up between the outlet of the Grace and Graymouth, neither are the goods, seemingly. Which makes a fellow wonder—what if they were diverted north to Luthlia instead, up the Gray into that wild Lakewalker country?”
Fawn sat up in indignation. “Lakewalkers wouldn’t rob farmer boats!”
Cutter shook his head. “They were valuable cargoes. Fine Tripoint steel and iron goods, plus I’d sent a deal of silver coin along with my keel bosses to buy tea and spices with, down south. Anyone could be tempted, but for some, it might be…easier.”
“It makes no sense,” Fawn insisted. “Leaving aside that Lakewalkers just don’t do things like that, Luthlia’s one of the few Lakewalker hinterlands that makes iron and steel on its own, and it’s good work, too. I’ve seen some. Dag says Luthlian mines and forges supply blades to the camps north of the Dead Lake nearly to Seagate! They can make steel that doesn’t even rust! Why would they rob yours?”
Cutter’s voice lowered. “Yeah, but there’s also the missing bodies to be accounted for. I can think of another reason they might not turn up downstream, and it ain’t a pretty one.” He ran a thumbnail between his teeth in a significant gesture, then glanced guiltily at the paling Berry. “Sorry, miss. But a man can’t help thinking.”
Fawn wanted to jump up and stalk out in a huff, but Whit’s mussels and beer arrived just then, and by the time the scullion took himself off again she had re-mastered her wits. “I can think of a reason a lot more likely than Lakewalkers—who do not either eat people—for folks to go missing, and that’s malices. Blight bogles. I was mixed up in that malice kill near Glassforge last spring—as close a witness as I could be. Bogles take farmer slaves, if they can. If one’s set up on the river, it’d be just as happy to take boatmen slaves, I’d imagine. And it wouldn’t necessarily know about selling stolen goods downstream.” Although its new minions might. Could a malice dispatch them to such a distance without risking losing control of them? Maybe not.
And yet…the whole Grace Valley was well-patrolled,