Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [89]
Cutter looked as if the idea of a river bogle didn’t sit well with him, but he didn’t reject it out of hand. If it was a malice snatching boats, all Cutter’s big men with big knives would be no use to him. But a lot of use to the malice. Fawn shivered.
Whit, watching her mulish expression anxiously, said, “Hey, Fawn, try one of these!” and pushed his plate of gaping mussel shells toward her. She picked one up and eyed it; Berry leaned over and showed her how to detach the morsel from its housing. Fawn chewed dubiously, without as much effect as she would have thought, gulped, and stole some of Whit’s beer for a chaser. Berry absently helped herself to a few more.
“If you find a pearl,” Cutter put in, watching Fawn with some amusement, “you get to keep it. They take back the shells, though.”
All those buttons, after all. Still, the notion of a pearl was enough to make her try one more, till Whit pulled back his plate in defense.
Cutter turned more seriously to Berry. “Your missing folks aren’t necessarily connected to ours. Or else the problem goes back farther than I thought. But my keel will be downriver before your flat, I expect, and I can ask after your folks, too, while I’m asking. What are the names again?”
Cutter listened carefully to Berry’s descriptions of her papa, brother Buckthorn, Alder, and their crewmen. She didn’t mention her betrothal, and from the pause in his chewing Fawn thought Whit noticed this. Remarking that two sets of ears were better than one, Cutter returned the names and some descriptions of the Tripoint boats and bosses—bewildering to Fawn, especially as some boats were named after men, but Berry seemed to follow it all. Berry even remarked of one boat, or boss, “Oh, I know that keel; Papa and us worked it upriver from Graymouth ’bout three years back,” which made Cutter nod.
Cutter leaned back, looking over the two young women and Whit, and asked, “So what do you have for muscle on your Fetch, ’sides this sawed-off boy here?” Which made Whit sit up and put his shoulders back, frowning.
“Two tall fellers and my uncle Bo, who’s canny when he’s sober. Couple of boat boys.”
Not mentioning, Fawn noticed, that the two tall fellows were shifty Lakewalkers. Was Berry actually growing protective of her unusual sweep-men?
Cutter’s mouth tightened in concern. “If I were you girls I’d find another flat or two to float with, so’s you can watch out for each other going down. If it’s river bandits, they’re more like to cut out a stray than tackle a crowd. There’s safety in numbers.”
Berry nodded acknowledgment of the point without precisely agreeing to the plan, and they took their leave of the Tripoint man.
Fawn, still fuming over Cutter’s slander of Lakewalkers, hadn’t been going to repeat that part to Dag when they all got back to the Fetch, but, alas, the excited Whit promptly did. Dag responded only with his peculiar expressionless expression, lowering and raising his eyelids, which Fawn recognized as his I am not arguing look that could conceal anything from bored weariness to silent rage. Dismissing the slur, however, Dag was a lot more interested in the news about the other lost boats. He agreed with Fawn’s hopeful suggestion that a river malice seemed unlikely due to the heavy patrolling in the region, but his hand, she noticed, absently rubbed his neck where a cord for a sharing knife sheath no longer hung.
Just before supper, finding herself briefly alone on the back deck with Whit, Fawn said, “You know, Berry’s still betrothed to her Alder, as far as she knows. What are you going to do if we find him downstream somewhere?”
Whit scratched his head. “Well, there’s this. I figure if we find out he’s died, she’ll need a shoulder