Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [9]
“Dag didn’t mean her to be idle. I thought you might train her to the cart.”
“Well, maybe. Papa means to breed her again, for sure. If we can find a stud around here worthy of her. He was talkin’ about Uncle Hawk’s Trustful, or maybe that flashy stallion of Sunny Sawman’s.”
Fawn said neutrally, “Trustful would be good.” She added, “Papa and Mama aren’t planning to cut Darkling, are they? Dag’s tent-sister Omba was worried about that.”
“Geld that colt? You’d have to be mad!” said Whit. “Just think of the stud fees, in a couple of years! He’ll support his mama in her old age, sure enough—and our mama, too.”
Fawn nodded in satisfaction on Omba’s behalf. “That’s all right, then.” She added, “Grace was bred to a real fine Lakewalker stallion named Shadow before we left.” Somewhat by accident, but that was another tale. “Dag expects her to throw a right lovely foal next spring, with his lines and her temper.”
Whit grinned. “As long as it’s not the other way around.”
“Hey! Grace is a very pretty horse, too, in her own way!”
“If you like ’em short and plump, which I admit is a popular style around here.”
Fawn gave him a suspicious scowl, but deciding he was referring to Clover and not herself, let the dig pass.
Whit lifted his brows and sniggered. “We’ll have to tell Clover your mare is going to beat her to the finish line in the baby race. I want to see the look on her face.”
I’m not in any baby race! Fawn was about to snap, but a loud, sharp whistle from the other end of the wheat field interrupted her. Papa took his hand from his mouth and jerked his thumb firmly toward the ground. His children, interpreting this without difficulty, shrugged in reply and crouched to their gleaning again.
When Mama, Clover, and Aunt Roper lugged lunch up to the wheat field, everyone took a break under the nearby apple trees. Fawn collected a skirt-load of the wormier groundfalls and carried them across to the pasture fence as a treat for the horses. They all clustered up, making the fence creak as they leaned over it, and nuzzled the aromatic fruit out of her hands, their thick, mobile lips tickling her palms. She liked watching the happy way their jaws moved beneath their sliding skins as they munched and crunched and sighed in appreciation, and how they rounded their big nostrils and blinked their deep brown eyes.
She wiped the mess of apple bits and horse slobber from her hands onto her skirt, and started back toward the orchard. Dag was sitting with Uncle and Aunt Roper and Fawn’s cousins, talking and gesturing. Trying to explain ground and groundsense to them, she guessed, partly from the way his hand touched the cord circling his left arm, and waved and closed and opened, but mostly by the way his desperately smiling listeners leaned back as if wishful to edge away, even while sitting cross-legged. Aunt Roper spotted Fawn, waved, and patted the ground beside her invitingly—come protect us from your wild patroller! Fawn sighed and trudged toward them.
The planned few days of rest in West Blue had slid instead into a few weeks of hard work, but Dag found himself oddly at ease despite the delay. The long days outdoors with the harvest-patrol had been laborious—that bean field, for one, had turned out to be much bigger than it looked, and before it was cleared Dag had started seeing cascades of beans in his sleep—but he was sleeping, and well, too. Indoors, every night, in a real bed, wrapped around Fawn. The food was not all dried-out to carry light, painstakingly rationed to the length of a pattern-walk, but gloriously, weightily abundant. There was no worse source of tension than an occasional clash of tempers, no deeper fear than of a splash of untimely rain.
This break in their journey had been good for him. The dark, sick pain in his bones from the blight was giving way to mere clean fatigue from well-used muscles. His left leg was not as weak—he hadn’t needed his stick for days. He felt less…unbalanced. He had not, admittedly, attempted to stray