Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [94]
“Look!” Fawn told Dag in excitement. “It has to be so much better for heating, because a fireplace only shows one face to a room, and this thing shows, what, six. Six times better. And you wouldn’t have to bend and crouch to cook on it, and it wouldn’t blow smoke in your face, either, and you’re less like to catch your clothes or hair on fire, too!” Oh, I want one!
He stared at it and her in mild alarm. “You’d need a wagon and team to shift it, Spark!”
“Naturally you wouldn’t cart it around with you, any more than you would a fireplace. Fire pit,” she revised, thinking of Lakewalkers camps.
“It would have to be planted someplace permanent.”
“Hm,” he said, looking at her with one of his odder smiles. “Farmer tool.”
“Well, of course.” She tossed her head, imagining someplace permanent where you could plant such a stove, and a garden. And children. Not a Lakewalker camp, they’d proved that. Not a farmer village, or at least not West Blue. A town like this one? Maybe not, as such a big concentration of folks plainly made Lakewalkers deeply uncomfortable. Where, then? Regretfully, she allowed Dag and Remo to drag them away from the fascinating emporium.
Back on the Fetch, they found a crisis brewing as Berry and Bo were ready to cast off, but Hawthorn’s raccoon kit had disappeared. Bo was all for leaving without the pesky creature, assuring the distraught Hawthorn that his pet would swim down the river and find a new home in the woods just fine. Hawthorn envisioned more dire fates, loudly. Then the listening Remo made himself hero of the hour—or at least of Hawthorn—by walking along the bank and retrieving the kit from a boat down the row where, caught raiding the pantry, it was about to meet its end at either the hands of the boat’s irate cook or the jaws of the excited boat-dog. Remo had a dangerously attractive face-lightening smile like Dag’s, Fawn discovered as he handed the little masked miscreant back to its ecstatic owner. Berry noticed it too, and smiled in pure contagion; Whit first smiled at her smile, then frowned at Remo.
As the boat made midstream and peace fell, Fawn pulled out her wool and drop spindle and took a seat on the bow to spin, watch the riverbank pass by, and think. Remo had to have opened and used his groundsense for that swift rescue, despite his aversion to farmer grounds. For Lakewalkers, hunting must be a very different activity than for farmers, if they could just stroll into a woods and find prey as easily as a woman picking jars off her pantry shelf. Although she supposed convincing, say, a bear to submit to having its skin peeled was just as dangerous to a Lakewalker hunter as to any farmer. Or was it? Were there other practical uses for persuasion than just on farmer merchants and maidens? And horses and mosquitoes and fireflies. She would have to ask Dag.
Twisting her yarn plump for warmth—it would knit up faster that way, too—she made quite a bit of progress before it was time to break off and go start lunch. An iron stove, she thought longingly, could be installed on a boat like this one and not be so sessile after all. But it would be a short love affair—you’d have to sell it downstream just as the boats were sold off at journey’s end, sometimes as houseboats for the poorer riverfolk but more usually broken up for their lumber. Most of Graymouth was built of former flatboats, she’d heard. She hated to think of the Fetch so dismembered, and hoped someone would buy it for a cozy floating home.
As she made her way into the kitchen, she found Dag sitting at the drop-table, his head bent strangely. He was staring down at a distressing lumpy gray blob on a pie plate, his face drained and almost greenish.
“What in the world is that thing?” Fawn asked, nodding at the plate. “You’re not going to eat it, are you?” The man certainly needed to get more food inboard, but preferably something wholesome. This looked like something dead too long that had been fished from the bottom of the river.
“Last piece of apple pie from last night,