Beguilement (11 page)

His silence this time took on an easy, listening quality. Unhurried. She felt she might fill it in her own good time. Out in the fields, a few early-summer insects sang in the weeds.

In a lower voice she said, “I didn’t mean to have a child. I wanted, wanted, something else. And then I was so scared and mad.”

Seeming to feel his way as cautiously as a hunter in the woods, he said,

“Farmer customs aren’t like ours. We hear pretty lurid songs and tales about them.

Your family—did they cast you out?” He scowled; Fawn was not sure why.

She shook her head harder. “No. They’d have taken care of me and the child, if they’d been put to it. I didn’t tell them. I ran away.”

He glanced at her in surprise. “From a place of safety? I don’t understand.”

“Well, I didn’t think the road would be this dangerous. That woman from Glassforge made it, after all. It seemed like an even trade, me for her.”

He pursed his lips and stared off down the lane to ask, even more quietly,

“Were you forced?”

“No!” She blew out her breath. “I can clear Stupid Sunny of that, at least. I wanted—to tell the truth, I asked him.”

His brows went up a little, although a tension eased out of his shoulders.

“Is there a problem with this, among farmers? It seems quite the thing to me. The woman invites the man to her tent. Except I suppose you don’t have tents.”

“I could have wished for a tent. A bed. Something. It was at his sister’s wedding, and we ended up out in the field behind the barn in the dark, hiding in the new wheat, which I thought could have stood to be taller. I hoped it might be romantic and wild. Instead, it was all mosquitoes and hurry and dodging his drunken friends. It hurt, which I expected, but not unbearably. I’d just thought there would be… more to it. I got what I asked for but not what I wanted.”

He rubbed his lips thoughtfully. “What did you want?”

She took a breath, thinking. As opposed to flailing, which was maybe what she had been doing back home. “I think… I wanted to know. It—what a man and a woman do—was like some kind of wall between me and being a grown-up woman, even though I was plenty old.”

“How old is plenty old?” He cocked his head curiously at her.

“Twenty,” she said defiantly.

“Oh,” he said, and though he managed to keep the amusement out of his voice, his gold eyes glinted a bit.

She would have been annoyed, but the glint was too pretty to complain about, and then there were the crow’s-feet, which framed the glint so perfectly. She waved her hands in defeat and went on, “It was like a big secret everyone knew but me.

I was tired of being the youngest, and littlest, and always the child.” She sighed. “We were a bit drunk, too.”

She added after a morose silence, “He did say a girl couldn’t be got with child the first time.”

Dag’s eyebrows climbed higher. “And you believed this? A country girl?”

“I said I was stupid about it. I thought maybe people were different than heifers. I thought maybe Sunny knew more than me. He could hardly know less.

It’s not as if anyone talked about it. To me, I mean.” She added after a moment,

“And… I’d had such a hard time nerving myself up to it, I didn’t want to stop.”

He scratched his head. “Well, among my people, we try not to be crude in front of the young ones, but we have to instruct and be instructed. Because of the hazards of tangling our grounds. Which young couples still do. There’s nothing so embarrassing as having to be rescued from an unintended groundlock by your friends, or worse, her kin.” At Fawn’s baffled look, he added, “It’s a bit like a trance. You get wound up in each other and forget to get up, go eat, report for duty… after a couple of hours—or days—the body’s needs break you out. But that’s pretty uncomfortable. Dangerous in an unsafe place to be so unaware of your surroundings for that long, too.”

It was her turn to say, “Oh,” rather blankly. She glanced up at him. “Did you ever… ?”

“Once. When I was very young.” His lips twitched. “Around twenty. It’s not something most people let happen twice. We look out for each other, try not to let the first learning kill anyone.”

A couple of days? I think I had a couple of minutes… She shook her head, not sure if she believed this tale. Or understood it, for that matter. “Well, that—what Sunny said then—wasn’t what made me so mad. Maybe he didn’t know either. Even getting with child didn’t make me mad, just scared. So I went to Sunny, because I reckoned he had a right to know. Besides, I thought he liked me, or maybe even loved me.”

Dag started to say something, but then at her last statement stopped himself, looking taken aback, and just waved her to continue. “This has to have happened to other farmer women. What do your folk usually do?”

Fawn shrugged. “Usually, people get married. In kind of a hurry. Her folks and his folks get together and put a good face on it, and things just go on. I mean, if no one is married already. If he’s already married, or if she is, I guess things get uglier. But I didn’t think… I mean, I had nerved myself up for the one, I figured I could nerve myself up for the other. “But when I told Sunny… it wasn’t what I’d expected. I didn’t necessarily think he’d be delighted, but I did expect him to follow through. After all, I had to.

But”—she took a deeper breath—“it seems he had other arrangements. His parents had made him a betrothal with the daughter of a man whose land bordered theirs.

Did I say Sunny’s folks have a big place? And he’s the only son, and she was the only child, and it had been understood for years. And I said, why didn’t he tell me earlier, and he said, everyone knew and why should he have, if I was giving myself away for free, and I said, that’s fine but there’s this baby now, and it was all going to have to come out, and both our parents would make us stand up together anyhow, and he said, no, his wouldn’t, I was portionless, and he would get three of his friends to say they’d had me that night too, and he’d get out of it.” She finished this last in a rush, her face hot. She stole a glance at Dag, who was sitting looking down the lane with a curiously blank face but with his teeth pressed into his lower lip. “And at that point, I decided I didn’t care if I was pregnant with twins, I wouldn’t have Stupid Sunny for my husband on a bet.” She jerked up her chin in defiance.

“Good!” said Dag, startling her. She stared at him.

He added, “I’d been wondering what to make of Stupid Sunny, in all this tale.

Now I think maybe a drum skin would be good. I’ve never tanned a human skin, mind you, but how hard could it be?” He blinked cheerfully at her.

A spontaneous laugh puffed from her lips. “Thank you!”

“Wait, I haven’t done it, yet!”

“No, I mean, thank you for saying it.” It had been a joke offer. Hadn’t it?

She remembered the bodies strewn in his wake yesterday and was suddenly less sure.

Lakewalkers, after all. “Don’t really do it.”

“Somebody should.” He rubbed his chin, which was stubbled and maybe itchy, and she wondered if shaving was something he didn’t do one-handed, either, or if it was just that his razor was in the bottom of his lost saddlebags along with his comb. “It’s different for us,” he went on. “You can’t lie about such things, for one. It shows in your ground. Which is not to say my people don’t get tangled up and unhappy in other ways.” He hesitated. “I can see why his family might choose to believe his lie, but would yours have? Is that why you ran off?”

She pressed her lips together, but managed a shrug. “Likely not. It wasn’t that, exactly. But I’d have been lessened. Forever. I would always be the one who…

who had been so stupid. And if I got any smaller in their eyes, I was afraid I’d just disappear. I don’t suppose this makes any sense to you.”

“Well,” he said slowly. “No. Or maybe yes, if I broaden the notion from just having babies to living altogether. I am put in mind of a certain not-so-young patroller who once moved the world to get back on patrol, for all that there were plenty of one-handed tasks needing doing back in the camps. His motives weren’t too sensible at the time, either.”

“Hm.” She eyed him sideways. “I figured I could learn to deal with a baby, if had to. It was dealing with Stupid Sunny and my family that seemed impossible.”

In the exact same distant tone that he’d inquired about Sunny and rape, he asked, “Was your family, um… cruel to you?”

She stared a moment in some bewilderment, trying to figure out what he was picturing. Beatings with whips? Being locked up on nothing but bread and water?

The fancy seemed as slanderous of her poor overworked parents and dear Aunt Nattie as what Sunny had threatened to say of her. She sat up in mortified indignation. “No!" After a reflective moment she revised this to, “Well, my brothers can be a plague. When they notice me at all, that is.” Justice served, but it brought her back to the depressing notion that it was all something wrong with her. Well, maybe it was.

“Brothers can be that,” he conceded. He added cautiously, “So could you go home now? There no longer being a”—his gesture finished, baby, but his mouth managed—“an obstacle.”

“I suppose,” she said dully.

His brows drew down. “Wait. Did you leave some word, or did you just vanish?”

“Vanished, more or less. I mean, I didn’t write anything. But I would think they could see I’d taken some things. If they looked closely.”

“Won’t your family be frantic? They could think you were hurt. Or dead. Or taken by bandits. Or who knows what—drowned, caught in a snare. Won’t Stu—Sunny confess and turn out to help search?”

Fawn’s nose wrinkled in doubt. “It’s not what I’d pictured.” Not of Sunny, anyway. Now relieved of the driving panic of her pregnancy, she thought anew of the baffling scene she’d likely left behind her at West Blue, and gulped guilt.

“They have to be looking for you, Spark. I sure would be, if I were your”—He bit off the last word, whatever it was, abruptly. Chewed and swallowed it, too, as if uncertain of the taste.

She said uneasily, “I don’t know. Maybe if I went back now, Stupid Sunny would think I had been lying. To trap him. For his stupid farm.”

“Do you care what he thinks? Compared to your kin, anyway?”

Her shoulders hunched. “Once, I cared a lot. He seemed… he seemed splendid to me. Handsome…” In retrospect, Sunny’s face was round and bland, and his eyes far too dull. “Tall…” Actually, short, she decided. He was as tall as her brothers, true. Who would come up maybe to Dag’s chin. “He had a good horse.” Well, so it had appeared, until she’d seen the long-legged beasts the patrollers all rode.

Sunny had shown off his horse, making it sidle and step high, making out that it was a restive handful only an expert might dare bestride. Patrollers rode with such quiet efficiency, you didn’t even notice how they were doing it. “You know, it’s odd. The farther away I get from him, the more he seems to… shrink.”

Dag smiled quietly. “He’s not shrinking. You’re growing, Spark. I’ve seen such spurts in young patrollers. They grow fast, sometimes, in the crush, when they have to get strong or go under. Takes some adjusting after, be warned—like when you put on eight inches of height in a year and nothing fits anymore.”

An example not, she suspected, pulled out of the air. “That was what I wanted.

To be grown-up, to be real, to matter.”

“Worked,” he said reflectively. “Roundaboutly.”

“Yes,” she whispered. And then, somehow, finally, the dam cracked, and it all came loose. “Hurts.”

“Yes,” he said simply, and put his arm around her shoulders, and snugged her in tight to him, because she had not cried all that night or day, but she was crying now. Dag studied the top of Fawn’s head, all he could see as she pressed her face into his chest and wept. Even now, she choked her sobs half to silence, shuddering with their suppression. His certainty that she needed to release the strain in her ground was confirmed; if he’d been forced to put it into words for her, he might have said that the fissures running through her seemed to grow less impossibly dark as her sorrow was disgorged, but he wasn’t sure if that would make sense to her. Sorrow and rage. There was more erosion of spirit here, going back further, than the malice’s destruction of her child.

His instinct was to let her weep the grief out, but after a time his worry roused anew as she clutched her belly once more, a sign of physical pain returning. “Sh,” he whispered, hugging her one-armed. “Sh. Don’t be making yourself sick, now. Would you like your hot stone again?”

Her clutch transferred to his sleeve and tightened. “No,” she muttered. She briefly raised her face, mottled white and flushed where it was not dark with bruises. “ ‘M too hot now.”

“All right.”

She ducked back down, gaining control of her breathing, but the tight stress in her body didn’t ease. He wondered if her abandonment of her family without a word was as appallingly ruthless as it seemed, or if there was more to the tale, but then, he came from a group that watched out for each other systematically, from partnered pairs through linkers to patrols to companies and right on up in a tested web. I sure would be looking for you, Spark, if I were your—and then his tongue had tangled between two choices, each differently disturbing: father or lover. Leave it alone. You are neither, old patroller. But he was the only thing she had for a partner here. So.

He lowered his lips toward her ear, nestled in the black curls, and murmured,

“Think of something beautifully useless.”

Her face came up, and she sniffed in confusion. “What?”

“There are a lot of senseless things in the world, but not all of them are sorrows. Sometimes—I find—it helps to remember the other kind. Everybody knows some light, even if they forget when they’re down in the dark. Something”—he groped for a term that would work for her—“everyone else thinks is stupid, but you know is wonderful.”