“Well, tell me which you’re doing, all right?”
“All right…” she said doubtfully.
Her expression was so very reserved and inward. As though painfully trying to listen to the marred song of her own body with a groundsense blighted deaf.
Or futilely looking for that other light within her, so bright and busy just this morning, now dark and dead. In all, Dag thought Fawn had been much too quiet ever since they’d left the lair. It made him feel unsettled and desperate.
He wondered if he ought to invent a few sisters for himself, to bolster his authority in the matter. “Look, I am a very experienced patroller,” he blathered on into that fraught silence. “I delivered a baby single-handedly on the Great Lake Road, once.” Wait, was this a good tale to tell now? Perhaps not, but it was too late to stop. “Well, not single-handedly, I had two hands then, but they were both pretty clumsy. Fortunately, it was the woman’s fourth, and she could tell me how to go on. Which she did, pretty tartly. She was not best pleased to be stuck with me for a midwife. She called me such names. I stored ‘em up to treasure—they came in right useful later on, when I was dealing with feckless young patrollers. Twenty-two I was, and so proud of myself after, you’d think I did all the work. Let me tell you, next bandit I faced after that didn’t look nearly so scary.”
This won a watery chuckle, as he’d hoped. Good, because if he’d gone with the fictional sisters, she might have asked their names, and he didn’t think his invention would last so far. His eyelids felt as if someone had attached lead weights to them when he wasn’t looking. The room was beginning to waver unpleasantly.
“She was one straightforward lady. Set me an example I never forgot.”
“I can see that,” murmured Fawn. And after a quiet moment added, “Thank you.”
“Oh, you’re an easy patient. I won’t have to shave you in the morning, and you won’t throw your boots at my head because you’re cranky and hurting. Bored cranky patrollers who hurt, world’s worst company. Trust me.”
“Do they really throw boots?”
“Yes. I did.”
A yawn cracked his face. His bruises and strains were reporting for duty, right enough. Reminded of his boots’ existence, he slowly drew up his feet and began to undo his laces. He’d had those boots on for two—no, four days, because he’d slept in them night before last.
“Would you feel more comfortable if I went out to sleep on the porch?” he asked.
Fawn eyed him over her sheets, now pulled up nearly to her lips. Pink, those lips, if much paler than he would have liked to see them, but not gray or bluish, good. “No,” she said in a curiously distant tone, “I don’t think I would.”
“Good…” Another yawn split the word, and others crowded after: “Because I don’t think… I could crawl through all that… sticky jam right now. Softer here. You can have the inside, I’ll take the outside.” He flopped forward facedown in the tick. He really should turn his head so he could breathe, he supposed. He turned toward Fawn, that being the better view, and eyed what he could see of her over the hillock of stuffed cloth. Dark curls, skin petal-fair where it was not bruised. Smelling infinitely better than him. A surprised brown eye.
“Mama,” he muttered, “the sheep are safe tonight.”
“Sheep?” she said after a moment.
“Patroller joke.” About farmers, come to think. He wasn’t going to tell it to her. Ever. Fortunately, he was growing too bludgeoned by his fatigue to talk.
He roused himself just enough to stretch over, pinch out the candle, and flop again.
“I don’t get it.”
“Good. ‘Night.” His rueful consciousness of that short curving body separated from his by only a couple of layers of fabric was intense, but very brief. Fawn woke in the dark of night on her right side, facing the kitchen wall, with a weight across her chest and a long, lumpy bolster seemingly wrapped around her in back. The weight was Dag’s left arm, she realized, and he must be dead asleep indeed to have flung it there, because he always seemed to carry it subtly out of the way, out of sight, when he was awake. His chin was scratching the back of her neck, his nose was buried in her hair, and she could feel her curls flutter with his slow breath. He lay very solidly between her and the door.
And whatever might come through the door. Scary things out there. Bandits, mud-men, blight bogles. And yet… wasn’t the tall patroller the scariest of all?
Because, at the end of the day, bandits, mud-men, and bogles all lay strewn in his path, and he was still walking. Limping, anyhow. How could someone scarier than anything make her feel safer? A riddle, that.
If not precisely trapped by his menace, she did find herself pinned by his exhaustion. Her attempt to slip out without waking him failed. There followed disjointed mumbled arguments in the dark about a trudge to the privy versus a chamber pot (he won), the change and care of blood-soaked dressings (he won again), and where he would go to sleep next (hard to tell who won that one, but he did end up on the tick between her and the door as before). Despite a new hot stone, her gnawing cramps ordained that he was asleep again before her. But the unlikely comfort of that bony body, wrapped like a fort wall around her hurting, assured that it wasn’t so very much before. When next she awoke it was broad day outside, and she was alone. Yesterday’s agony in her belly was reduced to a knotting ache, but her dressings were soaked again. Before she had time to panic, boot steps sounded on the porch, accompanied by a tuneless chirping whistle. She had never heard Dag whistle, but it could be no one else. He ducked in through the door and smiled at her, gold eyes bright from the light.
He must have been out bathing by the well, for his hair was wet and his damp skin free of blood and grime, leaving all his scratches looking tidier and less alarming. Also, he smelled quite nice, last night’s reek—although it had been reassuring to know exactly where he was even from several feet away in the dark—replaced with the clean sharpness of the lost farmwife’s homemade soap, rough brown stuff that she had nonetheless scented with lavender and mint.
He was shirtless, wearing a pair of unbloodied gray trousers clearly not his own cinched around his waist with a stray bit of rope. She suspected they came about a foot short lengthwise, but with the ends tucked into his boots, no one could tell. He had an uneven tan, his coppery skin paler where his shirt usually fell, although not nearly as pale as hers. He favored long sleeves even in summer, it seemed. His collection of bruises was almost as impressive as her own. But he was not so bony underneath as she’d feared; his long, strappy muscles moved easily under his skin. “Morning, Spark,” he said cheerily.
The first order of business was the repellent medical necessities, which he took on with such straightforward briskness that he left her almost feeling that blood clots were an achievement rather than a horror. “Clots are good. Red, spurting blood is bad. Thought we’d agreed on that one, Spark. Whatever the malice ripped up inside you is starting to mend, that says to me. Good work.
Keep lying down.”
She lay dozily as he wandered in and out. Things happened. A ragged white shirt appeared on his back, too tight across the shoulders and with the sleeves rolled up. More tea happened, and food: the remains of the pan bread she made yesterday rolled around some meat stew from the cellar. He had to coax her to eat, but miraculously, it stayed down, and she could feel strength starting to return to her body almost immediately because of it. Her hot stones were swapped out regularly. After a second longish expedition outside, he returned with a cloth full of strawberries from the farm woman’s kitchen garden and sat himself down on the floor beside her, sharing them out in mock exactitude.
She woke from a longer doze to see him sitting at the kitchen table, mulling glumly over his hand contraption laid out atop it.
“Can you fix it?” she asked muzzily. “Afraid not. Not a one-hand job even if I had the tools here. Stitching’s all ripped, and the wrist cap is cracked. This is beyond Dirla. When we get to Glassforge, I’ll have to find a harnessmaker and maybe a woodturner to put it right again.”