Fawn’s monthly had begun the day after Dag had left, not a surprise, but an unpleasant reminder of too many regrets. Sarri had shown Fawn how Lakewalker women used cattail fluff as absorbent stuffing for their ragbags, which could be emptied into the slit trench instead of tediously washed out along with the bags, after. The consolation was slight. Fawn had spent two unhappy days sitting, spinning, and cramping, trying without success to decide if this was just a bad one, or some abnormal relic from the malice’s mishandling, and wishing Mari were here to ask; but the grinding pain had passed off at last, and her fears eased with her bleeding. Today was much better.
Last row. Fawn cast off neatly and laid the new pair of cotton-yarn socks out on her skirted thigh. They had come out well; the few dropped stitches had been properly recaptured, the heels turned at a natural angle and not something that her brothers would have threatened to dress the rooster in. She grinned in memory of the irate bird stalking around with those misshapen wool bags tied to its feet, though at the time she’d been even madder than it had.
She slipped into her tent and combed her unruly hair, tying it up with a ribbon, then rummaged in her scrap bag for a bit of colored yarn. She folded the socks neatly and made a bow around the bundle with the yarn, to help them look more like a present. Then she straightened up, put her shoulders back, and walked down the road toward Cumbia Redwing’s encampment.
Rain had blown through from the west last night, and the tall hickory trees shed sparkling drops as a fresh breeze stirred them. Dag’s company must have ridden through the same broad storm, Fawn calculated, though whether it had caught them on the road or in shelter she could not guess. Despite the lingering damp, when Fawn came to the Redwing site she spotted Cumbia working outside, sitting on a leather cushion atop the inevitable upended log seat at one of the crude plank tables. She was wearing the sleeveless calf-length shift that seemed usual for women in summer here, this one a faded bluish-red that spoke of some berry dye. The lean, upright posture was slightly bent, the shining silver head turned down over her task. Skeins of the long-fibered plunkin flax yarn lay out on the table; with a four-pronged lucet, Cumbia was looping them into the strong, light cord Lakewalkers used. As Fawn had hoped, Dar and Omba were nowhere in sight—off to the bone shack and Mare Island, presumably.
Cumbia looked up and scowled as Fawn approached. Her hands, as gnarled with work and age as any farmwife’s, went on expertly braiding.
Fawn dipped her knees, and said, “How de’. Nice morning.”
Silence.
Unpromising, but Fawn hadn’t expected this to be easy. “I knitted Dag a pair of socks to go under his riding boots, very fine. He seemed to like them a lot. So I made a pair for you, too.” She thrust out her little bundle. Cumbia made no move to take it. If Fawn had been offering a dead squirrel found rotting in the woods, Cumbia’s expression might have been much the same. Fawn set the socks down next to the skeins and stepped back just a little, schooling herself not to turn and flee. She had to hook up some response to build on besides that dead stare. “I was glad to see you come watch Dag ride out the other morning. I know you wanted him to become an officer.”
The hands reached the end of some counting turn, stopped, and set the wooden tool on the table with a sharp clack. The scowl deepened. As if the words were jerked from her, Cumbia said, “Not like this.”
“How else should it be? It seemed very like Dag.”
“It came out all wrong.” Cumbia blew out her breath. “It generally does, with that boy. The aggravation and sorrow he has brought me, first to last, can hardly be counted.” Her gaze on Fawn left no doubt as to what she considered the latest entry in that tally.
At least she’s started talking. “Well, folks we’re close to most often do aggravate us. Because otherwise we wouldn’t care. He’s brought good things as well. Twenty-seven malice kills, to start. You have to be proud of that.”
Cumbia grimaced. “Oh, he’s proven himself on patrol, right enough, but he’d done that by the time he was twenty-five. It’s in camp where he’s ducked his duties, as if patrolling got him off responsibility for all else. If he’d married when he should have, years ago, we wouldn’t be in this muddle now.”
“He did, once,” Fawn pointed out, in an attempt at a dignified reply. “Right on time for a Lakewalker man, I guess. It turned into a hurtful tragedy that still haunts him.”
“He’s not the first nor the last to suffer such. Plenty of others have lost folks in the maw of some malice.” And Cumbia was one of them, Fawn was reminded. “He’s had twenty years to put it behind him.”
“Well, then”—Fawn took a breath—“it looks like he’s not going to, doesn’t it? You all had your chance with him, and a good long chance it was. Maybe it’s someone else’s turn now.”
Cumbia snorted. “Yours?”
“Seems like. I’d say you haven’t lost anything to me that you had in the first place. When I met him, he wasn’t betrothed to anything but his own death, near as I could tell. And if he’s lost that infatuation, well, good!”
Cumbia leaned back, her attention now fully engaged. Which wasn’t exactly a comfortable feeling, but at least it was a shift from her attempt to pretend Fawn didn’t exist at all.
Fawn went on, “You’re both of you stiff-necked. I think Dag must get it from you, to tell the truth. Somebody has to bend before things break.” Hearts, for one. “Can’t you please stop Dar from going to the camp council? It’s bound to end badly.”
“Yes, for you,” said Cumbia. More level than venomous, oddly.
Fawn raised her chin. “Do you really believe Dag’ll choose to cut strings if he’s forced to the edge? That he’d break his word? You have a strange idea of your son, for knowing him so long.”
“I believe he’ll be secretly relieved to be freed of that ill-chosen oath to you, girl. Embarrassed, sure, and obnoxious about it—men always are, when they’re caught in the wrong. But in the long run, glad to be rescued from his own mistakes, and gladder still not to have to do it himself.”
Fawn bit her lip. So you think your son’s a coward, as well as a liar? She didn’t say it. Or spit it. She was shaken by a faint undercurrent of plausibility in Cumbia’s argument. I’ve known him half a summer. She’s known him all his life. She gripped the cord around her left wrist, for solace and courage. “What if he chooses banishment?”
“He won’t. No Lakewalker could. He’ll remember what he owes, and who to.”
In general, Dag tried to keep as much distance between himself and his family as he could, and Fawn was beginning to see why. People left their families all the time—it was as normal for a Lakewalker man as it was for a farmer woman. Sometimes it was the straight path for growing up, like Dag’s marriage in Luthlia; he presumably had never intended to return from there once he’d wed Kauneo. Sometimes families were impossible in their own right, and could not be fixed, only fled from, and she was beginning to wonder if a little of that might have been behind Dag’s first marriage, too. She chose at last, “Who’s pushing this camp council showdown—you, or Dar?”
“The family is united in trying to rescue Dag from this—I grant, self-inflicted—disaster.”
“Because I think Dar knows better. And if he’s telling you something else, he’s lying.”
Cumbia looked faintly bemused. “Farmer girl, I’m a Lakewalker. I know when someone is lying.”
“Fooling himself, then.” Fawn tried another tack. “All this is hurting Dag. I can see the strain in him. It wasn’t right to send him off to war with all this mess on his mind.”