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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 a
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 Su
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 Su
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 Su
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 Su
“Good!” said Dag, startling her. She stared at him.
He added, “I’d been wondering what to make of Stupid Su
Now I think maybe a drum skin would be good. I’ve never ta
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 Su
In the exact same distant tone that he’d inquired about Su
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 Su
“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—Su
Fawn’s nose wrinkled in doubt. “It’s not what I’d pictured.” Not of Su