Their hostelry in Lumpton Market turned out to be an elderly inn just off the straight road north from town. Fawn thought it a sad comedown from the fine hotel in Glassforge, for it was small and grubby, if not without a certain air of shabby comfort. Further, it demanded cash money even from patrollers. In summer, however, patrons were sent out back of the kitchen to eat their dinners on plank tables and benches under some graceful old black walnut trees overlooking the side road, much better than the dank common room. Looking around curiously, Fawn saw no other Lakewalkers here tonight, just a quartet of teamsters at one table intent on their beer and, beyond them, a farm couple busy with a pack of noisy young children. Even with his height, striking looks, and splinted arm in a sling, Dag drew only brief stares, and Fawn felt reassuringly unnoticed in his shadow.
Dag slumped onto his bench with an understandably tired grunt, and Fawn slid in at his right. She plucked loose the ties of the lumpy leather wrap he’d directed she bring from his saddlebag, unrolling it to find it contained an array of extra devices for his wrist cuff. “Goodness, what are all these?”
“This and that. Experiments, or things I don’t use every day.” As she stared in bewilderment and held up a wooden bolt anchoring a curved and edged metal piece looking like a small stirrup, he added, “That’s a scraper. I spend a lot of time in the evening scraping hides, out on patrol. Boring as all get out, but one of the first jobs I took on after I got the arm harness. Forced me to strengthen the arm, which was good when I took up the bow.”
The scullion who doubled as servingwoman plunked down mugs of beer and trotted back inside. With hook and splinted hand, Dag clumsily reached, winced, and fell back, and Fawn said, “Ah! The bonesetter told you not to try and use your hand.
Five times when I was listening, and I don’t know how many more while I was out of the room. I thought he was going to slap you at one point.” The man had hardly needed Fawn’s encouragement to bind Dag’s arm with quelling thoroughness, having taken the measure of his aggravated patient very quickly. The barest tips of Dag’s fingers stuck out beyond the cotton wrappings. “You just keep it down in that sling there. We need to figure out how we’re to get along with all this.”
Hurriedly, she held the mug to his lips; he grimaced, but drank thirstily.
She managed not to splash him too badly when he nodded he was done, and whisked her handkerchief from her pocket to overtake his right arm up to mop his lips.
“And if you use your bandages for a napkin they’re going to stink long before six weeks are up, so don’t.”
He scowled sideways at her, ferociously.
“And if you keep looking at me like that, you’re going to make me break out in giggles, and then you’ll be throwing your boots at my head, and then where will we be?”
“No, I won’t,” he growled. “I need you to get the blasted boots off in the first place.”
But the corner of his mouth curled up nonetheless. Fawn was so relieved she got up on one knee and kissed the curl, which made it curve up more.
He vented a long, apologetic sigh for his touchiness. “Third from the left, there”—he nodded to the leather wrap—“should be a sort of fork-spoon thing.”
She pulled it out and examined it, an iron spoon with four short tines on the tip. “Ah, clever.”
“I don’t use it too often. A knife’s usually better, if I have anything at the table but my hook or the social hand.” That last was Dag’s name for the wooden hand-in-glove, which seemed to have little use but disguise among strangers, and not a very effective one at that.
With a slight clunk, Dag set his wooden cuff against the table edge. “Try swapping it out.”
Dag’s most commonly used device, the hook with the clever little spring strip, was set in tight. Fawn, leaning in, had to take a better grip before she was able to twist it out. The eating tool replaced it more readily. “Oh, that’s not too hard.”
Their plates arrived, piled with carrots and mashed potatoes with cream gravy and a generous portion of pork chops. After an exchange of silent looks—Fawn could see Dag working to keep his frayed temper—she leaned over and efficiently cut his meat, leaving the rest to him. The fork-spoon worked tolerably well, although it did involve his extending his elbow awkwardly. Thoughtfully, she kept the beer coming. It might just have been getting a good hot meal into him after a too-long day, but he slowly relaxed. The stout scullion then brought thick wedges of cherry pie, which threatened to push relaxation into sleep right there on the benches.
Fawn said, “So… should we stay here and rest up tomorrow, or push on and rest at West Blue? Will you be able to ride so far?” He had ridden from the bonesetter’s, his reins wrapped around his hook, but that had only been a mile.
“I’ve done more with worse. The powder will help.” He’d prudently picked up what he said was a Lakewalker remedy for pain from the medicine shop before they’d left the town square. Fawn wasn’t sure if the faint glaze in his eyes was from the drug or the ache in his arm; but on reflection, it was just as well the medicine didn’t work better, or there would be no slowing him down at all.
Confirming this, he stretched, and said, “I wouldn’t mind pushing on. There’s folks at Hickory Lake who can do things to help this heal faster.”
“Is it set all right?” she asked anxiously.
“Oh, yes. That bonesetter might have been a ham-handed torturer, but he knew his trade. It’ll heal straight.”
Dag had called him much worse things than that during the setting, but the fellow had just grinned, evidently used to colorful invective from his patients.
Possibly, Fawn thought, he collected the choice bits.
“If you don’t knock it around.” Fawn felt a little sick with anticipation of her homecoming. But if she had to do it at all, better to get it over with. Dag clearly thought it her duty, the right thing to do; and not even for Stupid Sunny and all her brothers put together would she risk Dag thinking her craven.
Even if I am. “All right. We’ll ride on.”
Dag rubbed his chin with his left sleeve. “In that case, we’d best get our tales straight. I want to leave out the primed knife in front of your family, just as we did for my patrol all but Mari.”
That seemed both fair and prudent. Fawn nodded.
“Anything else is up to you, but you have to tell me what you want.”
She stared down at the red streaks and crumbs on her empty plate. “They don’t know about me and Sunny. So they’re going to be mad that I scared them for seemingly nothing, running off like that.”
He leaned over and touched his lips to a red dent in her neck where one of the malice scabs had finally flaked off. “Not for nothing, Spark.”
“Yeah, but they don’t know much about malices, either.”
“So,” he said slowly, as if feeling his way, “if your Sunny has ‘fessed up, you will have one situation, and if he hasn’t, you’ll have another.”
“He’s not my Sunny,” Fawn said grumpily. “We were both real clear on that.” “Hm. Well, if you don’t tell your folks why you really left, you’ll have to make up some lie. This creates a tension and darkness in your ground that weakens a person, in my experience. I really don’t see why you feel any need to protect Sunny. Seems to me he benefits more from you keeping this secret than you do.”
Fawn’s eyebrows rose. “The shame of the thing goes on the girl. Used goods, they call you. You can’t get another suitor with good land, if word gets around you’re no virgin. Though… I think a lot of girls do anyhow, so you really have to wonder.”
“Farmers, eh.” Dag pursed his lips. “Does the same apply to widows, then?
Real ones, not grass ones.”
Fawn colored at this reminder, though she had to smile a little. “Oh, no.
Widows are a whole different matter. Widows, now… well, nobody can do as they please, really, there might be children, there might be no money, but widows hold their heads up fine and make their own way. Better if they’re not poor, to be sure.”
“So, ah… do you hanker after a suitor with good land, Spark?”
She sat up, startled. “Of course not! I want you.”
He cocked an eyebrow at her. “So why are you worrying about this, again?
Habit?”
“No!” She hesitated; her heart and voice fell. “I suppose… I thought we were a midsummer dream. I just keep trying real hard not to wake up. Stupid, I guess.
Somewhere, sometime… someone will come along who won’t let me keep you. Not for always.”
He looked away, through the deep shade of the walnut trees and down the side road where dust from the recent passage of a pony cart still hung golden in the westering sun. “However difficult your family is, mine is going to be worse, and I expect to stand up to them. I won’t lie, Spark; there are things that can take me from you, things I can’t control. Death is always one.” He paused. “Can’t think of anything else right at the moment, though.”
She gave a short, shaken nod, turning her face into his shoulder till she got her breath back.
He sighed. “Well, what you’ll say to your people is not my choice. It’s yours.
But my recommendation is to tell as much truth as you can, save for the knife priming.”
“How will we explain my going to your camp?”
“Your testimony to my captain is required in the death of the malice. Which is true. If they ask for more, I’ll get up on my tall horse and say it’s Lakewalker business.”
Fawn shook her head. “They won’t want to let me go off with you.”
“We’ll see. You can’t plan other people’s actions; only your own. If you try, you just end up facing the wrong way for the trouble you actually get. Hey.”
He bent down and kissed her hair. “If they chain you to the wall with iron bolts, undertake to break you out.”
“With no hands?”
“I’m very ingenious. And if they don’t chain you, then you can walk away. All it takes is courage, and I know you have that.”
She smiled, comforted, but admitted, “Not in my heart, not really. They… I don’t know how to explain this. They have ways of making me smaller.”
“I don’t know how they’ll be, but you are not the same as you were. One way or another, things will be different than you expect.”
Truly.
Exhausted, hurting, and uneasy, they did not make love that night, but held each other close in the stuffy inn chamber. Sleep was slow in coming. The summer sun was again slanting west when Fawn halted her mare and sat staring up the hill where a descending farm lane intersected the road. It had been a twenty-mile ride from Lumpton Market, and Dag had to admit, if only to himself, that his right arm was swollen and aching more than he cared for, and that his left, picking up an unaccustomed load, was not at its best either. They had taken the straight road north along the spreading ridge between the rivers for almost fifteen miles before turning west. Descending into the valley of the western branch, they’d crossed at a stony ford before turning north once more along the winding river road. A shortcut, Fawn claimed, to avoid doubling back a mile to the village of West Blue with its wagon bridge and mill.
And now she was home. Her ground was a complicated swirl at the moment, but it hardly took groundsense to see that her foremost emotion was not joy.
He kneed his horse up next to hers. “I think I’d like my social hand, to start,”
he murmured.
She nodded, and leaned over to open his belt pouch and swap out his hook for the less useful but less startling false hand. She paused to recomb her own hair and retie it in the curly horsetail with the bright ribbon, then stood up in her stirrups to take the comb to him as well; he lowered his head for the, in his unvoiced opinion, useless attempt to make him look his best. He perfectly understood her determination to walk back into her home looking proud and fine, not beaten and bedraggled. He just wished for her sake that he could look more the part of a valiant protector instead of something the cat had dragged in.
You’ve looked worse, old patroller. Go on.
Fawn swallowed and turned Grace into the lane, which wound up the slope for almost a quarter mile, lined on both sides with the ubiquitous drystone walls.
Past a grove of sugar maple, walnut, and hickory trees, a dilapidated old barn appeared on the right, and a larger, newer barn on the left. Above the new barn lay a couple of outbuildings, including a smokehouse; faint gray curls of smoke leaked from its eaves, and Dag’s nose caught the pleasant tang of smoldering hickory. A covered well sat at the top of the yard, and, on around to the right, the large old farmhouse loomed.
The central core of it was a two-story rectangle of blocky yellowish stone, with a porch and front door in the middle overlooking the river valley. On the far north end, a single-story add-on looked as though it contained two rooms. On the near end, an excavation was in progress, with piles of new stone waiting, evidently an addition planned to match the other. On the west, another add-on girdled with a long, covered porch ran the length of the house, clearly the kitchen. No one was in sight.
“Suppertime,” said Fawn. “They must all be in the kitchen.”
“Eight people,” said Dag, whose groundsense left him in no doubt.
Fawn took a long, long breath, and dismounted. She tied both their horses to the back porch rail and led Dag around to the steps. Her lighter and his heavier tread echoed briefly on the porch floor. Top and bottom halves of a double door were open wide and hooked to bolts in the wall, but beyond them was another, lighter doorframe with a gauze screen. Fawn pushed the screen door open and slipped in, holding it for him. He let his wooden hand rest briefly on her shoulder before dropping it to his side.
At a long table filling most of the right-hand half of the room, eight people turned and stared. Dag swiftly tried to match faces with the names and stories he’d been given. Aunt Nattie could be instantly identified, a very short, stout woman with disordered curly gray locks and eyes as milky as pearls, her head now cocked with listening. The four brothers were harder to sort, but he thought he could determine Fletch, bulky and oldest, Reed and Rush, the non-identical twins, brown-haired and brown-eyed, and ash-haired and blue-eyed respectively, and Whit, black-haired like Fawn, skinny, and youngest but for her. A plump young woman seated next to Fletch defeated his tutorial. Fawn’s parents, Sorrel and Tril Bluefield, were no hardship to identify, a graying man at the table’s head who’d stood up so fast his chair had banged over, and on the near end a short, middle-aged woman stumbling out of her seat shrieking.
Fawn’s parents descended upon her in such a whirl of joy, relief, and rage that Dag had to close off his groundsense lest he be overwhelmed. The brothers, behind, were mostly grinning with relief, and Aunt Nattie was asking urgently,
“What? Is that Fawn, you say? Told you she wasn’t dead! About time!”
Fawn, her face nearly unreadable, endured being hugged, kissed, and shaken in equal measure; the dampness in her blinking eyes was not, Dag thought, caught only from the emotions around her. Dag stiffened a little when her father, after hugging her off her feet, put her down and then threatened to beat her; but while his paternal relief was very real, it seemed his threats were not, for Fawn didn’t flinch in the least from them.
“Where have you been, girl?” her mother’s voice finally rose over the babble to demand.
Fawn backed up a trifle, raised her chin, and said in a rush, “I went to Glassforge to look for work, and I may have found some too, but first I have to go with Dag, here, to Hickory Lake to help make his report to his captain about the blight bogle we killed.”
Her family gazed at Fawn as though she’d started raving in a fever; Dag suspected the only part they’d really caught was Glassforge.
Fawn went on a bit breathlessly, before they could start up again, “Mama, Papa, this here is my friend, Dag Redwing Hickory.” She gave her characteristic little knee-dip, and pulled Dag forward. He nodded, trying to find some pleasantly neutral expression for his face. “He’s a Lakewalker patroller.”
“How de’ do,” said Dag politely and generally.
A silence greeted this, and a lot more staring, necks cranked back. Short stature ran in Fawn’s family, evidently.
Confirming Dag’s guess, Fawn’s mother, Tril, said, “Glassforge? Why would you want to go there to look for work? There’s plenty of work right here!”
“Which you left on all of us,” Fletch put in unhelpfully.
“And wouldn’t Lumpton Market have been a lot closer?” said Whit in a tone of judicious critique.
“Do you know how much trouble you caused, girl?” said Papa Bluefield.
“Yeah,” said Reed, or maybe Rush—no, Rush, ash-headed, check—“when you didn’t show for dinner market-day night, we figured you were out dawdling and daydreaming in the woods as usual, but when you didn’t show by bedtime, Papa made us all go out with torches and look and call. The barn, the privy, the woods, down by the river—it would have saved a deal of stumbling around in the dark and yelling if Mama had counted your clothes a day sooner!”
Fawn’s lip had given an odd twitch at something in this, which Dag determined to ask about later. “I am sorry you were troubled,” she said, in a carefully formal tone. “I should have written a note, so’s you needn’t have worried I’d met with an accident.”
“How would that have helped for worrying, fool girl!” Fawn’s mother wept a bit more. “Thoughtless, selfish…”
“Papa made me ride all the way to Aunt Wren’s, in the idea you might have gone there, and he made Rush ride to Lumpton asking after you,” Reed said.
A spate more of complaint and venting from all parties followed this. Fawn endured without argument, and Dag held his tongue. The ill words were not ill meant, and Fawn, apparently a native speaker of this strange family dialect, seemed to take them in their spirit and let the barbs roll off, mostly. Her eyes flashed resentment only once, when the plump girl beside Fletch chimed in with some support of one of his more snappish comments. But Fawn said only,
“Hello, Clover. Nice to see you, too,” which reduced the girl to nonplussed silence.
Notably missing was any word about Sunny Sawman. So Fawn’s judgment on that score was proven shrewd. Too early to guess at the consequences…
Dag was not sure how long the uproar would have continued in this vein, except that Aunt Nattie levered herself up, grasped a walking stick, and stumped around the table to Fawn’s side. “Let me see you, girl,” she said quietly, and Fawn hugged her—the first hug Dag had seen going the other way—and let the blind woman run her hands over her face. “Huh,” said Aunt Nattie. “Huh. Now introduce me to your patroller friend. It’s been a long time since I’ve met a Lakewalker.”
“Dag,” said Fawn, reverting to her breathless, anxious formality, “This is my aunt Nattie that I’ve told you about. She’d like to touch you, if that’s all right.”
“Of course,” said Dag.
The little woman stumped nearer, reached up, and bounced her fingers uncertainly off his collarbone. “Goodness, boy, where are you?”
“Say something,” Fawn whispered urgently.
“Um… up here, Aunt Nattie.”
Her hand went higher, to touch his chin; he obligingly bent his head. “Way up there!” she marveled. The knobby, dry fingers brushed firmly over his features, pausing at the slight heat of the bruises on his face from yesterday, circling his cheekbones and chin in inexplicable approval, tracing his lips and eyelids.
Dag realized with a slight shock that this woman possessed a rudimentary groundsense, possibly developed in the shadow of her lifelong blindness, and he let his reach out to touch hers.
Her breath drew in. “Ah, Lakewalker, right enough.”
“Ma’am,” Dag responded, not knowing what else to say.
“Good voice, too,” Nattie observed, Dag wasn’t sure who to. She stopped short of checking his teeth like a horse’s, although by this time Dag would scarcely have blinked at it. She felt down his body, her touch hesitating briefly at the splints and sling; her eyebrows went up as she felt his arm harness through his shirt and briefly gripped his wooden hand. But she added only, “Nice deep voice.”
“Have you eaten?” asked Tril Bluefield, and when Fawn explained no, they’d ridden all day from Lumpton, shifted to what Dag guessed was her more normal motherly mode, driving a couple of her sons to set chairs and places. She put Fawn next to herself, and Fawn insisted Dag be placed on her own right, “On account of I promised to help him out with his broken arm.” They settled at last. Clover, finally introduced as Fletch’s betrothed, was also drafted to help, plopping plates and cups of what smelled like cider down in front of them.
Dag, by this time very thirsty, was most interested in the drink. The food was a well-cooked stew, and Dag silently rejoiced at being confronted with something he could handle by himself, though he wondered who in the household had bad teeth.
“The fork-spoon, I think,” he murmured in Fawn’s ear, and she nodded and rummaged it out of his belt pouch.
“What happened to your arm?” asked Rush, across from them.
“Which one?” asked Dag. And endured the inevitable moment of rustling, craning, and stunned stares as Fawn calmly unscrewed his hand and replaced it with the more useful tool. “Thank you, Spark. Drink?” He smiled down at her as she lifted the cup to his lips. It was fresh cider, very tart from new summer apples.
“And thanks again.”
“You’re welcome, Dag.” He licked the spare drop off his lower lip, so she didn’t have to chase it with her napkin, yet.
Rush finally found his voice, more or less. “Er… I was going to ask about the, er, sling…”
Fawn answered briskly, “A sneak thief at Lumpton Market lifted my bedroll yesterday. Dag got it back, but his arm was broken in the fight before the thieves got scared and ran off. Dag gave a real good description to the Lumpton folks, though, so they might catch the fellows.” Her jaw set just a trifle.
“So I kind of owe him for the arm.”
“Oh,” said Rush. Reed and Whit stared across the table with renewed, if daunted, interest.
Tril Bluefield, looking hungrily and now more carefully at her restored daughter, frowned and let her hand drift to Fawn’s cheek where the four parallel gouges were now paling pink scars. “What are those marks?”
She glanced sidelong at Dag; he shrugged, Go on. She said, “That’s where the mud-man hit me.”
“The what?” said her mother, face screwing up.
“A… sort of bandit,” Fawn revised this. “Two bandits grabbed me off the road near Glassforge.”
“What? What happened?” her mother gasped. The assorted brothers, too, sat up; on Dag’s right, he could feel Fletch tense.
“Not too much,” said Fawn. “They roughed me up, but Dag, who was tracking them, came up just then and, um. Ran them off.” She glanced at him again, and he lowered his eyelids in thanks. He did not especially wish to begin his acquaintance with her family with a listing of all the dead bodies he’d left around Glassforge, the human ones at least. Far too many human ones, this last round. “That’s how we first met. His patrol had been called to Glassforge to deal with the bandits and the blight bogle.”
Rush asked, “What happened to the bandits after that?”
Fawn turned to Dag, who answered simply, “They were dealt with.” He applied himself to his stew, good plain farm food, in the hope of avoiding further expansion on this subject.
Fawn’s mother bent her head, eyes narrowing; her hand went out again, this time to the left side of Fawn’s neck and the deep red dent and three ugly black scabs. “Then what are those nasty-looking things?”
“Um… well, that was later.”
“What was later?”
In a desperately bright voice, Fawn replied, “That’s where the blight bogle lifted me up. They make those sorts of marks—their touch is deadly. It was big.
How big, would you say, Dag? Eight feet tall, maybe?”
“Seven and a half, I’d guess,” he said blandly. “About four hundred pounds.
Though I didn’t have the best vantage. Or light.”
Reed said, in a tone of growing disbelief, “So what happened to this supposed blight bogle, if it was so deadly?”
Fawn’s look begged help, so Dag replied, “It was dealt with, too.”
“Go on, Fawn,” said Fletch scornfully. “You can’t expect us to swallow your tall tales!”
Dag let his voice go very soft. “Are you calling your sister a liar… sir?” He let the and me? hang in implication.
Fletch’s thick brows wrinkled in honest bewilderment; he was not a man sensitive to implication, either, Dag guessed. “She’s my sister. I can call her anything want!”
Dag drew breath, but Fawn whispered, “Dag, let it go. It doesn’t matter.”
He did not yet speak this family dialect, he reminded himself. He had worried about how to conceal the strange accident with the sharing knife; he’d not imagined such feeble curiosity or outright disbelief. It was not in his present interest—or capacity—to bang Bluefield heads together and bellow, Your sister’s courage saved my life, and dozens, maybe thousands, more. Honor her! He let it go and nodded for more cider.
Blatantly changing the subject, Fawn asked Clover after the progress of her wedding plans, listening to the lengthy reply with well-feigned interest. The addition in progress on the south end of the house, it appeared, was intended for the soon-to-be-newlyweds. The true purpose of the question—camouflage—was revealed to Dag when Fawn added casually, “Anyone hear from the Sawmans since Saree’s wedding?”
“Not too much,” said Reed. “Sunny’s spent a lot of time at his brother-in-law’s place, helping clear stumps from the new field.”
Fawn’s mother gave her a narrow-eyed look. “His mama tells me Sunny’s betrothed to Violet Stonecrop as of midsummer. Hope you’re not disappointed. I thought you might be getting kind of sweet on him at one point.”
Whit piped up, in a whiny, practiced brotherly chant, “Fawn is sweet on Suh-nee, Fawn is sweet on Suh-nee…”
Dag cringed at the spate of deathly blackness that ran through Fawn’s ground.
He does not know, he reminded himself. None of them do. Although he would not have cast bets on Tril Bluefield’s unvoiced suspicions, because she now said in a flat voice unlike any he’d yet heard from her, brooking no argument, “Stop that, Whit. You’d think you were twelve.”
Dag could see the little ripple in Fawn’s jaw as she unset her teeth. “Not sweet in the least. I think Violet deserves better.”
Whit looked disappointed at not having drawn a more spectacular rise out of his sister from his expert lure but, glancing at his mother, did not resume his heckling.
“Perhaps,” Dag suggested gently, “we should go see to Grace and Copperhead.”
“Who?” asked Rush.
“Miss Bluefield’s horse, and mine. They’ve been waiting patiently out there.”
“What?” said Reed. “Fawn doesn’t have a horse!”
“Hey, Fawn, where’d you get a horse?”
“Can I ride your horse?”
“No.” Fawn thrust back her chair. Dag rose more quietly with her.
“Where did you get a horse, Fawn?” asked Papa Bluefield curiously, staring anew at Dag.
Fawn stood very straight. “She was my share for helping deal with the blight bogle. Which Fletch here doesn’t believe in. I must have ridden all the way from Glassforge on a wish horse, huh?”
She tossed her head and marched out. Dag cast a polite nod of farewell in the general direction of the table, thought to add a spoken, “Good evening, Aunt Nattie,” and followed. Behind him, he could hear her father’s growl, “Reed, go help your sister and that fellow with their horses.” Which in fact launched a general migration of Bluefields onto the porch to examine the new horse.
Grace was exhaustively discussed. At last Dag swapped back for his hook and led his own horse in an escape to the old barn, where spare stalls were to be found.
He lingered looking over the stall partition, keeping a light contact with his groundsense so the gelding wouldn’t snake around and attempt to savage Reed, his unfamiliar groom. Copperhead was not named for his chestnut color, despite appearances. When both horses were at last safely rubbed down, watered, and fed, Dag walked back to the house through the sunset light with Fawn, temporarily out of earshot of the rest of her relations.
“Well,” she said under her breath, “that could have gone worse.”
“Really?” said Dag.
“Really.”
“I’ll take your word. Truth to tell, I’m finding your family a bit strange.
My nearest kin don’t often like what I have to say, but they certainly hear what I have to say, and not something else altogether.”
“They’re better one at a time than in a bunch like that.”
“Hm. So… what was that about market-day night?”
“What?”
“When Rush said they’d missed you market-day night.”
“Oh. Nothing much. Except that I left market-day morning while it was still dark. Wonder where they thought I was all day?”
A number of Bluefields had collected in the front parlor, including Aunt Nattie, now plying a drop spindle, and Fawn’s mother. Dag set down his saddlebags and let Fawn unpack her gifts. Fletch, about to escort his betrothed home to her nearby farm, paused to watch as well.
Tril held the sparkling glass bowl up to the light of an oil lamp in astonishment. “You really did go to Glassforge!”
Fawn, who had wobbled all evening between trying to put on a good show and what seemed to Dag a most unfamiliar silent shrinking, said only, “That’s what I told you, Mama.”
Fawn pressed the corked scent bottle into her aunt’s hands and urged her to splash some on her wrists, which, smiling agreeably, she did. “Very pretty, lovie, but this sort of foolery is for courtin’ girls to entice their boys, not for lumpy old women like me. Better you should give it to Clover.”
“That’s Fletcher’s job,” said Fawn, with a more Spark-like edged grin at her brother. “Anyhow, all sorts of folks wear it in Glassforge—patroller men and women both, for some.”
Reed, hovering, snorted at the idea of men wearing scent, but Nattie showed willing and eased Dag’s heart by splashing a bit more on both herself and her younger sister Tril, and some on Fawn as well. “There! Sweet of you to think of me, lovie.”
It was growing dark outside. The boys dispersed to various evening chores, and Clover made farewells to her prospective in-laws. The two young women, Fawn and Clover, eyed each other a little stiffly as Clover made more congratulations on Fawn’s safe return, and Dag wondered anew at the strangeness of farmer customs.
A Lakewalker only-girlchild would have been the chief inheritor of her family’s tent, but that position here was apparently held by Fletch; and not Fawn but Clover would take Tril Bluefield’s place as female head of this household in due time. Leaving Fawn to go… where?
“I suppose,” said Papa Bluefield a trifle grudgingly, “if your friend here has a bedroll, he could lay it in the loft. Keep an eye on his horse.”
“Don’t be daft, Sorrel,” Aunt Nattie spoke up unexpectedly. “The man can’t climb the loft ladder with that broken arm.”
“He needs to be close by me, so’s I can help him,” said Fawn firmly. “Dag can lay his bedroll in Nattie’s weaving room.”
“Good idea, Fawn,” said Nattie cheerily.
Fawn slept in with her aunt; the boys shared rooms upstairs, as did their parents. Papa Bluefield looked as though he was thinking hard, suddenly, about the implications of leaving Fawn and Dag downstairs with a blind chaperone.
And then—inevitably—of the implications of how long Dag and Fawn had been on the road together. Did he know anything about his aging sister-in-law’s groundsense?
“I’ll try harder not to cut your throat with your razor tomorrow, Dag,” Fawn said.
“I’ve lost more blood for less,” he assured her.
“We should likely try to get on the road early.”
“What?” said Papa Bluefield, coming out of his frowning cogitation. “You’re not going anywhere, girl!”
She turned to him, stiffening up tight. “I told you first thing, Papa. I have an obligation to give witness.”
“Are you stupid, Fawn!”
Dag caught his breath at the hard black rip through Fawn’s ground; his eyes went to Nattie, but she gave no visible reaction, though her face was turned toward the pair.
Papa Bluefield went on, “Your obligations are here, for all you’ve run off and turned your back on them this past month! You’ve had enough gallivanting for a while, believe you me!”
Dag interposed quietly and quite truthfully, “Actually, Spark, my arm’s not doing all that well tonight. I wouldn’t mind a day or two to rest up.”
She turned anxious eyes up at him, as if not sure whether she was hearing support or betrayal. He gave her a small, reassuring nod.
Papa Bluefield gave Dag a sideways look. “You’d be welcome to go on, if you’ve a need.” “Papa!” snapped Fawn, gyrating back to something not strained show, but blazingly sincere. “The idea! Dag saved my life three times, twice at great risk to his own, once from the bandits, once from the malice—the bogle—and once again the night after the bogle… hurt me, because I would have bled to death right there in the woods if he hadn’t helped me. I will not have him turned out on the road by himself with two bad arms! For shame! Shame on this house if you dare!”
She actually stamped her foot; the parlor floor sounded like a drum.
Papa Bluefield had stepped backward. His wife was staring at Dag with eyes wide, holding the glass bowl tightly. Nattie… was amazingly hard to read, but she had a strange little smile on her lips.
“Oh.” Papa Bluefield cleared his throat. “You hadn’t exactly made that plain, Fawn.”
Fawn said wearily, “How could I? No one would let me finish a story without telling me I must be making things up.”
Her father glanced at Dag. “He’s a quiet one.”
Dag could not touch his temple; he had to settle for a short nod. “Thinking.
Sir.”
“Are you, now?”
It was not, in the Bluefield household, apparently possible to finish a debate.
But when the squabbling finally died into assorted mumblings, drifting away up stairs or down halls in the dark, Dag ended up with his bedroll set down beside Aunt Nattie’s loom, with an impressive pile of quilts and pillows arranged for his ease. He could hear the shortest two women of the family rustling around in the bedroom beyond in low-voiced preparation for bed, and then the creak of the bed frames as they settled down.
Dag disposed his throbbing arm awkwardly, grateful for the pillows. Save for the night on the Horsefords’ kitchen floor, he had never slept inside a farmer’s house, certainly not as an invited guest, though his patrols had sometimes been put up, by arrangement, in farmers’ barns. This beat a drafty hayloft with snow sifting in all hollow. Before he’d met Fawn’s family, he would scarcely have understood why she would want to leave such comforts.
He wasn’t sure if it was worse to be loved yet not valued than valued but not loved, but surely it was better to be both. For the first time, he began to think a farm’s brightest treasure need not be furtively stolen; it might be honestly won. But the hopes forming in his mind would have to wait on tomorrow for their testing.