Beguilement

Chapter 14

The next morning passed quietly. To Fawn’s eye Dag looked tired, moved slowly, and said little, and she thought his arm was probably troubling him more than he let on. She found herself caught up, will or nil, in the never-ending rhythm of farm chores; cows took no holidays even for homecomings. She and Dag did take a walk around the place in the midmorning, and she pointed out the scenes and sites from her tales of childhood. But her guess about his arm was confirmed when, after lunch, he took some more of the pain powder that had helped him through yesterday’s long ride. He slipped out—wordlessly—to the front porch overlooking the river valley and sat leaning against the house wall, nursing the arm and thinking… whatever he was thinking about all this. Fawn found herself assigned to stirring apple butter in the kitchen, and while you are about it, dear, why don’t you make up some pies for supper?

She was fluting the edge of the second one and reluctantly contemplating building up the fire under the hearth oven, which would make the hot room hotter still, when Dag came in.

“Drink?” she guessed.

“Please…”

She held the water ladle to his lips; when he’d drained it, he added, “There’s a young fellow who’s tethered his horse in your front woods. I believe he imagines he’s sneaking up the hill in secret. His ground seems pretty unsettled, but I don’t think he’s a house robber.”

“Did you see him?” she asked, then halted, considering what an absurd question that sounded if you didn’t know Dag. And then how well she had come to know Dag, that it should fall so readily from her lips.

“Just a glimpse.”

“Was he bright blond?”

“Yes.”

She sighed. “Sunny Sawman. I’ll bet Clover told folks that I’m back, and he’s come to see for himself if it’s true.”

“Why not ride openly up the lane?”

She flushed a little, not that he’d likely notice in this heat, and admitted,

“He used to sneak up to steal kisses from me that way, from time to time. He was afraid of my brothers finding out, I think.”

“Well, he’s afraid of something.” He hesitated. “Do you want me to stay?”

She tilted her head, frowning. “I better talk to him alone. He won’t be truthful if he’s in front of anyone.” She glanced up uneasily at him. “Maybe… don’t go far?”

He nodded; she didn’t seem to need to explain further. He stepped into Aunt Nattie’s weaving room, flanking the kitchen, and set the door open. She heard him dragging a chair behind it, and the creak of wood and possibly of Dag as he settled into it.

A few moments later, footsteps sounded on the porch, attempted tiptoe; they paused outside the kitchen window above the drainboard. She stepped up and stared without pleasure at Sunny’s face, craning around and peering in. He jerked back as he saw her, then whispered, “Are you alone?”

“For now.”

He nodded and nipped in through the back door. She regarded him, testing her feelings. Straw-gold hair still curled around his head in soft locks, his eyes were still bright blue, his skin fair and fine and summer-flushed, his shoulders broad, his muscular arms, tanned where his sleeves were rolled up, coated with a shimmer of gold hairs that had always seemed to make him gleam in sunlight.

His physical charm was unchanged, and she wondered how it was that she was now so wholly unmoved by it, who had once trembled beneath it in a wheatfield in such wild, flattered elation.

His daughter would have been a pretty girl. The thought twisted in her like a knife, and she fought to set it aside.

“Where is everyone?” he asked cautiously, looking around again.

“Papa and the boys are up cutting hay, Mama is out giving the chickens a dusting with that antilice powder she got from your uncle, and Aunt Nattie’s bad knee hurt so she went to lie down after lunch.”

“Nattie’s blind, she won’t see me anyhow. Good.” He loomed nearer, staring hard at her. No—just at her belly. She resisted an impulse to slump and push it out.

His head cocked. “As little as you are, I’d have thought you’d be popping out by now. Clover sure would have bleated about it if she’d noticed.”

“You talk to her?”

“Saw her at noon, down in the village.” He shifted restlessly. “It’s all the talk there, you turning up again.” He turned again, scowling. “So, did you come back to fuss at me some more? It won’t do you any good. I’m betrothed to Violet now.”

“So I heard,” said Fawn, in a flat voice. “I actually hadn’t planned to see you at all. We wouldn’t have stayed on today except for Dag’s broken arm.”

“Yeah, Clover said you had some Lakewalker fellow trailing you. Tall as a flagpole, with one arm wooden and the other broke, who didn’t hardly say boo.

Sounds about useless. You been running around alone with him for three or four weeks, seemingly.” He wet his lips. “So, what’s your plan? Switching horses in the middle of the river? Going to tell him the baby is his and hope he can’t count too good?”

A cast-iron frying pan was sitting on the drainboard. Swung in an appropriate arc, it would just fit Sunny’s round face, Fawn thought through a red haze.

“No.”

“I’m not playing your little game, Fawn,” said Sunny tightly. “You won’t pin this on me. I meant what I said.” His hands were trembling slightly. But then, so were hers.

Her voice went, if possible, even flatter. “Well, you can put your mind and your nasty tongue to rest. I miscarried down near Glassforge the day the blight bogle nearly killed me. So there’s nothing left to pin on anyone, except bad memories.”

His breath of relief was visible and audible; he squeezed his eyes shut with it.

The tension in the room seemed to drop by half. She thought Sunny must have gone into a flying panic when he’d heard of her return, watching his comfortable little world teeter, and felt grimly recompensed. Her world had been turned upside down. But if she could now turn it back upright, make all her misery not have been, at the cost of losing all she’d learned on the road to Glassforge—would she?

She could not, she thought, in all fairness judge Sunny for acting as though his daughter weren’t real to him; she’d scarcely seemed real to Fawn a deal of the time either, after all. She asked instead, “So where did you think I’d gone?”

He shrugged. “I thought at first you might have thrown yourself in the river.

Gave me a turn, for a while.”

She tossed her head. “But not enough of one to do anything about it, seemingly.”

“What would there have been to do at that point? It seemed like the sort of stupid thing you’d do when you get a mad on. You always did have a temper. I remember how your brothers’d get you so wound up you could scarcely breathe for screaming, sometimes, till your pa’d tear his hair and come beat you for making such awful noise. Then the word got around that some of your clothes had gone missing, which made it seem you’d run off, since not even you would take three changes to go drowning. Your folks all looked, but I guess not far enough.”

“You didn’t help look then, either, I take it.”

“Do I look stupid? I didn’t want to find you! You got yourself into this fix, you could get yourself out.”

“Yeah, that’s what I figured.” Fawn bit her lip.

Silence. More staring.

Just go away, you awful lout. “I haven’t forgotten what you said to me that night, Sunny Sawman. You aren’t welcome in my sight. In case you’d any doubt.”

He shrugged irritably. His golden brows drew together over his snub nose. “I figured the blight bogle was a tall tale. What really happened?”

“Bogles are real enough. One touched me. Here and there.” She fingered her neck where the dents glowed an angry red, and, reluctantly, laid her palm over her belly. “Lakewalkers make special knives to kill malices—that’s their name for blight bogles. Dag had one. Between us, we did for the bogle, but it was too late for the child. It was almost too late for the two of us, but not quite.”

“Oh, magic knives, now, as well as magic monsters? Sure, I believe that. Or maybe some of those secret Lakewalker medicines did the job, and the rest is a nice tale to cover it, make you look good in front of your family, eh?” He moved closer to her. She moved back.

“They don’t even know I was pregnant. I didn’t tell them that part.” She drew a long breath. “Do you really care which, so long as it’s not on you? Feh!” She gripped her hair, then drew her hands down hard over her face. “You know, I really don’t give two pennies what you think as long as you go think it somewhere else.” Aunt Nattie had once remarked that the opposite of love was not hate, but indifference. Fawn felt she was beginning to see the point of that.

Sunny edged closer again; she could feel his breath stir the sweat-dampened hairs on her neck. “So… have you been letting that patroller fellow poke you?

Does your family know that?”

Fawn’s breath clogged in rage. She would not scream… “After a miscarriage?

You got no brains at all, Sunny Sawman!”

He did hesitate at that, doubt flickering in his blue eyes.

“Besides,” she went on, “you’re marrying Violet Stonecrop. Are you poking her yet?”

His lips drew back in something like a smile, except that it was devoid of humor. He stepped closer still. “I was right. You are a little slut.” And grinned in countertriumph at the fury she knew was reddening her face. “Don’t give me that scowl,” he added, lifting a hand to squeeze her breast. “I know how easy you are.”

Her fingers groped for the frying-pan handle.

Long footsteps sounded from the weaving room; Sunny jumped back hurriedly.

“Hello, Spark,” said Dag. “Any more of that cider around?”

“Sure, Dag,” she said, backing away from Sunny and escaping across the room to the crock on the shelf. She shifted the lid and drew a cup, willing her hands to stop shaking.

Somehow, Dag was now standing between her and Sunny. “Caller?” he inquired, with a nod at Sunny. Sunny looked as though he was furiously wondering whether Dag had just come in, if they had been overheard, and if the latter, how incriminatingly much.

“This here’s Sunny Sawman,” said Fawn. “He’s leaving. Dag Redwing Hickory, a Lakewalker patroller. He’s staying.”

Sunny, looking unaccustomedly up, gave a wary nod. Dag looked back down without a whole lot of expression one way or another.

“Interestin’ to meet you at last, Sunny,” said Dag. “I’ve heard a lot about you.

All true, seemingly.”

Sunny’s mouth opened and closed—shocked that his slanderous threats had failed to silence Fawn? Well, he had only his own mouth to blame now. He looked toward the weaving room, which had no other exit except into Nattie and Fawn’s bedroom, and did not come up with a reply.

Dag continued coolly, “So… Sunny… has anyone ever offered to cut out your tongue and feed it to you?”

Sunny swallowed. “No.” He might have been trying for a bold tone, but it came out rather a croak.

“I’m surprised,” said Dag. He gently scratched the side of his nose with his hook, a quiet warning, Fawn thought, if both unobserved and unheeded by Sunny.

“Are you trying to start something?” asked Sunny, recovering his belligerence.

“Alas.” Dag indicated his broken arm with a slight movement of the sling.

“I’ll have to take you up later.”

Sunny’s eyes brightened as the apparent helplessness of the patroller dawned on him. “Then maybe you’d better keep a still tongue in your head till then, Lakewalker. Ha! Only Fawn would be fool enough to pick a cripple for a bullyboy!”

Dag’s eyes thinned to gold slits as Fawn cringed. In that same level, affable tone, he murmured, “Changed my mind. I’ll take you up now. Spark, you said this fellow was leaving. Open the door for him, would you?”

Plainly unable to imagine what Dag could possibly do to him, Sunny set his teeth, planted his legs, and glowered. Dag stood quite still. Confused, Fawn hastily set down the cup, slopping cider on the table; she swung the screen door inward and held it.

When Dag moved, his speed was shocking. She caught only a glimpse of him swerving half-around Sunny, his leg coming up hard behind Sunny’s knees, and his left arm whipping around with a wicked whir and glint of his hook. Suddenly Sunny was flailing forward, mouth agape, lifted by Dag’s hook through the seat of his trousers. His feet churned but barely touched the floor; he looked like someone tumbling on ice. Three long Dag-strides, a loud ripping noise, and Sunny was sailing through the air in truth, headfirst all the way over the porch boards to land beyond the steps in an awkward heap, haunches up, face scraping the dirt.

It was partly terrorized relief that Dag hadn’t just torn Sunny’s throat out with his hook as calmly as he’d slain that mud-man, but Fawn burst into a shriek of laughter. She clapped her hand across her mouth and stared at the ridiculously cheering sight of Sunny’s drawers flapping through the new vent in his britches.

Sunny twisted around and glared up, his face flushing a dull, mottled red, then scrambled to his feet, fists clenching. Between the dirt and the curses filling his mouth his spluttering was nearly incoherent, but the general sense of I’ll get you, Lakewalker! I’ll get you both! came through clearly enough, and Fawn’s breath caught in new alarm.

“Best bring a few friends,” Dag recommended dryly. “If you have any.” Aside from the flaring of his nostrils, he seemed barely winded.

Sunny took two steps up onto the porch, but then veered back uncertainly as that hook came quietly to the fore. Fawn darted for the frying pan. As Sunny hovered in doubt, his head jerked up at a thumping and shuffling sounding from the weaving room—blind Aunt Nattie with her cane. She had risen from her nap at last. Sunny stared wildly around, tripped backward down the steps, turned, and fled around the side of the house.

“You’re right, Spark,” Dag said, closing the screen door again. “He doesn’t much care for witnesses. You can sort of see why.”

Nattie wandered into the kitchen. “Hello, Fawn, lovie. Hello, Dag. My, that apple butter smells good.” Her face turned, following the retreating footsteps rounding the house and fading. “Young fool,” she added reflectively. “Sunny always thinks if I can’t see him, I can’t hear him. You have to wonder, really you do.”

Fawn gulped, dropped the pan on the table, and flew into Dag’s embrace. He wrapped his left arm around her in a reassuring hug. Aunt Nattie’s head tilted toward them, a smile touching her lips. “Thank you kindly for that bit o’

housecleaning, patroller.”

“My pleasure, Aunt Nattie. Here, now.” Dag folded Fawn closer. “For what it’s worth, Spark, he was more afraid of you than you were of him.” He added reflectively, “Sort of like a snake, that way.”

She gave a shaken giggle, and his grip eased. “I was about to hit him with the frying pan, just before you came in.”

“Thought something like that might be up. I was having a few daydreams along that line myself.”

“Too bad you couldn’t really have cut his tongue out…” She paused. “Was that a joke or not? I’m not too sure sometimes about patroller humor.”

“Eh,” he said, sounding faintly wistful. “Not, in any case, currently practical.

Though I suppose I’m right glad to see Sunny doesn’t believe any of those ugly rumors about Lakewalkers being black sorcerers.”

Her trembling diminished, but her brows pinched as she thought back. “I’m so glad you were there. Though I wish your arm wasn’t broken. Is it all right?”

She touched the sling in worry.

“That wasn’t especially good for it, but I haven’t unset it. We’re lucky for your aunt Nattie and Sunny’s, ah, sudden shyness.”

She drew back to stare up at his serious face, her eyes questioning, and he went on, “See, despite whatever hog butchering he’s done, Sunny’s never been in a lethal fight. I’ve been in no other kind since I was younger than him. He’s used to puppy scraps, the sort you have with brothers or cousins or friends or, in any case, folks you’re going to have to go on living with. Age, weight, youth, muscle, would all count against me in that sort of scuffle, even without a broken arm. If you truly want him dead, I’m your man; if you want less, it’s trickier.”

She sighed and leaned her head against his chest. “I don’t want him dead. I just want him behind me. Miles and years. I suppose I just have to wait for the years. I still think of him every day, and I don’t want to. Dead would be even worse, for that.”

“Wise Spark,” he murmured.

Her nose wrinkled in doubt. How seriously had he meant that lethal offer, to be so relieved that she hadn’t taken him up on it? Remembering, she fetched him his drink, which he accepted with a smile of thanks.

Nattie had drifted to the hearth to stir the apple butter which, by the smell, was on the verge of scorching. Now she tapped the wooden spoon on the pot rim to shake off the excess, set it aside, turned back, and said, “You’re a smart man, patroller.”

“Oh, Nattie,” said Fawn dolefully. “How much of that awfulness did you hear?”

“Pretty much all, lovie.” She sighed. “Is Sunny gone yet?”

That funny look Dag got when consulting his groundsense flitted over his face.

“Long gone, Aunt Nattie.”

Fawn breathed relief.

“Dag, you’re a good fellow, but I need to talk with my niece. Why don’t you take a walk?”

He looked down to Fawn, who nodded reluctantly. He said, “I expect I could stand to go check on Copperhead, make sure he hasn’t bitten anybody yet.”

“I ’spect so,” Nattie agreed.

He gave Fawn a last hug, bent down to touch his cider-scented lips to hers, smiled in encouragement, and left. She heard his steps wend through the house to the front door, and out.

Fawn wanted to put her head down in Nattie’s lap and bawl; instead, she busied herself raking the coals under the oven for the pies. Nattie sat on a kitchen chair and rested her hands on her cane. Haltingly at first, then less so, the story came out, from Fawn’s foolish tumble at the spring wedding to her growing realization and fear of the consequences to the initial horrid talk with Sunny.

“Teh.” Nattie sighed in regret. “I knew you were troubled, lovie. I tried to get you to talk to me, but you wouldn’t.”

“I know. I don’t know if I’m sorry now or not. I figured it was a problem I’d bought all on my own, so it was a problem to pay for all on my own. And then I thought my nerve would fail if I didn’t plunge in.”

For Nattie today, Fawn resolved to leave out nothing of her journey except the uncanny accident with Dag’s sharing knife—partly because she was daunted by the complicated explanations that would have to go with, partly because it made no difference to the fate of her pregnancy, but mostly because Lakewalker secrets were so clearly not hers to give away. No, not just Lakewalker secrets—Dag’s privacy. She grasped, now, what an intimate and personal possession his dead wife’s bone had been. It was the only confidence he’d asked her to keep.

Taking a breath, Fawn plunged in anew. She described her lonely trudge to Glassforge, her terrifying encounter with the young bandit and the strange mud-man. Her first flying view of the startled Dag, even more frightening, but in retrospect almost funny. The Horsefords’ eerie abandoned farm, the second abduction. The whole new measure for terror she’d learned at the malice’s hands.

Dag at the cave, Dag that night at the farm.

She did end up with her head in Nattie’s lap then, though she managed to keep her tears down to a choked sniffling. Nattie petted her hair in the old way she hadn’t done since Fawn had been small and weeping in pain for some minor hurt to her body, or in fury for some greater wound to her spirit. “Sh. Sh, lovie.”

Fawn inhaled, wiped her eyes and nose on her apron, and sat up again on the floor next to Nattie’s chair. “Please don’t tell Mama and Papa any of this.

They’re going to have to go on living with the Sawmans. There’s no point in making bad blood between the families now.”

“Eh, lovie. But it gars me to see Sunny get off free of all this.”

“Yes, but I couldn’t stand for my brothers to know. They’d either try to do something to Sunny and cause trouble, or they’d make a mock of me for being so stupid, and I don’t think I could bear that about this.” She added after a moment of consideration, “Or both.”

“I’m not sure even your brothers are thoughtless enough to make mock of this.”

Nattie hesitated, then conceded reluctantly, “Well, perhaps half-Whit.”

Fawn managed a watery smile at the old jibe. “Poor Whit, maybe it’s that old joke on his name that drives him to be such an awful thorn to everyone. Maybe should start calling him Whitesmith instead, see if it helps.”

“There’s a thought.” Nattie sat up, staring into her personal dark. “I think maybe you’re right about the bad blood, though. Oh my, yes. All right. This story will stop with me unless some other problem comes from it.”

Fawn breathed relief at this promise. “Thank you. Talking with you eases me, more than I expected.” She thought over Nattie’s last words, then said more firmly, “You have to understand, I’m going away with Dag. One way or another.”

Nattie did not immediately burst into objections and dire warnings, but said only, “Huh.” And then, after a moment, “Curious fellow, that Lakewalker. Tell me more.”

Fawn, busying herself once more about the kitchen, was only too glad to expand on her new favorite subject to an unexpectedly sympathetic, or at least not immediately outraged, ear. “I met his patrol in Glassforge…” She described Mari and Saun and Reela—if touching only lightly on Dirla and Razi and Utau—and Sassa’s proud tours to show off his town, and all the fascinating things folks found for work there that did not involve cows, sheep, or pigs. The bow-down, and Dag’s unexpected talents with a tambourine—a word picture that made Nattie laugh along with Fawn. At that point, Fawn came to a sudden stop.

“You’re heels-up in love with him, then,” Nattie said calmly. And, at Fawn’s gasp, “Come, girl, I’m not that blind.”

In love. It seemed too weak a term. She’d imagined herself in love back when she was mooning over Sunny. “More than that. I trust him… right down to the ground.”

“Oh, aye? After all that tale, I think I’m half in love with him myself.”

Nattie added after a thoughtful moment, “Haven’t heard such joy in your voice for a long, long time, lovie. Years.”

Fawn’s heart sprang up as though weights had been shifted from it, and she laughed aloud and gave Nattie a hug and a kiss that made the old woman smile foolishly. “Now, now. There’s still some provin’ to be done, you know.”

But then the pies were baked, and Fawn’s mother returned to start the rest of supper, sending Fawn to milk the cows so the boys could keep cutting hay while the light lasted. She went by the front porch on the way, but Dag had not yet returned to his thinking seat there. Dag made his way back to the house after a stroll around the lower perimeter of the farm, in part to stretch his legs and mind and in part to be certain Sunny had indeed packed off. Resentful and ripe for trouble, that boy, and his abrupt and satisfying removal from Fawn’s presence had likely been dangerously self-indulgent for a Lakewalker alone in farmer country, but Dag could not regret the act, despite the renewed throbbing of his jostled arm. Dag’s last veiled fear that, once back in the safety of her home, Fawn might repent her patroller and double back to her first love, faded altogether.

Once upon a time, Sunny had held star fire in his hand, and thrown it away in the mud of the road. He wouldn’t be getting that fortune back, ever. There seemed nothing in the wide green world Dag could do to him worse than what he had already done to himself. Smiling crookedly, Dag dismissed Sunny from his thoughts in favor of more urgent personal concerns.

In the kitchen, he found Fawn gone but her mother, Tril, buzzing about putting together supper for eight. A clicking and whirring from the next chamber proved to be Nattie at her spinning wheel, within sight and call of her sister, and he made sure to say how de’; she returned a friendly but unenlightening,

“Evening, patroller,” and carried on. Evidently the incident with Sunny was not to be discussed. On the whole, Dag was relieved.

He greeted Tril amiably and attempted to make himself useful hooking pots on and off the fire for her, while trying to think his way to other possibilities for a half-handed man to show his worth to the female who was, in Lakewalker terms, the head of Tent Bluefield. Tril watched him in such deep alarm, he began to fear he was looming, too tall for the room, and he finally just sat down and watched, which seemed to ease her. His comment about the weather fell flat, as did a leading question about her chickens; alas, Dag knew little about farm animals beyond horses. But a few questions about Fletch’s upcoming wedding led by a short route to West Blue marriage customs generally, which was exactly where Dag wanted her to go. The best way to keep her going, he quickly discovered, was to respond with comments on Lakewalker customs on the same head.

Tril paused in kneading biscuit dough to sigh. “I was afraid last spring Fawn was yearning after the Sawman boy, but that was never a hope. His papa and Jas Stonecrop had had it fixed between them for years that Sunny would marry Violet and the two farms would come together in the next generation. It’s going to be a rich spread, that one. If Violet has more than one boy, there may be enough to divide among them without the younger ones having to go off homesteading the way Reed and Rush keep talking of.”

The twins spoke of going to the edge of the cultivated zone, twenty miles or so west, and breaking new land between them, after Fletch married. It was a plan much discussed but so far little acted upon, Dag was given to understand.

“Fathers arrange marriages, among farmers?”

“Sometimes.” Tril smiled. “Sometimes they just think they do. Sometimes the fathers have to be arranged. The land, though, or the family due-share for children who aren’t getting land—that has to be understood and written out and kept by the village clerk, or you risk bad blood later.”

Land again; farmers were all about land. Other wealth was thought of as land’s equivalent, it seemed. He offered, “Lakewalker couples usually choose each other, but the man is expected to bring bride-gifts to her family, which he is considered to be joining. Horses and furs, traditionally, though it depends on what he has accumulated.” Dag added, as if casually, “I have eight horses at the moment. The other geldings are on loan to the camp pool, except for Copperhead, who is too evil-tempered to foist on anyone else. The three mares I keep in foal. My brother’s wife looks after them along with her mares.” “Camp pool?” Tril said, after a puzzled moment.

“If a man has more than he needs, he can’t just sit on it and let it rot. So it goes to the camp pool, usually to outfit a young patroller, and the camp scribe keeps a record of it. It’s very handy if you go to switch camps, because you can carry a letter of record and draw for your needs when you get there, instead of carrying all that burden along. At the hinterland meetings every two years, one of the jobs for the camp scribes is to meet and settle up any lingering differences. I have a long credit at Stores.” How to translate that into acreage temporarily defeated him, but he hoped she understood he was not by any measure destitute, despite his present road-worn appearance. He rubbed his nose reflectively with the side of his hook. “They tried me as a camp scribe for a while after I lost my hand, but I didn’t take to the fiddly work and all the writing. I wanted to be moving, out in the field.”

“You can read and write?” Tril looked as though this was a point in Dag’s favor—good.

“Pretty much all Lakewalkers can.”

“Hm. Are you the oldest in your family, or what?”

“Youngest by ten years, but I’ve only the one brother living. It was a great sorrow to my mother that she had no daughter to carry on her tent, but my brother married a younger sister of the Waterstriders—they had six—and she took our tent name so’s it wouldn’t be lost, and moved in so’s my mother wouldn’t be alone.” See, I’m a nice tame fellow, I have a family too. Of a sort. “My brother is a very gifted maker at our camp.” He decided not to say of what. The production of sharing knives was the most demanding of Lakewalker makings, and Dar was highly respected, but it seemed premature to introduce this to the Bluefields.

“Doesn’t he patrol?”

“He did when he was younger—nearly everyone does—but his making skills are too valuable to waste on patrolling.” Dag’s, needless to say, weren’t.

“So what of your father? Was he a maker or a patroller?”

“Patroller. He died on patrol, actually.”

“Killed by one of those bogles Fawn talks of?” It was not entirely clear to Dag if Tril had believed in bogles before, but on the whole he thought she’d come to now, and was rendered very uncomfortable thereby.

“No. He went in after a younger patroller who was swept away in a bad river crossing, late in the winter. I wasn’t there—I was patrolling in a different sector of the hinterland, and didn’t hear for some days.”

“Drowned? Seems an odd fate for a Lakewalker.”

“No. Or not just then. He took a fever of the lungs and died about four nights later. Drowned in a sense, I suppose.” Actually, he’d died of sharing; the two comrades who were trying to fetch him home in his dire illness had entered the tent to find him rolled over on his knife. Whether he’d chosen that end in shrewd judgment or delirium or despair or just plain exhaustion from the struggle, Dag would never know. The knife had come to him, anyway, and he’d used it three years later on a malice up near Cat Lick.

“Oh, aye, lung fever is nasty,” Tril said sympathetically. “One of Sorrel’s aunts was carried off by that just last winter. I’m so sorry.”

Dag shrugged. “It was eleven years ago.”

“Were you close?”

“Not really. He was away when I was smaller, and then I was away. I knew his father well, though; Grandfather had a bad knee by then, like Nattie”—Nattie, listening through the doorway as she spun, lifted up her head and smiled at her name—“and he stayed in camp and helped look after me, among other things. If I’d lost a foot instead of a hand, I might have ended like that, Uncle Dag to my brother’s pack.” Or I might have shared early. “So, um… are there any one-handed farmers?”

“Oh, yes, accidents happen on farms. Folks deal with it, I expect. I knew a man with a wooden leg, once. I’ve never heard tell of anything like that rig of yours, though.”

Fawn’s mother was relaxing nicely in his presence now and didn’t jump at all anymore when he moved. On the whole, Dag suspected that it was easier to coax wild animals to take food from his hand than to lull Bluefields. But he was clearly making progress. He wondered if his Lakewalker habits were betraying him, and if he ought to have started with Fawn’s papa instead of with the women.

Well, it hardly mattered where he started; he was eventually going to have to beguile the whole lot of them in order to get his way.

And in they clumped, sweaty and ravenous. Fawn followed, smelling of cows, with two covered buckets slung on a yoke, which she set aside to deal with later.

The crowd, minus Clover tonight, settled down happily to heaping portions of ham, beans, corn bread, summer squash, assorted pickled things, biscuits, butter, jams, fresh apple butter, cider, and milk. Conversation lagged for a little.

Dag ignored the covert glances as he dealt with biscuits by stabbing them whole with his fork-spoon; Tril, if he read her aright, was simply pleased that he seemed to like them. Happily, he did not need to feign this flattery although he would have if necessary.

“Where did you go while I was milking?” Fawn finally asked him.

“Took a walk down to the river and back around. I am pleased to say there’s no malice sign within a mile of here, although I wouldn’t expect any. This area gets patrolled regularly.”

“Really?” said Fawn. “I’ve never seen patrollers around here.”

“We cross settled land at night, mostly, to avoid disturbing folks. You wouldn’t notice us.”

Papa Bluefield looked up curiously at this. It was quite possible, over the years, that not all patrols had passed as invisibly to him as all that.

“Did you ever patrol West Blue?” Fawn asked.

“Not lately. When I was a boy just starting, from about age fifteen, I walked a lot in this area, so I might have. Don’t remember now.”

“We might have passed each other all unknowing.” She looked thoughtful at this notion.

“Um… no. Not then.” He added, “When I was twenty I was sent on exchange to a camp north of Farmer’s Flats, and started my first walk around the lake. I didn’t get back for eighteen years.”

“Oh,” she said.

“I’ve been all over this hinterland since, but not just here. It’s a big territory.”

Papa Bluefield sat back at the table’s head and eyed Dag narrowly. “Just how old are you, Lakewalker? A deal older than Fawn, I daresay.”

“I daresay,” Dag agreed.

Papa Bluefield continued to stare expectantly. The sound of forks scraping plates was suddenly obtrusive.

Cornered. Must this come out here? Perhaps it was better to get it on the table sooner than later. Dag cleared his throat, so that his voice would come out neither squeaking like a mouse’s nor too loud, and said, “Fifty-five.”

Fawn choked on her cider. He probably should have glanced aside first to see she wasn’t trying to swallow anything. His fork-spoon hand was no good for patting her on the back, but she recovered her breath m a moment. “Sorry,” she wheezed.

“Down the wrong pipe.” She looked up sideways at him in muffled, possibly, alarm. Or dismay. He hoped it wasn’t horror.

“Papa,” she muttered, “is fifty-three.”

All right, a little horror. They would deal with it.

Tril was staring. “You look forty, if that.”

Dag lowered his eyelids in nonargument.

“Fawn,” Papa Bluefield announced grimly, “is eighteen.”

Beside him, Fawn’s breath drew in, sharply aggravated.

Dag tried, almost successfully, to keep his lips from curling up. It was hard, when she was clearly boiling so much inside she was ready to pop. “Really?”

He eyed her blandly. “She told me she was twenty. Although from my vantage, it scarcely makes a difference.”

She hunched her shoulders sheepishly. But their eyes connected, and then she had trouble not laughing too, and all was well.

Papa Bluefield said in an aggravated tone, “Fawn had an old bad habit of telling tall tales. I tried to beat it out of her. I should have beat her more, maybe.”

Or less, Dag did not say aloud.

“As it happens, I come from a very long-lived kin,” Dag said, by way of attempted repair. “My grandfather I told you of was still spry till his death at well over a hundred.” One hundred twenty-six, but there was more than enough mental arithmetic going on around the table right now. The brothers, particularly, seemed to be floundering, staring at him in renewed wariness.

“It all works out,” Dag went on into the too-long pause. “If, for example, Fawn and I were to marry, we would actually arrive at old age tolerably close together. Barring accidents.”

All right, he’d said the magic word, marry. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t done something like this before, long ago. Well, all right, it had been nothing at all like this. Kauneo’s kin had been overpowering in an entirely different manner. The terror rippling through him felt the same, though. Papa Bluefield growled, “Lakewalkers don’t marry farmer girls.”

He couldn’t grip Fawn’s hand below the table for reassurance; all he could do was dig his fork into her thigh, with unpredictable but probably unhelpful results at the moment. He did glance down at her. Was he about to jump off this cliff alone or with her? Her eyes were wide. And lovely. And terrified. And…

thrilled. He drew a long breath.

“I would. I will. I wish to. Marry Fawn. Please?”

Seven stunned Bluefields created the loudest silence Dag had ever heard.