Beguilement

Chapter 7

The farm folk spotted the pair on the porch about the time they exited the lane, Fawn guessed by the way they paused and stared, taking stock. The stringy old man on the horse stayed back. Under his eye, the boy made himself busy taking down some rails and urging the sheep and cows into the pasture. Once the first few animals spread out in a lumbering burst of bawled complaint, quickly converted to hungry grazing, the rest followed willingly. The three adult men advanced cautiously toward the house, gripping tools like weapons: a pitchfork, a mattock, a big skinning knife.

“If those fellows are from here, they’ve just had some very bad days, by all the signs,” Dag said, whether in a tone of warning or mere observation Fawn was not certain. “Stay calm and quiet, till they’re sure I’m no threat.”

“How could they think that?” said Fawn indignantly. She straightened her spine against the house wall, twitching the white folds of her overabundant gown tighter about her, and frowned.

“Well, there’s a bit of history, there. Some bandits have claimed to be patrollers, in the past. Usually we leave bandits to their farmer-brethren, but those we string up good, if we catch ‘em at it. Farmers can’t always tell. I expect these’ll be all right, once they get over being jumpy.”

Dag stayed seated on the porch edge as the men neared, though he too sat up straighter. He raised his right hand to his temple in what might have been a salute of greeting or just scratching his head, but in either case conveyed no threat. “Evenin’,” he rasped.

The men sidled forward, looking ready either to pounce or bolt at the slightest provocation. The oldest, a thickset fellow with a bit of gray in his hair and the pitchfork in his grip, stepped in front. His glance at Fawn was bewildered.

She smiled back and waved her fingers.

Provisionally polite, the thickset man returned a “How de’.” He grounded the butt of his pitchfork and continued more sternly, “And who might you be, and what are you doing here?”

Dag gave a nod. “I’m from Mari Redwing’s Lakewalker patrol. We were called down from the north a couple of days ago to help deal with your blight bogle. This here’s Miss Sawfield. She was kidnapped off the road yesterday by the bogle I was hunting, and injured. I’d hoped to find folks here to help her, but you were all gone. Not willingly, by the signs.”

He’d left out an awful lot of important complications, Fawn thought. Only one was hers alone to speak to: “Bluefield,” she corrected. “M’ name’s Fawn Bluefield.”

Dag glanced over his shoulder, eyebrows rising. “Ah, right.”

Fawn tried to lighten the frowns of the farmers by saying brightly, “This your place?”

“Ayup,” said the man.

“Glad you made it back. Is everyone all right?”

A look of thankfulness in the midst of adversity came over the faces of all the men. “Ayup,” the spokesman said again, in a huff of blown-out breath. “Praise be, we didn’t suffer no one getting killed by those, those… things.”

“It was a near chance,” muttered a brown-haired fellow, who looked to be a brother or cousin of the thickset man.

A younger man with bright chestnut hair and freckles slid around to Dag’s left, staring at his empty shirt cuff. Dag feigned not to notice the stare, but Fawn thought she detected a slight stiffening of his shoulders. The man burst out,

“Hey—you wouldn’t be that fellow Dag all those other patrollers are looking for, would you? They said you couldn’t hardly be mistook—tall drink of water with his hair cropped short, bright goldy eyes, and missing his left hand.” He nodded in certainty, taking inventory of the man on the porch.

Dag’s voice was suddenly unguarded and eager. “You’ve seen my patrol? Where are they? Are they all right? I’d expected them to find me before now.”

The red-haired fellow made a wry face, and said, “Spread out between Glassforge and that big hole back in the hills those crazy fellows were trying to make us dig, I guess. Looking for you. When you hadn’t turned up in Glassforge by this morning, that scary old lady carried on like she was afraid you were dead in a ditch somewheres. I had four different patrollers buttonhole me with your particulars before we got out of town.”

Dag’s lips lifted at that apt description of what Fawn guessed must be his patrol leader, Mari. The boy and the skinny graybeard on the horse, once the fence rails were replaced, drifted up to the edge of the group watch and listen.

The thickset man gripped his pitchfork haft tighter again, although not in threat. “Them other patrollers all said you must have killed the bogle. They said that had to be what made all them monsters, mud-men they calls ‘em, run off like that yesterday night.”

“More or less,” said Dag. A twitch of his hand dismissed—or concealed—the details. “You’re right to travel cautious. There might still be a few bandits abroad—that’ll be for the Glassforge folks to deal with. Any mud-men who escaped my patrol or Chato’s will be running mindless through the woods for a while, till they die off. I put down two yesterday, but at least four I know of got away into the brush. They won’t attack you now, but they’re still dangerous to surprise or corner, like any sick wild animal. The malice’s—bogle’s—lair was up in the hills not eight miles due east of here. You all were lucky to escape its attentions before this.”

“You two look like you collected some attentions yourselves,” said the thickset man, frowning at their visible bruises and scrapes. He turned to the lanky boy.

“Here, Tad—go fetch your mama.” The boy nodded eagerly and pelted back down the lane toward the woods.

“What happened here?” Dag asked in turn.

This released a spate of increasingly eager tale-telling, one man interrupting another with corroboration or argument. Some twenty, or possibly thirty, mud-men had erupted out of the surrounding woods four days ago, brutalizing and terrifying the farm folk, then driving them off in a twenty-mile march southeast into the hills. The mud-men had kept the crowd under control by the simple expedient of carrying the three youngest children and threatening to dash out their brains against the nearest tree if anyone resisted, a detail that made Fawn gasp but Dag merely look more expressionless than ever. They had arrived at length at a crude campsite containing a couple dozen other prisoners, mostly victims of road banditry; some had been held for many weeks. There, the mud-men, uneasily supervised by a few human bandits, seemed intent on making their new slaves excavate a mysterious hole in the ground.

“I don’t understand that hole,” said the thickset man, eldest son of the graybeard and apparent leader of the farm folk, whose family name was Horseford.

The stringy old grandfather seemed querulous and addled—traits that seemed to predate the malice attack, Fawn judged from the practiced but not-unkind way everyone fielded his complaints.

“The malice—the blight bogle—was probably starting to try to mine,” said Dag thoughtfully. “It was growing fast.”

“Yes, but the hole wasn’t right for a mine, either,” put in the red-haired man, Sassa. He’d turned out to be a brother-in-law of the house, present that day to help with some log-hauling. He seemed less deeply shaken than the rest, possibly because his wife and baby had been safely back in Glassforge and had missed the horrific misadventure altogether. “They didn’t have enough tools, for one thing, till those mud-men brought in the ones they stole from here. They had folks digging with their hands and hauling dirt in bags made out of their clothes.

It was an awful mess.”

“Would be, at first, till the bogle caught someone with the know-how to do it right,” said Dag. “Later, when it’s safe again, you folks should get some real miners to come in and explore the site. There must be something of value under there; the malice would not have been mistaken about that. This part of the country, I’d guess an iron or coal seam, maybe with a forge planned to follow, but it might be anything.”

“I’d wondered if they were digging up another bogle,” said Sassa. “They’re supposed to come out of the ground, they say.” Dag’s brows twitched up, and he eyed the man with new appraisal. “Interesting idea. When two bogles chance to emerge nearby, which happily doesn’t occur too often, they usually attack each other first thing.”

“That would save you Lakewalkers some trouble, wouldn’t it?”

“No. Unfortunately. Because the winning bogle ends up stronger. Easier to take them down piecemeal.”

Fawn tried to imagine something stronger and more frightening than the creature she had faced yesterday. When you were already as terrified as your body could bear, what difference could it make if something was even worse? She wondered if that explained anything about Dag.

Movement at the end of the lane caught her eye. Another plow horse came out of the woods and trotted ponderously up to the farmyard, a middle-aged woman riding with the lanky boy up behind. They paused on the other side of the well, the woman staring down hard at something, then came up to join the others.

The red-haired Sassa, either more garrulous or more observant than his in-laws, was finishing his account of yesterday’s inexplicable uproar at the digging camp: the sudden loss of wits and mad flight of their captor mud-men, followed, not half an hour later, by the arrival from the sunset woods of a very off-balance patrol of Lakewalkers. The Lakewalkers had been trailed in turn by a mob of frantic friends and relatives of the captives from in and around Glassforge. Leaving the local people to each other’s care, the patrollers had withdrawn to their own Lake walkerish concerns, which seemed mainly to revolve around slaying all the mud-men they could catch and looking for their mysterious missing man Dag, who they seemed to think somehow responsible for the bizarre turn of events.

Dag rubbed his stubbled chin. “Huh. I suppose Mari or Chato must have thought this mining camp might be the lair. Following up traces from that bandit hideout we raided night before last, I expect. That explains where they were all day yesterday. And well into the night, sounds like.”

“Oh, aye,” said the thickset man. “Folks was still trailing into Glassforge all night and into this morning, yours and ours.”

The farmwife slid down off the horse and stood listening to this, her eyes searching her house, Dag, and especially Fawn. Fawn guessed from the farm men’s talk that she must be the woman they’d called Petti. Judging by the faint gray in her hair, she was of an age with her husband, and as lean as he was thick, tough and strappy, if tired-looking. Now she stepped forward. “What blood is all that in the tub out by the well?”

Dag gave her a polite duck of his head. “Miss S—Bluefield’s mostly, ma’am. My apologies for filching your linens. I’ve been throwing another bucket of water on them each time I go by. I’ll try to get them cleaned up better before we leave.”

We not I, some quick part of Fawn’s mind noted at once, with a catch of relief.

“Mostly?” The farmwife cocked her head at him, squinting. “How’d she get hurt?”

“That would be her tale to tell, ma’am.”

Her face went still for an instant. Her eye flicked up to Fawn and then back, to take in his empty cuff. “You really kill that bogle that did all this?”

He hesitated only briefly before replying, precisely but unexpansively, “We did.”

She inhaled and gave a little snort. “Don’t you be troubling about my laundry.

The idea.”

She turned back to, or upon, her menfolk. “Here, what are you all doing standing about gabbing and gawking like a pack of ninnies? There’s work to do before dark. Horse, see to milking those poor cows, if they ain’t been frightened dry.

Sassa, fetch in the firewood, if those thieves left any in the stack, and if they didn’t, make some more. Jay, put away and put right what can be, what needs fixin’, start on, what needs tomorrow’s tools, set aside. Tad, help your grandpa with the horses, and then come and start picking up inside. Hop to it while there’s light left!”

They scattered at her bidding.

Fawn said helpfully, pushing up, “The mud-men didn’t find your storage cellar—”

And then her head seemed to drain, throbbing unpleasantly. The world did not go black, but patterned shadows swarmed around her, and she was only dimly aware of abrupt movement: a strong hand and truncated arm catching her and half-walking, half-carrying her inside. She blinked her eyes clear to find herself on the feather pallet once more, two faces looming over her, the farmwife’s concerned and wary, Dag’s concerned and… tender? The thought jolted her, and she blinked some more, trying to swim back to reason.

“—flat, Spark,” he was saying. “Flat was working.” He brushed a sweat-dampened curl out of her eyes.

“What happened to you, girl?” demanded Petti.

“ ‘M not a girl,” Fawn mumbled. “ ‘M twenty…”

“The mud-men knocked her around hard yesterday.” Dag’s intent gaze on her seemed to be asking permission to continue, and she shrugged assent. “She miscarried of a two-months child. Bled pretty fierce, but it seems to have slowed now. Wish one of my patrol women were here. You do much midwifery, ma’am?”

“A little. Keeping her lying down is right if she’s been bleeding much.”

“How do you know if she… if a woman is going to be all right, after that?”

“If the bleeding tails off to nothing within five days, it’s a pretty sure bet things are coming back around all right inside, if there’s no fever. Ten days at the most. A two-months child, well, that’s as chance will happen. Much more than three months, now, that gets more dangerous.”

“Five days,” he repeated, as if memorizing the number. “Right, we’re still all right, then. Fever… ?” He shook his head and rose to his feet, wincing as he rubbed his left arm, and followed the farmwife’s gaze around her kitchen.

With an apologetic nod, he removed his arm contraption from her table, bundled it up, and set it down at the end of the tick.

“And what knocked you around?” asked Petti.

“This and that, over the years,” he answered vaguely. “If my patrol doesn’t find us by tomorrow, I’d like to take Miss Bluefield to Glassforge. I have to report in. Will there be a wagon?”

The farmwife nodded. “Later on. The girls should bring it tomorrow when they come.” The other women and children of the Horseford family were staying in town with Sassa’s wife, it seemed, sorting out recovered goods and waiting for their men to report the farm safe again.

“Will they be making another trip, after?”

“Might. Depends.” She scrubbed the back of her neck, staring around as if a hundred things cried for her attention and she only had room in her head for ten, which, Fawn guessed, was just about the case.

“What can I do for you, ma’am?” Dag inquired.

She stared at him as if taken by surprise by the offer. “Don’t know yet.

Everything’s been knocked all awhirl. Just… just wait here.”

She marched off to take a look around her smashed-up house.

Fawn whispered to Dag, “She’s not going to get settled in her mind till she has her things back in order.”

“I sensed that.” He bent over and took up the knife pouch, lying by the head of the pallet. Only then did Fawn realize how careful he’d been not to glance at it while the farmwife was present. “Can you put this somewhere out of sight?”

Fawn nodded, and sat up—slowly—to flip open her bedroll, laid at the pallet’s foot. Her spare skirt and shirt and underdrawers lay atop the one good dress she’d packed along to go look for work in, that hasty night she’d fled home.

She tucked the knife pouch well away and rolled up the blanket once more.

He nodded approval and thanks. “Best not to mention the knife to these folks, I think. Bothersome. That one worse than most.” And, under his breath, “Wish Mari would get here.”

They could hear the farmwife’s quick footsteps on the wooden floors overhead, and occasional wails of dismay, mostly, “My poor windows!”

“I noticed you left a lot out of your story,” said Fawn.

“Yes. I’d appreciate it if you would, too.”

“I promised, didn’t I? I sure don’t want to talk about that knife to just anyone, either.”

“If they ask too many questions, or too close of ones, just ask them about their troubles in turn. It’ll usually divert them, when they have so much to tell as now.”

“Ah, so that’s what you were doing out there!” In retrospect, she could spot how Dag had turned the talk so that they had learned so much of the Horsefords’

woes, but the Horsefords had received so little news in return. “Another old patroller trick?”

One corner of his mouth twitched up. “More or less.”

The farmwife came back downstairs about the time her son Tad came in from the barn, and after a moment’s thought she sent the boy and Dag off together to clean up broken glass and rubble around the house. She surveyed her kitchen and climbed down into her storage cellar, from which she emerged with a few jars for supper, seeming much reassured. After setting the jars in a row on the table—Fawn could almost see her counting stomachs and planning the upcoming meal in her head—she turned back and frowned down at Fawn.

“We’ll have to get you into a proper bed. Birdy’s room, I think, once Tad gets the glass out. It wasn’t too bad, otherwise.” And then, after a pause, in a much lower voice, “That patroller fellow tell the straight story on you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Fawn.

The woman’s face pinched in suspicion. “ ‘Cause he didn’t get those scratches on his face from no mud-man, I’ll warrant.”

Fawn looked back blankly, then said, “Oh! Those scratches. I mean, yes, that was me, but it was an accident. I mistook him for another bandit, at first. We got that one straightened out right quick.”

“Lakewalkers is strange folk. Black magicians, they say.”

Fawn struggled up on one elbow to say hotly, “You should be grateful if they are. Because blight bogles are blacker ones. I saw one, yesterday. Closer than you are to me now. Anything patrollers have to do to put them down is all right by me!”

Petti’s thoughts seemed to darken. “Was that what—did the blight bogle…

blight you?”

“Make me miscarry?”

“Aye. Because girls don’t usually miscarry just from being knocked around, or falling down stairs, or the like. Though I’ve seen some try for it. They just end up being bruised mothers, usually.”

“Yes,” said Fawn shortly, scrunching back down. “It was the bogle.” Were these too-close questions? Not yet, she decided. Even Dag had offered some explanations, just enough to satisfy without begging more questions. “It was ugly. Uglier than the mud-men, even. Bogles kill everything they touch, seemingly. You should go look at its lair, later. The woods are all dead for a mile around. I don’t know how long it will take for them to grow back.”

“Hm.” Petti busied herself unsealing jars, sniffing for wholesomeness and fishing out the broken wax to be rinsed and remelted, later. “Them mud-men was ugly enough. The day before we was brought to the digging camp, seems there was a woman had a sick child, who went to them and insisted on being let go to get him help. She tried carrying on, weeping and wailing, to force them. Instead, they killed her little boy. And ate him. She was in a state by the time we got there. Everybody was. Even them bandits, who I don’t think was in their right minds either, wasn’t too easy about that one.”

Fawn shuddered. “Dag said the mud-men ate folks. I wasn’t sure I believed him.

Till after… afterwards.” She hitched her shoulders. “Lakewalkers hunt those things. They go looking for them.”

“Hm.” The woman frowned as she kept trying to assemble the meal by her normal routine and coming up short against missing tools and vessels. But she improvised and went on, much as Fawn had. She added from across the room after a while, “They say Lakewalkers can beguile folk’s minds.”

“Look, you.” Fawn lurched back up on her elbow, scowling. “I say, that Lakewalker saved my life yesterday. At least twice. No, three times, because I’d have bled to death in the woods trying to walk out if he’d died in the fight.

He fought off five of those mud-men! He took care of me all last night when I couldn’t move for the pain, and carried out my bloody clouts with never a word of complaint, and he cleaned up your kitchen and he fixed your fence and he buried your dogs nice in the shady woods, and he didn’t have to do any of that.”

And his heart breaks for the memory of water lilies. “I’ve seen that man do more good with one hand in a day than I’ve seen any other man do with two in a week.

Or ever. If he’s beguiled my mind, he sure has done it the hard way!”

The farmwife had both her hands raised as if to ward off this hot, pelting defense, half-laughing. “Stop, stop, I surrender, girl!”

“Huh!” Fawn flopped back again. “Just don’t you give me any more they says.”

“Hm.” Petti’s smile dwindled to bleakness, but whatever shadowed her thoughts now, she did not confide to Fawn. Fawn lay quietly on her pallet till dusk drove the men indoors. At that point, Tad was made to carry off the feather tick, and the space was used for a trestle table. Makeshift benches—boards placed across sawed-off logs—were brought in to serve for the missing chairs. Petti allowed to Dag as how she thought it all right for Fawn to sit up long enough to take the meal with the family. Since the alternative appeared to be having Petti bring her something in bed in some lonely nook of the house, Fawn agreed decisively to this.

The meal was abundant, if makeshift and simple, eaten by the limited light of candle stubs and the fire at the end of the long summer day. Everyone would be going to bed right after, not just her, Fawn thought. The room was hot and the conversation, at first, scant and practical. All were exhausted, their minds filled with the recent disruptions in their lives. Since everyone was mostly eating with their hands anyhow, Dag’s slight awkwardness did not stick out, Fawn observed with satisfaction. You wouldn’t think his missing hand bothered him a bit, unless you noticed how he never raised his left wrist into sight above the table edge. He spoke only to encourage Fawn, next to him, to eat up, though about that he was quite firm.

“Kind o’ you to help Tad with all that busted glass,” the farmwife said to Dag.

“No trouble, ma’am. You should all be able to step safe now, leastways.” Sassa offered, “I’ll help you to get new windows in, Petti, soon as things are settled a bit.”

She gave her brother-in-law a grateful look. “Thankee, Sassa.”

Grandfather Horseford grumbled, “Oiled cloth stretched on the frames was good enough in my day,” to which his gray-haired son responded only, “Have some more pan bread, Pa.” The land might still be the old man’s, in name at least, but it was plain that the house was Petti’s.

Inevitably, Fawn supposed, the talk turned to picking over the past days’

disasters. Dag, who looked to Fawn’s eye as though he was growing tired, and no wonder, was not expansive; she watched him successfully use his diversion trick of answering a question with a question four times running. Until Sassa remarked to him, sighing, “Too bad your patrol didn’t get there a day sooner. They might’ve saved that poor little boy who got et.”

Dag did not exactly wince. It was merely a lowering of his eyelids, a slight, unargumentative tilt of his head. A shift of his features from tired to expressionless. And silence.

Fawn sat up, offended for him. “Careful what you wish after. If Dag’s patrol had got there anytime before I—we—before the bogle died and the mud-men ran off, there’d have been a big fight. Lots of folks might have gotten killed, and that little boy, too.”

Sassa, brow furrowed, turned to her. “Yes, but—et? Doesn’t it bother you extra?

It sure bothers me.”

“It’s what mud-men do,” murmured Dag.

Sassa eyed him, disconcerted. “Used to it, are you?”

Dag shrugged.

“But it was a child.”

“Everyone’s someone’s child.”

Petti, who’d been staring wearily at her plate, looked up at that.

In a tone of cheery speculation, Jay said, “If they’d have been five days faster, we’d not have been raided. And our cows and sheep and dogs would still be alive. Wish for that, while you’re at it, why don’t you?”

With a grimace that failed to quite pass as a smile, Dag pushed himself up from the table. He gave Petti a nod. “ ‘Scuse me, ma’am.”

He closed the kitchen door quietly behind him. His booted steps sounded across the porch, then faded into the night.

“What bit him?” asked Jay.

Petti took a breath. “Jay, some days I think your mama must have dropped you on your head when you was a baby, really I do.”

He blinked in bewilderment at her scowl, and said less in inquiry than protest,

“What?”

For the first time in hours, Fawn found herself chilled again, chilled and shaking. Her wan droop did not escape the observant Petti. “Here, girl, you should be in bed. Horse, help her.”

Horse, mercifully, was much quieter than his younger relations; or perhaps his wife had given him some low-down on their outlandish guests in private. He propelled Fawn through the darkening house. The loss of light was not from her going woozy, this time, though her skull was throbbing again. Petti followed with a candle in a cup for a makeshift holder.

The ground floor of one of the add-ons consisted of two small bedrooms opposite each other. Horse steered Fawn inside to where her feather tick had been laid across a wooden bed frame. The slashed rope webbing had been reknotted sometime recently, maybe by Dag and Tad. A moist summer night breeze wafted through the small, glassless windows. Fawn decided this must be a daughter’s bedchamber; the girls would likely be arriving home tomorrow with the wagon.

As soon as the transport was safely accomplished, Petti shooed Horse out.

Awkwardly, Fawn swapped out her dressings, half-hiding under a light blanket that she scarcely needed. Petti made no comment on them, beyond a “Give over, here,” and a “There you go, now.” A day ago, Fawn reflected, she would have given anything to trade her strange man helper for a strange woman. Tonight, the desire was oddly reversed.

“Horse ‘n me have the room across,” said Petti. “You can call out if you need anything in the night.”

“Thank you,” said Fawn, trying to feel grateful. She supposed it would not be understood if she asked for the kitchen floor back. The floor and Dag. Where would these graceless farmers try to put the patroller? In the barn? The thought made her glower.

Long, unmistakable footfalls sounded in the hall, followed by a sharp double rap against the door. “Come in, Dag,” Fawn called, before Petti could say anything.

He eased inside. A stack of dry garments lay over his left arm, the laundry Fawn had seen draped over the pasture fence earlier, Fawn’s blue dress and linen drawers; underneath were his own trousers and drawers that had been so spectacularly bloodied yesterday. He had her bedroll tucked under his armpit.

He laid the bedroll down in a swept corner of the room, with her cleaned clothes atop. “There you go, Spark.”

“Thank you, Dag,” she said simply. His smile flickered across his face like light on water, gone in the instant. Didn’t anyone ever just say thank you to patrollers? She was really beginning to wonder.

With a wary nod at the watching Petti, he stepped to Fawn’s bedside and laid his palm on her brow. “Warm,” he commented. He traded the palm for the inside of his wrist. Fawn tried to feel his pulse through their skins, as she had listened to his heartbeat, without success. “But not feverish,” he added under his breath.

He stepped back a little, his lips tightening. Fawn remembered those lips breathing in her hair last night, and suddenly wanted nothing more than to kiss and be kissed good night by them. Was that so wrong? Somehow, Petri’s frowning presence made it so.

“What did you find outside?” she asked, instead.

“Not my patrol.” He sighed. “Not for a mile in any direction, leastways.”

“Do you suppose they’re all still looking on the wrong side of Glassforge?”

“Could be. It looks like it’s fixing to rain; heat lightning off to the west. If I really were stuck in a ditch, I wouldn’t be sorry, but I hate to think of them running around in the woods in the dark and wet, in fear for me, when I’m snug inside and safe. I’m going to hear about that later, I expect.”

“Oh, dear.”

“Don’t worry, Spark; another day it will be the other way around. And then it will be my turn to be, ah, humorous.” His eyes glinted in a way that made her want to laugh.

“Will we really go to Glassforge tomorrow?”

“We’ll see. See how you’re doing in the morning, for one.”

“I’m doing much better tonight. Bleeding’s no worse than a monthly, now.”

“Do you want your hot stone again?”

“Really, I don’t think I need it anymore.”

“Good. Sleep hard, then, you.”

She smiled shyly. “I’ll try.”

His hand made a little move toward her, but then fell back to his side. “Good night.”

“G’night, Dag. You sleep hard too.”

He gave her a last nod, and withdrew; the farmwife carried the candle out with her, closing the door firmly behind. A faint flash of the heat lightning Dag had mentioned came through the window, too far away even to hear the thunder, but otherwise all was darkness and silence. Fawn rolled over and tried to obey Dag’s parting admonishment. “Hold up,” murmured the farmwife, and since she carried the only light, the stub melting down to a puddle in the clay cup, Dag did so. She shouldered past and led him to the kitchen. Another candle, and a last dying flicker from the fireplace, showed the trestle table and benches taken down and stowed by the wall, and the plates and vessels from dinner stacked on the drainboard by the sink, along with the bucket of water refilled.

The farmwife looked around the shadows and sighed. “I’ll deal with the rest of this in the morning, I guess.” Belying her words, she moved to cover and set aside the scant leftover food, including a stack of pan bread she had apparently cooked up with breakfast in mind.

“Where do you want me to sleep, ma’am?” Dag inquired politely. Not with Fawn, obviously. He tried not to remember the scent of her hair, like summer in his mouth, or the warmth of her breathing young body tucked under his arm.

“You can have one of those ticks that little girl mended; put it down where you will.”

“The porch, maybe. I can watch out for my people, if any come out of the woods in the night, and not wake the house. I could pull it into the kitchen if it comes on to rain.”

“That’d be good,” said the farmwife.

Dag peered through the empty window frame into the darkness, letting his groundsense reach out. The animals, scattered in the pasture, were calm, some grazing, some half-asleep. “That mare isn’t actually mine. We found it at the bogle’s lair and rode it out. Do you recognize it for anyone’s?”

Petti shook her head. “Not ours, anyways.”

“If I ride it to Glassforge, it would be nice to not be jumped for horse thieving before I can explain.”

“I thought you patrollers claimed a fee for killing a bogle. You could claim it.”

Dag shrugged. “I already have a horse. Leastways, I hope so. If no one comes forward for this one, I thought I might have it go to Miss Bluefield. It’s sweet-tempered, with easy paces. Which is part of what inclines me to think it wasn’t a bandit’s horse, or not for long.”

Petti paused, staring down at her store of food. “Nice girl, that Miss Bluefield.”

“Yes.”

“You wonder how she got in this fix.”

“Not my tale, ma’am.”

“Aye, I noticed that about you.”

What? That he told no tales?

“Accidents happen, to the young,” she went on. “Twenty, eh?”

“So she says.”

“You ain’t twenty.” She moved to kneel by the fire and poke it back for the night.

“No. Not for a long time, now.”

“You could take that horse and ride back to your patrol tonight, if you’re that worried about them. That girl would be all right, here. I’d take her in till she’s mended.”

That had been precisely his plan, yesterday. It seemed a very long time ago.

“Good of you to offer. But I promised to see her safe to Glassforge, which was where she was bound. Also, I want Mari to look her over. My patrol leader—she’ll be able to tell if Fawn’s healing all right.”

“Aye, figured you’d say something like that. I ain’t blind.” She sighed, stood, turned to face him with her arms crossed. “And then what?”

“Pardon?”

“Do you even know what you’re doing to her? Standing there with them cheekbones up in the air? No, I don’t suppose you do.”

Dag shifted from cautious to confused. That the far m wife was shrewd and observant, he had certainly noticed; but he did not understand her underlying distress in this matter. “I mean her only good.”

“Sure you do.” She frowned fiercely. “I had a cousin, once.”

Dag tilted his head in faint encouragement, torn between curiosity and an entirely unmagical premonition that wherever she was going with this tale, he didn’t want to go along.

“Real nice young fellow; handsome, too,” Petti continued. “He got a job as a horse boy at that hotel in Glassforge where your patrols always stay, when they’re passing through these parts. There was this patroller girl, young one, came there with her patrol. Very pretty, very tall. Very nice. Very nice to him, he thought.”

“Patrol leaders try to discourage that sort of thing.”

“Aye, so I understood. Too bad they don’t succeed. Didn’t take too long for him to fall mad in love with the girl. He spent the whole next year just waiting for her patrol to come back. Which it did. And she was nice to him again.”

Dag waited. Not comfortably.

“Third year, the patrol came again, but she did not. Seems she was only visiting, and had gone back to her own folks way west of here.”

“That’s usual, for training up young patrollers. We send them to other camps for a season or two, or more. They learn other ways, make friends; if ever we have to combine forces in a hurry, it makes everything easier if some patrollers already know each other’s routes and territories. The ones training up to be leaders, we send ‘em around to all seven hinterlands. They say of those that they’ve walked around the lake.”

She eyed him. “You ever walk around the lake?”

“Twice,” he admitted.

“Hm.” She shook her head, and went on, “He got the notion he would go after her, volunteer to join with you Lakewalkers.”

“Ah,” said Dag. “That would not work. It’s not a matter of pride or ill will, you understand; we just have skills and methods that we cannot share.”

“You mean to say, not pride or ill will alone, I think,” said the woman, her voice going flat.

Dag shrugged. Not my tale. Let it go, old patroller.

“He did find her, eventually. As you say, the Lakewalkers wouldn’t have him.

Came back after about six months, with his tail between his legs. Bleak and pining. Wouldn’t look at no other girl. Drank. It was like, if he couldn’t be in love with her, he’d be in love with death instead.”

“You don’t have to be a farmer for that. Ma’am,” Dag said coolly.

She spared him a sharp glance. “That’s as may be. He never settled, after that.

He finally took a job with the keelboat men, down on the Grace River. After a couple of seasons, we heard he’d fallen off his boat and drowned. I don’t think it was deliberate; they said he’d been drunk and had gone to piss over the side in the night. Just careless, but a kind of careless that don’t happen to other folks.”

Maybe that had been the trouble with his own schemes, Dag thought. He had never been careless enough. If Dag had been twenty instead of thirty-five when the darkness had overtaken him, it might have all: worked rather differently…

“We never heard back from that patroller girl. He was just a bit of passin’

fun to her, I guess. She was the end of the world to him, though.”

Dag held his silence.

She inhaled, and drove on: “So if you think it’s amusin’ to make that girl fall in love with you, I say, it won’t seem so funny down the road. I don’t know what’s in it for you, but there’s no future for her. Your people will see to that, if hers won’t. You and I both know that—but she don’t.”

“Ma’am, you’re seeing things.” Very plausible things, maybe, given that she could not know the true matter of the sharing knife that bound Dag and Fawn so tightly to each other, at least for now. He wasn’t about to try to explain the knife to this exhausted, edgy woman.

“I know what I’m seeing, thank you kindly. It ain’t the first time, neither.”

“I’ve scarcely known the girl a day!”

“Oh, aye? What’ll it be after a week, then? The woods’ll catch fire, I guess.”

She snorted derision. “All I know is, in the long haul, when folks tangle hearts with your folks, they end up dead. Or wishing they was.”

Dag unclenched his jaw, and gave her a short nod. “Ma’am… in the long haul, all folks end up dead. Or wishing they were.”

She just shook her head, lips twisting.

“Good night!” He touched his hand to his temple and went to haul the tick, stuffed into the next room, out onto the porch. If Little Spark was able to travel at all tomorrow, he decided, they would leave this place as soon as might be.