The space was a bare dozen feet long by ten or so wide, lined with shelves and a couple of scarred but cleared-off workbenches. Stools of various heights made from upended logs, cut away beneath for legs and above for short backrests, were thrust under the benches. The space smelled of old wood and fresh wood, herbs and solvents, the honeyed warmth of the candles, oil, leather, and time. And under it all, something undefinable; she tried not to think, death.

Dag dragged their bags just inside the door, rolling the plunkin along after with his foot. He closed the door against the gusts. Minus the rattling of bones and clatter of ice and nuts on the roof, the threatening creak of the trees in the wind, the howling storm, the interminable day, the harrowing scene, or half scene, they’d just been through, and both their moods, it might have been almost cozy. As it was, Fawn would have burst into tears if she hadn’t been so close to just bursting.

“So,” she said tightly, “what happened to all your smooth Lakewalker persuadin’, back there?”

Dag sighed and stretched his back. “There were only two ways it could go, Spark. Slow and excruciating, or fast and excruciating. Like yanking a tooth, I prefer my pain to go fast.”

“You didn’t even give her a chance to say her piece!”

He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Fewest unforgivable things we had the time to say to each other the better, I’d say.”

“I didn’t get a chance to say my piece! I didn’t even get to try with her! I’m not saying I would have got anywhere either, but at least I’d have known I tried!”

“I know that trying. Spark, it would’ve near broke my heart to watch you turning yourself inside out with it. I couldn’t have stood it.”

He turned to attempt to undo their bedroll strings with his hook; after watching him for a frustrated moment, Fawn reached past and plucked the knots apart, helping him unroll their blankets across the floor. He sat down on his with a weary grunt. She sat down opposite, cross-legged, frowning up at him, and raked her hands through her damp distracted curls.

“Sometimes, once folks have a chance to vent, they’ll calm down and talk more reasonable.” Cumbia had already advanced as far as promoting Fawn from farmer whore to that girl just in the short time she’d been given, scarcely worse than the that fellow that was Dag’s common name in West Blue. Who knew where they might have ended up if they’d just kept at it a bit?

He shrugged. “She won. It’s done.”

“If she won, what was her prize?” Fawn demanded. “I don’t see how anyone won anything much, back there.”

“Look—I didn’t leave, she threw me out. Either she means it, and she’ll never speak to me again, or else it’ll be up to her to apologize.”

“So what you’re actually saying is, you won. Some tactics, Dag!”

He grimaced. “Learned ’em at my mother’s knee.”

“What has got into you? I’ve seen you in some moods, but I never saw you in a mood like this one! Can’t say as I much like it.”

He lay back and stared up at the peeled-log ridgepole. None of the support timbers for the roof were squared off or dressed, being just slim bare trunks of the right length fitted into triangles. “I don’t much like the way I get here, either. It’s like I lose myself when I get mixed up with my closest kin. Dar and Mama mostly—my father when he was alive less so, but some. Mari I can stand. It’s part of why I touch down here lightly, or not at all if I can help it. A mile away, or better yet a hundred, I can go back to being me.”

“Huh,” said Fawn, mulling this over. She didn’t find it nearly as inexplicable as she might once have, remembering how vast new possibilities had seemed to open for her in Glassforge, and close down chokingly when she returned to West Blue. It was just that at Dag’s age she figured folks ought to be long over that sort of thing. Or maybe they’d just had more time to work down into a rut. Deep, deep rut. “Funny sort of exile.”

“Indeed it is.” But he wasn’t laughing.

The air was chilling fast as the storm rumbled through. The small stone fireplace was clearly there more for warming pots of work supplies than for heating the far from tight building, presumably not used in winter, but Dag bestirred them to lay a fire. “Have to replace that in the morning,” he muttered at the neat pile of deadfall standing ready on the porch just outside the door. But once the flames caught—Dag did seem to have a peculiar lucky knack for getting fires going—the yellow light, the scent of woodsmoke, and the occasional orange spark popping out onto the slate hearth lent some much-needed cheer to the room. Their hair and clothes began to dry, and Fawn’s skin lost its clamminess.

Fawn set a pot of rain-barrel water on an iron hook to boil for tea, swung it over the fire, and poked at the new coals with a stick, pushing more underneath her pot. “So,” she said, in what she hoped did not sound too desperate a tone, “where do we go tomorrow?”

“I figure to draw our own tent from Stores.”

They owned a tent? “Where will we set it up?”

“I have an idea or two. If they don’t work out, I’ll find a third.”

Which seemed to be all she was going to get right now. Was this clash with his family over, or not? It wasn’t that she thought Dag was lying to her, so much as that she was beginning to suspect his idea of a comfortable outcome did not match hers. If Lakewalkers didn’t marry farmers—or at least, didn’t do so and then take the farmers home—she wouldn’t expect the feeling here against her to be trifling or easily set aside. If this was something no one had successfully done before, her faith that Dag will know what to do was…if not misplaced, more hope than certainty. She wasn’t afraid of hard, but when did hard shade over into insurmountable?

Her stomach growled. If Dag was half as fatigued as she was, it was no wonder nobody seemed able to think straight. Food would help everything. She rolled the mysterious plunkin across in front of the hearth and stared at it. It still looked disconcertingly like a severed head. “What do we do with this?”

Dag sat cross-legged and smiled—not much of a smile, but a start. “Lots of choices. They all come down to plunkin. You can eat it raw in slices, peel it and cut it up and cook it alone or in a stew, boil it whole, wrap it in leaves and cook it in campfire coals, stick a sword through it and turn it on a spit, or, very popular, feed it to the pigs and eat the pigs. It’s very sustaining. Some say you could live forever on plunkin and rainwater. Others say it would just seem like forever.” He gestured to her belt knife, one of his spares that he’d insisted she wear since they’d left West Blue. “Try a slice.”

Dubiously, she captured the rolling globe between her knees and stabbed it. The brown rind was rather hard, but once opened revealed a dense, pale yellow fruit, solid all the way through, without a core or pit or seeds. She nibbled out a bite as if from a melon slice.

It was crunchy, not as sweet as an apple, not as starchy as a raw potato…“A bit parsnippy. Actually, quite a bit nicer than parsnip. Huh.” It seemed the problem was not in the quality, but in the quantity.

For simplicity, and because she really didn’t feel comfortable cooking over Dar’s fireplace, used for who knew what sorcerous processes, they ate it raw in slices. Although Fawn did draw the line at Dag’s attempt simply to stab his portion with his hook and gnaw around the edges; she peeled his piece and made him get out his fork-spoon. The plunkin was surprisingly satisfying. Hungry as they both were, they only disposed of half a head, or root, or whatever it was.

“Why don’t farmers have this?” Fawn wondered. “Food gets around. Flowers, too. Animals, too, really. We could grow it in ponds.”

Dag gestured with his slice, stuck on his fork-spoon. All right, so the official eating tool hadn’t made that much difference; it still made it all seem more like a real meal. “The ears need a little tickle in their grounds to germinate. If farmers planted them, they’d just go down in the mud and rot. It’s a trick most every Lakewalker here learns. I hated raft duty when I was young, thought it was the dullest thing possible. Now I understand why the old patrollers didn’t mind taking their turns, and laughed at me. Soothing, y’know.”