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?”