“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.