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.”