“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.

To Dag’s discontent, no patrollers emerged from the woods that night, either before or after the rain drove him inside. He did not see Fawn again till they met over the breakfast trestle. They were both back in their own clothes, dry and only faintly stained; in the shabby blue dress she looked almost well, except for a lingering paleness. A check of the insides of her eyelids, and of her fingernails, showed them not as rosy as he thought they ought to be, and she still grew dizzy if she attempted to stand too suddenly, but his hand on her brow felt no fever, good.

He was pressing her to eat more bread and drink more milk when the boy Tad burst through the kitchen door, wide-eyed and gasping. “Ma! Pa! Uncle Sassa!

There’s one of them mud-men in the pasture, worrying the sheep!”

Dag exhaled wearily; the three farm men around the table leaped up in a panic and scattered to find their tool-weapons. Dag loosened his war knife in its belt sheath and stepped out onto the porch. Fawn and the farmwife followed, peering fearfully around him, Petti clutching a formidable kitchen knife.

At the far end of the pasture, a naked man-form had pounced across the back of a bleating sheep, face buried in its woolly neck. The sheep bucked and threw the creature off. The mud-man fell badly, as if its arms were numb and could not properly catch itself. It rose, shook itself, and half loped, half crawled after the intended prey. The rest of the flock, bewildered, trotted a few yards away, then turned to stare.

“Worried?” Dag murmured to the women. “I’d say those sheep are downright appalled. That mud-man must have been made from a dog or a wolf. See, it’s trying to move like one, but nothing works. It can’t use its hands like a man, and it can’t use its jaws like a wolf. It’s trying to tear that silly sheep’s throat out, but all it’s getting is a mouthful of wool. Yech!”

He shook his head in exasperation and pity, stepped off the porch, and strode toward the pasture; behind him, Petti gasped, and Fawn muffled a squeak.

He jogged to the end of the lane, to circle between the mud-man and the woods, then hopped up and swung his legs over the rail fence. He stretched his shoulders and shook out his right arm, trying to work out the soreness and knots, and drew his knife. The morning air was heavy with moisture, gray on the ground, lilac and pale pink rising to turquoise in the sky beyond the tree line.

The grass was wet from the rain, beaded droplets glimmering like scattered silver, and the saturated soil squelched under his boots. He weaved around a few sodden cow flops and eased toward the mud-man. Aptly named—the creature was filthy, smeared with dung, hair matted and falling in its eyes, and it whiffed of nascent rot. Its flesh was already starting to lose tone and color, the skin mottled and yellowish. Its lips drew back as it snarled at Dag and froze, undecided between attack and flight.

Jump me, you clumsy suffering nightmare. Spare me the sweat of chasing you down.

“Come along,” Dag crooned, crouching a little and bringing his arms in. “End this. I’ll get you out of there, I promise.”

The creature’s hips wriggled as it leaned forward, and Dag braced himself as it sprang. He almost missed his move as it stumbled on the lunge, hands pawing the air, neck twisting and straining in a vain attempt to bring its all-too-human jaw to Dag’s neck. Dag blocked one black-clawed hand with his left arm, spun sideways, and slashed hard.

He jumped back as hot blood spurted from the creature’s neck, trying to save himself more laundry duty. The mud-man managed three steps away, yowling wordlessly, before it fell to the mucky ground. Dag circled in cautiously, but no further mercy cut was required; the mud-man shuddered and grew still, eyes glazed and half-open. A tuft of dirty wool, stuck to its lips, stopped fluttering. Absent gods, this is an ugly cleanup chore. But neatly enough done, this time. He wiped his blade on the grass, making plans to beg a dry rag from the farmwife in a moment.

He stood up and turned to see the farm men, huddled in a terrified knot clutching their tools, staring at him openmouthed. Tad came running from the fence and was caught around the waist by his father as he attempted to approach the corpse. “I told you to stay back!”

“It’s dead, Pa!” Tad wriggled free and gazed up with a glowing face at Dag.

“He just walked right up to it and took it down slick as anything!”

Ah. The last mud-men these folk had encountered had still been bound by the will of their maker, intelligent and lethal. Not like this forsaken, sick, confused animal trapped in its awkward body. Dag didn’t feel any overwhelming need to correct the farm men’s misperceptions of his daring. Safer if they remained cautious of the mud-men anyway. His lips curled up in grim amusement, but he said only, “It’s my job. You can have the burying of it, though.” The farm men gathered around the corpse, poking it at tool-handle distance. Dag strolled past them toward the house, not looking back.