Fawn leaned precariously around Dag’s shoulder and gazed down the main street, lined with older buildings of wood and stone or newer ones of brick. Plank sidewalks kept people’s feet out of the churned mud of the road. A block farther on, the mud gave way to cobblestones, and beyond that, brick. A town so rich they paved the street with brick! The road curved away to follow the bend in the river, but she could just glimpse a town square busy with a day market. Most of the smokes that smudged the air seemed to be coming from farther downstream and downwind. Dag turned the mare into a side street, jerking his chin at the brick building rising to their left, blunt and blocky but softened by climbing ivy.

“There’s our hotel. Patrols always stay there for free. It was written into the will of the owner’s father. Something about the last big malice we took out in these parts, nigh on sixty years ago. Must’ve been a scary one. Good thinking on someone’s part, because it gets the area patrolled more often.”

“You looked for sixty years without finding another?”

“Oh, there’ve been a couple in the interim, I believe. We just got them so small, the farmers never knew. Like, um… pulling a weed instead of chopping down a tree. Better for us, better for everyone, except harder to convince folks to chip in some payment. Farsighted man, that old innkeep.”

They turned again under a wide brick archway and into the yard between the hotel and its stable. A horse boy polishing harness on a bench glanced up and rose to come forward. He did not reach for the mare’s makeshift bridle.

“Sorry, mister, miss.” His nod was polite, but his look seemed to sum up the worth of the battered pair riding bareback and find it sadly short. “Hotel’s full up. You’ll have to find another place.” The twist of his lips turned slightly derisive, if not altogether without sympathy. “Doubt you could make the price of a room here anyways.”

Only Fawn’s hand on Dag’s back felt the faint rumble of—anger? no, amusement pass through him. “Doubt I could too. Happily, Miss Bluefield, here, has made the price of all of them.”

The boy’s face went a little blank, as he tried to work this out to anything that made sense to him. His confusion was interrupted by a pair of Lakewalkers hobbling out of the doorway into the yard, staring hard at Dag.

These two looked more like proper patrollers, neat in leather vests, with their long hair pulled back in decorated braids. One had a face nearly as bruised as Fawn’s, with a strip of linen wrapped awkwardly around his head and under his jaw not quite hiding a line of bloody stitches. He leaned on a stick. The other had her left arm, thickened with bandages, supported in a sling. Both were dark-haired and tall, though their eyes were an almost normal sort of clear bright brown.

“Dag Redwing Hickory… ?” said the woman cautiously.

Dag swung his right leg over the mare’s neck and sat sideways a moment; smiling faintly, he touched his hand to his temple in a gesture of acknowledgment.

“Aye.

You all from Chato’s Log Hollow patrol?”

Both patrollers stood straighter, despite their evident hurts. “Yes, sir!”

said the man, while the woman hissed at the hotel servant, “Boy, take the patroller’s horse!”

The boy jumped as though goosed and took the halter rope, his stare growing wide-eyed. Dag slid down and turned to help Fawn, who swung her legs over.

“Ah! Don’t you dare jump,” he said sternly, and she nodded and slid off into his arm, collecting something pleasantly like a hug as he eased her feet to the ground. She stifled her longing to lean her head into his chest and just stand there for, oh, say, about a week. He turned to the other patrollers, but his left arm stayed behind her back, a solid, anchoring weight.

“Where is everyone?” Dag asked. The man grinned, then winced, his hand going to his jaw. “Out looking for you, mostly.”

“Ah, I was afraid of that.”

“Yeah,” said the woman. “Your patrol all kept swearing you’d turn up like a cat, and then went running out again anyway without hardly stopping to eat or sleep.

Looks like the cat fanciers had the right of it. There’s a fellow upstairs name of Saun’s been fretting his heart out for you. Every time we go in, he badgers for news.”

Dag’s lips pursed in a breath of relief. “On medicine tent duty, are you?”

“Yep,” said the man.

“How many carrying-wounded have we got?”

“Just two—your Saun and our Reela. She got her leg broke when some mud-men spooked her horse over a drop.”

“Bad?”

“Not good, but she’ll get to keep it.”

Dag nodded. “Good enough, then.”

The man blinked in belated realization of Dag’s stump, but he added nothing more awkward. “I don’t know how tired you are, but it would be kindly done if you could step up and put Saun’s mind at ease first thing. He really has been fretting something awful. I think he’d rest better for seeing you with his own eyes.”

“Of course,” said Dag.

“Ah…” said the woman, looking at Fawn and then, inquiringly, at Dag.

“This here’s Miss Fawn Bluefield,” said Dag.

Fawn dipped her knees. “How de’ do?”

“And she is… ?” said the man dubiously.

“She’s with me.” Something distinctly firm in Dag’s voice discouraged further questions, and the two patrollers, after civil if still curious nods at Fawn, led the way inside.

Fawn had only a glimpse of the entry hall, featuring a tall wooden counter and archways leading off to some big rooms, before she followed the patrollers up a staircase with a time-polished banister, cool and smooth under her hesitant fingertips. One flight up, they turned into a hallway lined with doors on either side and a glass window set in the end for light.

“You partner’s mostly lucid today, although he still keeps claiming you brought him back from the dead,” said the man over his shoulder.

“He wasn’t dead,” said Dag.

The man shot a look at the woman. “Told you.”

“His heart had stopped and he’d quit breathing, was all.”

Fawn blinked in bafflement. And, she was heartened to see, she wasn’t the only one.

“Er…” The man stopped outside a door with a brass number 6 on it. “Pardon, sir?

I’d always been taught it was too risky to match grounds with someone mortally injured, and unworkable to block the pain at speed.”

“Likely.” Dag shrugged. “I just skipped the extras and went in and out fast.”

“Oh,” said the woman in a voice of enlightenment that Fawn did not share. The man blurted, “Didn’t it hurt?”

Dag gave him a long, slow look. Fawn was very glad it wasn’t her at the focus, because that look could surely reduce people to grease spots on the floor.

Dag gave the other patroller a moment more to melt—precisely timed, she was suddenly certain—then nodded at the door. The woman hastened to open it.

Dag passed in. If the two patrollers had been respectful before, the look they now exchanged behind his back was downright daunted. The woman glanced at Fawn doubtfully but did not attempt to exclude her as she slipped through the door in Dag’s wake.

The room had cutwork linen curtains, pushed open and moving gently in the summer air, and flanking the window two beds with feather ticks atop straw ticks.

One was empty, though it had gear and saddlebags piled on the floor at its foot.

So did the other, but in it lay an—inevitably—tall young man. His hair was light brown, unbraided, and spread out upon his pillow. A rumpled sheet was pulled up to his chest, where his torso was wrapped around with bandages. He stared listlessly at the ceiling, his pale brow wrinkled. When he turned his head at the sound of steps and recognized his visitor, the pain in his face transformed to joy so fast it looked like a flash flood washing over him.