“I plan to.”

“Huh. Do you, now.” She shook her head and clucked her horse forward, and Dag belatedly recalled his last statement to her on the subject of plans.

But he could almost watch himself being displaced in her head with the hundred details a patrol leader on duty must track—as well he remembered. Her gaze turned to sweep over the rest of her charges, checking their gear, their horses, their faces; judging their readiness, finding it enough to go on with. This day.

Again.

Fawn had been helping Reela, apparently one of the several dozen people, or so it seemed to Dag, that Fawn had managed to make friends of in this past week.

The two young women bade each other cheery good-byes, and Fawn popped down off the wagon to come stand with him as he watched his patrol form up and trot out through the gateway. At least as many riders gave a parting wave to her as to him. In a few minutes, Chato’s patrol too mounted up and wheeled out, at a slower pace for the rumbling wagon. Saun waved as enthusiastic a farewell as his injuries permitted. Silence settled in the stable yard.

Dag sighed, caught as usual between relief to be rid of the whole maddening lot of them, and the disconcerting loneliness that always set in when he was parted from his people. He told himself that it made no sense to be shaken by both feelings simultaneously. Anyway, there were more practical reasons to be wary when one was the only Lakewalker in a townful of farmers, and he struggled to wrap his usual guarded courtesy back about himself. Except now with Fawn also inside.

The horse boys disbanded toward the tack room or the back door to the kitchen, walking slowly in the humidity and chatting with each other.

“Your patrollers weren’t so bad,” said Fawn, staring thoughtfully out the gate.

“I didn’t think they’d accept me, but they did.”

“This is patrol. Camp is different,” said Dag absently.

“How?”

“Eh…” Weak platitudes rose to his mind, Time will tell, Don’t borrow trouble.

“You’ll see.” He felt curiously loath to explain to her, on this bright morning, why his personal war on malices wasn’t the sole reason that he volunteered for more extra duty than any other patroller in Hickory Lake Camp. His record had been seventeen straight months in the field without returning there, though he’d had to switch patrols several times to do it.

“Must we leave today, too?” asked Fawn.

Dag came to himself with a start and wrapped his arm around her, snugging her to his hip. “No, in fact. It’s a two-day hard ride to Lumpton from here, but we’ve no need to ride hard. We can make an easy start tomorrow, take it in gentle stages.” Or even later, the seductive thought occurred. “I was wondering if I ought to give my room back to the hotel. Since I’m not really a patroller and all.”

“What? No! That room is yours for as long as you want it, Spark!” Dag said indignantly.

“Um, well, that’s sort of the point, I thought.” She bit her lip, but her eyes, he realized, were sparkling. “I was wondering if I could sleep in with you?

For…

frugality.”

“Of course, frugality! Yes, that’s the thing. You are a thoughtful girl, Spark.”

She cast him a merry smirk. She flashed an entrancing dimple when she smirked, which made his heart melt like a block of butter left in the summer sun. She said, “I’ll go move my things.”

He followed, feeling as utterly scatter-witted as Mari had accused him of being.

He could not, could not run up and down the streets of Glassforge, leaping and shouting to the blue sky and the entire population, She says I make her eyes happy!

He really wanted to, though. They did not leave the next day, for it was raining. Nor the next either, for rain threatened then, too. On the following morning, Dag declared Fawn too sore from the previous night’s successfully concluded bed experiments to ride comfortably, although by midafternoon she was hopping around as happily as a flea and he was limping as the pulled muscle in his back seized up. Which provided the next day’s excuse for lingering, as well. He pictured the conversation with Fairbolt, Why are you late, Dag? Sorry, sir, I crippled myself making passionate love to a farmer girl. Yeah, that’d go over well.

Watching Fawn discover the delights that her own body could provide her was an enchantment to Dag as endlessly beguiling as water lilies. He had to cast his mind far back for comparisons, as he’d made those discoveries at a much younger age. He could indeed remember being a little crazed with it all for a while.

He found he really didn’t need to rack his brains to provide variety in his lovemaking, for she was still overwhelmed by the marvel of repeatability. So he probably hadn’t created anything he couldn’t handle, quite.

Dag also discovered in himself a previously unsuspected weakness for foot rubs.

If ever Fawn wanted to fix him in one place, she didn’t need to hog-tie him with ropes; when her small firm hands worked their way down past his ankles, he slumped like a man poleaxed and just lay there paralyzed, trying not to drool too unattractively into his pillow. In those moments, never getting out of bed again for the rest of his life seemed the very definition of paradise. As long as Spark was in the bed with him.

The short summer nights filled themselves, but Dag was unsettled by how swiftly the long days also slipped by. A gentle ride out for Fawn to try her new mare and riding trousers, with a picnic by the river, turned into an afternoon under a curtaining willow tree that lasted till sundown. Sassa the Horseford kinsman popped up again, and Dag found in Fawn an apparently bottomless appetite for tours of Glassforge crafters. Her endless curiosity and passion for questions was by no means limited to patrollers and sex, flattering as that had been, but seemed to extend to the whole wide world. Sassa’s willing, nay, proud escort and array of family connections guided them through the complex back premises of a brick burner, a silversmith, a saddler, three kinds of mills, a potter—Fawn cast a simple pot under the woman’s enthusiastic tutelage, becoming cheerfully muddied—and a repeat of the visit to Sassa’s own glassworks, because Dag had missed it before on account of being up to his waist in swamp.

Dag at first mustered a mere polite interest—he seldom paid close attention anymore to the details of anything he wasn’t being asked to track and slay—but found himself drawn in along the trail of Fawn’s fascination. With studied and sweating intensity, the glass workers brought together sand and fire and meticulous timing to effect transformations of the very ground of their materials into fragile, frozen brilliance. This is farmer magic, and they don’t even realize it, Dag thought, completely taken by their system of blowing glass into molds to make rapid, reliable replicas. Sassa gave to Fawn a bowl that she had seen being made the other day, now annealed, and she determined to take it home to her mother. Dag was doubtful about getting it to West Blue intact in a saddlebag, but Sassa provided a slat box padded with straw and hope. Which was going to be bulky and awkward; Dag steeled himself to deal with it.

Later, Fawn unpacked the bowl to set on the table beside their bed to catch the evening light. Dag sat on the bed and stared with nearly equal interest at the way the patterns pressed into it made wavering rainbows.

“All things have grounds, except where a malice has drained them,” he commented.

“The grounds of living things are always moving and changing, but even rocks have a sort of low, steady hum. When Sassa made that batch of glass and cast it, it was almost as if its ground came alive, it transformed so. Now it’s become still again, but changed. It’s like it”—his hand reached out as if grasping for the right word—“sings a brighter tune.”