You’ve looked worse, old patroller. Go on.

Fawn swallowed and turned Grace into the lane, which wound up the slope for almost a quarter mile, lined on both sides with the ubiquitous drystone walls.

Past a grove of sugar maple, walnut, and hickory trees, a dilapidated old barn appeared on the right, and a larger, newer barn on the left. Above the new barn lay a couple of outbuildings, including a smokehouse; faint gray curls of smoke leaked from its eaves, and Dag’s nose caught the pleasant tang of smoldering hickory. A covered well sat at the top of the yard, and, on around to the right, the large old farmhouse loomed.

The central core of it was a two-story rectangle of blocky yellowish stone, with a porch and front door in the middle overlooking the river valley. On the far north end, a single-story add-on looked as though it contained two rooms. On the near end, an excavation was in progress, with piles of new stone waiting, evidently an addition planned to match the other. On the west, another add-on girdled with a long, covered porch ran the length of the house, clearly the kitchen. No one was in sight.

“Suppertime,” said Fawn. “They must all be in the kitchen.”

“Eight people,” said Dag, whose groundsense left him in no doubt.

Fawn took a long, long breath, and dismounted. She tied both their horses to the back porch rail and led Dag around to the steps. Her lighter and his heavier tread echoed briefly on the porch floor. Top and bottom halves of a double door were open wide and hooked to bolts in the wall, but beyond them was another, lighter doorframe with a gauze screen. Fawn pushed the screen door open and slipped in, holding it for him. He let his wooden hand rest briefly on her shoulder before dropping it to his side.

At a long table filling most of the right-hand half of the room, eight people turned and stared. Dag swiftly tried to match faces with the names and stories he’d been given. Aunt Nattie could be instantly identified, a very short, stout woman with disordered curly gray locks and eyes as milky as pearls, her head now cocked with listening. The four brothers were harder to sort, but he thought he could determine Fletch, bulky and oldest, Reed and Rush, the non-identical twins, brown-haired and brown-eyed, and ash-haired and blue-eyed respectively, and Whit, black-haired like Fawn, skinny, and youngest but for her. A plump young woman seated next to Fletch defeated his tutorial. Fawn’s parents, Sorrel and Tril Bluefield, were no hardship to identify, a graying man at the table’s head who’d stood up so fast his chair had banged over, and on the near end a short, middle-aged woman stumbling out of her seat shrieking.

Fawn’s parents descended upon her in such a whirl of joy, relief, and rage that Dag had to close off his groundsense lest he be overwhelmed. The brothers, behind, were mostly grinning with relief, and Aunt Nattie was asking urgently,

“What? Is that Fawn, you say? Told you she wasn’t dead! About time!”

Fawn, her face nearly unreadable, endured being hugged, kissed, and shaken in equal measure; the dampness in her blinking eyes was not, Dag thought, caught only from the emotions around her. Dag stiffened a little when her father, after hugging her off her feet, put her down and then threatened to beat her; but while his paternal relief was very real, it seemed his threats were not, for Fawn didn’t flinch in the least from them.

“Where have you been, girl?” her mother’s voice finally rose over the babble to demand.

Fawn backed up a trifle, raised her chin, and said in a rush, “I went to Glassforge to look for work, and I may have found some too, but first I have to go with Dag, here, to Hickory Lake to help make his report to his captain about the blight bogle we killed.”

Her family gazed at Fawn as though she’d started raving in a fever; Dag suspected the only part they’d really caught was Glassforge.

Fawn went on a bit breathlessly, before they could start up again, “Mama, Papa, this here is my friend, Dag Redwing Hickory.” She gave her characteristic little knee-dip, and pulled Dag forward. He nodded, trying to find some pleasantly neutral expression for his face. “He’s a Lakewalker patroller.”

“How de’ do,” said Dag politely and generally.

A silence greeted this, and a lot more staring, necks cranked back. Short stature ran in Fawn’s family, evidently.

Confirming Dag’s guess, Fawn’s mother, Tril, said, “Glassforge? Why would you want to go there to look for work? There’s plenty of work right here!”

“Which you left on all of us,” Fletch put in unhelpfully.

“And wouldn’t Lumpton Market have been a lot closer?” said Whit in a tone of judicious critique.

“Do you know how much trouble you caused, girl?” said Papa Bluefield.

“Yeah,” said Reed, or maybe Rush—no, Rush, ash-headed, check—“when you didn’t show for dinner market-day night, we figured you were out dawdling and daydreaming in the woods as usual, but when you didn’t show by bedtime, Papa made us all go out with torches and look and call. The barn, the privy, the woods, down by the river—it would have saved a deal of stumbling around in the dark and yelling if Mama had counted your clothes a day sooner!”

Fawn’s lip had given an odd twitch at something in this, which Dag determined to ask about later. “I am sorry you were troubled,” she said, in a carefully formal tone. “I should have written a note, so’s you needn’t have worried I’d met with an accident.”

“How would that have helped for worrying, fool girl!” Fawn’s mother wept a bit more. “Thoughtless, selfish…”

“Papa made me ride all the way to Aunt Wren’s, in the idea you might have gone there, and he made Rush ride to Lumpton asking after you,” Reed said.

A spate more of complaint and venting from all parties followed this. Fawn endured without argument, and Dag held his tongue. The ill words were not ill meant, and Fawn, apparently a native speaker of this strange family dialect, seemed to take them in their spirit and let the barbs roll off, mostly. Her eyes flashed resentment only once, when the plump girl beside Fletch chimed in with some support of one of his more snappish comments. But Fawn said only,

“Hello, Clover. Nice to see you, too,” which reduced the girl to nonplussed silence.

Notably missing was any word about Sunny Sawman. So Fawn’s judgment on that score was proven shrewd. Too early to guess at the consequences…

Dag was not sure how long the uproar would have continued in this vein, except that Aunt Nattie levered herself up, grasped a walking stick, and stumped around the table to Fawn’s side. “Let me see you, girl,” she said quietly, and Fawn hugged her—the first hug Dag had seen going the other way—and let the blind woman run her hands over her face. “Huh,” said Aunt Nattie. “Huh. Now introduce me to your patroller friend. It’s been a long time since I’ve met a Lakewalker.”

“Dag,” said Fawn, reverting to her breathless, anxious formality, “This is my aunt Nattie that I’ve told you about. She’d like to touch you, if that’s all right.”

“Of course,” said Dag.

The little woman stumped nearer, reached up, and bounced her fingers uncertainly off his collarbone. “Goodness, boy, where are you?”

“Say something,” Fawn whispered urgently.

“Um… up here, Aunt Nattie.”

Her hand went higher, to touch his chin; he obligingly bent his head. “Way up there!” she marveled. The knobby, dry fingers brushed firmly over his features, pausing at the slight heat of the bruises on his face from yesterday, circling his cheekbones and chin in inexplicable approval, tracing his lips and eyelids.

Dag realized with a slight shock that this woman possessed a rudimentary groundsense, possibly developed in the shadow of her lifelong blindness, and he let his reach out to touch hers.

Her breath drew in. “Ah, Lakewalker, right enough.”