She gave a short, shaken nod, turning her face into his shoulder till she got her breath back.
He sighed. “Well, what you’ll say to your people is not my choice. It’s yours.
But my recommendation is to tell as much truth as you can, save for the knife priming.”
“How will we explain my going to your camp?”
“Your testimony to my captain is required in the death of the malice. Which is true. If they ask for more, I’ll get up on my tall horse and say it’s Lakewalker business.”
Fawn shook her head. “They won’t want to let me go off with you.”
“We’ll see. You can’t plan other people’s actions; only your own. If you try, you just end up facing the wrong way for the trouble you actually get. Hey.”
He bent down and kissed her hair. “If they chain you to the wall with iron bolts, undertake to break you out.”
“With no hands?”
“I’m very ingenious. And if they don’t chain you, then you can walk away. All it takes is courage, and I know you have that.”
She smiled, comforted, but admitted, “Not in my heart, not really. They… I don’t know how to explain this. They have ways of making me smaller.”
“I don’t know how they’ll be, but you are not the same as you were. One way or another, things will be different than you expect.”
Truly.
Exhausted, hurting, and uneasy, they did not make love that night, but held each other close in the stuffy inn chamber. Sleep was slow in coming. The summer sun was again slanting west when Fawn halted her mare and sat staring up the hill where a descending farm lane intersected the road. It had been a twenty-mile ride from Lumpton Market, and Dag had to admit, if only to himself, that his right arm was swollen and aching more than he cared for, and that his left, picking up an unaccustomed load, was not at its best either. They had taken the straight road north along the spreading ridge between the rivers for almost fifteen miles before turning west. Descending into the valley of the western branch, they’d crossed at a stony ford before turning north once more along the winding river road. A shortcut, Fawn claimed, to avoid doubling back a mile to the village of West Blue with its wagon bridge and mill.
And now she was home. Her ground was a complicated swirl at the moment, but it hardly took groundsense to see that her foremost emotion was not joy.
He kneed his horse up next to hers. “I think I’d like my social hand, to start,”
he murmured.
She nodded, and leaned over to open his belt pouch and swap out his hook for the less useful but less startling false hand. She paused to recomb her own hair and retie it in the curly horsetail with the bright ribbon, then stood up in her stirrups to take the comb to him as well; he lowered his head for the, in his unvoiced opinion, useless attempt to make him look his best. He perfectly understood her determination to walk back into her home looking proud and fine, not beaten and bedraggled. He just wished for her sake that he could look more the part of a valiant protector instead of something the cat had dragged in.
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.