“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.”
“Ma’am,” Dag responded, not knowing what else to say.
“Good voice, too,” Nattie observed, Dag wasn’t sure who to. She stopped short of checking his teeth like a horse’s, although by this time Dag would scarcely have blinked at it. She felt down his body, her touch hesitating briefly at the splints and sling; her eyebrows went up as she felt his arm harness through his shirt and briefly gripped his wooden hand. But she added only, “Nice deep voice.”
“Have you eaten?” asked Tril Bluefield, and when Fawn explained no, they’d ridden all day from Lumpton, shifted to what Dag guessed was her more normal motherly mode, driving a couple of her sons to set chairs and places. She put Fawn next to herself, and Fawn insisted Dag be placed on her own right, “On account of I promised to help him out with his broken arm.” They settled at last. Clover, finally introduced as Fletch’s betrothed, was also drafted to help, plopping plates and cups of what smelled like cider down in front of them.
Dag, by this time very thirsty, was most interested in the drink. The food was a well-cooked stew, and Dag silently rejoiced at being confronted with something he could handle by himself, though he wondered who in the household had bad teeth.
“The fork-spoon, I think,” he murmured in Fawn’s ear, and she nodded and rummaged it out of his belt pouch.
“What happened to your arm?” asked Rush, across from them.
“Which one?” asked Dag. And endured the inevitable moment of rustling, craning, and stunned stares as Fawn calmly unscrewed his hand and replaced it with the more useful tool. “Thank you, Spark. Drink?” He smiled down at her as she lifted the cup to his lips. It was fresh cider, very tart from new summer apples.
“And thanks again.”
“You’re welcome, Dag.” He licked the spare drop off his lower lip, so she didn’t have to chase it with her napkin, yet.
Rush finally found his voice, more or less. “Er… I was going to ask about the, er, sling…”
Fawn answered briskly, “A sneak thief at Lumpton Market lifted my bedroll yesterday. Dag got it back, but his arm was broken in the fight before the thieves got scared and ran off. Dag gave a real good description to the Lumpton folks, though, so they might catch the fellows.” Her jaw set just a trifle.
“So I kind of owe him for the arm.”
“Oh,” said Rush. Reed and Whit stared across the table with renewed, if daunted, interest.
Tril Bluefield, looking hungrily and now more carefully at her restored daughter, frowned and let her hand drift to Fawn’s cheek where the four parallel gouges were now paling pink scars. “What are those marks?”
She glanced sidelong at Dag; he shrugged, Go on. She said, “That’s where the mud-man hit me.”
“The what?” said her mother, face screwing up.
“A… sort of bandit,” Fawn revised this. “Two bandits grabbed me off the road near Glassforge.”
“What? What happened?” her mother gasped. The assorted brothers, too, sat up; on Dag’s right, he could feel Fletch tense.
“Not too much,” said Fawn. “They roughed me up, but Dag, who was tracking them, came up just then and, um. Ran them off.” She glanced at him again, and he lowered his eyelids in thanks. He did not especially wish to begin his acquaintance with her family with a listing of all the dead bodies he’d left around Glassforge, the human ones at least. Far too many human ones, this last round. “That’s how we first met. His patrol had been called to Glassforge to deal with the bandits and the blight bogle.”