“Doesn’t he patrol?”
“He did when he was younger—nearly everyone does—but his making skills are too valuable to waste on patrolling.” Dag’s, needless to say, weren’t.
“So what of your father? Was he a maker or a patroller?”
“Patroller. He died on patrol, actually.”
“Killed by one of those bogles Fawn talks of?” It was not entirely clear to Dag if Tril had believed in bogles before, but on the whole he thought she’d come to now, and was rendered very uncomfortable thereby.
“No. He went in after a younger patroller who was swept away in a bad river crossing, late in the winter. I wasn’t there—I was patrolling in a different sector of the hinterland, and didn’t hear for some days.”
“Drowned? Seems an odd fate for a Lakewalker.”
“No. Or not just then. He took a fever of the lungs and died about four nights later. Drowned in a sense, I suppose.” Actually, he’d died of sharing; the two comrades who were trying to fetch him home in his dire illness had entered the tent to find him rolled over on his knife. Whether he’d chosen that end in shrewd judgment or delirium or despair or just plain exhaustion from the struggle, Dag would never know. The knife had come to him, anyway, and he’d used it three years later on a malice up near Cat Lick.
“Oh, aye, lung fever is nasty,” Tril said sympathetically. “One of Sorrel’s aunts was carried off by that just last winter. I’m so sorry.”
Dag shrugged. “It was eleven years ago.”
“Were you close?”
“Not really. He was away when I was smaller, and then I was away. I knew his father well, though; Grandfather had a bad knee by then, like Nattie”—Nattie, listening through the doorway as she spun, lifted up her head and smiled at her name—“and he stayed in camp and helped look after me, among other things. If I’d lost a foot instead of a hand, I might have ended like that, Uncle Dag to my brother’s pack.” Or I might have shared early. “So, um… are there any one-handed farmers?”
“Oh, yes, accidents happen on farms. Folks deal with it, I expect. I knew a man with a wooden leg, once. I’ve never heard tell of anything like that rig of yours, though.”
Fawn’s mother was relaxing nicely in his presence now and didn’t jump at all anymore when he moved. On the whole, Dag suspected that it was easier to coax wild animals to take food from his hand than to lull Bluefields. But he was clearly making progress. He wondered if his Lakewalker habits were betraying him, and if he ought to have started with Fawn’s papa instead of with the women.
Well, it hardly mattered where he started; he was eventually going to have to beguile the whole lot of them in order to get his way.
And in they clumped, sweaty and ravenous. Fawn followed, smelling of cows, with two covered buckets slung on a yoke, which she set aside to deal with later.
The crowd, minus Clover tonight, settled down happily to heaping portions of ham, beans, corn bread, summer squash, assorted pickled things, biscuits, butter, jams, fresh apple butter, cider, and milk. Conversation lagged for a little.
Dag ignored the covert glances as he dealt with biscuits by stabbing them whole with his fork-spoon; Tril, if he read her aright, was simply pleased that he seemed to like them. Happily, he did not need to feign this flattery although he would have if necessary.
“Where did you go while I was milking?” Fawn finally asked him.
“Took a walk down to the river and back around. I am pleased to say there’s no malice sign within a mile of here, although I wouldn’t expect any. This area gets patrolled regularly.”
“Really?” said Fawn. “I’ve never seen patrollers around here.”
“We cross settled land at night, mostly, to avoid disturbing folks. You wouldn’t notice us.”
Papa Bluefield looked up curiously at this. It was quite possible, over the years, that not all patrols had passed as invisibly to him as all that.
“Did you ever patrol West Blue?” Fawn asked.
“Not lately. When I was a boy just starting, from about age fifteen, I walked a lot in this area, so I might have. Don’t remember now.”
“We might have passed each other all unknowing.” She looked thoughtful at this notion.
“Um… no. Not then.” He added, “When I was twenty I was sent on exchange to a camp north of Farmer’s Flats, and started my first walk around the lake. I didn’t get back for eighteen years.”
“Oh,” she said.
“I’ve been all over this hinterland since, but not just here. It’s a big territory.”
Papa Bluefield sat back at the table’s head and eyed Dag narrowly. “Just how old are you, Lakewalker? A deal older than Fawn, I daresay.”
“I daresay,” Dag agreed.
Papa Bluefield continued to stare expectantly. The sound of forks scraping plates was suddenly obtrusive.
Cornered. Must this come out here? Perhaps it was better to get it on the table sooner than later. Dag cleared his throat, so that his voice would come out neither squeaking like a mouse’s nor too loud, and said, “Fifty-five.”
Fawn choked on her cider. He probably should have glanced aside first to see she wasn’t trying to swallow anything. His fork-spoon hand was no good for patting her on the back, but she recovered her breath m a moment. “Sorry,” she wheezed.
“Down the wrong pipe.” She looked up sideways at him in muffled, possibly, alarm. Or dismay. He hoped it wasn’t horror.
“Papa,” she muttered, “is fifty-three.”
All right, a little horror. They would deal with it.
Tril was staring. “You look forty, if that.”
Dag lowered his eyelids in nonargument.
“Fawn,” Papa Bluefield announced grimly, “is eighteen.”
Beside him, Fawn’s breath drew in, sharply aggravated.
Dag tried, almost successfully, to keep his lips from curling up. It was hard, when she was clearly boiling so much inside she was ready to pop. “Really?”
He eyed her blandly. “She told me she was twenty. Although from my vantage, it scarcely makes a difference.”
She hunched her shoulders sheepishly. But their eyes connected, and then she had trouble not laughing too, and all was well.
Papa Bluefield said in an aggravated tone, “Fawn had an old bad habit of telling tall tales. I tried to beat it out of her. I should have beat her more, maybe.”
Or less, Dag did not say aloud.
“As it happens, I come from a very long-lived kin,” Dag said, by way of attempted repair. “My grandfather I told you of was still spry till his death at well over a hundred.” One hundred twenty-six, but there was more than enough mental arithmetic going on around the table right now. The brothers, particularly, seemed to be floundering, staring at him in renewed wariness.
“It all works out,” Dag went on into the too-long pause. “If, for example, Fawn and I were to marry, we would actually arrive at old age tolerably close together. Barring accidents.”
All right, he’d said the magic word, marry. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t done something like this before, long ago. Well, all right, it had been nothing at all like this. Kauneo’s kin had been overpowering in an entirely different manner. The terror rippling through him felt the same, though. Papa Bluefield growled, “Lakewalkers don’t marry farmer girls.”
He couldn’t grip Fawn’s hand below the table for reassurance; all he could do was dig his fork into her thigh, with unpredictable but probably unhelpful results at the moment. He did glance down at her. Was he about to jump off this cliff alone or with her? Her eyes were wide. And lovely. And terrified. And…
thrilled. He drew a long breath.
“I would. I will. I wish to. Marry Fawn. Please?”
Seven stunned Bluefields created the loudest silence Dag had ever heard.