“I’m sure I’ll be fine, Dag,” Fawn offered, although a faint doubt colored her voice.

“But can you keep her from trying to overdo?” Dag said gruffly. “What if she starts bleeding again? Or gets chilled and throws a fever?”

Even Fawn’s brow wrinkled at that last one. Her lips moved on a voiceless protest, But it’s midsummer.

“Then I’ll be better fit to deal with that than you would,” said Mari, watching him.

Watching him flail, he suspected glumly. He drew back from making more of a show of himself than he already had. He’d had his groundsense closed down tight since they’d hit the outskirts of Glassforge yesterday, but Mari clearly didn’t need to read his ground to draw her own shrewd conclusions, even without the way Fawn glowed like a rock-oil lamp in his presence.

He rolled up his chart and handed it to Mari. “You can have that to tack on the wall downstairs, and we can mark it off as we go. For whatever amusement it will provide folks. If you hint there could be a bow-down when we reach the end, it might go more briskly.”

She nodded affably and withdrew, and Dag put Fawn to work helping him restack the contents of the trunk in rather better order than he’d found it.

As she brought him an armload of stained and tattered logbooks, she asked, “That’s twice now you’ve talked about planting farmers. What do you mean?”

He sat back on his heels, surprised. “Don’t you know where your family comes from?”

“Sure I do. It’s written down in the family book that goes with the farm accounts. My great-great-great-grandfather”—she paused to check the generations on her fingers, and nodded—“came north to the river ridge from Lumpton with his brother almost two hundred years ago to clear land. A few years later, Great-great-great got married and crossed the western river branch to start our place. Bluefields have been there ever since. That’s why the nearest village is named West Blue.”

“And where were they before Lumpton Market?”

She hesitated. “I’m not sure. Except that it was just Lumpton back then, because Lumpton Crossroads and Upper Lumpton weren’t around yet.”