Dag snorted. “Lakewalker legends say the gods abandoned the world when the first malice came. And that they will return when the earth is entirely cleansed of its spawn. If you believe in gods.”

“Do you?”

“I believe they are not here, yes. It’s a faith of sorts.”

“Huh.” She rolled up the last maps and tied their strings before handing them to him. He settled them in place and closed the trunk.

He sat with his hand on the latch a moment. “Whatever their part really was,” he said finally, “I don’t think it was just the sorcerer-lords who built all those towers and laid those roads and sailed those ships. Your ancestors did, too.”

She blinked at this, but what she was thinking, he could not guess.

“And the lords didn’t come from nowhere, or elsewhere, either,” Dag continued tenaciously. “One line of thought says there was just one people, once, and that the sorcerers rose out of them. Except that then they bred up for their skills and senses, and then used their magic to make themselves more magical, and lordly, and powerful, and so grew away from their kin. Which may have been the first mistake.”

She tilted her head, and her lips parted as if to speak, but at that point a pair of footsteps echoed from the hall. Razi stuck his head through the doorframe.

“Ah, Dag, there you are. You should smell this.” He thrust out a small glass bottle and pulled off the leather stopper plugging its neck. “Dirla found this medicine shop up in town that sells the stuff.”

Dirla smiled proudly over his shoulder.

“What is it?” asked Fawn, leaning in and sniffing as the patroller waved the bottle past her. “Oh, pretty! It smells like chamomile and clover flowers.”

“Scented oil,” he answered. “They have seven or eight kinds.”

“What do you use it for?” Fawn asked innocently.

Dag mentally consigned his comrade to the middle of the Dead Levels. “Sore muscles,” he said repressively.

“Well, I suppose you could,” said Razi thoughtfully.

“Scented back rubs,” breathed Dirla in a warm voice. “Mm, nice idea.”

“How useful of you two to stop by,” Dag overrode this before it could grow more interesting still, either to himself, who didn’t hanker after a repeat of the discomforts of his ride from the Horsefords’, or to Fawn, who would undoubtedly ask more questions. “Happens I need this trunk taken back downstairs to the storeroom.” He stood up and pointed. “Lug.”

They grumbled, if lightheartedly, and lugged.

Dag closed the door behind them, shooed Fawn to her own room, and followed. Wondering if he dared ask just where that shop was located, and if it might be on the way to the harnessmaker’s.

Walking the patterns in the marshes west of Glassforge took six days.