“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, I 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.