Papa Bluefield gave Dag a sideways look. “You’d be welcome to go on, if you’ve a need.”

“Papa!” snapped Fawn, gyrating back to something not strained show, but blazingly sincere. “The idea! Dag saved my life three times, twice at great risk to his own, once from the bandits, once from the malice—the bogle—and once again the night after the bogle…hurt me, because I would have bled to death right there in the woods if he hadn’t helped me. I will not have him turned out on the road by himself with two bad arms! For shame! Shame on this house if you dare!” She actually stamped her foot; the parlor floor sounded like a drum.

Papa Bluefield had stepped backward. His wife was staring at Dag with eyes wide, holding the glass bowl tightly. Nattie…was amazingly hard to read, but she had a strange little smile on her lips.

“Oh.” Papa Bluefield cleared his throat. “You hadn’t exactly made that plain, Fawn.”

Fawn said wearily, “How could I? No one would let me finish a story without telling me I must be making things up.”

Her father glanced at Dag. “He’s a quiet one.”

Dag could not touch his temple; he had to settle for a short nod. “Thinking. Sir.”

“Are you, now?”

It was not, in the Bluefield household, apparently possible to finish a debate. But when the squabbling finally died into assorted mumblings, drifting away up stairs or down halls in the dark, Dag ended up with his bedroll set down beside Aunt Nattie’s loom, with an impressive pile of quilts and pillows arranged for his ease. He could hear the shortest two women of the family rustling around in the bedroom beyond in low-voiced preparation for bed, and then the creak of the bed frames as they settled down.

Dag disposed his throbbing arm awkwardly, grateful for the pillows. Save for the night on the Horsefords’ kitchen floor, he had never slept inside a farmer’s house, certainly not as an invited guest, though his patrols had sometimes been put up, by arrangement, in farmers’ barns. This beat a drafty hayloft with snow sifting in all hollow. Before he’d met Fawn’s family, he would scarcely have understood why she would want to leave such comforts.

He wasn’t sure if it was worse to be loved yet not valued than valued but not loved, but surely it was better to be both. For the first time, he began to think a farm’s brightest treasure need not be furtively stolen; it might be honestly won. But the hopes forming in his mind would have to wait on tomorrow for their testing.

14