“I’m not playing your little game, Fawn,” said Sunny tightly. “You won’t pin this on me. I meant what I said.” His hands were trembling slightly. But then, so were hers.

Her voice went, if possible, even flatter. “Well, you can put your mind and your nasty tongue to rest. I miscarried down near Glassforge the day the blight bogle nearly killed me. So there’s nothing left to pin on anyone, except bad memories.”

His breath of relief was visible and audible; he squeezed his eyes shut with it. The tension in the room seemed to drop by half. She thought Sunny must have gone into a flying panic when he’d heard of her return, watching his comfortable little world teeter, and felt grimly recompensed. Her world had been turned upside down. But if she could now turn it back upright, make all her misery not have been, at the cost of losing all she’d learned on the road to Glassforge—would she?

She could not, she thought, in all fairness judge Sunny for acting as though his daughter weren’t real to him; she’d scarcely seemed real to Fawn a deal of the time either, after all. She asked instead, “So where did you think I’d gone?”

He shrugged. “I thought at first you might have thrown yourself in the river. Gave me a turn, for a while.”

She tossed her head. “But not enough of one to do anything about it, seemingly.”

“What would there have been to do at that point? It seemed like the sort of stupid thing you’d do when you get a mad on. You always did have a temper. I remember how your brothers’d get you so wound up you could scarcely breathe for screaming, sometimes, till your pa’d tear his hair and come beat you for making such awful noise. Then the word got around that some of your clothes had gone missing, which made it seem you’d run off, since not even you would take three changes to go drowning. Your folks all looked, but I guess not far enough.”

“You didn’t help look then, either, I take it.”

“Do I look stupid? I didn’t want to find you! You got yourself into this fix, you could get yourself out.”

“Yeah, that’s what I figured.” Fawn bit her lip.

Silence. More staring.

Just go away, you awful lout. “I haven’t forgotten what you said to me that night, Sunny Sawman. You aren’t welcome in my sight. In case you’d any doubt.”

He shrugged irritably. His golden brows drew together over his snub nose. “I figured the blight bogle was a tall tale. What really happened?”