“I know. I don’t know if I’m sorry now or not. I figured it was a problem I’d bought all on my own, so it was a problem to pay for all on my own. And then I thought my nerve would fail if I didn’t plunge in.”

For Nattie today, Fawn resolved to leave out nothing of her journey except the uncanny accident with Dag’s sharing knife—partly because she was daunted by the complicated explanations that would have to go with, partly because it made no difference to the fate of her pregnancy, but mostly because Lakewalker secrets were so clearly not hers to give away. No, not just Lakewalker secrets—Dag’s privacy. She grasped, now, what an intimate and personal possession his dead wife’s bone had been. It was the only confidence he’d asked her to keep.

Taking a breath, Fawn plunged in anew. She described her lonely trudge to Glassforge, her terrifying encounter with the young bandit and the strange mud-man. Her first flying view of the startled Dag, even more frightening, but in retrospect almost funny. The Horsefords’ eerie abandoned farm, the second abduction. The whole new measure for terror she’d learned at the malice’s hands. Dag at the cave, Dag that night at the farm.

She did end up with her head in Nattie’s lap then, though she managed to keep her tears down to a choked sniffling. Nattie petted her hair in the old way she hadn’t done since Fawn had been small and weeping in pain for some minor hurt to her body, or in fury for some greater wound to her spirit. “Sh. Sh, lovie.”

Fawn inhaled, wiped her eyes and nose on her apron, and sat up again on the floor next to Nattie’s chair. “Please don’t tell Mama and Papa any of this. They’re going to have to go on living with the Sawmans. There’s no point in making bad blood between the families now.”

“Eh, lovie. But it gars me to see Sunny get off free of all this.”

“Yes, but I couldn’t stand for my brothers to know. They’d either try to do something to Sunny and cause trouble, or they’d make a mock of me for being so stupid, and I don’t think I could bear that about this.” She added after a moment of consideration, “Or both.”

“I’m not sure even your brothers are thoughtless enough to make mock of this.” Nattie hesitated, then conceded reluctantly, “Well, perhaps half-Whit.”

Fawn managed a watery smile at the old jibe. “Poor Whit, maybe it’s that old joke on his name that drives him to be such an awful thorn to everyone. Maybe I should start calling him Whitesmith instead, see if it helps.”