“You can read and write?” Tril looked as though this was a point in Dag’s favor—good.

“Pretty much all Lakewalkers can.”

“Hm. Are you the oldest in your family, or what?”

“Youngest by ten years, but I’ve only the one brother living. It was a great sorrow to my mother that she had no daughter to carry on her tent, but my brother married a younger sister of the Waterstriders—they had six—and she took our tent name so’s it wouldn’t be lost, and moved in so’s my mother wouldn’t be alone.” See, I’m a nice tame fellow, I have a family too. Of a sort. “My brother is a very gifted maker at our camp.” He decided not to say of what. The production of sharing knives was the most demanding of Lakewalker makings, and Dar was highly respected, but it seemed premature to introduce this to the Bluefields.

“Doesn’t he patrol?”

“He did when he was younger—nearly everyone does—but his making skills are too valuable to waste on patrolling.” Dag’s, needless to say, weren’t.

“So what of your father? Was he a maker or a patroller?”

“Patroller. He died on patrol, actually.”

“Killed by one of those bogles Fawn talks of?” It was not entirely clear to Dag if Tril had believed in bogles before, but on the whole he thought she’d come to now, and was rendered very uncomfortable thereby.

“No. He went in after a younger patroller who was swept away in a bad river crossing, late in the winter. I wasn’t there—I was patrolling in a different sector of the hinterland, and didn’t hear for some days.”

“Drowned? Seems an odd fate for a Lakewalker.”

“No. Or not just then. He took a fever of the lungs and died about four nights later. Drowned in a sense, I suppose.” Actually, he’d died of sharing; the two comrades who were trying to fetch him home in his dire illness had entered the tent to find him rolled over on his knife. Whether he’d chosen that end in shrewd judgment or delirium or despair or just plain exhaustion from the struggle, Dag would never know. The knife had come to him, anyway, and he’d used it three years later on a malice up near Cat Lick.

“Oh, aye, lung fever is nasty,” Tril said sympathetically. “One of Sorrel’s aunts was carried off by that just last winter. I’m so sorry.”

Dag shrugged. “It was eleven years ago.”

“Were you close?”