“Um…no. Not then.” He added, “When I was twenty I was sent on exchange to a camp north of Farmer’s Flats, and started my first walk around the lake. I didn’t get back for eighteen years.”

“Oh,” she said.

“I’ve been all over this hinterland since, but not just here. It’s a big territory.”

Papa Bluefield sat back at the table’s head and eyed Dag narrowly. “Just how old are you, Lakewalker? A deal older than Fawn, I daresay.”

“I daresay,” Dag agreed.

Papa Bluefield continued to stare expectantly. The sound of forks scraping plates was suddenly obtrusive.

Cornered. Must this come out here? Perhaps it was better to get it on the table sooner than later. Dag cleared his throat, so that his voice would come out neither squeaking like a mouse’s nor too loud, and said, “Fifty-five.”

Fawn choked on her cider. He probably should have glanced aside first to see she wasn’t trying to swallow anything. His fork-spoon hand was no good for patting her on the back, but she recovered her breath in a moment. “Sorry,” she wheezed. “Down the wrong pipe.” She looked up sideways at him in muffled, possibly, alarm. Or dismay. He hoped it wasn’t horror.

“Papa,” she muttered, “is fifty-three.”

All right, a little horror. They would deal with it.

Tril was staring. “You look forty, if that.”

Dag lowered his eyelids in nonargument.

“Fawn,” Papa Bluefield announced grimly, “is eighteen.”

Beside him, Fawn’s breath drew in, sharply aggravated.

Dag tried, almost successfully, to keep his lips from curling up. It was hard, when she was clearly boiling so much inside she was ready to pop. “Really?” He eyed her blandly. “She told me she was twenty. Although from my vantage, it scarcely makes a difference.”

She hunched her shoulders sheepishly. But their eyes connected, and then she had trouble not laughing too, and all was well.

Papa Bluefield said in an aggravated tone, “Fawn had an old bad habit of telling tall tales. I tried to beat it out of her. I should have beat her more, maybe.”

Or less, Dag did not say aloud.

“As it happens, I come from a very long-lived kin,” Dag said, by way of attempted repair. “My grandfather I told you of was still spry till his death at well over a hundred.” One hundred twenty-six, but there was more than enough mental arithmetic going on around the table right now. The brothers, particularly, seemed to be floundering, staring at him in renewed wariness.

“It all works out,” Dag went on into the too-long pause. “If, for example, Fawn and I were to marry, we would actually arrive at old age tolerably close together. Barring accidents.”