“I’ve dealt with dissolving patrols down to and including breaking up knife fights,” he assured Fawn at one especially distraught moment. “No one here’s tried to stab each other yet.”

“It’s been a near thing,” Fawn growled.

By supper of the second night after Dag’s proposal, Fawn’s parents had gone so far as to forbid discussion of the topic at the table, somewhat to Dag’s relief. It did render the meal uncharacteristically quiet. Dag thought his plan to extract Fawn gracefully from the clutches of her kin was not going as well as he’d hoped. Whether it took two days or twenty or two hundred, he was determined to persevere, but it was plain Fawn was close to melting in this family crucible, and her strain communicated itself to him, open to her ground as he could not help being.

They’d taken too long on this journey already. Much more tarrying in West Blue, and he’d risk not beating Mari’s patrol back to Hickory Lake, and they would panic and think him missing again. And this time, he wouldn’t be dragging back in with another malice kill in his bag to buy forgiveness.

Bluefields were falling to him, slowly. Fletch and Clover were openly agreeable, Nattie quietly agreeable, and Tril mainly just quiet. Whit didn’t greatly care, and Papa Bluefield still sat on the fence.

Sorrel and Tril Bluefield reminded Dag a bit of patrol leaders, their heads stuffed with too many duties and details, too many people’s conflicting desires and needs. An unsolvable dilemma had a good chance of being invited to go away; he thought they might break simply because they could not afford to spend all their time and energy on one problem when so many more crowded upon them. Dag felt almost cruelly ruthless, but he steeled himself to keep up the blandishments and subtle pressure. Fawn took care of the unsubtle pressure.

Reed and Rush remained a stubborn reservoir of resistance. Dag was not sure why, as neither would talk to him despite several friendly lures. Separately, he thought he might have gotten somewhere, but together they stayed locked in a knot of disapproval. Fawn, when he asked her for guidance into their objections, just went tight-lipped. But their more hotheaded remarks at least served to drive their papa further and faster toward conciliation than he would have gone on his own, if only from sheer embarrassment. Some opposition was its own worst enemy.

Still…I should have liked to have made some real tent-brothers. Now, there was an unreasonable hope to flush from hiding. Dag frowned at himself. The gift of comradeship he’d once found with Kauneo’s brothers in Luthlia, so fine in the having, was all the more painful in the loss. Maybe it was better this way.