After the postsupper chores the family usually gathered in the parlor, cooler than the kitchen, to share the lamplight. Dag had walked out with Fawn to feed scraps to the chickens; as they came through the kitchen door and into the central hall, he heard raised voices from the parlor. By this time Dag cringed at opening his groundsense in this raucous company, not a one of them capable of a decent veiling; but he did prick his ears to hear Reed’s voice, rumbling, hostile, and indistinct, and then Tril’s, raised in sharp fear: “Reed! Put that down! Fawn brought me that all the way from Glassforge!”

Beside him, Fawn drew in her breath and hurried forward. Dag strode after, bracing himself.

In the parlor, Reed and Rush had more or less cornered their parents. Tril was sitting beside the table that held the bright oil lamp, some sewing in her lap; Nattie sat across the room in the shadows with the drop spindle that was rarely out of her hands, now stilled. Whit crouched by Nattie, a spectator on the fringe, for once not heckling. Sorrel stood facing Reed, with Rush pacing nervously around them.

Reed was holding up the glass bowl and declaiming, overdramatically in Dag’s view, “—sell your daughter to some bloody-handed corpse-eater for the sake of a piece of glass?”

“Reed!” Fawn cried furiously, dashing forward. “You give that back! It’s not yours!”

Dag thought it was sheer force of habit; when confronted with that familiar sisterly rise, Reed quite unthinkingly raised the bowl high out of Fawn’s hopping reach. At her enraged squeal, he tossed it to Rush, who just as unthinkingly caught it.

Tears of fury sprang in Fawn’s eyes. “You two are just a pair of yard dogs—”

“If you hadn’t dragged Useless here home with you—” Rush began defensively.

Ah, yet another new nickname for himself, Dag realized. He was collecting quite a set of them here. But his own fraying temper was not nearly such a grating goad to him as Fawn’s humiliated helplessness.

Sorrel glanced at his distraught wife, whose hands had flown to her mouth, and barked angrily, “Boys, that’s enough!” He strode forward and started to pull the bowl out of Rush’s grasp. Sorrel, unwilling to snatch, let go just as Rush, afraid to resist, did likewise.

It was no one’s fault, exactly, or at least no one’s intention. Dag saw it coming as did Fawn, and a desolate little wail broke from her lips even before the bowl hit the wooden floor edge on and burst, falling into three large pieces and a sparkling spray of splinters.

Everyone froze in equal horror. Whit opened his lips, looked around, and then closed them flat.

Sorrel recovered his voice first, hoarse and low. “Whit, don’t move. You got no shoes on.”

Tril cried, “Reed! Rush! How could you!” And began sobbing into her sewing.