She shook her head, not in denial. “I was walking down the road. They just picked me up like you’d pick up a lost…thing, and claim it was yours.” Her frown deepened. “No…not just. They argued first. Strange. The one who was…um…the one you shot, he didn’t want to take me along, at first. It was the other one who insisted. But he wasn’t interested in me at all, later. When—just before you came.” And added under her breath, not expecting an answer, “What was he?”

“Raccoon, is my best guess,” said the patroller. He turned the cloth, hiding browning blood, and wet it again, moving down her cheek to the next gash.

This bizarre answer seemed so entirely unrelated to her question that she decided he must not have heard her aright. “No, I mean the big fellow who hit me. The one who ran away from you. He didn’t seem right in the head.”

“Truer than you guess, miss. I’ve been hunting those creatures all my life. You get so you can tell. He was a made thing. Confirms that a malice—your folk would call it a blight bogle—has emerged near here. The malice makes slaves of human shape for itself, to fight, or do its dirty work. Other shapes too, sometimes. Mud-men, we call them. But the malice can’t make them up out of nothing. So it catches animals, and reshapes them. Crudely at first, till it grows stronger and smarter. Can’t make life at all, really. Only death. Its slaves don’t last too long, but it hardly cares.”

Was he gulling her, like her brothers? Seeing how much a silly little farm girl could be made to swallow down whole? He seemed perfectly serious, but maybe he was just especially good at tall tales. “Are you saying that blight bogles are real?”

It was his turn to look surprised. “Where are you from, miss?” he asked in renewed caution.

She started to name the village nearest her family’s farm, but changed it to “Lumpton Market.” It was a bigger town, more anonymous. She straightened, trying to marshal the casual phrase I’m a widow and push it past her bruised lips.

“What’s your name?”

“Fawn. Saw…field,” she added, and flinched. She’d wanted neither Sunny’s name nor her own family’s, and now she’d stuck herself with some of both.

“Fawn. Apt,” said the patroller, with a sideways tilt of his head. “You must have had those eyes from birth.”

It was that uncomfortable weighty attention again. She tried shoving back: “What’s yours?” though she thought she already knew.

“I answer to Dag.”

She waited a moment. “Isn’t there any more?”