He caught sight of Rush walking down the lane in the gathering shadows. After the bowl episode, the twins had stopped aiming barbs at him, but only because they now avoided talking to him at all. If he couldn’t make friends, perhaps intimidation would do instead? Whit by contrast had become rather fascinated with Dag, following him about as though afraid he’d miss another magic show. Dag tried treating him as a particularly feckless young patroller, which seemed to work. If only his arm hadn’t been broken he might have offered to teach Whit archery, which would have made a good way to move them along amiably. As it was, his idle comment about it made Whit say, showing willing to a degree that surprised him, “When you come back, maybe?”

Which made him wonder: were they ever coming back? Half of Dag’s original intent for the marriage proposal had been to repair Fawn’s bridges here in case of some dire need—in case of his death, bluntly. A Lakewalker would be trying to join his bride’s family, to fit in as a new tent-brother; and the family in turn would expect to receive him as one. Farmer kin took in new sisters, not new brothers, and they weren’t trained up to the reverse. It had taken Dag some time to realize that the only members of the family he really needed to please in order to carry off Fawn were the elders, and they had quite expected her to be carried off sometime by someone in any case. Dag was a stretch of custom, but not a reversal. The questions this begged for Dag’s own homecoming niggled hard, the more so since Fawn could not anticipate most of them.

And here came Rush again, walking back up the lane. He spied Dag on the porch and angled toward him between the house and the old barn, a grassy area the sheep were sometimes turned out to crop. What the sheep refused to eat was scythed once a year to keep the space from turning back to woods and blocking the view. Rush, Dag realized as he approached, was tense, and Dag considered opening his groundsense wider, unpleasant as it was likely to prove.

“Hey, patroller,” said Rush. “Fawn wants you. Down by the road at the end of the lane.”