He evidently decided a tree would be faster for stowing his prey. He tossed a rope up over the crotch of a big sycamore that overhung the creek, using his horse to haul the body up it. He climbed up to be sure the corpse was securely wedged and to retrieve his rope. He moved so efficiently, Fawn could scarcely spot the extra motions and accommodations he made for his one-handed state.

Dag pressed his tired horse over the last ridge and was rewarded on the other side by finding a double-rutted track bumping along the creek bottom. “Ah, good,” he said aloud. “It’s been a while since I patrolled down this way, but I recall a good-sized farm tucked up at the head of this valley.”

The girl clinging behind his cantle remained too quiet, the same wary silence she’d maintained since he’d discussed her pregnant state. His groundsense, extended to utmost sensitivity in search for hidden threats, was battered by her nearby churning emotions; but the thoughts that drove them remained, as ever, opaque. He had maybe been too indiscreet. Farmers who found out much about Lakewalker groundsense tended to call it the evil eye, or black magic, and accuse patrollers of mind reading, cheating in trade, or worse. It was always trouble.

If he found enough people at this farm, he would leave her in their care, with strong warnings about the half-hunt-half-war presently going on in their hills. If there weren’t enough, he must try to persuade them to light out for Glassforge or some other spot where they might find safety in numbers till this malice was taught mortality. If he knew farmers, they wouldn’t want to go, and he sighed in anticipation of a dreary and thankless argument.

But the mere thought of a pregnant woman of any height or age wandering about in blithe ignorance anywhere near a malice’s lair gave him gruesome horrors. No wonder she’d shone so brightly in his ground-sense, with so much life happening in her. Although he suspected Fawn would have been scarcely less vivid even before this conception. But she would attract a malice’s attention the way a fire drew moths.

By the time they’d straightened out the definition of grass widow, he had been fairly sure he had no need to offer her condolences. Farmer bed customs made very little sense, sometimes, unless one believed Mari’s theories about their childbearing being all mixed up with their pretense of owning land. She had some very tart remarks on farmer women’s lack of control of their own fertility, as well. Generally in conjunction with lectures to young patrollers of both sexes about the need to keep their trousers buttoned while in farmer territory.

Old patrollers, too.