Details of a dead husband had been conspicuously absent in Fawn’s speech. Dag could understand grief robbing someone of words, but grief, too, seemed missing in her. Anger, fear, tense determination, yes. Shock from the recent terrifying attack upon her. Loneliness and homesickness. But not the anguish of a soul ripped in half. Strangely lacking, too, was the profound satisfaction such lifegiving usually engendered among Lakewalker women he’d known. Farmers, feh. Dag knew why his own people were all a little crazed, but what excuse did farmers have?

He was roused from his weary brooding as they passed out of the woods and the valley farm came into sight. He was instantly ill at ease. The lack of cows and horses and goats and sheep struck him first, then the broken-down places in the split-rail fence lining the pasture. Then the absence of farm dogs, who should have been barking annoyingly around his horse by now. He stood in his stirrups as they plodded up the lane. House and barn, both built of weathered gray planks, were standing—and standing open—but smoke rose in a thin trickle from the char and ashes of an outbuilding.

“What is it?” asked Fawn, the first words she’d spoken for an hour.

“Trouble, I think.” He added after a moment, “Trouble past.” Nothing human flared in the range of Dag’s perceptions—nor anything non-human either. “The place is completely deserted.”

He pulled up his horse in front of the house, swung his leg over its neck, and jumped down. “Move up. Take the reins,” he told Fawn. “Don’t get down yet.”

She scrambled forward from her perch on his saddlebags, staring around wide-eyed. “What about you?”

“Going to scout around.”

He made a quick pass through the house, a rambling two-story structure with additions built on to additions. The place seemed stripped of small objects of any value. Items too big to carry—beds, clothes chests—were frequently knocked over or split. Every glass window was broken out, senselessly. Dag had an idea how hard those improvements had been to come by, carefully saved for by some hopeful farmwife, packed in straw up from Glassforge over the rutted lanes. The kitchen pantry was stripped of food.

The barn was empty of animals; hay was left, some grain might be gone. Behind the barn on the manure pile, he at last found the bodies of three farm dogs, slashed and hacked about. He eyed the smoldering outbuilding in passing, charred timbers sticking out of the ash like black bones. Someone would need to look through it for other bones, later. He returned to his horse.

Fawn was gazing around warily as she took in the disturbing details. Dag leaned against Copperhead’s warm shoulder and swiped his hand through his hair.

“The place was raided by the bandits—or someone—about three days ago, I judge,” he told her. “No bodies.”