Subdued and impressed. And, more important, believing him. Well, it hadn’t been a lie. Maybe it would make her just cautious enough. He found his stirrup and pushed up, trying not to dwell on the contrast between this hard saddle and a feather bed. There had been one unslashed feather mattress left inside the farmhouse. He’d noticed it particularly, while shoving aside a little fantasy about falling into it face-first. He swung his horse around.

“Dag…?”

He turned at once to look over his shoulder. Big brown eyes stared up at him from a face like a bruised flower.

“Don’t let them eat you, either.”

Involuntarily, his lips turned up; she smiled brightly back through her darkening contusions. It gave him an odd feeling in his stomach, which he prudently did not attempt to name. Heartened despite all, he raised his carved hand in salute and cantered back down the lane.

Feeling bereft, Fawn watched the patroller vanish into the tunnel of trees at the edge of the fields. The silence of this homestead, stripped of animals and people, was eerie and oppressive, once she noticed it. She squinted upward. The sun had not even topped the arch of the sky for noon. It seemed years since dawn.

She sighed and ventured into the house. She walked all around it, footsteps echoing, feeling as though she intruded on some stranger’s grief. The senseless mess the raiders had left in their wake seemed overwhelming, taken in all at once. She came back to the kitchen and stood there shivering a little. Well, if the house was too much, what about one room? I could fix one room, yes.

She braced herself and started by turning back upright anything that would still stand, shelf and table and a couple of chairs. What was broken beyond mending she hauled outside, starting a pile at one end of the porch. Then she swept the floor clear of broken plates and glass and spilled flour and drying food. She swept the porch too, while she was at it.

Beneath a worn old rag rug, ignored by the invaders, she found a trapdoor with a rope handle. She shook the rug over the porch rail, returned, and stared worriedly at the trap. I don’t think Dag saw this.

She bit her lip, then took a bucket with a broken handle outside and collected a few live coals from the still-smoldering whatever-it-had-been, and started a little fire in the kitchen hearth. From it, she lit a candle stub found in the back of a drawer. She pulled up the trapdoor by its rope, wincing at the groaning of its hinges, swallowed, and stared at the ladder into the dark hole. Could there be anyone still hiding down there? Big spiders?…Bodies? She took a deep breath and descended.