A yawn cracked his face. His bruises and strains were reporting for duty, right enough. Reminded of his boots’ existence, he slowly drew up his feet and began to undo his laces. He’d had those boots on for two—no, four days, because he’d slept in them night before last.

“Would you feel more comfortable if I went out to sleep on the porch?” he asked.

Fawn eyed him over her sheets, now pulled up nearly to her lips. Pink, those lips, if much paler than he would have liked to see them, but not gray or bluish, good. “No,” she said in a curiously distant tone, “I don’t think I would.”

“Good…’’ Another yawn split the word, and others crowded after: “Because I don’t think…I could crawl through all that…sticky jam right now. Softer here. You can have the inside, I’ll take the outside.” He flopped forward facedown in the tick. He really should turn his head so he could breathe, he supposed. He turned toward Fawn, that being the better view, and eyed what he could see of her over the hillock of stuffed cloth. Dark curls, skin petal-fair where it was not bruised. Smelling infinitely better than him. A surprised brown eye.

“Mama,” he muttered, “the sheep are safe tonight.”

“Sheep?” she said after a moment.

“Patroller joke.” About farmers, come to think. He wasn’t going to tell it to her. Ever. Fortunately, he was growing too bludgeoned by his fatigue to talk. He roused himself just enough to stretch over, pinch out the candle, and flop again.

“I don’t get it.”

“Good. ’Night.” His rueful consciousness of that short curving body separated from his by only a couple of layers of fabric was intense, but very brief.

Fawn woke in the dark of night on her right side, facing the kitchen wall, with a weight across her chest and a long, lumpy bolster seemingly wrapped around her in back. The weight was Dag’s left arm, she realized, and he must be dead asleep indeed to have flung it there, because he always seemed to carry it subtly out of the way, out of sight, when he was awake. His chin was scratching the back of her neck, his nose was buried in her hair, and she could feel her curls flutter with his slow breath. He lay very solidly between her and the door.

And whatever might come through the door. Scary things out there. Bandits, mud-men, blight bogles. And yet…wasn’t the tall patroller the scariest of all? Because, at the end of the day, bandits, mud-men, and bogles all lay strewn in his path, and he was still walking. Limping, anyhow. How could someone scarier than anything make her feel safer? A riddle, that.