She said uneasily, “I don’t know. Maybe if I went back now, Stupid Sunny would think I had been lying. To trap him. For his stupid farm.”

“Do you care what he thinks? Compared to your kin, anyway?”

Her shoulders hunched. “Once, I cared a lot. He seemed…he seemed splendid to me. Handsome…’’ In retrospect, Sunny’s face was round and bland, and his eyes far too dull. “Tall…’’ Actually, short, she decided. He was as tall as her brothers, true. Who would come up maybe to Dag’s chin. “He had a good horse.” Well, so it had appeared, until she’d seen the long-legged beasts the patrollers all rode. Sunny had shown off his horse, making it sidle and step high, making out that it was a restive handful only an expert might dare bestride. Patrollers rode with such quiet efficiency, you didn’t even notice how they were doing it. “You know, it’s odd. The farther away I get from him, the more he seems to…shrink.”

Dag smiled quietly. “He’s not shrinking. You’re growing, Spark. I’ve seen such spurts in young patrollers. They grow fast, sometimes, in the crush, when they have to get strong or go under. Takes some adjusting after, be warned—like when you put on eight inches of height in a year and nothing fits anymore.”

An example not, she suspected, pulled out of the air. “That was what I wanted. To be grown-up, to be real, to matter.”

“Worked,” he said reflectively. “Roundaboutly.”

“Yes,” she whispered. And then, somehow, finally, the dam cracked, and it all came loose. “Hurts.”

“Yes,” he said simply, and put his arm around her shoulders, and snugged her in tight to him, because she had not cried all that night or day, but she was crying now.

Dag studied the top of Fawn’s head, all he could see as she pressed her face into his chest and wept. Even now, she choked her sobs half to silence, shuddering with their suppression. His certainty that she needed to release the strain in her ground was confirmed; if he’d been forced to put it into words for her, he might have said that the fissures running through her seemed to grow less impossibly dark as her sorrow was disgorged, but he wasn’t sure if that would make sense to her. Sorrow and rage. There was more erosion of spirit here, going back further, than the malice’s destruction of her child.

His instinct was to let her weep the grief out, but after a time his worry roused anew as she clutched her belly once more, a sign of physical pain returning. “Sh,” he whispered, hugging her one-armed. “Sh. Don’t be making yourself sick, now. Would you like your hot stone again?”