“Hm.” Petti busied herself unsealing jars, sniffing for wholesomeness and fishing out the broken wax to be rinsed and remelted, later. “Them mud-men was ugly enough. The day before we was brought to the digging camp, seems there was a woman had a sick child, who went to them and insisted on being let go to get him help. She tried carrying on, weeping and wailing, to force them. Instead, they killed her little boy. And ate him. She was in a state by the time we got there. Everybody was. Even them bandits, who I don’t think was in their right minds either, wasn’t too easy about that one.”

Fawn shuddered. “Dag said the mud-men ate folks. I wasn’t sure I believed him. Till after…afterwards.” She hitched her shoulders. “Lakewalkers hunt those things. They go looking for them.”

“Hm.” The woman frowned as she kept trying to assemble the meal by her normal routine and coming up short against missing tools and vessels. But she improvised and went on, much as Fawn had. She added from across the room after a while, “They say Lakewalkers can beguile folk’s minds.”

“Look, you.” Fawn lurched back up on her elbow, scowling. “I say, that Lakewalker saved my life yesterday. At least twice. No, three times, because I’d have bled to death in the woods trying to walk out if he’d died in the fight. He fought off five of those mud-men! He took care of me all last night when I couldn’t move for the pain, and carried out my bloody clouts with never a word of complaint, and he cleaned up your kitchen and he fixed your fence and he buried your dogs nice in the shady woods, and he didn’t have to do any of that.” And his heart breaks for the memory of water lilies. “I’ve seen that man do more good with one hand in a day than I’ve seen any other man do with two in a week. Or ever. If he’s beguiled my mind, he sure has done it the hard way!”

The farmwife had both her hands raised as if to ward off this hot, pelting defense, half-laughing. “Stop, stop, I surrender, girl!”

“Huh!” Fawn flopped back again. “Just don’t you give me any more they says.”

“Hm.” Petti’s smile dwindled to bleakness, but whatever shadowed her thoughts now, she did not confide to Fawn.