Fawn lay quietly on her pallet till dusk drove the men indoors. At that point, Tad was made to carry off the feather tick, and the space was used for a trestle table. Makeshift benches—boards placed across sawed-off logs—were brought in to serve for the missing chairs. Petti allowed to Dag as how she thought it all right for Fawn to sit up long enough to take the meal with the family. Since the alternative appeared to be having Petti bring her something in bed in some lonely nook of the house, Fawn agreed decisively to this.

The meal was abundant, if makeshift and simple, eaten by the limited light of candle stubs and the fire at the end of the long summer day. Everyone would be going to bed right after, not just her, Fawn thought. The room was hot and the conversation, at first, scant and practical. All were exhausted, their minds filled with the recent disruptions in their lives. Since everyone was mostly eating with their hands anyhow, Dag’s slight awkwardness did not stick out, Fawn observed with satisfaction. You wouldn’t think his missing hand bothered him a bit, unless you noticed how he never raised his left wrist into sight above the table edge. He spoke only to encourage Fawn, next to him, to eat up, though about that he was quite firm.

“Kind o’ you to help Tad with all that busted glass,” the farmwife said to Dag.

“No trouble, ma’am. You should all be able to step safe now, least-ways.”

Sassa offered, “I’ll help you to get new windows in, Petti, soon as things are settled a bit.”

She gave her brother-in-law a grateful look. “Thankee, Sassa.”

Grandfather Horseford grumbled, “Oiled cloth stretched on the frames was good enough in my day,” to which his gray-haired son responded only, “Have some more pan bread, Pa.” The land might still be the old man’s, in name at least, but it was plain that the house was Petti’s.

Inevitably, Fawn supposed, the talk turned to picking over the past days’ disasters. Dag, who looked to Fawn’s eye as though he was growing tired, and no wonder, was not expansive; she watched him successfully use his diversion trick of answering a question with a question four times running. Until Sassa remarked to him, sighing, “Too bad your patrol didn’t get there a day sooner. They might’ve saved that poor little boy who got et.”

Dag did not exactly wince. It was merely a lowering of his eyelids, a slight, unargumentative tilt of his head. A shift of his features from tired to expressionless. And silence.

Fawn sat up, offended for him. “Careful what you wish after. If Dag’s patrol had got there anytime before I—we—before the bogle died and the mud-men ran off, there’d have been a big fight. Lots of folks might have gotten killed, and that little boy, too.”