“Aye, I noticed that about you.”

What? That he told no tales?

“Accidents happen, to the young,” she went on. “Twenty, eh?”

“So she says.”

“You ain’t twenty.” She moved to kneel by the fire and poke it back for the night.

“No. Not for a long time, now.”

“You could take that horse and ride back to your patrol tonight, if you’re that worried about them. That girl would be all right, here. I’d take her in till she’s mended.”

That had been precisely his plan, yesterday. It seemed a very long time ago. “Good of you to offer. But I promised to see her safe to Glassforge, which was where she was bound. Also, I want Mari to look her over. My patrol leader—she’ll be able to tell if Fawn’s healing all right.”

“Aye, figured you’d say something like that. I ain’t blind.” She sighed, stood, turned to face him with her arms crossed. “And then what?”

“Pardon?”

“Do you even know what you’re doing to her? Standing there with them cheekbones up in the air? No, I don’t suppose you do.”

Dag shifted from cautious to confused. That the farmwife was shrewd and observant, he had certainly noticed; but he did not understand her underlying distress in this matter. “I mean her only good.”

“Sure you do.” She frowned fiercely. “I had a cousin, once.”

Dag tilted his head in faint encouragement, torn between curiosity and an entirely unmagical premonition that wherever she was going with this tale, he didn’t want to go along.

“Real nice young fellow; handsome, too,” Petti continued. “He got a job as a horse boy at that hotel in Glassforge where your patrols always stay, when they’re passing through these parts. There was this patroller girl, young one, came there with her patrol. Very pretty, very tall. Very nice. Very nice to him, he thought.”

“Patrol leaders try to discourage that sort of thing.”

“Aye, so I understood. Too bad they don’t succeed. Didn’t take too long for him to fall mad in love with the girl. He spent the whole next year just waiting for her patrol to come back. Which it did. And she was nice to him again.”

Dag waited. Not comfortably.

“Third year, the patrol came again, but she did not. Seems she was only visiting, and had gone back to her own folks way west of here.”

“That’s usual, for training up young patrollers. We send them to other camps for a season or two, or more. They learn other ways, make friends; if ever we have to combine forces in a hurry, it makes everything easier if some patrollers already know each other’s routes and territories. The ones training up to be leaders, we send ’em around to all seven hinterlands. They say of those that they’ve walked around the lake.”