She eyed him. “You ever walk around the lake?”

“Twice,” he admitted.

“Hm.” She shook her head, and went on, “He got the notion he would go after her, volunteer to join with you Lakewalkers.”

“Ah,” said Dag. “That would not work. It’s not a matter of pride or ill will, you understand; we just have skills and methods that we cannot share.”

“You mean to say, not pride or ill will alone, I think,” said the woman, her voice going flat.

Dag shrugged. Not my tale. Let it go, old patroller.

“He did find her, eventually. As you say, the Lakewalkers wouldn’t have him. Came back after about six months, with his tail between his legs. Bleak and pining. Wouldn’t look at no other girl. Drank. It was like, if he couldn’t be in love with her, he’d be in love with death instead.”

“You don’t have to be a farmer for that. Ma’am,” Dag said coolly.

She spared him a sharp glance. “That’s as may be. He never settled, after that. He finally took a job with the keelboat men, down on the Grace River. After a couple of seasons, we heard he’d fallen off his boat and drowned. I don’t think it was deliberate; they said he’d been drunk and had gone to piss over the side in the night. Just careless, but a kind of careless that don’t happen to other folks.”

Maybe that had been the trouble with his own schemes, Dag thought. He had never been careless enough. If Dag had been twenty instead of thirty-five when the darkness had overtaken him, it might have all worked rather differently…

“We never heard back from that patroller girl. He was just a bit of passin’ fun to her, I guess. She was the end of the world to him, though.”

Dag held his silence.

She inhaled, and drove on: “So if you think it’s amusin’ to make that girl fall in love with you, I say, it won’t seem so funny down the road. I don’t know what’s in it for you, but there’s no future for her. Your people will see to that, if hers won’t. You and I both know that—but she don’t.”

“Ma’am, you’re seeing things.” Very plausible things, maybe, given that she could not know the true matter of the sharing knife that bound Dag and Fawn so tightly to each other, at least for now. He wasn’t about to try to explain the knife to this exhausted, edgy woman.

“I know what I’m seeing, thank you kindly. It ain’t the first time, neither.”

“I’ve scarcely known the girl a day!”