“Oh, aye? What’ll it be after a week, then? The woods’ll catch fire, I guess.” She snorted derision. “All I know is, in the long haul, when folks tangle hearts with your folks, they end up dead. Or wishing they was.”

Dag unclenched his jaw, and gave her a short nod. “Ma’am…in the long haul, all folks end up dead. Or wishing they were.”

She just shook her head, lips twisting.

“Good night.” He touched his hand to his temple and went to haul the tick, stuffed into the next room, out onto the porch. If Little Spark was able to travel at all tomorrow, he decided, they would leave this place as soon as might be.

8

To Dag’s discontent, no patrollers emerged from the woods that night, either before or after the rain drove him inside. He did not see Fawn again till they met over the breakfast trestle. They were both back in their own clothes, dry and only faintly stained; in the shabby blue dress she looked almost well, except for a lingering paleness. A check of the insides of her eyelids, and of her fingernails, showed them not as rosy as he thought they ought to be, and she still grew dizzy if she attempted to stand too suddenly, but his hand on her brow felt no fever, good.

He was pressing her to eat more bread and drink more milk when the boy Tad burst through the kitchen door, wide-eyed and gasping. “Ma! Pa! Uncle Sassa! There’s one of them mud-men in the pasture, worrying the sheep!”

Dag exhaled wearily; the three farm men around the table leaped up in a panic and scattered to find their tool-weapons. Dag loosened his war knife in its belt sheath and stepped out onto the porch. Fawn and the farmwife followed, peering fearfully around him, Petti clutching a formidable kitchen knife.

At the far end of the pasture, a naked man-form had pounced across the back of a bleating sheep, face buried in its woolly neck. The sheep bucked and threw the creature off. The mud-man fell badly, as if its arms were numb and could not properly catch itself. It rose, shook itself, and half loped, half crawled after the intended prey. The rest of the flock, bewildered, trotted a few yards away, then turned to stare.

“Worried?” Dag murmured to the women. “I’d say those sheep are downright appalled. That mud-man must have been made from a dog or a wolf. See, it’s trying to move like one, but nothing works. It can’t use its hands like a man, and it can’t use its jaws like a wolf. It’s trying to tear that silly sheep’s throat out, but all it’s getting is a mouthful of wool. Yech!”

He shook his head in exasperation and pity, stepped off the porch, and strode toward the pasture; behind him, Petti gasped, and Fawn muffled a squeak.