Fawn leaned precariously around Dag’s shoulder and gazed down the main street, lined with older buildings of wood and stone or newer ones of brick. Plank sidewalks kept people’s feet out of the churned mud of the road. A block farther on, the mud gave way to cobblestones, and beyond that, brick. A town so rich they paved the street with brick! The road curved away to follow the bend in the river, but she could just glimpse a town square busy with a day market. Most of the smokes that smudged the air seemed to be coming from farther downstream and downwind. Dag turned the mare into a side street, jerking his chin at the brick building rising to their left, blunt and blocky but softened by climbing ivy.

“There’s our hotel. Patrols always stay there for free. It was written into the will of the owner’s father. Something about the last big malice we took out in these parts, nigh on sixty years ago. Must’ve been a scary one. Good thinking on someone’s part, because it gets the area patrolled more often.”

“You looked for sixty years without finding another?”

“Oh, there’ve been a couple in the interim, I believe. We just got them so small, the farmers never knew. Like, um…pulling a weed instead of chopping down a tree. Better for us, better for everyone, except harder to convince folks to chip in some payment. Farsighted man, that old innkeep.”

They turned again under a wide brick archway and into the yard between the hotel and its stable. A horse boy polishing harness on a bench glanced up and rose to come forward. He did not reach for the mare’s makeshift bridle.

“Sorry, mister, miss.” His nod was polite, but his look seemed to sum up the worth of the battered pair riding bareback and find it sadly short. “Hotel’s full up. You’ll have to find another place.” The twist of his lips turned slightly derisive, if not altogether without sympathy. “Doubt you could make the price of a room here anyways.”

Only Fawn’s hand on Dag’s back felt the faint rumble of—anger? no, amusement pass through him. “Doubt I could too. Happily, Miss Bluefield, here, has made the price of all of them.”

The boy’s face went a little blank, as he tried to work this out to anything that made sense to him. His confusion was interrupted by a pair of Lakewalkers hobbling out of the doorway into the yard, staring hard at Dag.