She looked at him with withering contempt. “Sometimes you’re so suspicious you make me want to puke, Armor-of-God.”

“It ain’t suspicion to say what’s really happening.”

“You can’t tell real from a rutabaga.”

“You going to wash this apple out of my hair, or do I have to make you lick it out?”

“I expect I’ll have to do something, or you’ll rub it all over the bed linen.”

Taleswapper felt almost like a thief, to take so much with him as he left. Two pair of thick stockings. A new blanket. An elkhide cloak. Jerky and cheese. A good whetstone.

And things they couldn’t even know they gave him. A rested body, free of aches and bruises. A jaunty step. Kind faces fresh in his mind. And stories. Stories jotted in the sealed-up part of the book, the ones he wrote down himself. And true stories painfully inscribed by their own hands.

Still, he gave them fair return, or tried to. Roofs patched for winter, other jobs here and there. More important, they’d seen a book with Ben Franklin’s own handwriting in it, with sentences from Tom Jefferson, Ben Arnold, Pat Henry, John Adams, Alex Hamilton—even Aaron Burr, from before the duel, and Daniel Boone, from after. Before Taleswapper came they were part of their family, and part of the Wobbish country, and that’s all. Now they belonged to much larger stories. The War of Appalachee Independence. The American Compact. They saw their own trek through the wilderness as one thread among many, and felt the strength of the whole tapestry woven from those threads. Not a tapestry, really. A rug. A good, thick, solid rug that generations of Americans after them could tread on. There was a poem in that; he’d work that into a poem sometime.

He left them a few other things, too. A beloved son he pulled from under a falling millstone. A father who now had the strength to send away his son before he killed him. A name for a young man’s nightmare, so he could understand that his enemy was real. A whispered encouragement for a broken child to heal himself.