Beguilement (29 page)

The central core of it was a two-story rectangle of blocky yellowish stone, with a porch and front door in the middle overlooking the river valley. On the far north end, a single-story add-on looked as though it contained two rooms. On the near end, an excavation was in progress, with piles of new stone waiting, evidently an addition planned to match the other. On the west, another add-on girdled with a long, covered porch ran the length of the house, clearly the kitchen. No one was in sight.

“Suppertime,” said Fawn. “They must all be in the kitchen.”

“Eight people,” said Dag, whose groundsense left him in no doubt.

Fawn took a long, long breath, and dismounted. She tied both their horses to the back porch rail and led Dag around to the steps. Her lighter and his heavier tread echoed briefly on the porch floor. Top and bottom halves of a double door were open wide and hooked to bolts in the wall, but beyond them was another, lighter doorframe with a gauze screen. Fawn pushed the screen door open and slipped in, holding it for him. He let his wooden hand rest briefly on her shoulder before dropping it to his side.

At a long table filling most of the right-hand half of the room, eight people turned and stared. Dag swiftly tried to match faces with the names and stories he’d been given. Aunt Nattie could be instantly identified, a very short, stout woman with disordered curly gray locks and eyes as milky as pearls, her head now cocked with listening. The four brothers were harder to sort, but he thought he could determine Fletch, bulky and oldest, Reed and Rush, the non-identical twins, brown-haired and brown-eyed, and ash-haired and blue-eyed respectively, and Whit, black-haired like Fawn, skinny, and youngest but for her. A plump young woman seated next to Fletch defeated his tutorial. Fawn’s parents, Sorrel and Tril Bluefield, were no hardship to identify, a graying man at the table’s head who’d stood up so fast his chair had banged over, and on the near end a short, middle-aged woman stumbling out of her seat shrieking.

Fawn’s parents descended upon her in such a whirl of joy, relief, and rage that Dag had to close off his groundsense lest he be overwhelmed. The brothers, behind, were mostly grinning with relief, and Aunt Nattie was asking urgently,

“What? Is that Fawn, you say? Told you she wasn’t dead! About time!”

Fawn, her face nearly unreadable, endured being hugged, kissed, and shaken in equal measure; the dampness in her blinking eyes was not, Dag thought, caught only from the emotions around her. Dag stiffened a little when her father, after hugging her off her feet, put her down and then threatened to beat her; but while his paternal relief was very real, it seemed his threats were not, for Fawn didn’t flinch in the least from them.

“Where have you been, girl?” her mother’s voice finally rose over the babble to demand.

Fawn backed up a trifle, raised her chin, and said in a rush, “I went to Glassforge to look for work, and I may have found some too, but first I have to go with Dag, here, to Hickory Lake to help make his report to his captain about the blight bogle we killed.”

Her family gazed at Fawn as though she’d started raving in a fever; Dag suspected the only part they’d really caught was Glassforge.

Fawn went on a bit breathlessly, before they could start up again, “Mama, Papa, this here is my friend, Dag Redwing Hickory.” She gave her characteristic little knee-dip, and pulled Dag forward. He nodded, trying to find some pleasantly neutral expression for his face. “He’s a Lakewalker patroller.”

“How de’ do,” said Dag politely and generally.

A silence greeted this, and a lot more staring, necks cranked back. Short stature ran in Fawn’s family, evidently.

Confirming Dag’s guess, Fawn’s mother, Tril, said, “Glassforge? Why would you want to go there to look for work? There’s plenty of work right here!”

“Which you left on all of us,” Fletch put in unhelpfully.

“And wouldn’t Lumpton Market have been a lot closer?” said Whit in a tone of judicious critique.

“Do you know how much trouble you caused, girl?” said Papa Bluefield.

“Yeah,” said Reed, or maybe Rush—no, Rush, ash-headed, check—“when you didn’t show for dinner market-day night, we figured you were out dawdling and daydreaming in the woods as usual, but when you didn’t show by bedtime, Papa made us all go out with torches and look and call. The barn, the privy, the woods, down by the river—it would have saved a deal of stumbling around in the dark and yelling if Mama had counted your clothes a day sooner!”

Fawn’s lip had given an odd twitch at something in this, which Dag determined to ask about later. “I am sorry you were troubled,” she said, in a carefully formal tone. “I should have written a note, so’s you needn’t have worried I’d met with an accident.”

“How would that have helped for worrying, fool girl!” Fawn’s mother wept a bit more. “Thoughtless, selfish…”

“Papa made me ride all the way to Aunt Wren’s, in the idea you might have gone there, and he made Rush ride to Lumpton asking after you,” Reed said.

A spate more of complaint and venting from all parties followed this. Fawn endured without argument, and Dag held his tongue. The ill words were not ill meant, and Fawn, apparently a native speaker of this strange family dialect, seemed to take them in their spirit and let the barbs roll off, mostly. Her eyes flashed resentment only once, when the plump girl beside Fletch chimed in with some support of one of his more snappish comments. But Fawn said only,

“Hello, Clover. Nice to see you, too,” which reduced the girl to nonplussed silence.

Notably missing was any word about Sunny Sawman. So Fawn’s judgment on that score was proven shrewd. Too early to guess at the consequences…

Dag was not sure how long the uproar would have continued in this vein, except that Aunt Nattie levered herself up, grasped a walking stick, and stumped around the table to Fawn’s side. “Let me see you, girl,” she said quietly, and Fawn hugged her—the first hug Dag had seen going the other way—and let the blind woman run her hands over her face. “Huh,” said Aunt Nattie. “Huh. Now introduce me to your patroller friend. It’s been a long time since I’ve met a Lakewalker.”

“Dag,” said Fawn, reverting to her breathless, anxious formality, “This is my aunt Nattie that I’ve told you about. She’d like to touch you, if that’s all right.”

“Of course,” said Dag.

The little woman stumped nearer, reached up, and bounced her fingers uncertainly off his collarbone. “Goodness, boy, where are you?”

“Say something,” Fawn whispered urgently.

“Um… up here, Aunt Nattie.”

Her hand went higher, to touch his chin; he obligingly bent his head. “Way up there!” she marveled. The knobby, dry fingers brushed firmly over his features, pausing at the slight heat of the bruises on his face from yesterday, circling his cheekbones and chin in inexplicable approval, tracing his lips and eyelids.

Dag realized with a slight shock that this woman possessed a rudimentary groundsense, possibly developed in the shadow of her lifelong blindness, and he let his reach out to touch hers.

Her breath drew in. “Ah, Lakewalker, right enough.”

“Ma’am,” Dag responded, not knowing what else to say.

“Good voice, too,” Nattie observed, Dag wasn’t sure who to. She stopped short of checking his teeth like a horse’s, although by this time Dag would scarcely have blinked at it. She felt down his body, her touch hesitating briefly at the splints and sling; her eyebrows went up as she felt his arm harness through his shirt and briefly gripped his wooden hand. But she added only, “Nice deep voice.”

“Have you eaten?” asked Tril Bluefield, and when Fawn explained no, they’d ridden all day from Lumpton, shifted to what Dag guessed was her more normal motherly mode, driving a couple of her sons to set chairs and places. She put Fawn next to herself, and Fawn insisted Dag be placed on her own right, “On account of I promised to help him out with his broken arm.” They settled at last. Clover, finally introduced as Fletch’s betrothed, was also drafted to help, plopping plates and cups of what smelled like cider down in front of them.

Dag, by this time very thirsty, was most interested in the drink. The food was a well-cooked stew, and Dag silently rejoiced at being confronted with something he could handle by himself, though he wondered who in the household had bad teeth.

“The fork-spoon, I think,” he murmured in Fawn’s ear, and she nodded and rummaged it out of his belt pouch.

“What happened to your arm?” asked Rush, across from them.

“Which one?” asked Dag. And endured the inevitable moment of rustling, craning, and stunned stares as Fawn calmly unscrewed his hand and replaced it with the more useful tool. “Thank you, Spark. Drink?” He smiled down at her as she lifted the cup to his lips. It was fresh cider, very tart from new summer apples.

“And thanks again.”

“You’re welcome, Dag.” He licked the spare drop off his lower lip, so she didn’t have to chase it with her napkin, yet.

Rush finally found his voice, more or less. “Er… I was going to ask about the, er, sling…”

Fawn answered briskly, “A sneak thief at Lumpton Market lifted my bedroll yesterday. Dag got it back, but his arm was broken in the fight before the thieves got scared and ran off. Dag gave a real good description to the Lumpton folks, though, so they might catch the fellows.” Her jaw set just a trifle.

“So I kind of owe him for the arm.”

“Oh,” said Rush. Reed and Whit stared across the table with renewed, if daunted, interest.

Tril Bluefield, looking hungrily and now more carefully at her restored daughter, frowned and let her hand drift to Fawn’s cheek where the four parallel gouges were now paling pink scars. “What are those marks?”

She glanced sidelong at Dag; he shrugged, Go on. She said, “That’s where the mud-man hit me.”

“The what?” said her mother, face screwing up.

“A… sort of bandit,” Fawn revised this. “Two bandits grabbed me off the road near Glassforge.”

“What? What happened?” her mother gasped. The assorted brothers, too, sat up; on Dag’s right, he could feel Fletch tense.

“Not too much,” said Fawn. “They roughed me up, but Dag, who was tracking them, came up just then and, um. Ran them off.” She glanced at him again, and he lowered his eyelids in thanks. He did not especially wish to begin his acquaintance with her family with a listing of all the dead bodies he’d left around Glassforge, the human ones at least. Far too many human ones, this last round. “That’s how we first met. His patrol had been called to Glassforge to deal with the bandits and the blight bogle.”

Rush asked, “What happened to the bandits after that?”

Fawn turned to Dag, who answered simply, “They were dealt with.” He applied himself to his stew, good plain farm food, in the hope of avoiding further expansion on this subject.

Fawn’s mother bent her head, eyes narrowing; her hand went out again, this time to the left side of Fawn’s neck and the deep red dent and three ugly black scabs. “Then what are those nasty-looking things?”

“Um… well, that was later.”

“What was later?”

In a desperately bright voice, Fawn replied, “That’s where the blight bogle lifted me up. They make those sorts of marks—their touch is deadly. It was big.

How big, would you say, Dag? Eight feet tall, maybe?”

“Seven and a half, I’d guess,” he said blandly. “About four hundred pounds.

Though I didn’t have the best vantage. Or light.”

Reed said, in a tone of growing disbelief, “So what happened to this supposed blight bogle, if it was so deadly?”

Fawn’s look begged help, so Dag replied, “It was dealt with, too.”

“Go on, Fawn,” said Fletch scornfully. “You can’t expect us to swallow your tall tales!”

Dag let his voice go very soft. “Are you calling your sister a liar… sir?” He let the and me? hang in implication.

Fletch’s thick brows wrinkled in honest bewilderment; he was not a man sensitive to implication, either, Dag guessed. “She’s my sister. I can call her anything want!”

Dag drew breath, but Fawn whispered, “Dag, let it go. It doesn’t matter.”

He did not yet speak this family dialect, he reminded himself. He had worried about how to conceal the strange accident with the sharing knife; he’d not imagined such feeble curiosity or outright disbelief. It was not in his present interest—or capacity—to bang Bluefield heads together and bellow, Your sister’s courage saved my life, and dozens, maybe thousands, more. Honor her! He let it go and nodded for more cider.

Blatantly changing the subject, Fawn asked Clover after the progress of her wedding plans, listening to the lengthy reply with well-feigned interest. The addition in progress on the south end of the house, it appeared, was intended for the soon-to-be-newlyweds. The true purpose of the question—camouflage—was revealed to Dag when Fawn added casually, “Anyone hear from the Sawmans since Saree’s wedding?”

“Not too much,” said Reed. “Sunny’s spent a lot of time at his brother-in-law’s place, helping clear stumps from the new field.”

Fawn’s mother gave her a narrow-eyed look. “His mama tells me Sunny’s betrothed to Violet Stonecrop as of midsummer. Hope you’re not disappointed. I thought you might be getting kind of sweet on him at one point.”

Whit piped up, in a whiny, practiced brotherly chant, “Fawn is sweet on Suh-nee, Fawn is sweet on Suh-nee…”

Dag cringed at the spate of deathly blackness that ran through Fawn’s ground.

He does not know, he reminded himself. None of them do. Although he would not have cast bets on Tril Bluefield’s unvoiced suspicions, because she now said in a flat voice unlike any he’d yet heard from her, brooking no argument, “Stop that, Whit. You’d think you were twelve.”

Dag could see the little ripple in Fawn’s jaw as she unset her teeth. “Not sweet in the least. I think Violet deserves better.”

Whit looked disappointed at not having drawn a more spectacular rise out of his sister from his expert lure but, glancing at his mother, did not resume his heckling.