“Taken, I’m afraid. If this malice is trying to take farmer slaves already, it’s growing fast.”

“What—slaves for what?”

“Not sure the malice even knows, yet. It’s a sort of instinct with malices.

It’ll figure it out fast enough, though. I’m running out of time.” He was growing dizzy with fatigue. Was he also growing stupid with fatigue?

He continued, “I’d give almost anything for two hours of sleep right now, except two hours of light. I need to get back to the trail while I still have daylight to see it. I think…” His voice slowed. “I think this place is as safe as any and safer than most. They’ve hit it once, it’s already stripped of everything valuable—they won’t be back too soon. I’m thinking maybe I could leave you here anyway. If anyone comes, you can tell them—no. First, if anyone comes, hide, till you are sure they’re all-right folks. Then come out and tell them Dag has a message for his patrol, he thinks the malice is holed up northeast of town, not south. If patrollers come, do you think you could show them to where the tracks led off? And that boy’s—bandit’s—body,” he added in afterthought.

She squinted at the wooded hills. “I’m not sure I could find my way back to it, the route you took.”

“There’s an easier way. This lane”—he waved at the track they’d ridden up—“goes back to the straight road in about four miles. Turn left, and I think the path your mud-man took east from it is about three miles on.”

“Oh,” she said more eagerly, “I could find that, sure.”

“Good, then.”

She had no fear, blast and blight it. He could change that… So did he want her to be terrified out of her mind, frozen witless? She was already sliding down off the horse, looking pleased to have a task within her capacity.

“What’s so dangerous about the mud-men?” she asked, as he gathered his reins and prepared to mount once more.

He hesitated a long moment. “They’ll eat you,” he said at last. After everything else is all over, that is.

“Oh.”

Subdued and impressed. And, more important, believing him. Well, it hadn’t been a lie. Maybe it would make her just cautious enough. He found his stirrup and pushed up, trying not to dwell on the contrast between this hard saddle and a feather bed. There had been one unslashed feather mattress left inside the farmhouse. He’d noticed it particularly, while shoving aside a little fantasy about falling into it face-first. He swung his horse around.

“Dag… ?”

He turned at once to look over his shoulder. Big brown eyes stared up at him from a face like a bruised flower.

“Don’t let them eat you, either.”

Involuntarily, his lips turned up; she smiled brightly back through her darkening contusions. It gave him an odd feeling in his stomach, which he prudently did not attempt to name. Heartened despite all, he raised his carved hand in salute and cantered back down the lane. Feeling bereft, Fawn watched the patroller vanish into the tunnel of trees at the edge of the fields. The silence of this homestead, stripped of animals and people, was eerie and oppressive, once she noticed it. She squinted upward.

The sun had not even topped the arch of the sky for noon. It seemed years since dawn.

She sighed and ventured into the house. She walked all around it, footsteps echoing, feeling as though she intruded on some stranger’s grief. The senseless mess the raiders had left in their wake seemed overwhelming, taken in all at once. She came back to the kitchen and stood there shivering a little. Well, if the house was too much, what about one room? I could fix one room, yes.

She braced herself and started by turning back upright anything that would still stand, shelf and table and a couple of chairs. What was broken beyond mending she hauled outside, starting a pile at one end of the porch. Then she swept the floor clear of broken plates and glass and spilled flour and drying food. She swept the porch too, while she was at it.

Beneath a worn old rag rug, ignored by the invaders, she found a trapdoor with a rope handle. She shook the rug over the porch rail, returned, and stared worriedly at the trap. I don’t think Dag saw this.

She bit her lip, then took a bucket with a broken handle outside and collected a few live coals from the still-smoldering whatever-it-had-been, and started a little fire in the kitchen hearth. From it, she lit a candle stub found in the back of a drawer. She pulled up the trapdoor by its rope, wincing at the groaning of its hinges, swallowed, and stared at the ladder into the dark hole.

Could there be anyone still hiding down there? Big spiders?… Bodies? She took a deep breath and descended.

When she turned and held up the candle, her lips parted in astonishment. The cellar was lined with shelves, and on them, untouched, were row upon row of glass jars, many sealed with hot rock wax and covered with cloth bound with twine. Food storage for a farm full of hungry people. A year of labor lined up—Fawn knew exactly how much work, too, as preserving boiled foodstuffs under wax seals had been one of her most satisfying tasks back home. None of the jars were labeled, but her eye had no trouble picking out and identifying the contents. Fruit preserves. Vinegar pickles. Corn relish. Stew meat. A barrel in the corner proved to hold several sacks of flour. Another held last year’s apples packed in straw, terribly wrinkly and by now only suitable for cooking, but not rotted. She was stirred to enthusiasm, and action.

Most of the jars were big, meant for a crowd, but she found three smaller ones, of dark purple fruit, corn relish, and what she trusted was stew meat, and hauled them up into the light. A kerchief full of flour, as well. A single iron pan, which she found kicked into a corner under a fallen shelf, was all that was left of the tools of this workplace, but with a little ingenuity she soon had flatbread cooking in it over her fire. The jar of meat proved to be, probably, pork cooked to flinders with onions and herbs, which she heated up after she’d freed the pan of her bread circles.

She caught up on days of scant rations, then, replete, set aside portions made up for Dag when he returned. Clearly, judging from his lady patrol leader and his general build, he was the sort of fellow you had to capture, hog-tie, and make remember to eat. Was he just a goer, or did he live too much inside his own head to notice his body’s needs? And what all else was that head furnished with?

He seemed driven. Considering the almost casual physical courage he’d displayed so far, it was unsettling to consider what he might fear that pushed him along so unceasingly. Well, if I were as tall as a tree, maybe I’d be brave too. A

skinny tree. Upon consideration, she wrapped the meat and the preserves in rolls of flatbread so that he might eat while riding, because when he came back, it was likely he’d be in a hurry still.

If he came back. He hadn’t actually said. The thought made a disappointed cold spot in her belly. Now you’re being stupid. Stop it. The cure for bad sad thoughts was busyness, right enough, but she was getting dreadfully tired.

In one of the other rooms she found an abandoned sewing basket, also overlooked by the raiders, probably because the mending that topped it looked like rags.

They’d entirely missed the valuable tools inside, sharp scissors and good thimbles and a collection of fine iron needles. Were the blight bogle’s—malice’s—mud-men all men then? Did it make any mud-women? It seemed not.

She decided she would sew up some of the slashed feather ticks in payment for the food, so it wouldn’t feel so stolen. Sewing was not her best skill, but straight seams would be simple enough, and it would put an end to the messy, desolate feather wrack drifting about the place. She hauled the ticks out onto the porch, for the light, and so she could watch down the lane for a tall—for whoever. Needle and thread and fine repetitive work made a soothing rhythm under her hands. In the quiet, her mind circled back to this morning’s terror.