The farmhouse kitchen was fragrant with cooking—ham and beans, cornbread, squash, biscuits, applesauce, pumpkin pie, and a dozen familiar go-withs—and the moist perfume of it all made Fawn weirdly homesick even though she was home. Mama and Clover, both be-aproned, were bustling around the kitchen as they stepped through the back door, and Mama, at least, fell on Fawn with shrieks of delighted surprise. Blind Aunt Nattie lumbered up from her spinning wheel just beyond the doorway to her weaving room, hugged Fawn hard, and spared an embrace for Dag as well. Her hand lingered a moment on the wedding cord circling Dag’s left arm, below his rolled-up shirt sleeve and above the arm harness for his hook, and her smile softened. “Glad to see this is still holdin’,” she murmured, and “Aye,” Dag murmured back, giving her in return a squeeze that lifted her off her feet and made her grin outright.
Papa and Fletch clumped in from wherever they’d been working—with the sheep, from the smell—when the greetings were all still at the babbling stage. Plump Clover, announcing that the food wouldn’t wait, sent Fawn and Dag off to put down their bags and wash up. She hurried to set extra places, and wouldn’t let Fawn help serve—“Sit, sit! You two must be tired from all that ridin’. You’re a guest now, Fawn!” Aren’t you? her worried eyes added silently. Fletch looked as if he were wondering the same thing, though he greeted his sister and her unlikely husband affably enough.
They sat eight around the long kitchen table, filled with the variety and abundance of farm fare that Fawn had always taken for granted but that still seemed to take Dag aback; having seen the austerity of life in a Lakewalker camp, Fawn now understood why. Dag certainly did not disapprove, praising the cooks and filling his plate in a way that demonstrated the ultimate compliment of a good appetite.