Fawn came to the well-house a little before noon. More than a farmstead, less than an inn, it sat close to the straight road she’d been trudging down for two days. The farmyard lay open to travelers, bounded by a semicircle of old log outbuildings, with the promised covered well in the middle. To resolve all doubt, somebody had nailed a sign picturing the well itself to one of the support posts, and below the painting a long list of goods the farm might sell, with the prices. Each painstakingly printed line had a little picture below it, and colored circles of coins lined up in rows beyond, for those who could not read the words and numbers themselves. Fawn could, and keep accounts as well, skills her mother had taught her along with a hundred other household tasks.

She frowned at the unbidden thought: So if I’m so clever, what am I doing in this fix?

She set her teeth and felt in her skirt pocket for her coin purse. It was not heavy, but she might certainly buy some bread. Bread would be bland. The dried mutton from her pack that she’d tried to eat this morning had made her sick, again, but she needed something to fight the horrible fatigue that slowed her steps to a plod, or she’d never make it to Glassforge. She glanced around the unpeopled yard and at the iron bell hung from the post with a pull cord dangling invitingly, then lifted her eyes to the rolling fields beyond the buildings.

On a distant sunlit slope, a dozen or so people were haying. Uncertainly, she went around to the farmhouse’s kitchen door and knocked.

A striped cat perching on the step eyed her without getting up. The cat’s plump calm reassured Fawn, together with the good repair of the house’s faded shingles and fieldstone foundation, so that when a comfortably middle-aged farmwife opened the door, Fawn’s heart was hardly pounding at all.