Wizard and Glass

1

A perfect disc of silver-the Kissing Moon, as it was called in Full Earth-hung above the ragged hill five miles east of Hambry and ten miles south of Eyebolt Canyon. Below the hill the late summer heat still held, suffocating even two hours after sundown, but atop the Coos, it was as if Reap had already come, with its strong breezes and frost-pinched air. For the woman who lived here with no company but a snake and one old mutie cat, it was to be a long night.

Never mind, though; never mind, my dear. Busy hands are happy hands. So they are.

She waited until the hoofbeats of her visitors’ horses had faded, sitting quietly by the window in the hut’s large room (there was only one other, a bedroom little bigger than a closet). Musty, the six-legged cat, was on her shoulder. Her lap was full of moonlight.

Three horses, bearing away three men. The Big Coffin Hunters, they called themselves.

She snorted. Men were funny, aye, so they were, and the most amusing thing about them was how little they knew it. Men, with their swaggering, belt-hitching names for themselves. Men, so proud of their muscles, their drinking capacities, their eating capacities; so everlastingly proud of their pricks. Yes, even in these times, when a good many of them could shoot nothing but strange, bent seed that produced children fit only to be drowned in the nearest well. Ah, but it was never their fault, was it, dear? No, always it was the woman-her womb, her fault. Men were such cowards. Such grinning cowards. These three had been no different from the general run. The old one with the limp might bear watching-aye, so he might, a clear and overly curious pair of eyes had looked out at her from his head-but she saw nothing in them she could not deal with, came it to that.

Men! She could not understand why so many women feared them. Hadn’t the gods made them with the most vulnerable part of their guts hanging right out of their bodies, like a misplaced bit of bowel? Kick them there and they curled up like snails. Caress them there and their brains melted. Anyone who doubted that second bit of wisdom need only look at her night’s second bit of business, the one which still lay ahead. Thorin! Mayor of Hambry! Chief Guard o’ Barony! No fool like an old fool!

Yet none of these thoughts had any real power over her or any real malice to them, at least not now; the three men who called themselves the Big Coffin Hunters had brought her a marvel, and she would look at it; aye, fill up her eyes with it, so she would.

The gimp, Jonas, had insisted she put it away-he had been told she had a place for such things, not that he wanted to see it himself, not any of her secret places, gods forbid (at this sally Depape and Reynolds had laughed like trolls)-and so she had, but the hoofbeats of their horses had been swallowed by the wind now, and she would do as she liked. The girl whose tits had stolen what little there was of Hart Thorin’s mind would not be here for another hour, at least (the old woman had insisted that the girl walk from town, citing the purification value of such a moonlit heel-and-toe, actually just wanting to put a safe bumper of time between her two appointments), and during that hour she would do as she liked.

“Oh, it’s beautiful, I’m sure ’tis,” she whispered, and did she feel a certain heat in that place where her ancient bowlegs came together? A certain moisture in the dry creek which hid there? Gods!

“Aye, even through the box where they hid it I felt its glam. So beautiful, Musty, like you.” She took the cat from her shoulder and held it in front of her eyes. The old torn purred and stretched out its pug of a face toward hers. She kissed its nose. The cat closed its milky gray-green eyes in ecstasy. “So beautiful, like you-so y’are, so y’are! Hee!”

She put the cat down. It walked slowly toward the hearth, where a late fire lazed, desultorily eating at a single log. Musty’s tail, split at the tip so it looked like the forked tail of a devil in an old drawing, switched back and forth in the room’s dim orange air. Its extra legs, dangling from its sides, twitched dreamily. The shadow which trailed across the floor and grew up the wall was a horror: a thing that looked like a cat crossed with a spider.

The old woman rose and went into her sleeping closet, where she had taken the thing Jonas had given her.

“Lose that and you’ll lose your head,” he’d said.

“Never fear me, my good friend,” she’d replied, directing a cringing, servile smile back over her shoulder, all the while thinking: Men! Foolish strutting creatures they were!

Now she went to the foot of her bed, knelt, and passed one hand over the earth floor there. Lines appeared in the sour dirt as she did. They formed a square. She pushed her fingers into one of these lines; it gave before her touch. She lifted the hidden panel (hidden in such a way that no one without the touch would ever be able to uncover it), revealing a compartment perhaps a foot square and two feet deep. Within it was an ironwood box. Curled atop the box was a slim green snake. When she touched its back, its head came up. Its mouth yawned in a silent hiss, displaying four pairs of fangs-two on top, two on the bottom.

She took the snake up, crooning to it. As she brought its flat face close to her own, its mouth yawned wider and it’s hissing became audible. She opened her own mouth; from between her wrinkled gray lips she poked the yellowish, bad-smelling mat of her tongue. Two drops of poison- enough to kill an entire dinner-party, if mixed in the punch-fell on it. She swallowed, feeling her mouth and throat and chest bum, as if with strong liquor. For a moment the room swam out of focus, and she could hear voices murmuring in the stenchy air of the hut-the voices of those she called “the unseen friends.” Her eyes ran sticky water down the trenches time had drawn in her cheeks. Then she blew out a breath and the room steadied. The voices faded.

She kissed Ermot between his lidless eyes (time o’ the Kissing Moon, all right, she thought) and then set him aside. The snake slipped beneath her bed, curled itself in a circle, and watched as she passed her palms over the top of the ironwood box. She could feel the muscles in her upper arms quivering, and that heat in her loins was more pronounced. Years it had been since she had felt the call of her sex, but she felt it now, so she did, and it was not the doing of the Kissing Moon, or not much.

The box was locked and Jonas had given her no key, but that was nothing to her, who had lived long and studied much and trafficked with creatures that most men, for all their bold talk and strutting ways, would run from as if on fire had they caught even the smallest glimpse of them. She stretched one hand toward the lock, on which was inlaid the shape of an eye and a motto in the High Speech (I see who opens me), and then withdrew it. All at once she could smell what her nose no longer noticed under ordinary circumstances: must and dust and a dirty mattress and the crumbs of food that had been consumed in bed; the mingled stench of ashes and ancient incense; the odor of an old woman with wet eyes and (ordinarily, at least) a dry pussy. She would not open this box and look at the wonder it contained in here; she would go outside, where the air was clean and the only smells were sage and mesquite.

She would look by the light of the Kissing Moon.

Rhea of Coos Hill pulled the box from its hole with a grunt, rose to her feet with another grunt (this one from her nether regions), tucked the box under her arm, and left the room.

2

The hut was far enough below the brow of the hill to block off the bitterest gusts of the winter wind which blew almost constantly in these highlands from Reaping until the end of Wide Earth. A path led to the hill’s highest vantage; beneath the full moon it was a ditch of silver. The old woman toiled up it, puffing, her white hair standing out around her head in dirty clumps, her old dugs swaying from side to side under her black dress. The cat followed in her shadow, still giving off its rusty purr like a stink.

At the top of the hill, the wind lifted her hair away from her ravaged face and brought her the moaning whisper of the thinny which had eaten its way into the far end of Eyebolt Canyon. It was a sound few cared for, she knew, but she herself loved it; to Rhea of the Coos, it sounded like a lullaby. Overhead rode the moon, the shadows on its bright skin sketching the faces of lovers kissing… if you believed the ordinary fools below, that was. The ordinary fools below saw a different face or set of faces in each full moon, but the hag knew there was only one-the face of the Demon. The face of death.

She herself, however, had never felt more alive.

“Oh, my beauty,” she whispered, and touched the lock with her gnarled fingers. A faint glimmer of red light showed between her bunched knuckles, and there was a click. Breathing hard, like a woman who has run a race, she put the box down and opened it.

Rose-colored light, dimmer than that thrown by the Kissing Moon but infinitely more beautiful, spilled out. It touched the ruined face hanging above the box, and for a moment made it the face of a young girl again.

Musty sniffed, head stretched forward, ears laid back, old eyes rimmed with that rose light. Rhea was instantly jealous.

“Get away, foolish, ’tis not for the likes of you!”

She swatted the cat. Musty shied back, hissing like a kettle, and stalked in dudgeon to the hummock which marked the very tip of Coos Hill. There he sat, affecting disdain and licking one paw as the wind combed ceaselessly through his fur.

Within the box, peeping out of a velvet drawstring bag, was a glass globe. It was filled with that rosy light; it flowed in gentle pulses, like the beat of a satisfied heart. \

“Oh, my lovely one,” she murmured, lifting it out. She held it up before her; let its pulsing radiance run down her wrinkled face like rain. “Oh, ye live, so ye do!”

Suddenly the color within the globe darkened toward scarlet. She felt it thrum in her hands like an immensely powerful motor, and again she felt that amazing wetness between her legs, that tidal tug she believed had been left behind long ago.

Then the thrumming died, and the light in the globe seemed to furl up like petals. Where it had been there was now a pinkish gloom… and three riders coming out of it. At first she thought it was the men who had brought her the globe-Jonas and the others. But no, these were younger, even younger than Depape, who was about twenty-five. The one on the left of the trio appeared to have a bird’s skull mounted on the pommel of his saddle-strange but true.

Then that one and the one on the right were gone, darkened away somehow by the power of the glass, leaving only the one in the middle. She took in the jeans and boots he wore, the flat-brimmed hat that hid the upper half of his face, the easy way he sat his horse, and her first alarmed thought was Gunslinger! Come east from the Inner Baronies, aye, perhaps from Gilead itself! But she did not have to see the upper half of the rider’s face to know he was little more than a child, and there were no guns on his hips. Yet she didn’t think the youth came unarmed. If only she could see a little better…

She brought the glass almost to the tip of her nose and whispered, “Closer, lovie! Closer still!”

She didn’t know what to expect-nothing at all seemed most likely-but within the dark circle of the glass, the figure did come closer. Swum closer, almost, like a horse and rider underwater, and she saw there was a quiver of arrows on his back. Before him, on the pommel of his saddle, was not a skull but a shortbow. And to the right side of the saddle, where a gunslinger might have carried a rifle in a scabbard, there was the feather-fluffed shaft of a lance. He was not one of the Old People, his face had none of that look… yet she did not think he was of the Outer Arc, either.

“But who are ye, cully?” she breathed. “And how shall I know ye? Ye’ve got yer hat pulled down so far I can’t see your God-pounding eyes, so ye do! By yer horse, mayhap… or p'raps by yer… get away, Musty! Why do yer trouble me so? Arrrr!”

The cat had come back from its lookout point and was twining back and forth between her swollen old ankles, waowing up at her in a voice even more rusty than its purr. When the old woman kicked out at him, Musty dodged agilely away… then immediately came back and started in again, looking up at her with moonstruck eyes and making those soft yowls.

Rhea kicked out at it again, this one just as ineffectual as the first one, then looked into the glass once more. The horse and its interesting young rider were gone. The rose light was gone, as well. It was now just a dead glass ball she held, its only light a reflection borrowed from the moon.

The wind gusted, pressing her dress against the ruination that was her body. Musty, undaunted by the feeble kicks of his mistress, darted forward and began to twine about her ankles again, crying up at her the whole time.

“There, do ye see what you’ve done, ye nasty bag of fleas and disease? The light’s gone out of it, gone out just when I-”

Then she heard a sound from the cart track which led up to her hut, and understood why Musty had been acting out. It was singing she heard. It was the girl she heard. The girl was early.

Grimacing horribly-she loathed being caught by surprise, and the little miss down there would pay for doing it-she bent and put the glass back in its box. The inside was lined with padded silk, and the ball fit as neatly as the breakfast egg in His Lordship’s cup. And still from down the hill (the cursed wind was wrong or she would have heard it sooner), the sound of the girl singing, now closer than ever:

“Love, o love, o careless love.

Can’t you see what careless love has done?”

“I’ll give'ee careless love, ye virgin bitch,” the old woman said. She could smell the sour reek of sweat from under her arms, but that other moisture had dried up again. “I’ll give ye payday for walking in early on old Rhea, so I will!”

She passed her fingers over the lock on the front of the box, but it wouldn’t fasten. She supposed she had been overeager to have it open, and had broken something inside it when she used the touch. The eye and the motto seemed to mock her: i see who opens me. It could be put right, and in a jiffy, but right now even a jiffy was more than she had.

“Pestering cunt!” She whined, lifting her head briefly toward the approaching voice (almost here now, by the gods, and forty-five minutes before her time!). Then she closed the lid of the box. It gave her a pang to do it, because the glass was coming to life again, filling with that rosy glow, but there was no time for looking or dreaming now. Later, perhaps, after the object of Thorin’s unseemly late-life prickishness had gone.

And you must restrain yourself from doing anything too awful to the girl, she cautioned herself. Remember she’s here because of him, and at least ain’t one of those green girls with a bun in the oven and a boyfriend acting reluctant about the cries o’ marriage. It’s Thorin ’s doing, this one’s what he thinks about after his ugly old crow of a wife is asleep and he takes himself in his hand and commences the evening milking; it’s Thorin’s doing, he has the old law on his side, and he has power. Furthermore, what’s in that box is his man’s business, and if Jonas found out ye looked at it… that ye used it…

Aye, but no fear of that. And in the meantime, possession were nine-tenths of the law, were it not?

She hoisted the box under one arm, hoisted her skirts with her free hand, and ran back along the path to the hut. She could still run when she had to, aye, though few there were who’d believe it.

Musty ran at her heels, bounding along with his cloven tail held high and his extra legs flopping up and down in the moonlight.

1

Rhea darted into her hut, crossed in front of the guttering fire, then stood in the doorway to her tiny bedroom, swiping a hand through her hair in a distracted gesture. The bitch hadn’t seen her outside the hut-she surely would have stopped caterwauling, or at least faltered in it if she had- and that was good, but the cursed hidey-hole had sealed itself up again, and that was bad. There was no time to open it again, either. Rhea hurried to the bed, knelt, and pushed the box far back into the shadows beneath.

Ay, that would do; until Susy Greengown was gone, it would do very well. Smiling on the right side of her mouth (the left was mostly frozen), Rhea got up, brushed her dress, and went to meet her second appointment of the night.

2

Behind her, the unlocked lid of the box clicked open. It came up less than an inch, but that was enough to allow a sliver of pulsing rose-colored light to shine out.

3

Susan Delgado stopped about forty yards from the witch’s hut, the sweat chilling on her arms and the nape of her neck. Had she just spied an old woman (surely the one she had come to see) dart down that last bit of path leading from the top of the hill? She thought she had.

Don’t stop singing-when an old lady hurries like that, she doesn’t want to be seen. If you stop singing, she’ll likely know she was.

For a moment Susan thought she’d stop anyway-that her memory would close up like a startled hand and deny her another verse of the old song which she had been singing since youngest childhood. But the next verse came to her, and she continued on (with feet as well as voice):

“Once my cares were far away, Yes, once my cares were far away,

Now my love has gone from me

And misery is in my heart to stay.”

A bad song for a night such as this, mayhap, but her heart went its own way without much interest in what her head thought or wanted; always had^ She was frightened to be out by moonlight, when werewolves were said to walk, she was frightened of her errand, and she was frightened by what that errand portended. Yet when she had gained the Great Road out of Hambry and her heart had demanded she run, she had run- under the light of the Kissing Moon and with her skirt held above her knees she had galloped like a pony, with her shadow galloping right beside her. For a mile or more she had run, until every muscle in her body tingled and the air she pulled down her throat tasted like some sweet heated liquid. And when she reached the upland track leading to this high sinister, she had sung. Because her heart demanded it. And, she supposed, it really hadn’t been such a bad idea; if nothing else, it had kept the worst of her megrims away. Singing was good for that much, anyway.

Now she walked to the end of the path, singing the chorus of “Careless Love.” As she stepped into the scant light which fell through the open door and onto the stoop, a harsh raincrow voice spoke from the shadows: “Stop yer howling, missy-it catches in my brains like a fishhook!”

Susan, who had been told all her life that she had a fair singing voice, a gift from her gramma, no doubt, fell silent at once, abashed. She stood on the stoop with her hands clasped in front of her apron. Beneath the apron she wore her second-best dress (she only had two). Beneath it, her heart was thumping very hard.

A cat-a hideous thing with two extra legs sticking out of its sides like toasting forks-came into the doorway first. It looked up at her, seemed to measure her, then screwed its face up in a look that was eerily human: contempt. It hissed at her, then flashed away into the night.

Well, good evening to you, too, Susan thought.

The old woman she had been sent to see stepped into the doorway.

She looked Susan up and down with that same expression of flat-eyed contempt, then stood back. “Come in. And mind ye clap the door tight. The wind has a way of blowin it open, as ye see!”

Susan stepped inside. She didn’t want to close herself into this bad-smelling room with the old woman, but when there was no choice, hesitation was ever a fault. So her father had said, whether the matter under discussion was sums and subtractions or how to deal with boys at barn-dances when their hands became overly adventurous. She pulled the door firmly to, and heard it latch.

“And here y’are,” the old woman said, and offered a grotesque smile of welcome. It was a smile guaranteed to make even a brave girl think of stories told in the nursery-Winter’s tales of old women with snaggle teeth and bubbling cauldrons full of toad-green liquid. There was no cauldron over the fire in this room (nor was the fire itself much of a shake, in Susan’s opinion), but the girl guessed there had been, betimes, and things in it of which it might be better not to think. That this woman was a real witch and not just an old lady posing as one was something Susan had felt sure of from the moment she had seen Rhea darting back inside her hut with the malformed cat at her heels. It was something you could almost smell, like the reeky aroma rising off the hag’s skin.

“Yes,” she said, smiling. She tried to make it a good one, bright and unafraid. “Here I am.”

“And it’s early y’are, my little sweeting. Early y’are! Hee!”

“I ran partway. The moon got into my blood, I suppose. That’s what my da would have said.”

The old woman’s horrible smile widened into something that made Susan think of the way eels sometimes seemed to grin, after death and just before the pot. “Aye, but dead he is, dead these five years, Pat Delgado of the red hair and beard, the life mashed out of 'im by 'is own horse, aye, and went into the clearing at the end of the path with the music of his own snapping bones in his ears, so he did!”

The nervous smile slipped from Susan’s face as if slapped away. She felt tears, always close at the mere mention of her da’s name, bum at the back of her eyes. But she would not let them fall. Not in this heartless old crow’s sight, she wouldn’t.

“Let our business be quick and be done,” she said in a dry voice that was far from her usual one; that voice was usually cheery and merry and ready for fun. But she was Pat Delgado’s child, daughter of the best drover ever to work the Western Drop, and she remembered his face very well; she could rise to a stronger nature if required, as it now clearly was. The old woman had meant to reach out and scratch as deep as she could, and the more she saw that her efforts were succeeding, the more she would redouble them.

The hag, meanwhile, was watching Susan shrewdly, her bunch-knuckled hands planted on her hips while her cat twined around her ankles. Her eyes were rheumy, but Susan saw enough of them to realize they were the same gray-green shade as the cat’s eyes, and to wonder what sort of fell magic that might be. She felt an urge-a strong one-to drop her eyes, and would not. It was all right to feel fear, but sometimes a very bad idea to show it.

“You look at me pert, missy,” Rhea said at last. Her smile was dissolving slowly into a petulant frown.

“Nay, old mother,” Susan replied evenly. “Only as one who wishes to do the business she came for and be gone. I have come here at the wish of My Lord Mayor of Mejis, and at that of my Aunt Cordelia, sister of my father. My dear father, of whom I would hear no ill spoken.”

“I speak as I do,” the old woman said. The words were dismissive, yet there was a trace of fawning servility in the hag’s voice. Susan set no importance on that; it was a tone such a thing as this had probably adopted her whole life, and came as automatically as breath. “I’ve lived alone a long time, with no mistress but myself, and once it begins, my tongue goes where it will.”

“Then sometimes it might be best not to let it begin at all.”

The old woman’s eyes flashed uglily. “Curb your own, stripling girl, lest you find it dead in your mouth, where it will rot and make the Mayor think twice about kissing you when he smells its stink, aye, even under such a moon as this!”

Susan’s heart filled with misery and bewilderment. She’d come up here intent on only one thing: getting the business done as quickly as possible, a barely explained rite that was apt to be painful and sure to be shameful. Now this old woman was looking at her with flat and naked hatred. How could things have gone wrong with such suddenness? Or was it always this way with witches?

“We have begun badly, mistress-can we start over?” Susan asked suddenly, and held out her hand.

The hag looked startled, although she did reach out and make brief contact, the wrinkled tips of her fingers touching the short-nailed lingers of the sixteen-year-old girl who stood before her with her clear-skinned face shining and her long hair braided down her back. Susan had to make a real effort not to grimace at the touch, brief as it was. The old woman’s fingers were as chilly as those of a corpse, but Susan had touched chilly fingers before (“Cold hands, warm heart,” Aunt Cord sometimes said). The real unpleasantness was in the texture, the feel of cold flesh spongy and loose on the bones, as if the woman to whom they were attached had drowned and lain long in some pool.

“Nay, nay, there’s no starting over,” the old woman said, “yet may-hap we’ll go on better than we’ve begun. Ye’ve a powerful friend in the Mayor, and I’d not have him for my enemy.”

She’s honest, at least, Susan thought, then had to laugh at herself. This woman would be honest only when she absolutely had to be; left to her own devices and desires, she’d lie about everything-the weather, the crops, the flights of birds come Reaping.

“Ye came before I expected ye, and it’s put me out of temper, so it has. Have ye brought me something, missy? Ye have, I’ll warrant!” Her eyes were glittering once more, this time not with anger.

Susan reached beneath her apron (so stupid, wearing an apron for an errand on the backside of nowhere, but it was what custom demanded) and into her pocket. There, tied to a string so it could not be easily lost (by young girls suddenly moved to run in the moonlight, perchance), was a cloth bag. Susan broke the binding string and brought the bag out. She put it in the outstretched hand before her, the palm so worn that the lines marking it were now little more than ghosts. She was careful not to touch Rhea again… although the old woman would be touching her again, and soon.

“Is it the sound o’ the wind makes ye shiver?” Rhea asked, although Susan could tell her mind was mostly fixed on the little bag; her fingers were busy tugging out the knot in the drawstring.

“Yes, the wind.”

“And so it should. ’tis the voices of the dead you hear in the wind, and when they scream so, ’tis because they regret-ah!”

The knot gave. She loosened the drawstring and tumbled two gold coins into her hand. They were unevenly milled and crude-no one had made such for generations-but they were heavy, and the eagles engraved upon them had a certain power. Rhea lifted one to her mouth, pulled back her lips to reveal a few gruesome teeth, and bit down. The hag looked at the faint indentations her teeth had left in the gold. For several seconds she gazed, rapt, then closed her fingers over them tightly.

While Rhea’s attention was distracted by the coins, Susan happened to look through the open door to her left and into what she assumed was the witch’s bedchamber. And here she saw an odd and disquieting thing: a light under the bed. A pink, pulsing light. It seemed to be coming from some kind of box, although she could not quite…

The witch looked up, and Susan hastily moved her eyes to a comer of the room, where a net containing three or four strange white fruits hung from a hook. Then, as the old woman moved and her huge shadow danced ponderously away from that part of the wall, Susan saw they were not fruits at air, but skulls. She felt a sickish drop in her stomach.

“The fire needs building up, missy. Go round to the side of the house and bring back an armload of wood. Good-sized sticks are what’s wanted, and never mind whining ye can’t lug ’em. Ye’re of a strappin good size, so ye are!”

Susan, who had quit whining about chores around the time she had quit pissing into her clouts, said nothing… although it did cross her mind to ask Rhea if everyone who brought her gold was invited to lug her wood. In truth, she didn’t mind; the air outside would taste like wine after the stench of the hut.

She had almost reached the door when her foot struck something hot and yielding. The cat yowled. Susan stumbled and almost fell. From behind her, the old woman issued a series of gasping, choking sounds which Susan eventually recognized as laughter.

“Watch Musty, my little sweet one! Tricksy, he is! And tripsy as well, betimes, so he is! Hee!” And off she went, in another gale.

The cat looked up at Susan, its ears laid back, its gray-green eyes wide. It hissed at her. And Susan, unaware she was going to do it until it was done, hissed back. Like its expression of contempt, Musty’s look of surprise was eerily-and, in this case, comically-human. It turned and fled for Rhea’s bedroom, its split tail lashing. Susan opened the door and went outside to get the wood. Already she felt as if she had been here a thousand years, and that it might be a thousand more before she could go home.

4

The air was as sweet as she had hoped, perhaps even sweeter, and for a moment she only stood on the stoop, breathing it in, trying to cleanse her lungs… and her mind.

After five good breaths, she got herself in motion. Around the side of the house she went… but it was the wrong side, it seemed, for there was no woodpile here. There was a narrow excuse for a window, however, half-buried in some tough and unlovely creeper. It was toward the back of the hut, and must look in on the old woman’s sleeping closet.

Don’t look in there, whatever she’s got under her bed isn’t your business, and if she were to catch you…

She went to the window despite these admonitions, and peeked in.

It was unlikely that Rhea would have seen Susan’s face through the dense overgrowth of pig ivy even if the old besom had been looking in that direction, and she wasn’t. She was on her knees, the drawstring bag caught in her teeth, reaching under the bed.

She brought out a box and opened its lid, which was already ajar. Her face was flooded with soft pink radiance, and Susan gasped. For one moment it was the face of a young girl-but one filled with cruelty as well as youth, the face of a self-willed child determined to learn all the wrong things for all the wrong reasons. The face of the girl this hag once had been, mayhap. The light appeared to be coming from some sort of glass ball.

The old woman looked at it for several moments, her eyes wide and fascinated. Her lips moved as if she were speaking to it or perhaps even singing to it; the little bag Susan had brought from town, its string still clamped in the hag’s mouth, bobbed up and down as she spoke. Then, with what appeared to be great effort of will, she closed the box, cutting off the rosy light. Susan found herself relieved-there was something about it she didn’t like.

The old woman cupped one hand over the silver lock in the middle of the lid, and a brief scarlet light spiked out from between her fingers. All this with the drawstring bag still hanging from her mouth. Then she put the box on the bed, knelt, and began running her hands over the dirt just beneath the bed’s edge. Although she touched only with her palms, lines appeared as if she had used a drawing tool. These lines darkened, becoming what looked like grooves.

The wood, Susan! Gel the wood before she wakes up to how long you’ve been gone! For your father’s sake!

Susan pulled the skirt of her dress all the way up to her waist-she did not want the old woman to see dirt or leaves on her clothing when she came back inside, did not want to answer the questions the sight of such smuts might provoke-and crawled beneath the window with her white cotton drawers flashing in the moonlight. Once she was past, she got to her feet again and hurried quietly around to the far side of the hut. Here she found the woodpile under an old, moldy-smelling hide. She took half a dozen good-sized chunks and walked back toward the front of the house with them in her arms.

When she entered, turning sideways to get her load through the doorway without dropping any, the old woman was back in the main room, staring moodily into the fireplace, where there was now little more than embers; Of the drawstring bag there was no sign.

“Took; you long enough, missy,” Rhea said. She continued to look into the fireplace, as if Susan were of no account… but one foot tapped below the dirty hem of her dress, and her eyebrows were drawn together.

Susan crossed the room, peering over the load of wood in her arms as well as she could while she walked. It wouldn’t surprise her a bit to spy the cat lurking near, hoping to trip her up. “I saw a spider,” she said. “I flapped my apron at it to make it run away. I hate the look of them, so I do.”

“Ye’ll see something ye like the look of even less, soon enough,” Rhea said, grinning her peculiar one-sided grin. “Out of old Thorin’s nightshirt it’ll come, stiff as a stick and as red as rhubarb! Hee! Hold a minute, girl; ye gods, ye’ve brought enough for a Fair-Day bonfire.”

Rhea took two fat logs from Susan’s pile and tossed them indifferently onto the coals. Embers spiraled up the dark and faintly roaring shaft of the chimney. There, ye’ve scattered what’s left of yer fire, ye silly old thing, and will likely have to rekindle the whole mess, Susan thought. Then Rhea reached into the fireplace with one splayed hand, spoke a guttural word, and the logs blazed up as if soaked in oil.

“Put the rest over there,” she said, pointing at the woodbox. “And mind ye not be a scatterbark, missy.”

What, and dirty all this neat? Susan thought. She bit the insides of her cheeks to kill the smile that wanted to rise on her mouth.

Rhea might have sensed it, however; when Susan straightened again, the old woman was looking at her with a dour, knowing expression.

“All right, mistress, let’s do our business and have it done. Do ye know why you’re here?”

“I am here at Mayor Thorin’s wish,” Susan repeated, knowing that was no real answer. She was frightened now-more frightened than when she had looked through the window and seen the old woman crooning to the glass ball. “His wife has come barren to the end of her courses. He wishes to have a son before he is also unable to-”

“Pish-tush, spare me the codswallop and pretty words. He wants tits and arse that don’t squish in his hands and a box that’ll grip what he pushes. If he’s still man enough to push it, that is. If a son come of it, aye, fine, he’ll give it over to ye to keep and raise until it’s old enough to school, and after that ye’ll see it no more. If it’s a daughter, he’ll likely take it from ye and give it to his new man, the one with the girl’s hair and the limp, to drown in the nearest cattle-wallow.”

Susan stared at her, shocked out of all measure.

The old woman saw the look and laughed. “Don’t like the sound of the truth, do yer? Few do, missy. But that’s neither here nor there; yer auntie was ever a trig one, and she’ll have done all right out of Thorin and Thorin’s treasury. What gold you see of it’s none o’ mine… and won’t be none o’ yours, either, if you don’t watch sharp! Hee! Take off that dress!”

I won’t was what rose to her lips, but what then? To be turned out of this hut (and to be turned out pretty much as she had come, and not as a lizard or a hopping toad would probably be the best luck she could hope for) and sent west as she was now, without even the two gold coins she’d brought up here? And that was only the small half of it. The large was that she had given her word. At first she had resisted, but when Aunt Cord had invoked her father’s name, she had given in. As she always did. Really, she had no choice.'' And when there was no choice, hesitation was ever a fault.

She brushed the front of her apron, to which small bits of bark now clung, then untied it and took it off. She folded it, laid it on a small, grimy hassock near the hearth, and unbuttoned her dress to the waist. She shivered it from her shoulders, and stepped out. She folded it and laid it atop the apron, trying not to mind the greedy way Rhea of Coos was staring at her in the firelight. The cat came sashaying across the floor, grotesque extra legs hobbling, and sat at Rhea’s feet. Outside, the wind gusted. It was warm on the hearth but Susan was cold just the same, as if that wind had gotten inside her, somehow.

“Hurry, girl, for yer father’s sake!”

Susan pulled her shift over her head, folded it atop the dress, then stood in only her drawers, with her arms folded over her bosom. The fire painted warm orange highlights along her thighs; black circles of shadow in the tender folds behind her knees.

“And still she’s not nekkid!” the old crow laughed. “Ain’t we lah-di-dah! Aye, we are, very fine! Take off those drawers, mistress, and stand as ye slid from yer mother! Although ye had not so many goodies as to interest the likes of Hart Thorin then, did ye? Hee!”

Feeling caught in a nightmare, Susan did as she was bid. With her mound and bush uncovered, her crossed arms seemed foolish. She lowered them to her sides.

“Ah, no wonder he wants ye!” the old woman said.” ’tis beautiful ye are, and true! Is she not, Musty?”

The cat waowed.

“There’s dirt on yer knees,” Rhea said suddenly. “How came it there?” \

Susan felt a moment of awful panic. She had lifted her skirts to crawl beneath the hag’s window… and hung herself by doing it.

Then an answer rose to her lips, and she spoke it calmly enough. “When I came in sight of your hut, I grew fearful. I knelt to pray, and raised my skirt so as not to soil it.”

“I’m touched-to want a clean dress for the likes o’ me! How good y’are! Don’t you agree, Musty?”

The cat waowed, then began to lick one of its forepaws.

“Get on with it,” Susan said. “You’ve been paid and I’ll obey, but stop teasing and have done.”

“You know what it is I have to do, mistress.”

“I don’t,” Susan said. The tears were close again, burning the backs of her eyes, but she would not let them fall. Would not. “I have an idea, but when I asked Aunt Cord if I was right, she said that you’d 'take care of my education in that regard.'”

“Wouldn’t dirty her mouth with the words, would she? Well, that’s all right. Yer Aunt Rhea’s not too nice to say what yer Aunt Cordelia won’t. I’m to make sure that ye’re physically and spiritually intact, missy.

Proving honesty is what the old ones called it, and it’s a good enough name. So it is. Step to me.”

Susan took two reluctant steps forward, so that her bare toes were almost touching the old woman’s slippers and her bare breasts were almost touching the old woman’s dress.

“If a devil or demon has polluted yer spirit, such a thing as might taint the child you’ll likely bear, it leaves a mark behind. Most often it’s a suck-mark or a lover’s bite, but there’s others… open yer mouth!”

Susan did, and when the old woman bent closer, the reek of her was so strong that the girl’s stomach clenched. She held her breath, praying this would be over soon.

“Run out yer tongue.”

Susan ran out her tongue.

“Now send yer breezes into my face.”

Susan exhaled her held breath. Rhea breathed it in and then, mercifully, pulled her head away a little. She had been close enough for Susan to see the lice hopping in her hair.

“Sweet enough,” the old woman said. “Aye, good’s a meal. Now turn around.”

Susan did, and felt the old witch’s fingers trail down her back and to her buttocks. Their tips were cold as mud.

“Bend over and spread yer cheeks, missy, be not shy, Rhea’s seen more than one pultry in her time!”

Face flushing-she could feel the beat of her heart in the center of her forehead and in the hollows of her temples-Susan did as told. And then she felt one of those corpselike fingers prod its way into her anus. Susan bit her lips to keep from screaming.

The invasion was mercifully short… but there would be another, Susan feared.

“Turn around.”

She turned. The old woman passed her hands over Susan’s breasts, flicked lightly at the nipples with her thumbs, then examined the undersides carefully. Rhea slipped a finger into the cup of the girl’s navel, then hitched up her own skirt and dropped to her knees with a grunt of effort. She passed her hands down Susan’s legs, first front, then back. She seemed to take special pains with the area just below the calves, where the tendons ran.

“Lift yer right foot, girl.”

Susan did, and uttered a nervous, screamy laugh as Rhea ran a thumbnail down her instep to her heel. The old woman parted her toes, looking between each pair.

After this process had been repeated with the other foot, the old woman-still on her knees-said: “You know what comes next.”

“Aye.” The word came out of her in a little trembling rush.

“Hold ye still, missy-all else is well, clean as a willow-strip, ye are, but now we’ve come to the cozy nook that’s all Thorin cares for; we’ve come to where honesty must really be proved. So hold ye still!”

Susan closed her eyes and thought of horses running along the Drop-nominally they were the Barony’s horse, overlooked by Rimer, Thorin’s Chancellor and the Barony’s Minister of Inventory, but the horses didn’t know that; they thought they were free, and if you were free in your mind, what else mattered?

Let me be free in my mind, as free as the horses along the Drop, and don’t let her hurt me. Please, don’t let her hurt me. And if she does, please help me to bear it in decent silence.

Cold fingers parted the downy hair below her navel; there was a pause, and then two cold fingers slipped inside her. There was pain, but only a moment of it, and not bad; she’d hurt herself worse stubbing her toe or barking her shin on the way to the privy in the middle of the night. The humiliation was the bad part, and the revulsion of Rhea’s ancient touch.

“Caulked tight, ye are!” Rhea cried. “Good as ever was! But Thorin’ll see to that, so he will! As for you, my girl, I’ll tell yer a secret yer prissy aunt with her long nose ’ tight purse ’ little goosebump tits never knew: even a girl who’s intact don’t need to lack for a shiver now ’ then, if she knows how!”

The hag’s withdrawing fingers closed gently around the little nubbin of flesh at the head of Susan’s cleft. For one terrible second Susan thought they would pinch that sensitive place, which sometimes made her draw in a breath if it rubbed just so against the pommel of her saddle when she was riding, but instead the fingers caressed… then pressed… and the girl was horrified to feel a heat which was far from unpleasant kindle in her belly.

“Like a little bud o’ silk,” the old woman crooned, and her meddling fingers moved faster. Susan felt her hips sway forward, as if with a mind and life of their own, and then she thought of the old woman’s greedy, self-willed face, pink as the face of a whore by gaslight as it hung over the open box; she thought of the way the drawstring bag with the gold pieces in it had hung from the wrinkled mouth like some disgorged piece of flesh, and the heat she felt was gone. She drew back, trembling, her arms and belly and breasts breaking out in gooseflesh.

“You’ve finished what you were paid to do,” Susan said. Her voice was dry and harsh.

Rhea’s face knotted. “Ye’ll not tell me aye, no, yes, or maybe, impudent stripling of a girl! I know when I’m done, I, Rhea, the Weirding of Coos, and-”

“Be still, and be on your feet before I kick you into the fire, unnatural thing.”

The old woman’s lips wriggled back from her few remaining teeth in a doglike sneer, and now, Susan realized, she and the witch-woman were back where they had been at the start: ready to claw each other’s eyes out.

“Raise hand or foot to me, you impudent cunt, and what leaves my house will leave handless, footless, and blind of eye.”

“I do not much doubt you could do it, but Thorin should be vexed,” Susan said. It was the first time in her life she had ever invoked a man’s name for protection. Realizing this made her feel ashamed… small, somehow. She didn’t know why that should be, especially since she had agreed to sleep in his bed and bear his child, but it was.

The old woman stared, her seamed face working until it folded into a parody of a smile that was worse than her snarl. Puffing and pulling at the, arm of her chair, Rhea got to her feet. As she did, Susan quickly began to dress.

“Aye, vexed he would be. Perhaps you know best after all, missy;

I’ve had a strange night, and it’s wakened parts of me better left asleep. Anything else that might have happened, take it as a compliment to yer youth'n purity… and to yer beauty as well. Aye. You’re a beautiful thing, and there’s no doubtin it. Yer hair, now… when yer let it down, as ye will for Thorin, I wot, when ye lay with him… it glows like the sun, doesn’t it?”

Susan did not want to force the old hag out of her posturing, but she didn’t want to encourage these fawning compliments, either. Not when she could still see the hate in Rhea’s rheumy eyes, not when she could feel the old woman’s touch still crawling like beetles on her skin. She said nothing, only stepped into her dress, set it on her shoulders, and began to button up the front.

Rhea perhaps understood the run of her thoughts, for the smile dropped off her mouth and her manner grew businesslike. Susan found this a great relief.

“Well, never mind it. Ye’ve proved honest; ye may dress yerself and go. But not a word of what passed between us to Thorin, mind ye! Words between women need trouble no man’s ear, especially one as great as he.” Yet at this Rhea could not forbear a certain spasming sneer. Susan didn’t know if the old woman was aware of it or not. “Are we agreed?”

Anything, anything, just as long as I can be out of here and away.

“You declare me proved?”

“Aye, Susan, daughter of Patrick. So I do. But it’s not what I say that matters. Now… wait… somewhere here…”

She scrabbled along the mantel, pushing stubs of candles stuck on cracked saucers this way and that, lifting first a kerosene lantern and then a battery flashlight, looking fixedly for a moment at a drawing of a young boy and then putting it aside.

“Where… where… arrrrr… here!”

She snatched up a pad of paper with a sooty cover (citgo stamped on it in ancient gold letters) and a stub of pencil. She paged almost to the end of the pad before finding a blank sheet. On it she scrawled something, then tore the sheet off the spiral of wire at the top of the pad. She held the sheet out to Susan, who took it and looked at it. Scrawled there was a word she did not understand at first:

Below it was a symbol:

“What’s this?” she asked, tapping the little drawing. “Rhea, her mark. Known for six Baronies around, it is, and can’t be copied. Show that paper to yer aunt. Then to Thorin. If yer aunt wants to take it and show it to Thorin herself-I know her, y’see, and her bossy ways-tell her no, Rhea says no, she’s not to have the keeping of it.” “And if Thorin wants it?”

Rhea shrugged dismissively. “Let him keep it or bum it or wipe his bum with it, for all of me. It’s nothing to you, either, for you knew you were honest all along, so you did. True?”

Susan nodded. Once, walking home after a dance, she had let a boy slip his hand inside her shirt for a moment or two, but what of that? She was honest. And in more ways than this nasty creature meant.

“But don’t lose that paper. Unless you’d see me again, that is, and go through the same business a second time.”

Gods perish even the thought, Susan thought, and managed not to shudder. She put the paper in her pocket, where the drawstring bag had been.

“Now, come to the door, missy.” She looked as if she wanted to grasp Susan’s arm, then thought better of it. The two of them walked side by side to the door, not touching in such a careful way that it made them look awkward. Once there, Rhea did grip Susan’s arm. Then, with her other hand, she pointed to the bright silver disc hanging over the top of the Coos.

“The Kissing Moon,” Rhea said.” ’tis midsummer.”

“Yes.”

“Tell Thorin he’s not to have you in his bed-or in a haystack, or on the scullery floor, or anywhere else-until Demon Moon rises full in the sky.”

“Not until Reaping?” That was three months-a lifetime, it seemed to her. Susan tried not to show her delight at this reprieve. She’d thought Thorin would put an end to her virginity by moonrise the next night. She wasn’t blind to the way he looked at her.

Rhea, meanwhile, was looking at the moon, seeming to calculate. Her hand went to the long tail of Susan’s hair and stroked it. Susan bore this as well as she could, and just when she felt she could bear it no longer, Rhea dropped her hand back to her side and nodded. “Aye, not just Reaping, but true fin de ano-Fair-Night, tell him. Say that he may have you after the bonfire. You understand?”

“True fin de ano, yes.” She could barely contain her joy.

“When the fire in Green Heart bums low and the last of the red-handed men are ashes,” Rhea said. “Then and not until then. You must tell him so.”

“I will.”

The hand came out and began to stroke her hair again. Susan bore it.

After such good news, she thought, it would have been mean-spirited to do otherwise. “The time between now and Reaping you will use to meditate, and to gather your forces to produce the male child the Mayor wants… or mayhap just to ride along the Drop and gather the last flowers of your maidenhood. Do you understand?”

“Yes.” She dropped a curtsey. “Thankee-sai.”

Rhea waved this off as if it were a flattery. “Speak not of what passed between us, mind. “Tis no one’s affair but our own.”

“I won’t. And our business is done?”

“Well… mayhap there’s one more small thing…” Rhea smiled to show it was indeed small, then raised her left hand in front of Susan’s eyes with three fingers together and one apart. Glimmering in the fork between was a silver medallion, seemingly produced from nowhere. The girl’s eyes fastened on it at once. Until Rhea spoke a single guttural word, that was.

Then they closed.

5

Rhea looked at the girl who stood asleep on her stoop in the moonlight. As she replaced the medallion within her sleeve (her fingers were old and bunchy, but they moved dexterously enough when it was required, oh, aye), the businesslike expression fell from her face, and was replaced by a look of squint-eyed fury. Kick me into the fire, would you, you trull? Tattle to Thorin? But her threats and impudence weren’t the worst. The worst had been the expression of revulsion on her face when she had pulled back from Rhea’s touch.

Too good for Rhea, she was! And thought herself too good for Thorin as well, no doubt, she with sixteen years’ worth of fine blonde hair hanging down from her head, hair Thorin no doubt dreamed of plunging his hands into even as he plunged and reared and plowed down below.

She couldn’t hurt the girl, much as she wanted to and much as the girl deserved it; if nothing else, Thorin might take the glass ball away from her, and Rhea couldn’t bear that. Not yet, anyway. So she could not hurt the girl, but she could do something that would spoil his pleasure in her, at least for awhile.

Rhea leaned close to the girl, grasped the long braid which lay down her back, and began to slip it through her fist, enjoying its silky smoothness.

“Susan,” she whispered. “Do’ee hear me, Susan, daughter of Patrick?”

“Yes.” The eyes did not open.

“Then listen.” The light of the Kissing Moon fell on Rhea’s face and turned it into a silver skull. “Listen to me well, and remember. Remember in the deep cave where yer waking mind never goes.”

She pulled the braid through her hand again and again. Silky and?| smooth. Like the little bud between her legs.

“Remember,” the girl in the doorway said.

“Aye. There’s something ye’ll do after he takes yer virginity. Ye’ll do it right away, without even thinking about it. Now listen to me, Susan, daughter of Patrick, and hear me very well.”

Still stroking the girl’s hair, Rhea put her wrinkled lips to the smooth cup of Susan’s ear and whispered in the moonlight.

1

She had never in her life had such a strange night, and it was probably not surprising that she didn’t hear the rider approaching from behind until he was almost upon her.

The thing that troubled her most as she made her way back toward town was her new understanding of the compact she had made. It was good to have a reprieve-months yet before she would have to live up to her end of the bargain-but a reprieve didn’t change the basic fact: when the Demon Moon was full, she would lose her virginity to Mayor Thorin, a skinny, twitchy man with fluffy white hair rising like a cloud around the bald spot on top of his head. A man whose wife regarded him with a certain weary sadness that was painful to look at. Hart Thorin was a man who laughed uproariously when a company of players put on an entertainment involving head-knocking or pretend punching or rotten fruit-throwing, but who only looked puzzled at a story which was pathetic or tragical. A knuckle-cracker, a back-slapper, a dinner-table belcher, a man who had a way of looking anxiously toward his Chancellor at almost every other word, as if to make sure he hadn’t offended Rimer in some way.

Susan had observed all these things often; her father had for years been in charge of the Barony’s horse and had gone to Seafront often on business. Many times he had taken his much loved daughter with him. Oh, she had seen a lot of Hart Thorin over the years, and he had seen a lot of her, as well. Too much, mayhap! For what now seemed the most important fact about him was that he was almost fifty years older than the girl who would perhaps bear his son.

She had made the bargain lightly enough-

No, not lightly, that was being unfair to herself… but she had lost little sleep over it, that much was true. She had thought, after listening to all Aunt Cord’s arguments: Well, it’s little enough, really, to have the indenture off the lands; to finally own our little piece of the Drop in fact as well as in tradition… to actually have papers, one in our house and one in Rimer’s files, saying it’s ours. Aye, and to have horses again. Only three, ’tis true, but that’s three more than we have now. And against that? To lie with him a time or two, and to bear a child, which millions of women have done before me with no harm. ’tis not, after all, a mutant or a leper I’m being asked to partner with but just an old man with noisy knuckles. ’tis not forever, and, as Aunt Cord says, I may still marry, if time and ka decree; I should not be the first woman to come to her husband’s bed as a mother. And does it make me a whore to do such? The law says not, but never mind that; my heart’s law is what matters, and my heart says that if I may gain the land that was my da’s and three horses to run on it by being such, then it’s a whore I’ll be.

There was something else: Aunt Cord had capitalized-rather ruthlessly, Susan now saw-on a child’s innocence. It was the baby Aunt Cord had harped on, the cunning little baby she would have. Aunt Cord had known that Susan, the dolls of her childhood put aside not all that long ago, would love the idea of her own baby, a little living doll to dress and feed and sleep with in the heat of the afternoon.

What Cordelia had ignored (perhaps she’s too innocent even to have considered it, Susan thought, but didn’t quite believe) was what the hag-woman had made brutally clear to her this evening: Thorin wanted more than a child.

He wants tits and arse that don’t squish in his hands and a box that ’ll grip what he pushes.

Just thinking of those words made her face throb as she walked through the post-moonset dark toward town (no high-spirited running this time; no singing, either). She had agreed with vague thoughts of how managed livestock mated-they were allowed to go at it “until the seed took,” then separated again. But now she knew that Thorin might want her again and again, probably would want her again and again, and common law going back like iron for two hundred generations said that he could continue to lie with her until she who had proved the consort honest should prove her honestly with child as well, and that child honest in and of itself… not, that was, a mutant aberration. Susan had made discreet enquiries and knew that this second proving usually came around the fourth month of pregnancy… around the time she would begin to show, even with her clothes on. It would be up to Rhea to make the judgment… and Rhea didn’t like her.

Now that it was too late-now that she had accepted the compact formally tendered by the Chancellor, now that she had been proved honest by yon strange bitch-she rued the bargain. Mostly what she thought of was how Thorin would look with his pants off, his legs white and skinny, like the legs of a stork, and how, as they lay together, she would hear his long bones crackling: knees and back and elbows and neck.

And knuckles. Don’t forget his knuckles.

Yes. Big old man’s knuckles with hair growing out of them. Susan chuckled at the thought, it was that comical, but at the same time a warm tear ran unnoticed from the comer of one eye and tracked down her cheek. She wiped it away without knowing it, any more than she heard the clip-clip of approaching hoofs in the soft road-dust. Her mind was still far away, returning to the odd thing she had seen through the old woman’s bedroom window-the soft but somehow unpleasant light coming from the pink globe, the hypnotized way the hag had been looking down at it…

When Susan at last heard the approaching horse, her first alarmed thought was that she must get into the copse of trees she was currently passing and hide. The chances of anyone aboveboard being on the road this late seemed small to her, especially now that such bad times had come to Mid-World-but it was too late for that.

The ditch, then, and sprawled flat. With the moon down, there was at least a chance that whoever it was would pass without-

But before she could even begin in that direction, the rider who had sneaked up behind her while she was thinking her long and rueful thoughts had hailed her. “Goodeven, lady, and may your days be long upon the earth.”

She turned, thinking: What if it’s one of the new men always lounging about Mayor’s House or in the Travellers’ Rest? Not the oldest one, the voice isn’t wavery like his, but maybe one of the others… it could be the one they call Depape…

“Goodeven,” she heard herself saying to the man shape on the tall horse. “May yours be long also.”

Her voice didn’t tremble, not that she could hear. She didn’t think it was Depape, or the one named Reynolds, either. The only thing she could tell about the fellow for sure was that he wore a flat-brimmed hat, the sort she associated with men of the Inner Baronies, back when travel between east and west had been more common than it was now. Back before John Farson came-the Good Man-and the bloodletting began.

As the stranger came up beside her, she forgave herself a little for not hearing him approach-there was no buckle or bell on his gear that she could see, and everything was tied down so as not to snap or flap. It was almost the rig of an outlaw or a harrier (she had the idea that Jonas, he of the wavery voice, and his two friends might have been both, in other times and other climes) or even a gunslinger. But this man bore no guns, unless they were hidden. A bow on the pommel of his saddle and what looked like a lance in a scabbard, that was all. And there had never, she reckoned, been a gunslinger as young as this.

He clucked sidemouth at the horse just as her da had always done (and she herself, of course), and it stopped at once. As he swung one leg over his saddle, lifting it high and with unconscious grace, Susan said:

“Nay, nay, don’t trouble yerself, stranger, but go as ye would!”

If he heard the alarm in her voice, he paid no heed to it. He slipped off the horse, not bothering with the tied-down stirrup, and landed neatly in front of her, the dust of the road puffing about his square-toed boots. By starlight she saw that he was young indeed, close to her own age on one side or the other. His clothes were those of a working cowboy, although new.

“Will Dearborn, at your service,” he said, then doffed his hat, extended a foot on one bootheel, and bowed as they did in the Inner Baronies.

Such absurd courtliness out here in the middle of nowhere, with the acrid smell of the oil patch on the edge of town already in her nostrils, startled her out of her fear and into a laugh. She thought it would likely offend him, but he smiled instead. A good smile, honest and artless, its inner part lined with even teeth.

She dropped him a little curtsey, holding out one side of her dress. “Susan Delgado, at yours.”

He tapped his throat thrice with his right hand. “Thankee-sai, Susan Delgado. We’re well met, I hope. I didn’t mean to startle you-”

“Ye did, a little.”

“Yes, I thought I had. I’m sorry.”

Yes. Not aye but yes. A young man, from the Inner Baronies, by the sound. She looked at him with new interest.

“Nay, ye need not apologize, for I was deep in my own thoughts,” she said. “I’d been to see a… friend… and hadn’t realized how much time had passed until I saw the moon was down. If ye stopped out of concern, I thankee, stranger, but ye may be on yer way as I would be on mine. It’s only to the edge of the village I go-Hambry. It’s close, now.”

“Pretty speech and lovely sentiments,” he answered with a grin, “but it’s late, you’re alone, and I think we may as well pass on together. Do you ride, sai?”

“Yes, but really-”

“Step over and meet my friend Rusher, then. He shall carry you the last two miles. He’s gelded, sai, and gentle.”

She looked at Will Dearborn with a mixture of amusement and irritation. The thought which crossed her mind was If he calls me sai again, as though I were a schoolteacher or his doddery old great aunt, I’m going to take off this stupid apron and swat him with it. “I never minded a bit of temper in a horse docile enough to wear a saddle. Until his death, my father managed the Mayor’s horses… and the Mayor in these parts is also Guard o’ Barony. I’ve ridden my whole life.”

She thought he might apologize, perhaps even stutter, but he only nodded with a calm thoughtfulness that she rather liked. “Then step to the stirrup, my lady. I’ll walk beside and trouble you with no conversation, if you’d rather not have it. It’s late, and talk palls after moonset, some say.”

She shook her head, softening her refusal with a smile. “Nay. I thank ye for yer kindness, but it would not be well, mayhap, for me to be seen riding a strange young man’s horse at eleven o’ the clock. Lemon-juice won’t take the stain out of a lady’s reputation the way it will out of a shirtwaist, you know.”

“There’s no one out here to see you,” the young man said in a maddeningly reasonable voice. “And that you’re tired, I can tell. Come, sai-”

“Please don’t call me that. It makes me feel as ancient as a… “She hesitated for a brief moment, rethinking the word

(witch)

that first came to her mind. “… as an old woman.”

“Miss Delgado, then. Are you sure you won’t ride?”

“Sure as can be. I’d not ride cross-saddle in a dress in any case, Mr. Dearborn-not even if you were my own brother. 'Twouldn’t be proper.”

He stood in the stirrup himself, reached over to the far side of his saddle (Rusher stood docilely enough at this, only flicking his ears, which Susan would have been happy to flick herself had she been Rusher-they were that beautiful), and stepped back down with a rolled garment in his hands. It was tied with a rawhide hank. She thought it was a poncho.

“You may spread this over your lap and legs like a duster,” he said. “There’s quite enough of it for decorum’s sake-it was my father’s, and he’s taller than me.” He looked off toward the western hills for a moment, and she saw he was handsome, in a hard sort of way that jagged against his youth. She felt a little shiver inside her, and wished for the thousandth time that the foul old woman had kept her hands strictly on her business, as unpleasant as that business had been. Susan didn’t want to look at this handsome stranger and remember Rhea’s touch.

“Nay,” she said gently. “Thankee again, I recognize yer kindness, but I must refuse.”

“Then I’ll walk along beside, and Rusher’ll be our chaperone,” he said cheerfully. “As far as the edge of town, at least, there’ll be no eyes to see and think ill of a perfectly proper young woman and a more-or-less proper young man. And once there, I’ll tip my hat and wish you a very good night.”

“I wish ye wouldn’t. Really.” She brushed a hand across her forehead. “Easy for you to say there are no eyes to see, but sometimes there are eyes even where there shouldn’t be. And my position is… a little delicate just now.”

“I’ll walk with you, however,” he repeated, and now his face was somber. “These are not good times. Miss Delgado. Here in Mejis you are far from the worst of the troubles, but sometimes trouble reaches out.”

She opened her mouth-to protest again, she supposed, perhaps to tell him that Pat Delgado’s daughter could take care of herself-and then she thought of the Mayor’s new men, and the cold way they had run their eyes over her when Thorin’s attention had been elsewhere. She had seen those three this very night as she left on her way to the witch’s hut. Them she had heard approaching, and in plenty of time for her to leave the road and rest behind a handy pinon tree (she refused to think of it as hiding, exactly). Back toward town they had gone, and she supposed they were drinking at the Travellers’ Rest right now-and would continue to until Stanley Ruiz closed the bar-but she had no way of knowing that for sure. They could come back.

“If I can’t dissuade ye, very well,” she said, sighing with a vexed resignation she didn’t really feel. “But only to the first mailbox-Mrs. Beech’s. That marks the edge of town.”

He tapped his throat again, and made another of those absurd, enchanting bows-foot stuck out as if he would trip someone, heel planted in the dirt. “Thankee, Miss Delgado!”

At least he didn’t call me sai, she thought. That’s a start.

2

She thought he’d chatter away like a magpie in spite of his promise to be silent, because that was what boys did around her-she was not vain of her looks, but she thought she was good-looking, if only because the boys could not shut up or stop shuffling their feet when they were around her. And this one would be full of questions the town boys didn’t need to ask-how old was she, had she always lived in Hambry, were her parents alive, half a hundred others just as boring-but they would all circle in on the same one: did she have a steady fellow?

But Will Dearborn of the Inner Baronies didn’t ask her about her schooling or family or friends (the most common way of approaching any romantic rivals, she had found). Will Dearborn simply walked along beside her, one hand wrapped around Rusher’s bridle, looking off east toward the Clean Sea. They were close enough to it now so that the teary smell of salt mingled with the tarry stench of oil, even though the wind was from the south.

They were passing Citgo now, and she was glad for Will Dearborn’s presence, even if his silence was a little irritating. She had always found the oil patch, with its skeletal forest of gantries, a little spooky. Most of those steel towers had stopped pumping long since, and there was neither the parts, the need, nor the understanding to repair them. And those which did still labor along-nineteen out of about two hundred-could not be stopped. They just pumped and pumped, the supplies of oil beneath them seemingly inexhaustible. A little was still used, but a very little-most simply ran back down into the wells beneath the dead pumping stations. The world had moved on, and this place reminded her of a strange mechanical graveyard where some of the corpses hadn’t quite-

Something cold and smooth nuzzled the small of her back, and she wasn’t quite able to stifle a little shriek. Will Dearborn wheeled toward her, his hands dropping toward his belt. Then he relaxed and smiled.

“Rusher’s way of saying he feels ignored. I’m sorry, Miss Delgado.”

She looked at the horse. Rusher looked back mildly, then dipped his head as if to say he was also sorry for having startled her.

Foolishness, girl, she thought, hearing the hearty, no-nonsense voice of her father. He wants to know why you ’re being so standoffy, that’s all. And so do I. ’tisn’t like you, so it’s not.

“Mr. Dearborn, I’ve changed my mind,” she said. “I’d like to ride.”

3

He turned his back and stood looking out at Citgo with his hands in his pockets while Susan first laid the poncho over the cantle of the saddle (the plain black saddle of a working cowboy, without a Barony brand or even a ranch brand to mark it), and then mounted into the stirrup. She lifted her skirt and glanced around sharply, sure he would be stealing a peek, but his back was still to her. He seemed fascinated with the rusty oil derricks.

What’s so interesting about them, cully? she thought, a trifle crossly- it was the lateness of the hour and the residue of her stirred-up emotions, she supposed. Filthy old things have been there six centuries and more, and I’ve been smelling their stink my whole life.

“Stand easy now, my boy,” she said once she had her foot fixed in the stirrup. One hand held the top of the saddle’s pommel, the other the reins. Rusher, meanwhile, flicked his ears as if to say he would stand easy all night, were that what she required.

She swung up, one long bare thigh flashing in the starlight, and felt the exhilaration of being horsed that she always felt… only tonight it seemed a little stronger, a little sweeter, a little sharper. Perhaps because the horse was such a beauty, perhaps because the horse was a stranger…

Perhaps because the horse’s owner is a stranger, she thought, and fair.

That was nonsense, of course… and potentially dangerous nonsense. Yet it was also true. He was fair.

As she opened the poncho and spread it over her legs, Dearborn began to whistle. And she realized, with a mixture of surprise and superstitious fear, what the tune was: “Careless Love.” The very lay she had been singing on her way up to Rhea’s hut.

Mayhap it’s ka, girl, her father’s voice whispered.

No such thing, she thought right back at him. I’ll not see ka in every passing wind and shadow, like the old ladies who gather in Green Heart of a summer’s evening. It’s an old tune: everyone knows it.

Mayhap better if you’re right. Pat Delgado’s voice returned. For if it’s ka, it’ll come like a wind, and your plans will stand before it no more than my da’s barn stood before the cyclone when it came.

Not ka; she would not be seduced by the dark and the shadows and the grim shapes of the oil derricks into believing it was. Not ka but only a chance meeting with a nice young man on the lonely road back to town.

“I’ve made myself decent,” she said in a dry voice that didn’t sound much like her own. “Ye may turn back if you like, Mr. Dearborn.”

He did turn and gazed at her. For a moment he said nothing, but she could see the look in his eyes well enough to know that he found her fair as well. And although this disquieted her-perhaps because of what he’d been whistling-she was also glad. Then he said, “You look well up there. You sit well."

“And I shall have horses of my own to sit before long,” she said. Now the questions will come, she thought.

But he only nodded, as though he had known this about her already, and began to walk toward town again. Feeling a little disappointed and not knowing exactly why, she clucked sidemouth at Rusher and twitched her knees at him. He got moving, catching up with his master, who gave Rusher’s muzzle a companionable little caress.

“What do they call that place yonder?” he asked, pointing at the derricks.

“The oil patch? Citgo.”

“Some of the derricks still pump?”

“Aye, and no way to stop them. Not that anyone still knows.”

“Oh,” he said, and that was all-just oh. But he left his place by Rusher’s head for a moment when they came to the weedy track leading into Citgo, walking across to look at the old disused guard-hut. In her childhood there had been a sign on it reading authorized personnel only, but it had blown away in some windstorm or other. Will Dearborn had his look and then came ambling back to the horse, boots puffing up summer dust, easy in his new clothes.

They went toward town, a young walking man in a flat-crowned hat, a young riding woman with a poncho spread over her lap and legs. The starlight rained down on them as it has on young men and women since time’s first hour, and once she looked up and saw a meteor flash overhead-a brief and brilliant orange streak across the vault of heaven. Susan thought to wish on it, and then, with something like panic, realized she had no idea what to wish for. None at all.

4

She kept her own silence until they were a mile or so from town, and then asked the question which had been on her mind. She had planned to ask hers after he had begun asking his, and it irked her to be the one to break the silence, but in the end her curiosity was too much.

“Where do ye come from, Mr. Dearborn, and what brings ye to our little bit o’ Mid-World… if ye don’t mind me asking?”

“Not at all,” he said, looking up at her with a smile. “I’m glad to talk and was only trying to think how to begin. Talk’s not a specialty of mine.” Then what is. Will Dearborn? she wondered. Yes, she wondered very much, for in adjusting her position on the saddle, she had put her hand on the rolled blanket behind… and had touched something hidden inside that blanket. Something that felt like a gun. It didn’t have to be, of course, but she remembered the way his hands had dropped instinctively toward his belt when she had cried out in surprise.

“I come from the In-World. I’ve an idea you probably guessed that much on your own. We have our own way of talking.”

“Aye. Which Barony is yer home, might I ask?”

“New Canaan.”

She felt a flash of real excitement at that. New Canaan! Center of the Affiliation! That did not mean all it once had, of course, but still-

“Not Gilead?” she asked, detesting the hint of a girlish gush she heard in her voice. And more than just a hint, mayhap.

“No,” he said with a laugh. “Nothing so grand as Gilead. Only Hemphill, a village forty or so wheels west of there. Smaller than Hambry, I wot.”

Wheels, she thought, marvelling at the archaism. He said wheels.

“And what brings ye to Hambry, then? May ye tell?”

“Why not? I’ve come with two of my friends, Mr. Richard Stock-worth of Pennilton, New Canaan, and Mr. Arthur Heath, a hilarious young man who actually does come from Gilead. We’re here at the order of the Affiliation, and have come as counters.”

“Counters of what?”

“Counters of anything and everything which may aid the Affiliation in the coming years,” he said, and she heard no lightness in his voice now.” The business with the Good Man has grown serious.”

“Has it? We hear little real news this far to the south and east of the hub.”

He nodded. “The Barony’s distance from the hub is the chief reason we’re here. Mejis has been ever loyal to the Affiliation, and if supplies need to be drawn from this part of the Outers, they’ll be sent. The question that needs answering is how much the Affiliation can count on.”

“How much of what?”

“Yes,” he agreed, as if she’d made a statement instead of asking a question. “And how much of what.”

“Ye speak as though the Good Man were a real threat. He’s just a bandit, surely, frosting his thefts and murders with talk of 'democracy' and 'equality'?”

Dearborn shrugged, and she thought for a moment that would be his only comment on the matter, but then he said, reluctantly:” ’twas once so, perhaps. Times have changed. At some point the bandit became a general, and now the general would become a ruler in the name of the people.” He paused, then added gravely, “The Northern and West'rd Baronies are in flames, lady.”

“But those are thousands of miles away, surely!” This talk was upsetting, and yet strangely exciting, too. Mostly it seemed exotic, after the pokey all-days-the-same world of Hambry, where someone’s dry well was good for three days of animated conversation.

“Yes,” he said. Not aye but yes-the sound was both strange and pleasing to her ear. “But the wind is blowing in this direction.” He turned to her and smiled. Once more it softened his hard good looks, and made him seem no more than a child, up too late after his bedtime. “But I don’t think we’ll see John Farson tonight, do you?”

She smiled back. “If we did, Mr. Dearborn, would ye protect me from him?”

“No doubt,” he said, still smiling, “but I should do so with greater enthusiasm, I wot, if you were to let me call you by the name your father gave you.”

“Then, in the interests of my own safety, ye may do so. And I suppose I must call ye Will, in those same interests.”

“Tis both wise and prettily put,” he said, the smile becoming a grin, wide and engaging. “I-” Then, walking as he was with his face turned back and up to her, Susan’s new friend tripped over a rock Jutting out of the road and almost fell. Rusher whinnied through his nose and reared a little. Susan laughed merrily. The poncho shifted, revealing one bare leg, and she took a moment before putting matters right again. She liked him, aye, so she did. And what harm could there be in it? He was only a boy, after all. When he smiled, she could see he was only a year or two removed from jumping in haystacks. (The thought that she had recently graduated from haystack-jumping herself had somehow fled her mind.)

“I’m usually not clumsy,” he said. “I hope I didn’t startle you.”

Not at all. Will; boys have been stubbing their toes around me ever since I grew my breasts.

“Not at all,” she said, and returned to the previous topic. It interested her greatly. “So ye and yer friends come at the behest of the Affiliation to count our goods, do you?”

“Yes. The reason I took particular note of yon oil patch is because one of us will have to come back and count the working derricks-”

“I can spare ye that, Will. There are nineteen.”

He nodded. “I’m in your debt. But we’ll also need to make out-if we can-how much oil those nineteen pumps are bringing up.”

“Are there so many oil-fired machines still working in New Canaan that such news matters? And do ye have the alchemy to change the oil into the stuff yer machines can use?”

“It’s called refinery rather than alchemy in this case-at least I think so-and I believe there is one that still works. But no, we haven’t that many machines, although there are still a few working filament-lights in the Great Hall at Gilead.”

“Fancy it!” she said, delighted. She had seen pictures of filament-lights and electric flambeaux, but never the lights themselves. The last ones in Hambry (they had been called “spark-lights” in this part of the world, but she felt sure they were the same) had burned out two generations ago.

“You said your father managed the Mayor’s horses until his death,” Will Dearborn said. “Was his name Patrick Delgado? It was, wasn’t it?”

She looked down at him, badly startled and brought back to reality in an instant. “How do ye know that?”

“His name was in our lessons of calling. We’re to count cattle, sheep, pigs, oxen… and horses. Of all your livestock, horses are the most important. Patrick Delgado was the man we were to see in that regard. I’m sorry to hear he’s come to the clearing at the end of the path, Susan. Will you accept my condolence?”

“Aye, and with thanks.”

“Was it an accident?”

“Aye.” Hoping her voice said what she wanted it to say, which was leave this subject, ask no more.

“Let me be honest with you,” he said, and for the first time she thought she heard a false note there. Perhaps it was only her imagination. Certainly she had little experience of the world (Aunt Cord reminded her of this almost daily), but she had an idea that people who set on by saying Let me be honest with you were apt to go on by telling you straight-faced that rain fell up, money grew on trees, and babies were brought by the Grand Featherex.

“Aye, Will Dearborn,” she said, her tone just the tiniest bit dry. “They say honesty’s the best policy, so they do.”

He looked at her a bit doubtfully, and then his smile shone out again. That smile was dangerous, she thought-a quicksand smile if ever there was one. Easy to wander in; perhaps more difficult to wander back out.

“There’s not much Affiliation in the Affiliation these days. That’s part of the reason Parson’s gone on as long as he has; that’s what has allowed his ambitions to grow. He’s come a far way from the harrier who began as a stage-robber in Garlan and Desoy, and he’ll come farther yet if the Affiliation isn’t revitalized. Maybe all the way to Mejis.”

She couldn’t imagine what the Good Man could possibly want with her own sleepy little town in the Barony which lay closest to the Clean Sea, but she kept silent.

“In any case, it wasn’t really the Affiliation that sent us,” he said. “Not all this way to count cows and oil derricks and hectares of land under cultivation.”

He paused a moment, looking down at the road (as if for more rocks in the way of his boots) and stroking Rusher’s nose with absentminded gentleness. She thought he was embarrassed, perhaps even ’shamed. “We were sent by our fathers.”

“Yer-” Then she understood. Bad boys, they were, sent out on a make-work quest that wasn’t quite exile. She guessed their real job in Hambry might be to rehabilitate their reputations. Well, she thought, it certainly explains the quicksand smile, doesn’t it? 'Ware this one, Susan; he’s the sort to burn bridges and upset mail-carts, then go on his merry way without a single look back. Not in meanness but in plain old boy-carelessness.

That made her think of the old song again, the one she’d been singing, the one he’d been whistling.

“Our fathers, yes.”

Susan Delgado had cut a caper or two (or perhaps it was two dozen) other own in her time, and she felt sympathy for Will Dearborn as well as caution. And interest. Bad boys could be amusing… up to a point. The question was, how bad had Will and his cronies been?

“Helling?” she asked.

“Helling,” he agreed, still sounding glum but perhaps brightening just a bit about the eyes and mouth. “We were warned; yes, warned very well. There was… a certain amount of drinking.”

And a few girls to squeeze with the hand not busy squeezing the ale-pot? It was a question no nice girl could outright ask, but one that couldn’t help occurring to her mind.

Now the smile which had played briefly around the comers of his mouth dropped away. “We pushed it too far and the fun stopped. Fools have a way of doing that. One night there was a race. One moonless night. After midnight. All of us drunk. One of the horses caught his hoof in a gopher-hole and snapped a foreleg. He had to be put down.”

Susan winced. It wasn’t the worst thing she could think of, but bad enough. And when he opened his mouth again, it got worse.

“The horse was a thoroughbred, one of just three owned by my friend Richard’s father, who is not well-to-do. There were scenes in our households which I haven’t any desire to remember, let alone talk about. I’ll make a long story short and say that, after much talk and many proposals for punishment, we were sent here, on this errand. It was Arthur’s father’s idea. I think Arthur’s da has always been a bit appalled by Arthur. Certainly Arthur’s ructions didn’t come from George Heath’s side.”

Susan smiled to herself, thinking of Aunt Cordelia saying, “She certainly doesn’t get it from our side of the family.” Then the calculated pause, followed by: “She had a great-aunt on her mother’s side who ran crazy… you didn’t know? Yes! Set herself on fire and threw herself over the Drop. In the year of the comet, it was.”

“Anyway,” Will resumed, “Mr. Heath set us on with a saying from his own father-'One should meditate in purgatory.' And here we are.”

“Hambry’s far from purgatory.”

He sketched his funny little how again. “If it were, all should want to be bad enough to come here and meet the pretty denizens.”

“Work on that one a bit,” she said in her driest voice. “It’s still rough, 1 fear. Perhaps-”

She fell silent as a dismaying realization occurred to her: she was going to have to hope this boy would enter into a limited conspiracy with her. Otherwise, she was apt to be embarrassed.

“Susan?”

“I was just thinking. Are you here yet, Will? Officially, I mean?”

“No,” he said, taking her meaning at once. And likely already seeing where this was going. He seemed sharp enough, in his way. “We only arrived in Barony this afternoon, and you’re the first person any of us has spoken to… unless, that is, Richard and Arthur have met folks. I couldn’t sleep, and so came out to ride and to think things over a little. We’re camped over there.” He pointed to the right. “On that long slope that runs toward the sea.”

“Aye, the Drop, it’s called.” She realized that Will and his mates might even be camped on what would be her own land by law before much more time had passed. The thought was amusing and exciting and a little startling.

“Tomorrow we ride into town and present our compliments to My Lord Mayor, Hart Thorin. He’s a bit of a fool, according to what we were told before leaving New Canaan.”

“Were ye indeed told so?” she asked, raising one eyebrow.

“Yes-apt to blabber, fond of strong drink, even more fond of young girls,” Will said. “Is it true, would you say?”

“I think ye must judge for yerself,” said she, stifling a smile with some effort.

“In any case, we’ll also be presenting to the Honorable Kimba Rimer, Thorin’s Chancellor, and I understand he knows his beans. And counts his beans, as well.”

“Thorin will have ye to dinner at Mayor’s House,” Susan said. “Perhaps not tomorrow night, but surely the night after.”

“A dinner of state in Hambry,” Will said, smiling and still stroking Rusher’s nose. “Gods, how shall I bear the agony of my anticipation?”

“Never mind yer nettlesome mouth,” she said, “but only listen, ifye’d be my friend. This is important.”

His smile dropped away, and she saw again-as she had for a moment or two before-the man he’d be before too many more years had passed. The hard face, the concentrated eyes, the merciless mouth. It was a frightening face, in a way-a frightening prospect-and yet, still, the place the old hag had touched felt warm and she found it difficult to take her eyes off him. What, she wondered, was his hair like under that stupid hat he wore?

“Tell me, Susan.”

“If you and yer friends come to table at Thorin’s, ye may see me. If ye see me, Will, see me for the first time. See Miss Delgado, as I shall see Mr. Dearborn. Do’ee take my meaning?”

“To the letter.” He was looking at her thoughtfully. “Do you serve? Surely, if your father was the Barony’s chief drover, you do not-”

“Never mind what I do or don’t do. Just promise that if we meet at Seafront, we meet for the first time.”

“I promise. But-”

“No more questions. We’ve nearly come to the place where we must part ways, and I want to give ye a warning-fair payment for the ride on this nice mount of yours, mayhap. If ye dine with Thorin and Rimer, ye’ll not be the only new folk at his table. There’ll likely be three others, men Thorin has hired to serve as private guards o’ the house.”

“Not as Sheriff' s deputies?”

“Nay, they answer to none but Thorin… or, mayhap, to Rimer. Their names are Jonas, Depape, and Reynolds. They look like hard boys to me… although Jonas’s boyhood is so long behind him that I imagine he’s forgot he ever had one.”

“Jonas is the leader?”

“Aye. He limps, has hair that falls to his shoulders pretty as any girl’s, and the quavery voice of an old gaffer who spends his days polishing the chimney-comer… but I think he’s the most dangerous of the three all the same. I’d guess these three have forgot more about helling than you and yer friends will ever learn.”

Now why had she told him all that? She didn’t know, exactly. Gratitude, perhaps. He had promised to keep the secret of this late-night meeting, and he had the look of a promise-keeper, in hack with his father or not.

“I’ll watch them. And I thank you for the advice.” They were now climbing a long, gentle slope. Overhead, Old Mother blazed relentlessly. “Bodyguards,” he mused. “Bodyguards in sleepy little Hambry. It’s strange times, Susan. Strange indeed.”

“Aye.” She had wondered about Jonas, Depape, and Reynolds herself, and could think of no good reason for them to be in town. Had they been Rimer’s doing. Rimer’s decision? It seemed likely-Thorin wasn’t the sort of man to even think about bodyguards, she would have said; the High Sheriff had always done well enough for him-but still… why?

They breasted the hill. Below them lay a nestle of buildings-the village of Hambry. Only a few lights still shone. The brightest cluster marked the Travellers’ Rest. From here, on the warm breeze, she could hear the piano beating out “Hey Jude” and a score of drunken voices gleefully murdering the chorus. Not the three men of whom she had warned Will Dearborn, though; they would be standing at the bar, watching the room with their flat eyes. Not the singing type were those three. Each had a small blue coffin-shape tattooed on his right hand, burned into the webbing between thumb and forefinger. She thought to tell Will this, then realized he’d see for himself soon enough. Instead, she pointed a little way down the slope, at a dark shape which overhung the road on a chain. “Do ye see that?”

''Yes.” He heaved a large and rather comical sigh. “Is it the object I fear beyond all others? Is it the dread shape of Mrs. Beech’s mailbox?”

“Aye. And it’s there we must part.”

“If you say we must, we must. Yet I wish-” Just then the wind shifted, as it sometimes did in the summer, and blew a strong gust out of the west. The smell of sea-salt was gone in an instant, and so was the sound of the drunken, singing voices. What replaced them was a sound infinitely more sinister, one that never failed to produce a scutter of gooseflesh up her back: a low, atonal noise, like the warble of a siren being turned by a man without much longer to live.

Will took a step backward, eyes widening, and again she noticed his hands take a dip toward his belt, as if reaching for something not there.

“What in gods’ name is that?”

“It’s a thinny,” she said quietly. “In Eyebolt Canyon. Have ye never heard of such?”

“Heard of, yes, but never heard until now. Gods, how do you stand it? It sounds alive!”

She had never thought of it quite like that, but now, in a way listening with his ears instead of her own, she thought he was right. It was as if some sick part of the night had gained a voice and was actually trying to sing.

She shivered. Rusher felt the momentary increased pressure of her knees and whickered softly, craning his head around to look at her.

“We don’t often hear it so clearly at this time of year,” she said. “In the fall, the men bum it to quiet.”

“I don’t understand.”

Who did? Who understood anything anymore? Gods, they couldn’t even turn off the few oil-pumps in Citgo that still worked, although half of them squealed like pigs in a slaughtering chute. These days you were usually just grateful to find things that still worked at all.

“In the summer, when there’s time, drovers and cowboys drag loads of brush to the mouth of Eyebolt,” she said. “Dead brush is all right, but live is better, for it’s smoke that’s wanted, and the heavier the better. Eye-bolt’s a box canyon, very short and steep-walled. Almost like a chimney lying on its side, you see?”

“Yes.”

“The traditional time for burning is Reap Mom-the day after the fair and the feast and the fire.”

“The first day of winter.”

“Aye although in these parts it doesn’t feel like winter so soon. In any case it’s no tradition; the brush is sometimes lit sooner, if the winds have been prankish or if the sound’s particularly strong. It upsets the livestock, you know-cows give poorly when the noise of the thinny’s strong-and it makes sleep difficult.”

“I should think it would.” Will was still looking north, and a stronger gust of wind blew his hat off. It fell to his back, the rawhide tugstring pulling against the line of his throat. The hair so revealed was a little long, and as black as a crow’s wing. She felt a sudden, greedy desire to run her hands through it, to let her fingers tell its texture-rough or smooth or silky? And how would it smell? At this she felt another shiver of heat down low in her belly. He turned to her as though he had read her mind, and she flushed, grateful that he wouldn’t be able to see the darkening of her cheek.

“How long has it been there?”

“Since before I was born,” she said, “but not before my da was born. He said that the ground shook in an earthquake just before it came. Some say the earthquake brought it, some say that’s superstitious nonsense. All I know is that it’s always been there. The smoke quiets it awhile, the way it will quiet a hive of bees or wasps, but the sound always comes back. The brush piled at the mouth helps to keep any wandering livestock out, too-sometimes they’re drawn to it, gods know why. But if a cow or sheep does happen to yet in-after the burning and before the next year’s pile has started to grow, mayhap-it doesn’t come back out. Whatever it is, it’s hungry.”

She put his poncho aside, lifted her right leg over the saddle without so much as touching the horn, and slipped off Rusher-all this in a single liquid movement. It was a stunt made for pants rather than a dress, and she knew from the further widening of his eyes that he’d seen a good lot of her… but nothing she had to wash with the bathroom door closed, so what of that? And that quick dismount had ever been a favorite trick of hers when she was in a showoffy mood.

“Pretty!” he exclaimed.

“I learned it from my da,” she said, responding to the more innocent interpretation of his compliment. Her smile as she handed him the reins, however, suggested that she was willing to accept the compliment any way it was meant.

“Susan? Have you ever seen the thinny?”

“Aye, once or twice. From above.”

“What does it look like?”

“Ugly,” she responded at once. Until tonight, when she had observed Rhea’s smile up close and endured her twiddling, meddling fingers, she would have said it was the ugliest thing she had ever seen. “It looks a little like a slow-burning peat fire, and a little like a swamp full of scummy green water. There’s a mist that rises off it. Sometimes it looks like long, skinny arms. With hands at the end of em.”

“Is it growing?”

“Aye, they say it is, that every thinny grows, but it grows slowly. 'Twon’t escape Eyebolt Canyon in your time or mine.”

She looked up at the sky, and saw that the constellations had continued to tilt along their tracks as they spoke. She felt she could talk to him all night-about the thinny, or Citgo, or her irritating aunt, or just about anything-and the idea dismayed her. Why should this happen to her now, for the gods’ sake? After three years of dismissing the Hambry boys, why should she now meet a boy who interested her so strangely? Why was life so unfair?

Her earlier thought, the one she’d heard in her father’s voice, recurred to her: If it’s ka, it’ll come like a wind, and your plans will stand before it no more than a barn before a cyclone.

But no. And no. And no. So set she, with all her considerable determination, her mind against the idea. This was no bam; this was her life.

Susan reached out and touched the rusty tin of Mrs. Beech’s mailbox, as if to steady herself in the world. Her little hopes and daydreams didn’t mean so much, perhaps, but her father had taught her to measure herself by her ability to do the things she’d said she would do, and she would not overthrow his teachings simply because she happened to encounter a good-looking boy at a time when her body and her emotions were in a stew.

“I’ll leave ye here to either rejoin yer friends or resume yer ride,” she said. The gravity she heard in her voice made her feel a bit sad, for it was an adult gravity. “But remember yer promise, Will-if ye see me at Seafront-Mayor’s House-and ifye’d be my friend, see me there for the first time. As I’d see you.”

He nodded, and she saw her seriousness now mirrored in his own face. And the sadness, mayhap. “I’ve never asked a girl to ride out with me, or if she’d accept a visit of me. I’d ask of you, Susan, daughter of Patrick-I’d even bring you flowers to sweeten my chances-but it would do no good, I think.”

She shook her head. “Nay. Twouldn’t.”

“Are you promised in marriage? It’s forward of me to ask, I know, but I mean no harm.”

“I’m sure ye don’t, but I’d as soon not answer. My position is a delicate one just now, as I told ye. Besides, it’s late. Here’s where we part, Will. But stay… one more moment…”

She rummaged in the pocket of her apron and brought out half a cake wrapped in a piece of green leaf. The other half she had eaten on her way up to the Coos… in what now felt like the other half of her life. She held what was left of her little evening meal out to Rusher, who sniffed it, then ate it and nuzzled her hand. She smiled, liking the velvet tickle in the cup of her palm. “Aye, thee’s a good horse, so ye are.”

She looked at Will Dearborn, who stood in the road, shuffling his dusty boots and gazing at her unhappily. The hard look was gone from his face, now; he looked her age again, or younger. “We were well met, weren’t we?” he asked.

She stepped forward, and before she could let herself think about what she was doing, she put her hands on his shoulders, stood on her toes, and kissed him on the mouth. The kiss was brief but not sisterly.

“Aye, very well met. Will.” But when he moved toward her (as thoughtlessly as a flower turning its face to follow the sun), wishing to repeat the experience, she pushed him back a step, gently but firmly.

“Nay, that was only a thank-you, and one thank-you should be enough for a gentleman. Go yer course in peace, Will.”

He took up the reins like a man in a dream, looked at them for a moment as if he didn’t know what in the world they were, and then looked hack at her. She could see him working to clear his mind and emotions of the impact her kiss had made. She liked him for it. And she was very glad she had done it.

“And you yours,” he said, swinging into the saddle. “I look forward to meeting you for the first time.”

He smiled at her, and she saw both longing and wishes in that smile. Then he gigged the horse, turned him, and started back the way they’d come-to have another look at the oil patch, mayhap. She stood where she was, by Mrs. Beech’s mailbox, willing him to turn around and wave so she could see his face once more. She felt sure he would… but he didn’t. Then, just as she was about to turn away and start down the hill to town, he did turn, and his hand lifted, fluttering for a moment in the dark like a moth.

Susan lifted her own in return and then went her way, feeling happy and unhappy at the same time. Yet-and this was perhaps the most important thing-she no longer felt soiled. When she had touched the boy’s lips, Rhea’s touch seemed to have left her skin. A small magic, perhaps, but she welcomed it.

She walked on, smiling a little and looking up at the stars more frequently than was her habit when out after dark.

1

He rode restlessly for nearly two hours back and forth along what she called the Drop, never pushing Rusher above a trot, although what he wanted to do was gallop the big gelding under the stars until his own blood began to cool a little.

It’ll cool plenty if you draw attention to yourself, he thought, and likely you won’t even have to cool it yourself. Fools are the only folk on the earth who can absolutely count on getting what they deserve. That old saying made him think of the scarred and bowlegged man who had been his life’s greatest teacher, and he smiled.

At last he turned his horse down the slope to the trickle of brook which ran there, and followed it a mile and a half upstream (past several gathers of horse; they looked at Rusher with a kind of sleepy, wall-eyed surprise) to a grove of willows. From the hollow within, a horse whickered softly. Rusher whickered in return, stamping one hoof and nodding his head up and down.

His rider ducked his own head as he passed through the willow fronds, and suddenly there was a narrow and inhuman white face hanging before him, its upper half all but swallowed by black, pupilless eyes.

He dipped for his guns-the third time tonight he’d done that, and for the third time there was nothing there. Not that it mattered; already he recognized what was hanging before him on a string: that idiotic rook’s skull.

The young man who was currently calling himself Arthur Heath had taken it off his saddle (it amused him to call the skull so perched their lookout, “ugly as an old gammer, but perfect cheap to feed”) and hung it here as a prank greeting. Him and his jokes! Rusher’s master batted it aside hard enough to break the string and send the skull flying into the dark.

“Fie, Roland,” said a voice from the shadows. It was reproachful, but there was laughter bubbling just beneath… as there always was. Cuthbert was his oldest friend-the marks of their first teeth had been embedded on many of the same toys-but Roland had in some ways never understood him. Nor was it just his laughter; on the long-ago day when Hax, the palace cook, was to be hung for a traitor on Gallows Hill, Cuthbert had been in an agony of terror and remorse. He’d told Roland he couldn’t stay, couldn’t watch… but in the end he had done both. Because neither the stupid jokes nor the easy surface emotions were the truth of Cuthbert Allgood.

As Roland entered the hollow at the center of the grove, a dark shape stepped out from behind the tree where it had been keeping. Halfway across the clearing, it resolved itself into a tall, narrow-hipped boy who was barefooted below his jeans and bare-chested above them. In one hand he held an enormous antique revolver-a kind which was sometimes called a beer-barrel because of the cylinder’s size.

“Fie,” Cuthbert repeated, as if he liked the sound of this word, not archaic only in forgotten backwaters like Mejis. “That’s a fine way to treat the guard o’ the watch, smacking the poor thin-faced fellow halfway to the nearest mountain-range!”

“If I’d been wearing a gun, I likely would have blown it to smithereens and woken half the countryside.”

“I knew you wouldn’t be going about strapped,” Cuthbert answered mildly. “You’re remarkably ill-looking, Roland son of Steven, but nobody’s fool even as you approach the ancient age of fifteen.”

“I thought we agreed we’d use the names we’re travelling under. Even among ourselves.”

Cuthbert stuck out his leg, bare heel planted in the turf, and bowed with his arms outstretched and his hands strenuously bent at the wrist-an inspired imitation of the sort of man for whom court has become career. He also looked remarkably like a heron standing in a marsh, and Roland snorted laughter in spite of himself. Then he touched the inside of his left wrist to his forehead, to see if he had a fever. He felt feverish enough inside his head, gods knew, but the skin above his eyes felt cool.

“I cry your pardon, gunslinger,” Cuthbert said, his eyes and hands still turned humbly down.

The smile on Roland’s face died. “And don’t call me that again, Cuthbert. Please. Not here, not anywhere. Not if you value me.”

Cuthbert dropped his pose at once and came quickly to where Roland sat his horse. He looked honestly humbled.

“Roland-Will-I’m sorry.”

Roland clapped him on the shoulder. “No harm done. Just remember from here on out. Mejis may be at the end of the world… but it still is the world. Where’s Alain?”

“Dick, do you mean? Where do you think?” Cuthbert pointed across the clearing, to where a dark hulk was either snoring or slowly choking to death.

“That one,” Cuthbert said, “would sleep through an earthquake.”

“But you heard me coming and woke.”

“Yes,” Cuthbert said. His eyes were on Roland’s face, searching it with an intensity that made Roland feel a little uneasy. “Did something happen to you? You look different.”

“Do I?”

“Yes. Excited. Aired out, somehow.”

If he was going to tell Cuthbert about Susan, now was the time. He decided without really thinking about it (most of his decisions, certainly the best of them, were made in this same way) not to tell. If he met her at Mayor’s House, it would be the first time as far as Cuthbert and Alain knew, as well. What harm in that?

“I’ve been properly aired, all right,” he said, dismounting and bending to uncinch the girths of his saddle. “I’ve seen some interesting things, too.”

“Ah? Speak, companion of my bosom’s dearest tenant.”

“I’ll wait until tomorrow, I think, when yon hibernating bear is finally awake. Then I only have to tell once. Besides, I’m tired. I’ll share you one thing, though: there are too many horses in these parts, even for a Barony renowned for its horseflesh. Too many by far.”

Before Cuthbert could ask any questions, Roland pulled the saddle from Rusher’s back and set it down beside three small wicker cages which had been bound together with rawhide, making them into a carrier which could be secured to a horse’s back. Inside, three pigeons with white rings around their necks cooed sleepily. One took his head out from beneath his wing, had a peek at Roland, and then tucked himself away again.

“These fellows all right?” Roland asked.

“Fine. Pecking and shitting happily in their straw. As far as they’re concerned, they’re on vacation. What did you mean about-”

“Tomorrow,” Roland said, and Cuthbert, seeing that there would be no more, only nodded and went to find his lean and bony lookout.

Twenty minutes later, Rusher unloaded and rubbed down and set to forage with Buckskin and Glue Boy (Cuthbert could not even name his horse as a normal person would), Roland lay on his back in his bedroll, looking up at the late stars overhead. Cuthbert had gone back to sleep as easily as he had awakened at the sound of Rusher’s hoofs, but Roland had never felt less sleepy in his life.

His mind turned back a month, to the whore’s room, to his father sitting on the whore’s bed and watching him dress. The words his father had spoken-I have known for two years-had reverberated like a struck gong in Roland’s head. He suspected they might continue to do so for the rest of his life.

But his father had had much more to say. About Marten. About Roland’s mother, who was, perhaps, more sinned against than sinning. About harriers who called themselves patriots. And about John Farson, who had indeed been in Cressia, and who was gone from that place now-vanished, as he had a way of doing, like smoke in a high wind. Before leaving, he and his men had burned Indrie, the Barony seat, pretty much to the ground. The slaughter had been in the hundreds, and perhaps it was no surprise that Cressia had since repudiated the Affiliation and spoken for the Good Man. The Barony Governor, the Mayor of Indrie, and the High Sheriff had all ended the early summer day which concluded Farson’s visit with their heads on the wall guarding the town’s entrance. That was, Steven Deschain had said, “pretty persuasive politics.”

It was a game of Castles where both armies had come out from behind their Hillocks and the final moves had commenced, Roland’s father had said, and as was so often the case with popular revolutions, that game was apt to be over before many in the Baronies of Mid-World had begun to realize that John Farson was a serious threat… or, if you were one of those who believed passionately in his vision of democracy and an end to what he called “class slavery and ancient fairy-tales,” a serious agent of change.

His father and his father’s small ka-tet of gunslingers, Roland was amazed to learn, cared little about Farson in either light; they looked upon him as small cheese. Looked upon the Affiliation itself as small cheese; come to that.

I’m going to send you away, Steven had said, sitting there on the bed and looking somberly at his only son. the one who had lived. There is no true safe place left in Mid- World, hut the Barony of Mejis on the Clean Sea is as close to true safety as any place may be these days… so it’s there you’ll go, along with at least two of your mates. Alain, I suppose, for one. Just not that laughing boy for the other, I beg of you. You ’d be better off with a barking dog.

Roland, who on any other day in his life would have been overjoyed at the prospect of seeing some of the wider world, had protested hotly. If the final battles against the Good Man were at hand, he wanted to fight them at his father’s side. He was a gunslinger now, after all, if only a 'prentice, and-

His father had shaken his head, slowly and emphatically. No, Roland. You don’t understand. You shall, however; as well as possible, you shall.

Later, the two of them had walked the high battlements above Mid-World’s last living city-green and gorgeous Gilead in the morning sun, with its pennons flapping and the vendors in the streets of the Old Quarter and horses trotting on the bridle paths which radiated out from the palace standing at the heart of everything. His father had told him more (not everything), and he had understood more (far from everything-nor did his father understand everything). The Dark Tower had not been mentioned by either of them, but already it hung in Roland’s mind, a possibility like a storm cloud far away on the horizon.

Was the Tower what all of this was really about? Not a jumped-up harrier with dreams of ruling Mid-World, not the wizard who had enchanted his mother, not the glass ball which Steven and his posse had hoped to find in Cressia… but the Dark Tower?

He hadn’t asked.

He hadn’t dared ask.

Now he shifted in his bedroll and closed his eyes. He saw the girl’s face at once; he felt her lips pressed firmly against his own again, and smelled the scent of her skin. He was instantly hot from the top of his head to the base of his spine, cold from the base of his spine to the tips of his toes. Then he thought of the way her legs had flashed as she slid from Rusher’s back (also the glimmer of the undergarments beneath her briefly raised dress), and his hot half and cold half changed places.

The whore had taken his virginity but wouldn’t kiss him; had turned her face aside when he tried to kiss her. She’d allowed him to do whatever else he wanted, but not that. At the time he’d been bitterly disappointed. Now he was glad.

The eye of his adolescent mind, both restless and clear, considered (he braid which fell down her back to her waist, the soft dimples which had formed at the comers of her mouth when she smiled, the lilt of her voice, her old-fashioned way of saying aye and nay, ye and yer and da. He thought of how her hands had felt on his shoulders as she stretched up to kiss him, and thought he would give everything he owned to feel her hands there again, so light and so firm. And her mouth on his. It was a mouth that knew only a little about kissing, he guessed, but that was a little more than he knew himself.

Be careful, Roland-don’t let your feeling for this girl tip anything over. She’s not free, anyway-she said as much. Not married, but spoken for in some other way.

Roland was far from the relentless creature he would eventually become, but the seeds of that relentlessness were there-small, stony things that would, in their time, grow into trees with deep roots… and bitter fruit. Now one of these seeds cracked open and sent up its first sharp blade.

What’s been spoken for may be unspoken, and what’s done may be undone. Nothing’s sure, but… I want her.

Yes. That was the one thing he did know, and he knew it as well as he knew the face of his father: he wanted her. Not as he had wanted the whore when she lay naked on her bed with her legs spread and her half-lidded eyes looking up at him, but in the way he wanted food when he was hungry or water when he was thirsty. In the way, he supposed, that he wanted to drag Marten’s dusty body behind his horse down Gilead’s High Road in payment for what the wizard had done to his mother.

He wanted her; he wanted the girl Susan.

Roland turned over on his other side, closed his eyes, and fell asleep. His rest was thin and lit by the crudely poetic dreams only adolescent boys have, dreams where sexual attraction and romantic love come together and resonate more powerfully than they ever will again. In these thirsty visions Susan Delgado put her hands on Roland’s shoulders over and over, kissed his mouth over and over, told him over and over to come to her for the first time, to be with her for the first time, to see her for the first time, to see her very well.

2

Five miles or so from where Roland slept and dreamed his dreams, Susan Delgado lay in her bed and looked out her window and watched Old Star begin to grow pale with the approaching dawn. Sleep was no closer now than it had been when she lay down, and there was a throb between her legs where the old woman had touched her. It was distracting but no longer unpleasant, because she now associated it with the boy she’d met on the road and impulsively kissed by starlight. Every time she shifted her legs, that throb flared into a brief sweet ache.

When she’d got home, Aunt Cord (who would have been in her own bed an hour before on any ordinary night) had been sitting in her rocking chair by the fireplace-dead and cold and swept clean of ashes at this time of year-with a lapful of lace that looked like wave-froth against her dowdy black dress. She was edging it with a speed that seemed almost supernatural to Susan, and she hadn’t looked up when the door opened and her niece came in on a swirl of breeze.

“I expected ye an hour ago,” Aunt Cord said. And then, although she didn’t sound it: “I was worried.”

“Aye?” Susan said, and said no more. She thought that on any other night she would have offered one of her fumbling excuses which always sounded like a lie to her own ears-it was the effect Aunt Cord had had on her all her life-but this hadn’t been an ordinary night. Never in her life had there been a night like this. She found she could not get Will Dearborn out of her mind.

Aunt Cord had looked up then, her close-set, rather beady eyes sharp and inquisitive above her narrow blade of a nose. Some things hadn’t changed since Susan had set out for the Coos; she had still been able to feel her aunt’s eyes brushing across her face and down her body, like little whisk-brooms with sharp bristles.

“What took ye so long?” Aunt Cord had asked. “Was there trouble?”

“No trouble,” Susan had replied, but for a moment she thought of how the witch had stood beside her in the doorway, pulling her braid through the gnarled tube of one loosely clenched fist. She remembered wanting to go, and she remembered asking Rhea if their business was done.

Mayhap there’s one more little thing, the old woman had said… or so Susan thought. But what had that one more little thing been? She couldn’t remember. And, really, what did it matter? She was shut of Rhea until her belly began to rise with Thorin’s child… and if there could be no baby-making until Reap-Night, she’d not be returning to the Coos until late winter at the soonest. An age! And it would be longer than that, were she slow to kindle…

“I walked slowly coming home, Aunt. That’s all.”

“Then why look ye so?” Aunt Cord had asked, scant brows knitting toward the vertical line which creased her brow.

“How so?” Susan had asked, taking off her apron and knotting the strings and hanging it on the hook just inside the kitchen door.

“Flushy. Frothy. Like milk fresh out of the cow.”

She’d almost laughed. Aunt Cord, who knew as little about men as Susan did about the stars and planets, had struck it directly. Flushy and frothy was exactly how she felt. “Only the night air, I suppose,” she had said. “I saw a meteor, Aunt. And heard the thinny. The sound’s strong tonight.”

“Aye?” her aunt asked without interest, then returned to the subject which did interest her. “Did it hurt?”

“A little.”

“Did ye cry?”

Susan shook her head.

“Good. Better not. Always better. She likes it when they cry, I’ve heard. Now, Sue-did she give you something? Did the old pussy give you something?”

“Aye.” She reached into her pocket and brought out the paper with

written upon it. She held it out and her aunt snatched it away with a greedy look. Cordelia had been quite the sugarplum over the last month or so, but now that she had what she wanted (and now that Susan had come too far and promised too much to have a change of heart), she’d reverted to the sour, supercilious, often suspicious woman Susan had grown up with; the one who’d been driven into almost weekly bouts of rage by her phlegmatic, life-goes-as-'twill brother. In a way, it was a relief. It had been nervewracking to have Aunt Cord playing Cybilla Good-Sprite day after day.

“Aye, aye, there’s her mark, all right,” her aunt had said, tracing her fingers over the bottom of the sheet. “A devil’s hoof’s what it means, some say, but what do we care, eh. Sue? Nasty, horrid creature that she is, she’s still made it possible for two women to get on in the world a little longer. And ye’ll only have to see her once more, probably around Year’s End, when ye’ve caught proper.”

“It will be later than that,” Susan had told her. “I’m not to lie with him until the full of the Demon Moon. After the Reaping Fair and the bonfire.”

Aunt Cord had stared, eyes wide, mouth open. “Said she so?”

Are you calling me a liar. Auntie? she had thought with a sharpness that wasn’t much like her; usually her nature was more like her father’s.

“Aye.”

“But why? Why so long?” Aunt Cord was obviously upset, obviously disappointed. There had so far been eight pieces of silver and four of gold out of this; they were tucked up wherever it was that Aunt Cord squirreled her money away (and Susan suspected there was a fair amount of it, although Cordelia liked to plead poverty at every opportunity), and twice that much was still owed… or would be, once the bloodstained sheet went to the Mayor’s House laundress. That same amount would be paid yet again when Rhea had confirmed the baby, and the baby’s honesty. A lot of money, all told. A great lot, for a little place like this and little folk like them. And now, to have the paying of it put back so far…

Then came a sin Susan had prayed over (although without much enthusiasm) before getting into her bed: she had rather enjoyed the cheated, frustrated look on Aunt Cord’s face-the look of the thwarted miser. “Why so long?” she repeated.

“I suppose you could go up the Coos and ask her.”

Cordelia Delgado’s lips, thin to begin with, had pressed together so tightly they almost disappeared. “Are you pert, missy? Are you pert with me?”

“No. I’m much too tired to be pert with anyone. I want to wash-I can still feel her hands on me, so I can-and go to bed.”

“Then do so. Perhaps in the morning we can discuss this in more ladylike fashion. And we must go and see Hart, of course.” She folded the paper Rhea had given Susan, looking pleased at the prospect of visiting Hart Thorin, and moved her hand toward her dress pocket.

“No,” Susan said, and her voice had been unusually sharp-enough so to freeze her aunt’s hand in midair. Cordelia had looked at her, frankly startled. Susan had felt a little embarrassed by that look, but she hadn’t dropped her eyes, and when she held out her own hand, it had been steady enough.

“I’m to have the keeping of that. Aunt.”

“Who tells ye to speak so?” Aunt Cord had asked, her voice almost whining with outrage-it was close to blasphemy, Susan supposed, but for a moment Aunt Cord’s voice had reminded her of the sound the thinny made. “Who tells ye to speak so to the woman who raised a motherless girl? To the sister of that girl’s poor dead father?”

“You know who,” Susan said. She still held her hand out. “I’m to keep it, and I’m to give it to Mayor Thorin. She said she didn’t care what happened to it then, he could wipe his bum with it for all of her,” (the flush which suffused her aunt’s face at that had been very enjoyable) “but until then, it was to be in my keeping.”

“I never heard of such a thing,” Aunt Cordelia had huffed… but she had handed the grimy scrap of paper back. “Giving the keep of such an important document to a mere scrap of a girl.”

Yet not too mere a scrap to be his gilly, am I? To lie under him and listen to his bones creak and take his seed and mayhap bear his child.

She’d dropped her eyes to her pocket as she put the paper away again, not wanting Aunt Cord to see the resentment in them.

“Go up,” Aunt Cord had said, brushing the froth of lace off her lap and into her workbasket, where it lay in an unaccustomed tangle. “And when you wash, do your mouth with especial care. Cleanse it of its impudence and disrespect toward those who have given up much for love of its owner.”

Susan had gone silently, biting back a thousand retorts, mounting the stairs as she had so often, throbbing with a mixture of shame and resentment.

And now here she was, in her bed and still awake as the stars paled away and the first brighter shades began to color the sky. The events of the night just past slipped through her mind in a kind of fantastical blur, like shuffled playing cards-and the one which turned up with the most persistence was the face of Will Dearborn. She thought of how that face could be hard at one moment and soften so unexpectedly at the next. And was it a handsome face? Aye, she thought so. For herself, she knew so.

I’ve never asked a girl to ride out with me, or if she would accept a visit of me. I would ask you, Susan, daughter of Patrick.

Why now? Why should I meet him now, when no good can come of it?

If it’s ka, it ’ll come like a wind. Like a cyclone.

She tossed from one side of the bed to the other, then at last rolled onto her back again. There would be no sleep for her in what remained of this night, she thought. She might as well walk out on the Drop and watch the sun come up.

Yet she continued to lie in bed, feeling somehow sick and well at the same time, looking into the shadows and listening to the first cries of the morning birds, thinking of how his mouth had felt against hers, the tender grain of it and the feeling of his teeth below his lips; the smell of his skin, the rough texture of his shirt under her palms.

She now put those palms against the top of her shift and cupped her breasts with her fingers. The nipples were hard, like little pebbles. And when she touched them, the heat between her legs flared suddenly and urgently.

She could sleep, she thought. She could, if she took care of that heat. If she knew how.

And she did. The old woman had shown her. Even a girl who’s intact don’t need to lack for a shiver now ’ then… Like a little bud o’ silk, so it is.

Susan shifted in bed and slipped a hand deep beneath the sheet. She forced the old woman’s bright eyes and hollow cheeks out of her mind- it wasn’t hard to do at all once you set your mind to it, she discovered- and replaced it with the face of the boy with the big gelding and the silly flat-crowned hat. For a moment the vision of her mind became so clear and so sweet that it was real, and all the rest of her life only a drab dream. In this vision he kissed her over and over, their mouths widening, their tongues touching; what he breathed out, she breathed in.

She burned. She burned in her bed like a torch. And when the sun finally came over the horizon some short time later, she lay deeply asleep, with a faint smile on her lips and her unbraided hair lying across the side of her face and her pillow like loose gold.

3

In the last hour before dawn, the public room of the Travellers’ Rest was as quiet as it ever became. The gaslights which turned the chandelier into a brilliant jewel until two of the clock or so on most nights were now turned down to guttering blue points, and the long, high room was shadowy and spectral.

In one corner lay a jumble of kindling-the remains of a couple of chairs smashed in a fight over a Watch Me game (the combatants were currently residing in the High Sheriff’s drunk-cell). In another comer was a fairly large puddle of congealing puke. On the raised platform at the east end of the room stood a battered piano; propped against its bench was the ironwood club which belonged to Barkie, the saloon’s bouncer and all-around tough man. Barkie himself, the naked mound of his scarred stomach rising above the waistband of his corduroy pants like a clot of bread dough, lay under the bench, snoring. In one hand he held a playing card: the deuce of diamonds.

At the west end of the room were the card tables. Two drunks lay with their heads on one of these, snoring and drooling on the green felt, their outstretched hands touching. Above them, on the wall, was a picture of Arthur, the Great King of Eld astride his white stallion, and a sign which read (in a curious mixture of High and Low Speech): ARGYOU NOT ABOUT THE HAND YOU ARE DELT IN CARDS OR LIFE.

Mounted behind the bar, which ran the length of the room, was a monstrous trophy: a two-headed elk with a rack of antlers like a forest grove and four glaring eyes. This beast was known to local habitues of the Travellers’ as The Romp. None could have said why. Some wit had carefully drawn a pair of sow-titty condoms over the prongs of two of its antlers. Lying on the bar itself and directly beneath The Romp’s disapproving gaze was Pettie the Trotter, one of the Travellers’ dancers and gilly-girls… although Pettie’s actual girlhood was well behind her now, and soon she would be reduced to doing her business on her knees behind the Travellers’ rather than upstairs in one of the tiny cribs. Her plump legs were spread, one dangling over the bar on the inside, one on the outside, the filthy tangle of her skirt frothed up between. She breathed in long snores, occasionally twitching at the feet and fat fingers. The only other sounds were the hot summer wind outside and the soft, regular snap of cards being turned one by one.

A small table stood by itself near the batwing doors which gave upon the Hambry High Street; it was here that Coral Thorin, owner of the Travellers’ Rest (and the Mayor’s sister), sat on the nights when she descended from her suite “to be a part of the company.” When she came down, she came down early-when there were still more steaks than whiskey being served across the old scratched bar-and went back up around the time that Sheb, the piano player, sat down and began to pound his hideous instrument. The Mayor himself never came in lit nil, although it was well-known that he owned at least a half-interest in the Travellers'. Clan Thorin enjoyed the money the place brought in; they just didn’t enjoy the look of it after midnight, when the sawdust spread on the floor began to soak up the spilled beer and the spilled blood. Yet there was a hard streak in Coral, who had twenty years before been what was called “a wild child.” She was younger than her political brother, not so thin, and good-looking in a large-eyed, weasel-headed way. No one sat at her table during the saloon’s operating hours-Barkie would have put a stop to anyone who tried, and double-quick-but operating hours were over now, the drunks mostly gone or passed out upstairs, Sheb curled up and fast asleep in the comer behind his piano. The softheaded boy who cleaned the place had been gone since two o’ the clock or so (chased out by jeers and insults and a few flying beer-glasses, as he always was; Roy Depape in particular had no love in his heart for that particular lad). He would be back around nine or so, to begin readying the old party-palace for another night of hilarity, but until then the man sitting at Mistress Thorin’s table had the place to himself.

A game of Patience was laid out before him: black on red, red on black, the partially formed Square o’ Court above all, just as it was in the affairs of men. In his left hand the player held the remains of the deck. As he flipped the cards up, one by one, the tattoo on his right hand moved. It was disconcerting somehow, as if the coffin were breathing. The card-player was an oldish fellow, not as thin as the Mayor or his sister, but thin. His long white hair straggled down his back. He was deeply tanned, except for his neck, where he always burned; the flesh there hung in scant wattles. He wore a mustache so long the ragged white ends hung nearly to his jaw-a sham gunslinger’s mustache, many thought it, but no one used the word “sham” to Eldred Jonas’s face. He wore a white silk shirt, and a black-handled revolver hung low on his hip. His large, red-rimmed eyes looked sad on first glance. A second, closer look showed them only to be watery. Of emotion they were as dead as the eyes of The Romp.

He turned up the Ace of Wands. No place for it. “Pah, you bugger,” he said in an odd, reedy voice. It quavered, as well, like the voice of a man on the verge of tears. It fit perfectly with his damp and red-rimmed eyes. He swept the cards together.

Before he could reshuffle, a door opened and closed softly upstairs. Jonas put the cards aside and dropped his hand to the butt of his gun.

Then, as he recognized the sound of Reynolds’s boots coming along the gallery, he let go of the gun and drew his tobacco-pouch from his belt instead. The hem of the cloak Reynolds always wore came into view, and then he was coming down the stairs, his face freshly washed and his curly red hair hanging about his ears. Vain of his looks was dear old Mr. Reynolds, and why not? He’d sent his cock on its exploring way up more damp and cozy cracks than Jonas had ever seen in his life, and Jonas was twice his age.

At the bottom of the stairs Reynolds walked along the bar, pausing to squeeze one of Pettie’s plump thighs, and then crossed to where Jonas sat with his makings and his deck of cards.

“Evening, Eldred.”

“Morning, Clay.” Jonas opened the sack, took out a paper, and sprinkled tobacco into it. His voice shook, but his hands were steady. “Like a smoke?”

“I could do with one.”

Reynolds pulled out a chair, turned it around, and sat with his forearms crossed on its back. When Jonas handed him the cigarette, Reynolds danced it along the backs of his fingers, an old gunslinger trick. The Big Coffin Hunters were full of old gunslinger tricks.

“Where’s Roy? With Her Nibs?” They had been in Hambry a little over a month now, and in that time Depape had conceived a passion for a fifteen-year-old whore named Deborah. Her bowlegged clumping walk and her way of squinting off into the distance led Jonas to suspect she was just another cowgirl from a long line of them, but she had high-hat ways. It was Clay who had started calling the girl Her Nibs, or Her Majesty, or sometimes (when drunk) “Roy’s Coronation Cunt.”

Reynolds now nodded. “It’s like he’s drunk on her.”

“He’ll be all right. He ain’t throwing us over for some little snuggle-bunny with pimples on her tits. Why, she’s so ignorant she can’t spell cat. Not so much as cat, no. I asked her.”

Jonas made a second cigarette, drew a sulfur match from the sack, and popped it alight with his thumbnail. He lit Reynolds’s first, then his own.

A small yellow cur came in under the batwing doors. The men watched it in silence, smoking. It crossed the room, first sniffed at the curdled vomit in the comer, then began to eat it. Its stub of a tail wagged back and forth as it dined.

Reynolds nodded toward the admonition not to argue about the cards you were dealt. “That mutt’d understand that, I’d say.”

“Not at all, not at all,” Jonas demurred. “Just a dog is all he is, a spew-eating dog. I heard a horse twenty minutes ago. First on the come, then on the go. Would it have been one of our hired watchmen?”

“You don’t miss a trick, do you?”

“Don’t pay to, no, don’t pay a bit. Was it?”

“Yep. Fellow who works for one of the small freeholders out along the east end of the Drop. He seen ’em come in. Three. Young. Babies.” Reynolds pronounced this last as they did in the North'rd Baronies: babbies. “Nothing to worry of.”

“Now, now, we don’t know that,” Jonas said, his quavering voice making him sound like a temporizing old man. “Young eyes see far, they say.”

“Young eyes see what they’re pointed at,” Reynolds replied. The dog trotted past him, licking its chops. Reynolds helped it on its way with a kick the cur was not quite quick enough to avoid. It scuttled back out under the batwings, uttering little yike-yike sounds that made Barkie snort thickly from his place of rest beneath the piano bench. His hand opened and the playing card dropped out of it.

“Maybe so, maybe not,” Jonas said. “In any case, they’re Affiliation brats, sons of big estates off in the Green Somewhere, if Rimer and that fool he works for have it straight. That means we’ll be very, very careful. Walk easy, like on eggshells. Why, we’ve got three more months here, at least! And those young'uns may be here that whole time, counting this ’ counting that and putting it all down on paper. Folks counting things ain’t good for us right now. Not for men in the resupply business.”

“Come on! It’s make-work, that’s all-a slap on the wrist for getting in trouble. Their daddies-”

“Their daddies know Farson’s in charge of the whole Southwest Edge now, and sitting on high ground. The brats may know the same-that playtime’s purt' near over for the Affiliation and all its pukesome royalty. Can’t know, Clay. With folks like these, you can’t know which way they’ll jump. At the very least, they may try to do a half-decent job just to try and get on the good side o’ their parents again. We’ll know better when we see em, but I tell you one thing: we can’t just put guns to the backs of their heads and drop them like broke-leg bosses if they see the wrong thing. Their daddies might be mad at em alive, but I think they’d be very tender of em dead-that’s just the way daddies are. We’ll want to be trig, Clay; as trig as we can be.”

“Better leave Depape out of it, then.”

“Roy will be fine,” Jonas said in his quavery voice. He dropped the stub of his cigarette to the floor and crushed it under his bootheel. He looked up at The Romp’s glassy eyes and squinted, as if calculating. “Tonight, your friend said? They arrived tonight, these brats?”

“Yep.”

“They’ll be in to see Avery tomorrow, then, I reckon.” This was Herk Avery, High Sheriff of Mejis and Chief Constable of Hambry, a large man who was as loose as a trundle of laundry.

“Reckon so,” Clay Reynolds said. “To present their papers ’ all.”

“Yes, sir, yes indeedy. How-d'you-do, and how-d'you-do, and how-d'you-do again.”

Reynolds said nothing. He often didn’t understand Jonas, but he had been riding with him since the age of fifteen, and knew it was usually better not to ask for enlightenment. If you did, you were apt to end up listening to a cult-manni lecture about the other worlds the old buzzard had visited through what he called “the special doors.” As far as Reynolds was concerned, there were enough ordinary doors in the world to keep him busy.

“I’ll speak to Rimer and Rimer’ll talk to the Sheriff about where they should stay,” Jonas said. “I think the bunkhouse at the old Bar K ranch. You know where I mean?”

Reynolds did. In a Barony like Mejis, you got to know the few landmarks in a hurry. The Bar K was a deserted spread of land northwest of town, not too far from that weird squalling canyon. They burned at the mouth of the canyon every fall, and once, six or seven years ago, the wind had shifted and gone back wrong and burned most of the Bar K to the ground-barns, stables, the home place. It had spared the bunkhouse, however, and that would be a good spot for three tenderfeet from the Inners. It was away from the Drop; it was also away from the oil patch.

“Ye like it, don’t ye?” Jonas asked, putting on a hick Hambry accent. “Aye, ye like it very much, I can see ye do, my cully. Ye know what they say in Cressia? 'Ifye’d steal the silver from the dining room, first put the dog in the pantry.'”

Reynolds nodded. It was good advice. “And those trucks? Those what-do-you-callums, tankers?”

“Fine where they are,” Jonas said. “Not that we could move em now without attracting the wrong kind of attention, eh? You and Roy want to go out there and cover them with brush. Lay it on nice and thick. Day after tomorrow you’ll do it.”

“And where will you be while we’re flexing our muscles out at Citgo?”

“By daylight? Preparing for dinner at Mayor’s House, you clod-the dinner Thorin will be giving to introduce his guests from the Great World to the shitpicky society of the smaller one.” Jonas began making another cigarette. He gazed up at The Romp rather than at what he was doing, and still spilled barely a scrap of tobacco. “A bath, a shave, a trim of these tangled old man’s locks… I might even wax my mustache, Clay, what do you say to that?”

“Don’t strain yourself, Eldred.”

Jonas laughed, the sound shrill enough to make Barkie mutter and Pettie stir uneasily on her makeshift bar-top bed. “So Roy and I aren’t invited to this fancy do.” “You’ll be invited, oh yes, you’ll be invited very warmly,” Jonas said, and handed Reynolds the fresh cigarette. He began making another for himself. “I’ll offer your excuses. I’ll do you boys proud, count on me. Strong men may weep.”

“All so we can spend the day out there in the dust and stink, covering those hulks. You’re too kind, Jonas.”

“I’ll be asking questions, as well,” Jonas said dreamily. “Drifting here and there… looking spruce, smelling of baybemes… and asking my little questions. I’ve known folks in our line of trade who’ll go to a fat, jolly fellow to find out the gossip-a saloon-keeper or bartender, perhaps a livery stable owner or one of the chubby fellows who always hangs about the jail or the courthouse with his thumbs tucked into his vest pockets. As for myself. Clay, I find that a woman’s best, and the narrower the better-one with more nose than tits sticking off her. I look for one who don’t paint her lips and keeps her hair scrooped back against her head.” “You have someone in mind?”

“Yar. Cordelia Delgado’s her name.” “Delgado?”

“You know the name, it’s on the lips of everyone in this town, I reckon. Susan Delgado, our esteemed Mayor’s soon-to-be gilly. Cordelia’s her auntie. Now here’s a fact of human nature I’ve found: folk are more apt to talk to someone like her, who plays them close, than they are to the local jolly types who’ll buy you a drink. And that lady plays them close. I’m going to slip in next to her at that dinner, and I’m going to compliment her on the perfume I doubt like hell she’ll be wearing, and I’m going to keep her wineglass full. Now, how sounds that for a plan?”

“A plan for what? That’s what I want to know.”

“For the game of Castles we may have to play,” Jonas said, and all the lightness dropped out of his voice. “We’re to believe that these boys have been sent here more as punishment than to do any real job of work. It sounds plausible, too. I’ve known rakes in my time, and it sounds plausible, indeed. I believe it each day until about three in the morning, and then a little doubt sets in. And do you know what, Clay?”

Reynolds shook his head.

“I’m right to doubt. Just as I was right to go with Rimer to old man Thorin and convince him that Farson’s glass would be better with the witch-woman, for the nonce. She’ll keep it in a place where a gunslinger couldn’t find it, let alone a nosy lad who’s yet to have his first piece of arse. These are strange times. A storm’s coming. And when you know the wind is going to blow, it’s best to keep your gear battened down.”

He looked at the cigarette he had made. He had been dancing it along the backs of his knuckles, as Reynolds had done earlier. Jonas pushed back the fall of his hair and tucked the cigarette behind his ear.

“I don’t want to smoke,” he said, standing up and stretching. His back made small crackling sounds. “I’m crazy to smoke at this hour of the morning. Too many cigarettes are apt to keep an old man like me awake.”

He walked toward the stairs, squeezing Pettie’s bare leg as he went by, also as Reynolds had done. At the foot of the stairs he looked back.

“I don’t want to kill them. Things are delicate enough without that. I’ll smell quite a little wrong on them and not lift a finger, no, not a single finger of my hand. But… I’d like to make them clear on their place in the great scheme o’ things.”

“Give them a sore paw.”

Jonas brightened. “Yessir, partner, maybe a sore paw’s just what I’d like to give them. Make them think twice about tangling with the Big Coffin Hunters later on, when it matters. Make them swing wide around us when they see us in their road. Yessir, that’s something to think about. It really is.”

He started up the stairs, chuckling a little, his limp quite pronounced- it got worse late at night. It was a limp Roland’s old teacher, Cort, might have recognized, for Cort had seen the blow which caused it. Cort’s own father had dealt it with an ironwood club, breaking Eldred Jonas’s leg in the yard behind the Great Hall of Gilead before taking the boy’s weapon and sending him west, gunless, into exile.

Eventually, the man the boy had become had found a gun, of course; the exiles always did, if they looked hard enough. That such guns could never be quite the same as the big ones with the sandalwood grips might haunt them for the rest of their lives, but those who needed guns could still find them, even in this world.

Reynolds watched until he was gone, then took his seat at Coral Thorin’s desk, shuffled the cards, and continued the game which Jonas had left half-finished.

Outside, the sun was coming up.

1

Two nights after arriving in the Barony of Mejis, Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain rode their mounts beneath an adobe arch with the words come in peace inscribed above it. Beyond was a cobblestone courtyard lit with torches. The resin which coated these had been doctored somehow so that the torches glowed different colors: green, orangey-red, a kind of sputtery pink that made Roland think of fireworks. He could hear the sound of guitars, the murmur of voices, the laughter of women. The air was redolent of those smells which would always remind him of Mejis: sea-salt, oil, and pine.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” Alain muttered. He was a big boy with a mop of unruly blond hair spilling out from under his stockman’s hat. He had cleaned up well-they all had-but Alain, no social butterfly under the best of circumstances, looked scared to death. Cuthbert was doing better, but Roland guessed his old friend’s patina of insouciance didn’t go very deep. If there was to be leading done here, he would have to do it.

“You’ll be fine,” he told Alain. “Just-”

“Oh, he looks fine,” Cuthbert said with a nervous laugh as they crossed the courtyard. Beyond it was Mayor’s House, a sprawling, many-winged adobe hacienda that seemed to spill light and laughter from every window. “White as a sheet, ugly as a-”

“Shut up,” Roland said curtly, and the teasing smile tumbled off Cuthbert’s face at once. Roland noted this, then turned to Alain again. “Just don’t drink anything with alcohol in it. You know what to say on that account. Remember the rest of our story, too. Smile. Be pleasant. Use what social graces you have. Remember how the Sheriff fell all over himself to make us feel welcome.”

Alain nodded at that, looking a little more confident.

“In the matter of social graces,” Cuthbert said, “they won’t have many themselves, so we should all be a step ahead.”

Roland nodded, then saw that the bird’s skull was back on the horn of Cuthbert’s saddle. “And get rid of that!”

Looking guilty, Cuthbert stuffed “the lookout” hurriedly into his saddlebag. Two men wearing white jackets, white pants, and sandals were coming forward, bowing and smiling.

“Keep your heads,” Roland said, lowering his voice. “Both of you. Remember why you’re here. And remember the faces of your fathers.” He clapped Alain, who still looked doubtful, on the shoulder. Then he turned to the hostlers. “Goodeven, gents,” he said. “May your days be long upon the earth.”

They both grinned, their teeth flashing in the extravagant torchlight. The older one bowed. “And your own as well, young masters. Welcome to Mayor’s House.”

2

The High Sheriff had welcomed them the day before every bit as happily as the hostlers.

So far everyone had greeted them happily, even the carters they had passed on their way into town, and that alone made Roland feel suspicious and on his guard. He told himself he was likely being foolish-of course the locals were friendly and helpful, that was why they had been sent here, because Mejis was both out-of-the-way and loyal to the Affiliation-and it probably was foolish, but he thought it best to be on close watch, just the same. To be a trifle nervous. The three of them were little more than children, after all, and if they fell into trouble here, it was apt to be as a result of taking things at face value.

The combined Sheriff’s office and jail o’ Barony was on Hill Street, overlooking the bay. Roland didn’t know for sure, but guessed that few if any hungover drunks and wife-beaters anywhere else in Mid-World woke up to such picturesque views: a line of many-colored boathouses to the south, the docks directly below, with boys and old men line-fishing while the women mended nets and sails; beyond them, Hambry’s small fleet moving back and forth on the sparkling blue water of the bay, setting their nets in the morning, pulling them in the afternoon.

Most buildings on the High Street were adobe, but up here, overlooking Hambry’s business section, they were as squat and bricky as any narrow lane in Gilead’s Old Quarter. Well kept, too, with wrought-iron gates in front of most and tree-shaded paths. The roofs were orange tile, the shutters closed against the summer sun. It was hard to believe, riding down this street with their horses’ hoofs clocking on the swept cobbles, that the northwestern side of the Affiliation-the ancient land of Eld, Arthur’s kingdom-could be on fire and in danger of falling.

The jailhouse was just a larger version of the post office and land office; a smaller version of the Town Gathering Hall. Except, of course, for the bars on the windows facing down toward the small harbor.

Sheriff Herk Avery was a big-bellied man in a lawman’s khaki pants and shirt. He must have been watching them approach through the spy hole in the center of the jail’s iron-banded front door, because the door was thrown open before Roland could even reach for the turn-bell in the center. Sheriff Avery appeared on the stoop, his belly preceding him as a bailiff may precede My Lord Judge into court. His arms were thrown wide in the most amiable of greetings.

He bowed deeply to them (Cuthbert said later he was afraid the man might overbalance and go rolling down the steps; perhaps go rolling all the way down to the harbor) and wished them repeated goodmorns, tapping away at the base of his throat like a madman the whole while. His smile was so wide it looked as if it might cut his head clean in two. Three deputies with a distinctly farmerish look about them, dressed in khaki like the Sheriff, crowded into the door behind Avery and gawked. That was what it was, all right, a gawk; there was just no other word for that sort of openly curious and totally unselfconscious stare.

Avery shook each boy by the hand, continuing to bow as he did so, and nothing Roland said could get him to stop until he was done. When he finally was, he showed them inside. The office was delightfully cool in spite of the beating midsummer sun. That was the advantage of brick, of course. It was big as well, and cleaner than any High Sheriff’s office Roland had ever been in before… and he had been in at least half a dozen over the last three years, accompanying his father on several short trips and one longer patrol-swing.

There was a rolltop desk in the center, a notice-board to the right of the door (the same sheets of foolscap had been scribbled on over and over; paper was a rare commodity in Mid-World), and, in the far comer, two rifles in a padlocked case. These were such ancient blunderbusses that Roland wondered if there was ammunition for them. He wondered if they would fire, come to that. To the left of the gun-case, an open door gave on the jail itself-three cells on each side of a short corridor, and a smell of strong lye soap drifting out.

They’ve cleaned for our coming, Roland thought. He was amused, touched, and uneasy. Cleaned it as though we were a troop of Inner Barony horse-career soldiers who might want to stage a hard inspection instead of three lads serving punishment detail.

But was such nervous care on the part of their hosts really so strange? They were from New Canaan, after all, and folk in this tucked-away corner of the world might well see them as a species of visiting royalty.

Sheriff Avery introduced his deputies. Roland shook hands with all of them, not trying to memorize their names. It was Cuthbert who took care of names, and it was a rare occasion when he dropped one. The third, a bald fellow with a monocle hanging around his neck on a ribbon, actually dropped to one knee before them.

“Don’t do that, ye great idiot!” Avery cried, yanking him back up by the scruff of his neck. “What kind of a bumpkin will they think ye? Besides, you’ve embarrassed them, so ye have!”

“That’s all right,” Roland said (he was, in fact, very embarrassed, although trying not to show it). “We’re really nothing at all special, you know-”

“Nothing special!” Avery said, laughing. His belly, Roland noticed, did not shake as one might have expected it to do; it was harder than it looked. The same might be true of its owner. “Nothing special, he says! Five hundred mile or more from the In-World they’ve come, our first official visitors from the Affiliation since a gunslinger passed through on the Great Road four year ago, and yet he says they’re nothing special! Would ye sit, my boys? I’ve got graf, which ye won’t want so early in the day- p'raps not at all, given your ages (and if you’ll forgive me for statin so bald the obvious fact of yer youth, for youth’s not a thing to be ashamed of, so it’s not, we were all young once), and I also have white iced tea, which I recommend most hearty, as Dave’s wife makes it and she’s a dab hand with most any potable.”

Roland looked at Cuthbert and Alain, who nodded and smiled (and tried not to look all at sea), then back at Sheriff Avery. White tea would go down a treat in a dusty throat, he said.

One of the deputies went to fetch it, chairs were produced and set in a row at one side of Sheriff Avery’s rolltop, and the business of the day commenced.

“You know who ye are and where ye hail from, and I know the same,” Sheriff Avery said, sitting down in his own chair (it uttered a feeble groan beneath his bulk but held steady). “I can hear In-World in yer voices, but more important, I can see it in yer faces.

“Yet we hold to the old ways here in Hambry, sleepy and rural as we may be; aye, we hold to our course and remember the faces of our fathers as well’s we can. So, although I’d not keep yer long from yer duties, and if ye’ll forgive me for the impertinence, I’d like a look at any papers and documents of passage ye might just happen to’ve brought into town with ye.”

They just “happened” to have brought all of their papers into town with them, as Roland was sure Sheriff Avery well knew they would. He went through them quite slowly for a man who’d promised not to hold them from their duties, tracing the well-folded sheets (the linen content so high that the documents were perhaps closer to cloth than paper) with one pudgy finger, his lips moving. Every now and then the finger would reverse as he reread a line. The two other deputies stood behind him, looking sagely down over his large shoulders. Roland wondered if either could actually read.

William Dearborn. Drover’s son.

Richard Stockworth. Rancher’s son.

Arthur Heath. Stockline breeder’s son.

The identification document belonging to each was signed by an attestor-James Reed (of Hemphill) in the case of Dearborn, Piet Raven-head (of Pennilton) in the case of Stockworth, Lucas Rivers (of Gilead) in the case of Heath. All in order, descriptions nicely matched. The papers were handed back with profuse thanks. Roland next handed Avery a letter which he took from his wallet with some care. Avery handled it in the same fashion, his eyes growing wide as he saw the frank at the bottom.” 'Pon my soul, boys! ’twas a gunslinger wrote this!”

“Aye, so it was,” Cuthbert agreed in a voice of wonder. Roland kicked his ankle-hard-without taking his respectful eyes from Avery’s face.

The letter above the frank was from one Steven Deschain of Gilead, a gunslinger (which was to say a knight, squire, peacemaker, and Baron… the last title having almost no meaning in the modem day, despite all John Farson’s ranting) of the twenty-ninth generation descended from Arthur of Eld, on the side line of descent (the long-descended gel of one of Arthur’s many gillies, in other words). To Mayor Hartwell Thorin, Chancellor Kimba Rimer, and High Sheriff Herkimer Avery, it sent greetings and recommended to their notice the three young men who delivered this document, Masters Dearborn, Stockworth, and Heath. These had been sent on special mission from the Affiliation to serve as counters of all materials which might serve the Affiliation in time of need (the word war was omitted from the document, but glowed between every line). Steven Deschain, on behalf of the Affiliation of Baronies, exhorted Misters Thorin, Rimer, and Avery to afford the Affiliation’s nominated counters every help in their service, and to be particularly careful in the enumerations of all livestock, all supplies of food, and all forms of transport. Dearborn, Stockworth, and Heath would be in Mejis for at least three months, Deschain wrote, possibly as long as a year. The document finished by inviting any or all of the addressed public officials to “write us word of these young men and their deportment, in all detail as you shall imagine of interest to us.” And, it begged, “Do not stint in this matter, if you love us.”

Tell us if they behaved themselves, in other words. Tell us if they’ve learned their lesson.

The deputy with the monocle came back while the High Sheriff was perusing this document. He carried a tray loaded with four glasses of white tea and bent down with it like a butler. Roland murmured thanks and handed the glasses around. He took the last for himself, raised it to his lips, and saw Alain looking at him, his blue eyes bright in his stolid face.

Alain shook his glass slightly-just enough to make the ice tinkle- and Roland responded with the barest sliver of a nod. He had expected cool tea from a jug kept in a nearby springhouse, but there were actual chunks of ice in the glasses. Ice in high summer. It was interesting.

And the tea was, as promised, delicious.

Avery finished the letter and handed it back to Roland with the air of one passing on a holy relic. “Ye want to keep that safe about yer person, Will Dearborn-aye, very safe indeed!”

“Yes, sir.” He tucked the letter and his identification back into his purse. His friends “Richard” and “Arthur” were doing the same.

“This is excellent white tea, sir,” Alain said. “I’ve never had better.”

“Aye,” Avery said, sipping from his own glass.” ’tis the honey that makes it so fearsome. Eh, Dave?”

The deputy with (he monocle smiled from his place by the notice-hoard. “1 believe so, but Judy don’t like to say. She had the recipe from her mother.”

“Aye, we must remember the faces of our mothers, too, so we must.” Sheriff Avery looked sentimental for a moment, but Roland had an idea that the face of his mother was the furthest thing from the big man’s mind just then. He turned to Alain, and sentiment was replaced by a surprising shrewdness.

“Ye’re wondering about the ice, Master Stockworth.”

Alain started. “Well, I…”

“Ye expected no such amenity in a backwater like Hambry, I’ll warrant,” Avery said, and although there was a joshing quality on top of his voice, Roland thought there was something else entirely underneath.

He doesn’t like us. He doesn’t like what he thinks of as our “city ways.” He hasn’t known us long enough to know what kind of ways we have, if any at all, but already he doesn’t like them. He thinks we’re a trio of snotnoses; that we see him and everyone else here as country bumpkins.

“Not just Hambry,” Alain said quietly. “Ice is as rare in the Inner Arc these days as anywhere else, Sheriff Avery. When I grew up, I saw it mostly as a special treat at birthday parties and such.”

“There was always ice on Glowing Day,” Cuthbert put in. He spoke with very un-Cuthbertian quiet. “Except for the fireworks, that’s what we liked about it most.”

“Is that so, is that so,” Sheriff Avery said in an amazed, wonders-will-never-cease tone. Avery perhaps didn’t like them riding in like this, didn’t like having to take up what he would probably call “half the damn morning” with them; he didn’t like their clothes, their fancy identification papers, their accents, or their youth. Least of all their youth. Roland could understand all that, but wondered if it was the whole story. If there was something else going on here, what was it?

“There’s a gas-fired refrigerator and stove in the Town Gathering Hall,” Avery said. “Both work. There’s plenty of earth-gas out at Citgo- that’s the oil patch east of town. Yer passed it on yer way in, I wot.”

They nodded.

“Stove’s nobbut a curiosity these days-a history lesson for the schoolchildren-but the refrigerator comes in handy, so it does.” Avery held up his glass and looked through the side. “Specially in summer.”

He sipped some tea, smacked his lips, and smiled at Alain, “You see? No mystery.”

“I’m surprised you haven’t found use for the oil,” Roland said. “No generators in town, Sheriff?”

“Aye, there be four or five,” Avery said. “The biggest is out at Francis Lengyll’s Rocking B ranch, and I recall when it useter run. It’s HONDA. Do ye kennit that name, boys? HONDA?”

“I’ve seen it once or twice,” Roland said, “on old motor-driven bicycles.”

“Aye? In any case, none of the generators will run on the oil from the Citgo patch. Tis too thick. Tarry goo, is all. We have no refineries here.”

“I see,” Alain said. “In any case, ice in summer’s a treat. However it comes to the glass.” He let one of the chunks slip into his mouth, and crunched it between his teeth.

Avery looked at him a moment longer, as if to make sure the subject was closed, then switched his gaze back to Roland. His fat face was once more radiant with his broad, untrustworthy smile.

“Mayor Thorin has asked me to extend ye his very best greetings, and convey his regrets for not bein here today-very busy is our Lord Mayor, very busy indeed. But he’s laid on a dinner-party at Mayor’s House tomorrow evening-seven o’ the clock for most folk, eight for you young fellows… so you can make a bit of an entrance, I imagine, add a touch o’ drama, like. And I need not tell such as yourselves, who’ve probably attended more such parties than I’ve had hot dinners, that it would be best to arrive pretty much on the dot.”

“Is it fancy-dress?” Cuthbert asked uneasily. “Because we’ve come a long way, almost four hundred wheels, and we didn’t pack formal wear and sashes, none of us.”

Avery was chuckling-more honestly this time, Roland thought, perhaps because he felt “Arthur” had displayed a streak of unsophistication and insecurity. “Nay, young master, Thorin understands ye’ve come to do a job-next door to workin cowboys, ye be! 'Ware they don’t have ye out draggin nets in the bay next!”

From the comer, Dave-the deputy with the monocle-honked unexpected laughter. Perhaps it was the sort of joke you had to be local to understand, Roland thought.

“Wear the best ye have, and ye’ll be fine. There’ll be no one there in sashes, in any case-that’s not how things are done in Hambry.” Again

Roland was struck by the man’s constant smiling denigration of his town;iiul Barony… and the resentment of the outsiders which lay just beneath it.

“In any case, ye’ll find yerselves working more than playing tomorrow night, I imagine. Hart’s invited all the large ranchers, stockliners, and livestock owners from this part of the Barony… not that there’s so many, you understand, bein as how Mejis is next door to desert once you get west o’ the Drop. But everyone whose goods and chattel you’ve been sent to count will be there, and I think you’ll find all of them loyal Affiliation men, ready and eager to help. There’s Francis Lengyll of the Rocking B… John Croydon of the Piano Ranch… Henry Wertner, who’s the Barony’s stockliner as well as a horsebreeder in his own right… Hash Renfrew, who owns the Lazy Susan, the biggest horse-ranch in Mejis (not that it’s much by the standards you fellows are used to, I wot)… and there’ll be others, as well. Rimer’ll introduce you, and get you about your business right smart.”

Ronald nodded and turned to Cuthbert. “You’ll want to be on your mettle tomorrow night.”

Cuthbert nodded. “Don’t fear me, Will, I’ll note em all.”

Avery sipped more tea, eyeing them over his glass with a roguish expression so false it made Roland want to squirm.

“Most of em’s got daughters of marriageable age, and they’ll bring em. You boys want to look out.”

Roland decided he’d had enough tea and hypocrisy for one morning. He nodded, emptied his glass, smiled (hoping his looked more genuine than Avery’s now looked to him), and got to his feet. Cuthbert and Alain took the cue and did likewise.

“Thank you for the tea, and for the welcome,” Roland said. “Please send a message to Mayor Thorin, thanking him for his kindness and telling him that he’ll see us tomorrow, at eight o’ the clock, prompt.”

“Aye. So I will.”

Roland then turned to Dave. That worthy was so surprised to be noticed again that he recoiled, almost bumping his head on the notice-board. “And please thank your wife for the tea. It was wonderful.”

“I will. Thankee-sai.”

They went back outside, High Sheriff Avery herding them along like a genial, overweight sheepdog.

“As to where you’ll locate-” he began as they descended the steps and started down the walk. As soon as they hit the sunshine, he began to sweat.

“Oh, land, I forgot to ask you about that,” Roland said, knocking the heel of his hand against his forehead. “We’ve camped out on that long slope, lots of horses as you go down the turf, I’m sure you know where I mean-”

“The Drop, aye.”

“-but without permission, because we don’t yet know who to ask.”

“That’d be John Croydon’s land, and I’m sure he wouldn’t begrudge ye, but we mean to do ye better than that. There’s a spread northwest of here, the Bar K. Used to b'long to the Garber family, but they gave it up and moved on after a fire. Now it b'longs to the Horsemen’s Association-that’s a little local group of farmers and ranchers. I spoke to Francis Lengyll about you fellows-he’s the H.A. president just current-and he said 'We’ll put em out to the old Garber place, why not?'”

“Why not?” Cuthbert agreed in a gentle, musing voice. Roland shot him a sharp glance, but Cuthbert was looking down at the harbor, where the small fishing boats skittered to and fro like waterbugs.

“Aye, just what I said, 'Why not, indeed?' I said. The home place burned to a cinder, but the bunkhouse still stands; so does the stable and the cook-shack next door to it. On Mayor Thorin’s orders, I’ve taken the liberty of stocking the larder and having the bunkhouse swept out and spruced up a little. Ye may see the occasional bug, but nothing that’ll bite or sting… and no snakes, unless there’s a few under the floor, and if there are, let em stay there’s what I say. Hey, boys? Let em stay there!”

“Let em stay there, right under the floor where they’re happy,” Cuthbert agreed, still gazing down at the harbor with his arms folded over his chest.

Avery gave him a brief, uncertain glance, his smile flickering a bit at the comers. Then he turned back to Roland, and the smile shone out strongly once more. “There’s no holes in the roof, lad, and if it rains, ye’ll be dry. What think ye of that? Does it sound well to ye?”

“Better than we deserve. I think that you’ve been very efficient and Mayor Thorin’s been far too kind.” And he did think that. The question was why. “But we appreciate his thoughtfulness. Don’t we, boys?”

Cuthbert and Alain made vigorous assent.

“And we accept with thanks.”

Avery nodded. “I’ll tell him. Go safely, boys.”

They had reached the hitching rail. Avery once more shook hands all around, this time saving his keenest looks for their horses.

“Until tomorrow night, then, young gents?”

“Tomorrow night,” Roland agreed.

“Will ye be able to find the Bar K on your own, do yer think?”

Again Roland was struck by the man’s unspoken contempt and unconscious condescension. Yet perhaps it was to the good. If the High Sheriff thought they were stupid, who knew what might come of it?

“We’ll find it,” Cuthbert said, mounting up. Avery was looking suspiciously at the rook’s skull on the horn of Cuthbert’s saddle. Cuthbert saw him looking, but for once managed to keep his mouth shut. Roland was both amazed and pleased by this unexpected reticence. “Fare you well, Sheriff.”

“And you, boy.”

He stood there by the hitching post, a large man in a khaki shirt with sweat-stains around the armpits and black boots that looked too shiny for a working sheriff’s feet. And where’s the horse that could support him through a day of range-riding? Roland thought. I’d like to see the cut of that Cayuse.

Avery waved to them as they went. The other deputies came down the walk, Deputy Dave in the forefront. They waved, too.

3

The moment the Affiliation brats mounted on their fathers’ expensive horseflesh were around the comer and headed downhill to the High Street, the sheriff and the deputies stopped waving. Avery turned to Dave Hollis, whose expression of slightly stupid awe had been replaced by one marginally more intelligent.

“What think ye, Dave?”

Dave lifted his monocle to his mouth and began to nibble nervously at its brass edging, a habit about which Sheriff Avery had long since ceased to nag him. Even Dave’s wife, Judy, had given up on that score, and Judy Hollis-Judy Wertner that was-was a fair engine when it came to getting her own way.

“Soft,” Dave said. “Soft as eggs just dropped out of a chicken’s ass.”

“Mayhap,” Avery said, putting his thumbs in his belt and rocking enormously back and forth, “but the one did most of the talking, him in the flathead hat, he doesn’t think he’s soft.”

“Don’t matter what he thinks,” Dave said, still nibbling at his eyeglass. “He’s in Hambry, now. He may have to change his way of thinking to our'n.”

Behind him, the other deputies laughed. Even Avery smiled. They would leave the rich boys alone if the rich boys left them alone-those were orders, straight from Mayor’s House-but Avery had to admit that he wouldn’t mind a little dust-up with them, so he wouldn’t. He would enjoy putting his boot into the balls of the one with that idiotic bird’s skull on his saddle-horn-standing there and mocking him, he’d been, thinking all the while that Herk Avery was too country-dumb to know what he was up to-but the thing he’d realty enjoy would be beating the cool look from the eyes of the boy in the flathead preacher’s hat, seeing a hotter expression of fear rise up in them as Mr. Will Dearborn of Hemphill realized that New Canaan was far away and his rich father couldn’t help him.

“Aye,” he said, clapping Dave on the shoulder. “Mayhap he’ll have to change his way of thinking.” He smiled-one very different from any of those he had shown the Affiliation counters. “Mayhap they all will.”

4

The three boys rode in single file until they were past the Travellers’ Rest (a young and obviously retarded man with kinky black hair looked up from scrubbing the brick stoop and waved to them; they waved back). Then they moved up abreast, Roland in the middle.

“What did you think of our new friend, the High Sheriff?” Roland asked.

“I have no opinion,” Cuthbert said brightly. “No, none at all. Opinion is politics, and politics is an evil which has caused many a fellow to be hung while he’s still young and pretty.” He leaned forward and tapped the rook’s skull with his knuckles. “The lookout didn’t care for him, though. I’m sorry to say that our faithful lookout thought Sheriff Avery a fat bag of guts without a trustworthy bone in his body.”

Roland turned to Alain. “And you, young Master Stockworth?”

Alain considered it for some time, as was his way, chewing a piece of grass he’d bent oversaddle to pluck from his side of the road. At last he said: “If he came upon us burning in the street, I don’t think he’d piss on us to put us out.”

Cuthbert laughed heartily at that. “And you, Will? How do you say, dear captain?”

“He doesn’t interest me much… but one thing he said does. Given that the horse-meadow they call the Drop has to be at least thirty wheels long and runs five or more to the dusty desert, how do you suppose Sheriff Avery knew we were on the part of it that belongs to Croydon’s Piano Ranch?”

They looked at him, first with surprise, then speculation. After a moment Cuthbert leaned forward and rapped once more on the rook’s skull. “We’re being watched, and you never reported it? No supper for you, sir, and it’ll be the stockade the next time it happens!”

But before they had gone much farther, Roland’s thoughts of Sheriff Avery gave way to more pleasant ones of Susan Delgado. He would see her the following night, of that he was sure. He wondered if her hair would be down.

He couldn’t wait to find out.

5

Now here they were, at Mayor’s House. Let the game begin, Roland thought, not clear on what that meant even as the phrase went through his mind, surely not thinking of Castles… not then.

The hostlers led their mounts away, and for a moment the three of them stood at the foot of the steps-huddled, almost, as horses do in unfriendly weather-their beardless faces washed by the light of the torches. From inside, the guitars played and voices were raised in a fresh eddy of laughter.

“Do we knock?” Cuthbert asked. “Or just open and march in?”

Roland was spared answering. The main door of the had was thrown open and two women stepped out, both wearing long white-collared dresses that reminded all three boys of the dresses stockmen’s wives wore in their own part of the world. Their hair was caught back in snoods that sparkled with some bright diamondy stuff in the light of the torches.

The plumper of the two stepped forward, smiling, and dropped them a deep curtsey. Her earrings, which looked like square-cut firedims, flashed and bobbed. “You are the young men from the Affiliation, so you are, and welcome you are, as well. Goodeven, sirs, and may your days be long upon the earth!”

They bowed in unison, boots forward, and thanked her in an unintended chorus that made her laugh and clap her hands. The tall woman beside her offered them a smile as spare as her frame.

“I am Olive Thorin,” the plump woman said, “the Mayor’s wife. This is my sister-in-law, Coral.”

Coral Thorin, still with that narrow smile (it barely creased her lips and touched her eyes not at all), dipped them a token curtsey. Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain bowed again over their outstretched legs.

“I welcome you to Seafront,” Olive Thorin said, her dignity leavened and made pleasant by her artless smile, her obvious dazzlement at the appearance of her young visitors from In-World. “Come to our house with joy. I say so with all my heart, so I do.”

“And so we will, madam,” Roland said, “for your greeting has made us joyful.” He took her hand, and, with no calculation whatever, raised it to his lips and kissed it. Her delighted laughter made him smile. He liked Olive Thorin on sight, and it was perhaps well he met someone of that sort early on, for, with the problematic exception of Susan Delgado, he met no one else he liked, no one else he trusted, all that night.

6

It was warm enough even with the seabreeze, and the cloak- and coat-collector in the foyer looked as though he’d had little or no custom. Roland wasn’t entirely surprised to see that it was Deputy Dave, his remaining bits of hair slicked back with some sort of gleaming grease and his monocle now lying on the snow-white breast of a houseman’s jacket. Roland gave him a nod. Dave, his hands clasped behind his back, returned it.

Two men-Sheriff Avery and an elderly gent as gaunt as Old Doctor Death in a cartoon-came toward them. Beyond, through a pair of double doors now open wide, a whole roomful of people stood about with crystal punch-cups in their hands, talking and taking little bits of food from the trays which were circulating.

Roland had time for just one narrow-eyed glance toward Cuthbert:

Everything. Every name, every face… every nuance. Especially those.

Cuthbert raised an eyebrow-his discreet version of a nod-and then Roland was pulled, willy-nilly, into the evening, his first real evening of service as a working gunslinger. And he had rarely worked harder.

Old Doctor Death turned out to be Kimba Rimer, Thorin’s Chancellor and Minister of Inventory (Roland suspected the title had been made up special for their visit). He was easily five inches taller than Roland, who was considered tall in Gilead, and his skin was pale as candlewax. Not unhealthy-looking; just pale. Wings of iron-gray hair floated away from either side of his head, gossamer as cobwebs. The top of his skull was completely bald. Balanced on his whelk of a nose was a pince-nez.

“My boys!” he said, when the introductions had been made. He had the smooth, sadly sincere voice of a politician or an undertaker. “Welcome to Mejis! To Hambry! And to Seafront, our humble Mayor’s House!”

“If this is humble, I should wonder at the palace your folk might build,” Roland said. It was a mild enough remark, more pleasantry than witticism (he ordinarily left the wit to Bert), but Chancellor Rimer laughed hard. So did Sheriff Avery.

“Come, boys!” Rimer said, when he apparently felt he had expressed enough amusement. “The Mayor awaits you with impatience, I’m sure.”

“Aye,” said a timid voice from behind them. The skinny sister-in-law, Coral, had disappeared, but Olive Thorin was still there, looking up at the newcomers with her hands decorously clasped before that area of her body which might once have been her waist. She was still smiling her hopeful, pleasant smile. “Very eager to meet you, Hart is, very eager, indeed. Shall I conduct them, Kimba, or-”

“Nay, nay, you mustn’t trouble yourself with so many other guests to attend,” Rimer said.

“I suppose you’re right.” She curtseyed to Roland and his companions a final time, and although she still smiled and although the smile looked completely genuine to Roland, he thought: She’s unhappy about something, all the same. Desperately so, I think.

“Gentlemen?” Rimer asked. The teeth in his smile were almost disconcertingly huge. “Will ye come?”

He led them past the grinning Sheriff and into the reception hall.

7

Roland was hardly overwhelmed by it; he had, after all, been in the Great Hall of Gilead-the Hall of the Grandfathers, it was sometimes called-and had even peeped down on the great party which was held there each year, the so-called Dance of Easterling, which marked the end of Wide Earth and the advent of Sowing. There were five chandeliers in the Great Hall instead of just one, and lit with electric bulbs rather than oil lamps. The dress of the partygoers (many of them expensive young men and women who had never done a hand’s turn of work in their lives, a fact of which John Farson spoke at every opportunity) had been richer, the music had been fuller, the company of older and nobler lines which grew closer and closer together as they stretched back toward Arthur Eld, he of the white horse and unifying sword.

Yet there was life here, and plenty of it. There was a robustness that had been missing in Gilead, and not just at Easterling, either. The texture he felt as he stepped into the Mayor’s House reception room was the sort of thing, Roland reflected, that you didn’t entirely miss when it was gone, because it slipped away quietly and painlessly. Like blood from a vein cut in a tub filled with hot water.

The room-almost but not quite grand enough to be a hall-was circular, its panelled walls decorated by paintings (most quite bad) of previous Mayors. On a raised stand to the right of the doors leading into the dining area, four grinning guitarists in tati jackets and sombreros were playing something that sounded like a waltz with pepper on it. In the center of the floor was a table supporting two cut-glass punchbowls, one vast and grand, the other smaller and plainer. The white-jacketed fellow in charge of the dipping-out operations was another of Avery’s deputies.

Contrary to what the High Sheriff had told them the day before, several of the men were wearing sashes of various colors, but Roland didn’t feel too out of place in his white silk shirt, black string tie, and one pair of stovepipe dress trousers. For every man wearing a sash, he saw three wearing the sort of dowdy, box-tailed coats that he associated with stockmen at church, and he saw several others (younger men, for the most part) who weren’t wearing coats at all. Some of the women wore jewelry (though nothing so expensive as sai Thorin’s firedim earrings), and few looked as if they’d missed many meals, but they also wore clothes Roland recognized: the long, round-collared dresses, usually with the lace fringe of a colored underskirt showing below the hem, the dark shoes with low heels, the snoods (most sparkling with gem-dust, as those of Olive and Coral Thorin had been).

And then he saw one who was very different.

It was Susan Delgado, of course, shimmering and almost too beautiful to look at in a blue silk dress with a high waist and a square-cut bodice which showed the tops of her breasts. Around her neck was a sapphire pendant that made Olive Thorin’s earrings look like paste. She stood next to a man wearing a sash the color of coals in a hot woodfire. That deep orange-red was the Barony’s color, and Roland supposed that the man was their host, but for the moment Roland barely saw him. His eye was held by Susan Delgado: the blue dress, the tanned skin, the triangles of color, too pale and perfect to be makeup, which ran lightly up her cheeks; most of all her hair, which was unbound tonight and fell to her waist like a shimmer of palest silk. He wanted her, suddenly and completely, with a desperate depth of feeling that felt like sickness. Everything he was and everything he had come for, it seemed, was secondary to her.

She turned a little, then, and spied him. Her eyes (they were gray, he saw) widened the tiniest bit. He thought that the color in her cheeks deepened a little. Her lips-lips that had touched his as they stood on a dark road, he thought with wonder-parted a little. Then the man standing next to Thorin (also tall, also skinny, with a mustache and long white hair lying on the dark shoulders of his coat) said something, and she turned back to him. A moment later the group around Thorin was laughing, Susan included. The man with the white hair didn’t join them, but smiled thinly.

Roland, hoping his face did not give away the fact that his heart was pounding like a hammer, was led directly to this group, which stood close to the punchbowls. Distantly, he could feel Rimer’s bony confederation of fingers clamped to his arm above the elbow. More clearly he could smell mingled perfumes, the oil from the lamps on the walls, the aroma of the ocean. And thought, for no reason at all, Oh, I am dying. I am dying.

Take hold of yourself, Roland of Gilead. Stop this foolishness, for your father’s sake. Take hold!

He tried… to some degree succeeded… and knew he would be lost the next time she looked at him. It was her eyes. The other night, in the dark, he hadn’t been able to see those fog-colored eyes. I didn’t know how lucky I was, he thought wryly.

“Mayor Thorin?” Rimer asked. “May I present our guests from the Inner Baronies?”

Thorin turned away from the man with the long white hair and the woman standing next to him, his face brightening. He was shorter than his Chancellor but just as thin, and his build was peculiar: a short and narrow-shouldered upper body over impossibly long and skinny legs, He looked, Roland thought, like the sort of bird you should glimpse in a marsh at dawn, bobbing for its breakfast.

“Aye, you may!” he cried in a strong, high voice. “Indeed you may, we’ve been waiting with impatience, great impatience, for this moment! Well met we are, very well met! Welcome, sirs! May your evening in this house of which I am the fleeting proprietor be happy, and may your days be long upon the earth!”

Roland took the bony outstretched hand, heard the knuckles crack beneath his grip, looked for an expression of discomfort on the Mayor’s face, and was relieved to see none. He bowed low over his outstretched leg.

“William Dearborn, Mayor Thorin, at your service. Thank you for your welcome, and may your own days be long upon the earth.”

“Arthur Heath” made his manners next, then “Richard Stockworth.” Thorin’s smile widened at each deep bow. Rimer did his best to beam, but looked unused to it. The man with the long white hair took a glass of punch, passed it to his female companion, and continued to smile thinly. Roland was aware that everyone in the room-the guests numbered perhaps fifty in all-was looking at them, but what he felt most upon his skin, beating like a soft wing, was her regard. He could see the blue silk of her dress from the side of one eye, but did not dare look at her more directly.

“Was your trip difficult?” Thorin was asking. “Did you have adventures and experience perils? We would hear all the details at dinner, so we would, for we have few guests from the Inner Arc these days.” His eager, slightly fatuous smile faded; his tufted brows drew together. “Did ye encounter patrols of Farson?”

“No, Excellency,” Roland said. “We-”

“Nay, lad, nay-no Excellency, I won’t have it, and the fisherfolk and hoss-drovers I serve wouldn’t, even if I would. Just Mayor Thorin, if you please.”

“Thank you. We saw many strange things on our journey, Mayor Thorin, but no Good Men.”

“Good Men!” Rimer jerked out, and his upper lip lifted in a smile which made him look doglike. “Good Men, indeed!”

“We would hear it all, every word,” Thorin said. “But before I forget my manners in my eagerness, young gentlemen, let me introduce you to these close around me. Kimba you’ve met; this formidable fellow to my left is Eldred Jonas, chief of my newly installed security staff.” Thorin’s smile looked momentarily embarrassed. “I’m not convinced that I need extra security, Sheriff Avery’s always been quite enough to keep the peace in our comer of the world, but Kimba insists. And when Kimba insists, the Mayor must bow.”

“Very wise, sir,” Rimer said, and bowed himself. They all laughed, save for Jonas, who simply held onto his narrow smile.

Jonas nodded. “Pleased, gents, I’m sure.” The voice was a reedy quaver. He then wished them long days upon the earth, all three, coming to Roland last in his round of handshaking. His grip was dry and firm, utterly untouched by the tremor in his voice. And now Roland noticed the queer blue shape tattooed on the back of the man’s right hand, in the webbing between thumb and first finger. It looked like a coffin.

“Long days, pleasant nights,” Roland said with hardly a thought. It was a greeting from his childhood, and it was only later that he would realize it was one more apt to be associated with Gilead than with any such rural place as Hemphill. Just a small slip, but he was beginning to believe that their margin for such slips might be a good deal less than his father had thought when he had sent Roland here to get him out of Marten’s way.

“And to you,” Jonas said. His bright eyes measured Roland with a thoroughness that was close to insolence, still holding his hand. Then he released it and stepped back.

“Cordelia Delgado,” Mayor Thorin said, next bowing to the woman who had been speaking to Jonas. As Roland also bowed in her direction, he saw the family resemblance… except that what looked generous and lovely on Susan’s face looked pinched and folded on the face before him now. Not the girl’s mother; Roland guessed that Cordelia Delgado was a bit too young for that.

“And our especial friend, Miss Susan Delgado,” Thorin finished, sounding flustered (Roland supposed she would have that effect on any man, even an old one like the Mayor). Thorin urged her forward, bobbing his head and grinning, one of his knuckle-choked hands pressed against the small of her back, and Roland felt an instant of poisonous jealousy. Ridiculous, given this man’s age and his plump, pleasant wife, but it was there, all right, and it was sharp. Sharp as a bee’s ass, Cort would have said.

Then her face tilted up to his, and he was looking into her eyes again.

He had heard of drowning in a woman’s eyes in some poem or story, and thought it ridiculous. He still thought it ridiculous, but understood it was perfectly possible, nonetheless. And she knew it. He saw concern in her eyes, perhaps even fear.

Promise me that if we meet at Mayor’s House, we meet for the first time.

The memory of those words had a sobering, clarifying effect, and seemed to widen his vision a little. Enough for him to be aware that the woman beside Jonas, the one who shared some of Susan’s features, was looking at the girl with a mixture of curiosity and alarm.

He bowed low, but did little more than touch her ringless outstretched hand. Even so, he felt something like a spark jump between their fingers. From the momentary widening of those eyes, he thought that she felt it, too.

“Pleased to meet you, sai,” he said. His attempt to be casual sounded tinny and false in his own ears. Still, he was begun, it felt like the whole world was watching him (them), and there was nothing to do but go on with it. He tapped his throat three times. “May your days be long-”

“Aye, and yours, Mr. Dearborn. Thankee-sai.”

She turned to Alain with a rapidity that was almost rude, then to Cuthbert, who bowed, tapped, then said gravely: “Might I recline briefly at your feet, miss? Your beauty has loosened my knees. I’m sure a few moments spent looking up at your profile from below, with the back of my head on these cool tiles, would put me right.”

They all laughed at that-even Jonas and Miss Cordelia. Susan blushed prettily and slapped the back of Cuthbert’s hand. For once Roland blessed his friend’s relentless sense of foolery.

Another man joined the party by the punchbowl. This newcomer was blocky and blessedly un-thin in his boxtail coat. His cheeks burned with high color that looked like windburn rather than drink, and his pale eyes lay in nets of wrinkles. A rancher; Roland had ridden often enough with his father to know the look.

“There’ll be maids a-plenty to meet you boys tonight,” the newcomer said with a friendly enough smile. “Ye’ll find y’selves drunk on perfume if ye’re not careful. But I’d like my crack at you before you meet em. Fran Lengyll, at your service.”

His grip was strong and quick; no bowing or other nonsense went with it.

“I own the Rocking B… or it owns me, whichever way ye want to look at it. I’m also boss of the Horsemen’s Association, at least until they fire me. The Bar K was my idea. Hope it’s all right.”

“It’s perfect, sir,” Alain said. “Clean and dry and room for twenty. Thank you. You’ve been too kind.”

“Nonsense,” Lengyll said, looking pleased all the same as he knocked back a glass of punch. “We’re all in this together, boy. John Farson’s but one bad straw in a field of wrong-headedness these days. The world’s moved on, folks say. Huh! So it has, aye, and a good piece down the road to hell is where it’s moved on to. Our job is to hold the hay out of the furnace as well as we can, as long as we can. For the sake of our children even more than for that of our fathers.”

“Hear, hear,” Mayor Thorin said in a voice that strove for the high ground of solemnity and fell with a splash into fatuity instead. Roland noticed the scrawny old fellow was gripping one of Susan’s hands (she seemed almost unaware of it; was looking intently at Lengyll instead), and suddenly he understood: the Mayor was either her uncle or perhaps a cousin of some close degree. Lengyll ignored both, looking at the three newcomers instead, scrutinizing each in turn and finishing with Roland.

“Anything us in Mejis can do to help, lad, just ask-me, John Croydon, Hash Renfrew, Jake White, Hank Wertner, any or all. Ye’ll meet em tonight, aye, their wives and sons and daughters as well, and ye need only ask. We may be a good piece out from the hub of New Canaan here, but we’re strong for the Affiliation, all the same. Aye, very strong.”

“Well spoken,” Rimer said quietly.

“And now,” Lengyll said, “we’ll toast your arrival proper. And ye’ve had to wait too long already for a dip of punch. It’s dry as dust ye must be.”

He turned to the punchbowls and reached for the ladle in the larger and more ornate of the two, waving off the attendant, clearly wanting to honor them by serving them himself.

“Mr. Lengyll,” Roland said quietly. Yet there was a force of command in that voice; Fran Lengyll heard it and turned.

“The smaller bowl is soft punch, is it not?”

Lengyll considered this, at first not understanding. Then his eyebrow went up. For the first time he seemed to consider Roland and the others not as living symbols of the Affiliation and the Inner Baronies, but as actual human beings. Young ones. Only boys, when you got right down to it.

“Aye?”

“Draw ours from that, if you’d be so kind.” He felt all eyes upon them now. Her eyes particularly. He kept his own firmly fixed on the rancher, but his peripheral vision was good, and he was very aware that Jonas’s thin smile had resurfaced. Jonas knew what this was about already. Roland supposed Thorin and Rimer did, as well. These country mice knew a lot. More than they should, and he would need to think about that carefully later. It was the least of his concerns at the current moment, however.

“We have forgotten the faces of our fathers in a matter that has some bearing on our posting to Hambry.” Roland was uncomfortably aware that he was now making a speech, like it or not. It wasn’t the whole room he was addressing-thank the gods for little blessings-but the circle of listeners had grown well beyond the original group. Yet there was nothing for it but to finish; the boat was launched. “I needn’t go into details-nor would you expect them, I know-but I should say that we promised not to indulge in spirits during our time here. As penance, you see.”

Her gaze. He could still feel it on his skin, it seemed.

For a moment there was complete quiet in the little group around the punchbowls, and then Lengyll said: “Your father would be proud to hear ye speak so frank, Will Dearborn-aye, so he would. And what boy worth his salt didn’t get up to a little noise ’ wind from time to time?” He clapped Roland on the shoulder, and although the grip of his hand was firm and his smile looked genuine, his eyes were hard to read, only gleams of speculation deep in those beds of wrinkles. “In his place, may I be proud for him?”

“Yes,” Roland said, smiling in return. “And with my thanks.”

“And mine,” Cuthbert said.

“Mine as well,” Alain said quietly, taking the offered cup of soft punch and bowing to Lengyll.

Lengyll filled more cups and handed them rapidly around. Those already holding cups found them plucked away and replaced with fresh cups of the soft punch. When each of the immediate group had one, Lengyll turned, apparently intending to offer the toast himself. Rimer tapped him on the shoulder, shook his head slightly, and cut his eyes toward the Mayor. That worthy was looking at them with his eyes rather popped and his jaw slightly dropped. To Roland he looked like an enthralled playgoer in a penny seat; all he needed was a lapful of orange-peel. Lengyll followed the Chancellor’s glance and then nodded.

Rimer next caught the eye of the guitar player standing at the center of the musicians. He stopped playing; so did the others. The guests looked that way, then back to the center of the room when Thorin began speaking. There was nothing ridiculous about his voice when he put it to use as he now did-it was carrying and pleasant.

“Ladies and gentlemen, my friends,” he said. “I would ask you to help me in welcoming three new friends-young men from the Inner Baronies, fine young men who have dared great distances and many perils on behalf of the Affiliation, and in the service of order and peace.”

Susan Delgado set her punch-cup aside, retrieved her hand (with some difficulty) from her uncle’s grip, and began to clap. Others joined in. The applause which swept the room was brief but warm. Eldred Jonas did not, Roland noticed, put his cup aside to join in.

Thorin turned to Roland, smiling. He raised his cup. “May I set you on with a word, Will Dearborn?”

“Aye, so you may, and with thanks,” Roland said. There was laughter and fresh applause at his usage.

Thorin raised his cup even higher. Everyone else in the room followed suit; crystal gleamed like starpoints in the light of the chandelier.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I give you William Dearborn of Hemphill, Richard Stockworth of Pennilton, and Arthur Heath of Gilead.”

Gasps and murmurs at that last, as if their Mayor had announced Arthur Heath of Heaven.

“Take of them well, give to them well, make their days in Mejis sweet, and their memories sweeter. Help them in their work and to advance the causes which are so dear to all of us. May their days be long upon the earth. So says your Mayor.”

“SO SAY WE ALL!” they thundered back.

Thorin drank; the rest followed his example. There was fresh applause. Roland turned, helpless to stop himself, and found Susan’s eyes again at once. For a moment she looked at him fully, and in her frank gaze he saw that she was nearly as shaken by his presence as he was by hers. Then the older woman who looked like her bent and murmured something into her ear. Susan turned away, her face a composed mask… but he had seen her regard in her eyes. And thought again that what was done might be undone, and what was spoken might be unspoken.

8

As they passed into the dining hall, which had tonight been set with four long trestle tables (so close there was barely room to move between them), Cordelia tugged her niece’s hand, pulling her back from the Mayor and Jonas, who had fallen into conversation with Fran Lengyll.

“Why looked you at him so, miss?” Cordelia whispered furiously. The vertical line had appeared on her forehead. Tonight it looked as deep as a trench. “What ails thy pretty, stupid head?” Thy. Just that was enough to tell Susan that her aunt was in a fine rage.

“Looked at who? And how?” Her tone sounded right, she thought, but oh, her heart-

The hand over hers clamped down, hurting. “Play no fiddle with me, Miss Oh So Young and Pretty! Have ye ever seen that fine-turned row of pins before? Tell me the truth!”

“No, how could I? Aunt, you’re hurting me.”

Aunt Cord smiled balefully and clamped down harder. “Better a small hurt now than a large one later. Curb your impudence. And curb your flirtatious eyes.”

“Aunt, I don’t know what you-”

“I think you do,” Cordelia said grimly, pressing her niece close to the wood panelling to allow the guests to stream past them. When the rancher who owned the boathouse next to theirs said hello, Aunt Cord smiled pleasantly at him and wished him goodeven before turning back to Susan.

“Mind me, miss-mind me well. If I saw yer cow’s eyes, ye may be sure that half the company saw. Well, what’s done is done, but it stops now. Your time for such child-maid games is over. Do you understand?”

Susan was silent, her face setting in those stubborn lines Cordelia hated most of all; it was an expression that always made her feel like slapping her headstrong niece until her nose bled and her great gray doe’s eyes gushed tears.

“Ye’ve made a vow and a contract. Papers have been passed, the weird-woman has been consulted, money has changed hands. And ye’ve given your promise. If that means nothing to such as yerself, girl, remember what it’d mean to yer father.”

Tears rose in Susan’s eyes again, and Cordelia was glad to see them. Her brother had been an improvident irritation, capable of producing only this far too pretty womanchild… but he had his uses, even dead.

“Now promise ye’ll keep yer eyes to yourself, and that if ye see that boy coming, ye’ll swing wide-aye, wide’s you can-to stay out of his way.”

“I promise. Aunt,” Susan whispered. “I do.”

Cordelia smiled. She was really quite pretty when she smiled. “It’s well, then. Let’s go in. We’re being looked at. Hold my arm, child!”

Susan clasped her aunt’s powdered arm. They entered the room side by side, their dresses rustling, the sapphire pendant on the swell of Susan’s breast flashing, and many there were who remarked upon how alike they looked, and how well pleased poor old Pat Delgado would have been with them.

9

Roland was seated near the head of the center table, between Hash Renfrew (a rancher even bigger and blockier than Lengyll) and Thorin’s rather morose sister, Coral. Renfrew had been handy with the punch; now, as the soup was brought to table, he set about proving himself equally adept with the ale.

He talked about the fishing trade (“not what it useter be, boy, although it’s less muties they pull up in their nets these days, ’ that’s a blessin”), the farming trade (“folks round here can grow most anythin, long’s it’s corn or beans”), and finally about those things clearly closest to his heart: horsin, coursin, and ranchin. Those businesses went on as always, aye, so they did, although times had been hard in the grass-and-sea-coast Baronies for forty year or more.

Weren’t the bloodlines clarifying? Roland asked. For they had begun to do so where he came from.

Aye, Renfrew agreed, ignoring his potato soup and gobbling barbecued beef-strips instead. These he scooped up with a bare hand and washed down with more ale. Aye, young master, bloodlines was clarifying wonderful well, indeed they were, three colts out of every five were threaded stock-in thoroughbred as well as common lines, kennit-and the fourth could be kept and worked if not bred. Only one in five these days born with extra legs or extra eyes or its guts on the outside, and that was good. But the birthrates were way down, so they were; the stallions had as much ram as ever in their ramrods, it seemed, but not as much powder and ball.

“Beggin your pardon, ma’am,” Renfrew said, leaning briefly across Roland to Coral Thorin. She smiled her thin smile (it reminded Roland of Jonas’s), trudged her spoon through her soup, and said nothing. Renfrew emptied his ale-cup, smacked his lips heartily, and held the cup out again. As it was recharged, he turned back to Roland.

Things weren’t good, not as they once had been, but they could be worse. Would be worse, if that bugger Farson had his way. (This time he didn’t bother excusing himself to sai Thorin.) They all had to pull together, that was the ticket-rich and poor, great and small, while pulling could still do some good. And then he seconded Lengyll, telling Roland that whatever he and his friends wanted, whatever they needed, they had only to name it.

“Information should be enough,” Roland said. “Numbers of things.”

“Aye, can’t be a counter without numbers,” Renfrew agreed, and sprayed beery laughter. On Roland’s left hand, Coral Thorin nibbled a bit of green (the beef-strips she had not so much as touched), smiled her narrow smile, and went on boating with her spoon. Roland guessed there was nothing wrong with her ears, though, and that her brother might get a complete report of their conversation. Or possibly it would be Rimer to get the report. For, while it was too early to say for sure, Roland had an idea that Rimer might be the real force here. Along, perhaps, with sai Jonas.

“For instance,” Roland said, “how many riding horses do you think we may be able to report back to the Affiliation?”

“Tithe or total?”

“Total.”

Renfrew put his cup down and appeared to calculate. As he did, Roland looked across the table and saw Lengyll and Henry Wertner, the Barony’s stockliner, exchange a quick glance. They had heard. And he saw something else as well, when he returned his attention to his seatmate: Hash Renfrew was drunk, but likely not as drunk as he wanted young Will Dearborn to believe.

“Total, ye say-not just what we owe the Affiliation, or might be able to send along in a pinch.”

“Yes.”

“Well, let’s see, young sai. Fran must run a hundred'n forty head; John Croydon’s got near a hundred. Hank Wertner’s got forty on his own hook, and must run sixty more out along the Drop for the Barony. Gov'mint hossflesh, Mr. Dearborn.”

Roland smiled. “I know it well. Split hoofs, low necks, no speed, bottomless bellies.”

Renfrew laughed hard at that, nodding… but Roland found himself wondering if the man was really amused. In Hambry, the waters on top and the waters down below seemed to run in different directions.

“As for myself, I’ve had a bad ten or twelve year-sand-eye, brain fever, cabbards. At one time there was two hundred head of running horses out there on the Drop with the Lazy Susan brand on em; now there can’t be more than eighty.”

Roland nodded. “So we’re speaking of four hundred and twenty head.”

“Oh, more’n that,” Renfrew said with a laugh. He went to pick up his ale-cup, struck it with the side of one work- and weather-reddened hand, knocked it over, cursed, picked it up, then cursed the aleboy who came slow to refill it.

“More than that?” Roland prompted, when Renfrew was finally cocked and locked and ready to resume action.

“Ye have to remember, Mr. Dearborn, that this is hoss-country more than it’s fisher-country. We josh each other, we and the fishers, but there’s many a scale-scraper got a nag put away behind his house, or in the Barony stables if they have no roof of their own to keep the rain off a boss’s head. ’twas her poor da useter keep the Barony stables.”

Renfrew nodded toward Susan, who was seated across and three seats up from Roland himself-just a table’s turn from the Mayor, who was, of course, seated at the head. Roland found her placement there passing peculiar, especially given the fact that the Mayor’s missus had been seated almost all the way at the far end of the table, with Cuthbert on one side of her and some rancher to whom they had not yet been introduced on her other.

Roland supposed an old fellow like Thorin might like to have a pretty young relation near at hand to help draw attention to him, or to cheer up his own eye, but it still seemed odd. Almost an insult to one’s wife. If he was tired of her conversation, why not put her at the head of another table?

They have their own customs, that’s all, and the customs of the country aren’t your concern. This man’s crazy horse-count is your concern.

“How many other running horses, would you say?” he asked Renfrew. “In all?”

Renfrew gazed at him shrewdly. “An honest answer’ll not come back to haunt me, will it, sonny? I’m an Affiliation man-so I am, Affiliation to the core, they’ll carve Excalibur on my gravehead, like as not-but I’d not see Hambry and Mejis stripped of all its treasure.”

“That won’t happen, sai. How could we force you to give up what you don’t want to in any case? Such forces as we have are all committed in the north and west, against the Good Man.”

Renfrew considered this, then nodded.

“And may I not be Will to you?”

Renfrew brightened, nodded, and offered his hand a second time. He grinned broadly when Roland this time shook it in both of his, the over-and-under grip preferred by drovers and cowboys.

“These’re bad times we live in, Will, and they’ve bred bad manners. I’d guess there are probably another hundred and fifty head of horse in and about Mejis. Good ones is what I mean.”

“Big-hat stock.”

Renfrew nodded, clapped Roland on the back, ingested a goodly quaff of ale. “Big-hats, aye.”

From the top of their table there came a burst of laughter. Jonas had apparently said something funny. Susan laughed without reservation, her head tilted back and her hands clasped before the sapphire pendant. Cordelia, who sat with the girl on her left and Jonas on her right, was also laughing. Thorin was absolutely convulsed, rocking back and forth in his chair, wiping his eyes with a napkin.

“Yon’s a lovely girl,” Renfrew said. He spoke almost reverently. Roland could not quite swear that a small sound-a womanly hmmpf, perhaps-had come from his other side. He glanced in that direction and saw sai Thorin still sporting with her soup. He looked back toward the head of the table.

“Is the Mayor her uncle, or perhaps her cousin?” Roland asked.

What happened next had a heightened clarity in his memory, as if someone had turned up all the colors and sounds of the world. The velvet swags behind Susan suddenly seemed a brighter red; the caw of laughter which came from Coral Thorin was the sound of a breaking branch. It was surely loud enough to make everyone in the vicinity stop their conversations and look at her, Roland thought… except only Renfrew and the two ranchers across the table did.

“Her uncle!” It was her first conversation of the evening. “Her uncle, that’s good. Eh, Rennie?”

Renfrew said nothing, only pushed his ale-cup away and finally began to eat his soup.

“I’m surprised at ye, young man, so I am. Ye may be from the In-World, but oh goodness, whoever tended to your education of the real world-the one outside of books ’ maps-stopped a mite short, I’d say. She’s his-” And then a word so thick with dialect that Roland had no idea what it was. Seefin, it sounded, or perhaps sheevin.

“I beg pardon?” He was smiling, but the smile felt cold and false on his mouth. There was a heaviness in his belly, as if the punch and the soup and the single beef-strip he had eaten for politeness’ sake had all lumped together in his stomach. Do you serve? he’d asked her, meaning did she serve at table. Mayhap she did serve, but likely she did it in a room rather more private than this. Suddenly he wanted to hear no more; had not the slightest interest in the meaning of the word the Mayor’s sister had used.

Another burst of laughter rocked the top of the table. Susan laughed with her head back, her cheeks glowing, her eyes sparkling. One strap of her dress had slipped down her arm, disclosing the tender hollow of her shoulder. As he watched, his heart full of fear and longing, she brushed it absently back into place with the palm of her hand.

“It means ‘quiet little woman,’” Renfrew said, clearly uncomfortable. “It’s an old term, not used much these days-”

“Stop it, Rennie,” said Coral Thorin. Then, to Roland: “He’s just an old cowboy, and can’t quit shovelling horseshit even when he’s away from his beloved nags. Sheevin means side-wife. In the time of my great-grandmother, it meant whore… but one of a certain kind.” She looked with a pale eye at Susan, who was now sipping ale, then turned back to Roland. There was a species of baleful amusement in her gaze, an expression that Roland liked little. “The kind of whore you had to pay for in coin, the kind too fine for the trade of simple folk.”

“She’s his gilly?” Roland asked through lips which felt as if they had been iced.

“Aye,” Coral said. “Not consummated, not until the Reap-and none too happy about that is my brother, I’ll warrant-but bought and paid for just as in the old days. So she is.” Coral paused, then said, “Her father would die of shame if he could see her.” She spoke with a kind of melancholy satisfaction.

“I hardly think we should judge the Mayor too harshly,” Renfrew said in an embarrassed, pontificating voice.

Coral ignored him. She studied the line of Susan’s jaw, the soft swell of her bosom above the silken edge of her bodice, the fall of her hair. The thin humor was gone from Coral Thorin’s face. In it now was a somehow chilling species of contempt.

In spite of himself, Roland found himself imagining the Mayor’s knuckle-bunchy hands pushing down the straps of Susan’s dress, crawling over her naked shoulders, plunging like gray crabs into the cave beneath her hair. He looked away, toward the table’s lower end, and what he saw there was no better. It was Olive Thorin that his eye found-Olive, who had been relegated to the foot of the table, Olive, looking up at the laughing folk who sat at its head. Looking up at her husband, who had replaced her with a beautiful young girl, and gifted that girl with a pendant which made her own firedim earrings look dowdy by comparison. There was none of Coral’s hatred and angry contempt on her face. Looking at her might have been easier if that were so. She only gazed at her husband with eyes that were humble, hopeful, and unhappy. Now Roland understood why he had thought her sad. She had every reason to be sad.

More laughter from the Mayor’s party; Rimer had leaned over from the next table, where he was presiding, to contribute some witticism. It must have been a good one. This time even Jonas was laughing. Susan put a hand to her bosom, then took her napkin and raised it to wipe a tear of laughter from the comer of her eye. Thorin covered her other hand. She looked toward Roland and met his eyes, still laughing. He thought of Olive Thorin, sitting down there at the foot of the table, with the salt and spices, an untouched bowl of soup before her and that unhappy smile on her face. Seated where the girl could see her, as well. And he thought that, had he been wearing his guns, he might well have drawn one and put a bullet in Susan Delgado’s cold and whoring little heart.

And thought: Who do you hope to fool?

Then one of the serving boys was there, putting a plate offish in front of him. Roland thought he had never felt less like eating in his life… but he would eat, just the same, just as he would turn his mind to the questions raised by his conversation with Hash Renfrew of the Lazy Susan Ranch. He would remember the face of his father.

Yes, I’ll remember it very well, he thought. If only I could forget the one above yon sapphire.

10

The dinner was interminable, and there was no escape afterward. The table at the center of the reception room had been removed, and when l lie guests came back that way-like a tide which has surged as high as it can and now ebbs-they formed two adjacent circles at the direction of a sprightly little redhaired man whom Cuthbert later dubbed Mayor Thorin’s Minister of Fun.

The boy-girl, boy-girl, boy-girl circling was accomplished with much laughter and some difficulty (Roland guessed that about three-quarters of (lie guests were now fairly well shottered), and then the guitarists struck up a quesa. This proved to be a simple sort of reel. The circles revolved in opposite directions, all holding hands, until the music stopped for a moment. Then the couple created at the place where the two circles touched danced at the center of the female partner’s circle, while everyone else clapped and cheered.

The lead musician managed this old and clearly well-loved tradition with a keen eye to the ridiculous, stopping his muchachos in order to create the most amusing couples: tall woman-short man, fat woman-skinny man, old woman-young man (Cuthbert ended up side-kicking with a woman as old as his great-granddame, to the sai’s breathless cackles and the company’s general roars of approval).

Then, just when Roland was thinking this stupid dance would never end, the music stopped and he found himself facing Susan Delgado.

For a moment he could do nothing but stare at her, feeling that his eyes must burst from their sockets, feeling that he could move neither of his stupid feet. Then she raised her arms, the music began, the circle (this one included Mayor Thorin and the watchful, narrowly smiling Eldred Jonas) applauded, and he led her into the dance.

At first, as he spun her through a figure (his feet moved with all their usual grace and precision, numb or not), he felt like a man made of glass. Then he became aware of her body touching his, and the rustle of her dress, and he was all too human again.

She moved closer for just a moment, and when she spoke, her breath tickled in his ear. He wondered if a woman could drive you mad-literally mad. He wouldn’t have believed so before tonight, but tonight everything had changed.

“Thank you for your discretion and your propriety,” she whispered.

He pulled back from her a little and at the same time twirled her, his hand against the small of her back-palm resting on cool satin, fingers touching warm skin. Her feet followed his with never a pause or stutter; they moved with perfect grace, unafraid of his great and booted clod-stompers even in their flimsy silk slippers.

“I can be discreet, sai,” he said. “As for propriety? I’m amazed you even know the word.”

She looked up into his cold face, her smile fading. He saw anger come in to fill it, but before anger there was hurt, as if he had slapped her. He felt both glad and sorry at the same time.

“Why do you speak so?” she whispered.

The music stopped before he could answer… although how he might have answered, he had no idea. She curtseyed and he bowed, while those surrounding them clapped and whistled. They went back to their places, to their separate circles, and the guitars began again. Roland felt his hands grasped on either side and began to turn with the circle once more.

Laughing. Kicking. Clapping on the beat. Feeling her somewhere behind him, doing the same. Wondering if she wanted as badly as he did to be out of here, to be in the dark, to be alone in the dark, where he could put his false face aside before the real one beneath could grow hot enough to set it afire.

1

Around ten o’ the clock, the trio of young men from the Inner Baronies made their manners to host and hostess, then slipped off into the fragrant summer night. Cordelia Delgado, who happened to be standing near Henry Wertner, the Barony’s stockliner, remarked that they must be tired. Wertner laughed at this and replied in an accent so thick it was almost comic: “Nay, ma’am, byes that age’re like rats explorin en woodpile after hokkut rain, so they are. It’ll be hours yet before the bunks out'ta Bar K sees em.”

Olive Thorin left the public rooms shortly after the boys, pleading a headache. She was pale enough to be almost believable.

By eleven, the Mayor, his Chancellor, and the chief of his newly inaugurated security staff were conversing in the Mayor’s study with the last few late-staying guests (all ranchers, all members of the Horsemen’s Association). The talk was brief but intense. Several of the ranchers present expressed relief that the Affiliation’s emissaries were so young. Eldred Jonas said nothing to this, only looked down at his pale, long-fingered hands and smiled his narrow smile.

By midnight, Susan was at home and undressing for bed. She didn’t have the sapphire to worry about, at least; that was a Barony jewel, and had been tucked back into the strongbox at Mayor’s House before she left, despite what Mr. Ain’t-We-Fine Will Dearborn might think about it and her. Mayor Thorin (she couldn’t bring herself to call him Hart, although he had asked her to do so-not even to herself could she do it) had taken it back from her himself. In the hallway just off from the reception room, that had been, by the tapestry showing Arthur Eld carrying his sword out of the pyramid in which it had been entombed. And he (Thorin, not the Eld) had taken the opportunity to kiss her mouth and have a quick fumble at her breasts-a part of her that had felt much too naked during that entire interminable evening. “1 burn for Reaping,” he had whispered melodramatically in her ear. His breath had been redolent of brandy. “Each day of this summer seems an age.”

Now, in her room, brushing her hair with harsh, quick strokes and looking out at the waning moon, she thought she had never been so angry in her life as she was at this moment: angry at Thorin, angry at Aunt Cord, furious with that self-righteous prig of a Will Dearborn. Most of all, however, she was angry at herself.

“There’s three things ye can do in any situation, girl,” her father had told her once. “Ye can decide to do a thing, ye can decide not to do a thing… or ye can decide not to decide.” That last, her da had never quite come out and said (he hadn’t needed to) was the choice of weaklings and fools. She had promised herself she would never elect it herself… and yet she had allowed herself to drift into this ugly situation. Now all the choices seemed bad and honorless, all the roads either filled with rocks or hub-deep in mud.

In her room at Mayor’s House (she had not shared a chamber with Hart for ten years, or a bed, even briefly, for five), Olive sat in a night-dress of undecorated white cotton, also looking out at the waning moon. After closing herself into this safe and private place, she had wept… but not for long. Now she was dry-eyed, and felt as hollow as a dead tree.

And what was the worst? That Hart didn’t understand how humiliated she was, and not just for herself. He was too busy strutting and preening (also too busy trying to look down the front of sai Delgado’s dress at every opportunity) to know that people-his own Chancellor among them-were laughing at him behind his back. That might stop when the girl had returned to her aunt’s with a big belly, but that wouldn’t be for months yet. The witch had seen to that. It would be even longer if the girl kindled slowly. And what was the silliest, most humiliating thing of all? That she, John Haverty’s daughter Olive, still loved her husband. Hart was an overweening, vainglorious, prancing loon of a man, but she still loved him.

There was something else, something quite apart from the matter of Hart’s turning into George o’ Goats in his late middle age: she thought there was an intrigue of some sort going on, something dangerous and quite likely dishonorable. Hart knew a little about it, but she guessed he knew only what Kimba Rimer and that hideous limping man wanted him to know.

There was a time, and not so long ago, when Hart wouldn’t have allowed himself to be fobbed off in such fashion by the likes of Rimer, a time when he would have taken one look at Eldred Jonas and his friends and sent them west ere they had so much as a single hot dinner in them. But that was before Hart had become besotted with sai Delgado’s gray eyes. high bosom, and flat belly.

Olive turned down the lamp, blew out the flame, and crept off to bed, where she would lie wakeful until dawn.

By one o’ the clock, no one was left in the public rooms of Mayor’s House except for a quartet of cleaning women, who performed their chores silently (and nervously) beneath the eye of Eldred Jonas. When one of them looked up and saw him gone from the window-seat where he had been sitting and smoking, she murmured softly to her friends, and they all loosened up a little. But there was no singing, no laughter. Il spectra, the man with the blue coffin on his hand, might only have stepped hack into the shadows. He might still be watching.

By two o’ the clock, even the cleaning women were gone. It was an hour at which a party in Gilead would just have been reaching its apogee of glitter and gossip, but Gilead was far away, not just in another Barony hut almost in another world. This was the Outer Arc, and in the Outers, even gentry went to bed early.

There was no gentry on view at the Travellers’ Rest, however, and beneath the all-encompassing gaze of The Romp, the night was still fairly young.

2

At one end of the saloon, fishermen still wearing their rolled-down boots drank and played Watch Me for small stakes. To their right was a poker table; to their left, a knot of yelling, exhorting men-cowpokes, mostly- stood along Satan’s Alley, watching the dice bounce down the velvet incline. At the room’s other end, Sheb McCurdy was pounding out jagged boogie, right hand flying, left hand pumping, the sweat pouring down his neck and pale cheeks. Beside and above him, standing drunk on a stool, Pettie the Trotter shook her enormous bottom and bawled out the words to the song at the top of her voice: “Come on over, baby, we got chicken in the hum, what hum. whose barn, my burn! Come on over, baby, baby got the bull by the horns…”

Sheemie stopped beside the piano, the camel bucket in one hand, grinning up at her and attempting to sing along. Pettie swatted him on his way, never missing a word, bump, or grind, and Sheemie went with his peculiar laugh, which was shrill but somehow not unpleasant.

A game of darts was in progress; in a booth near the back, a whore who styled herself Countess Jillian of Up’ard Killian (exiled royalty from distant Garlan, my dears, oh how special we are) was managing to give two handjobs at the same time while smoking a pipe. And at the bar, a whole line of assorted toughs, drifters, cowpunchers, drovers, drivers, carters, wheelwrights, stagies, carpenters, conmen, stockmen, boatmen, and gunmen drank beneath The Romp’s double head.

The only real gunmen in the place were at the end of the bar, a pair drinking by themselves. No one attempted to join them, and not just because they wore shooting irons in holsters that were slung low and tied down gunslinger fashion. Guns were uncommon but not unknown in Mejis at that time, and not necessarily feared, but these two had the sullen look of men who have spent a long day doing work they didn’t want to do-the look of men who would pick a fight on no account at all, and be glad to end their day by sending some new widow’s husband home in a hurry-up wagon.

Stanley the bartender served them whiskey after whiskey with no attempt to make conversation, not so much as a “Hot day, gents, wa'n’t it?” They reeked of sweat, and their hands were pitchy with pine-gum. Not enough to keep Stanley from being able to see the blue coffin-shapes tattooed on them, though. Their friend, the old limping buzzard with the girl’s hair and the gimp leg, wasn’t here, at least. In Stanley’s view, Jonas was easily the worst of the Big Coffin Hunters, but these two were bad enough, and he had no intention of getting aslant of them if he could help it. With luck, no one would; they looked tired enough to call it a night early.

Reynolds and Depape were tired, all right-they had spent the day out at Citgo, camouflaging a line of empty steel tankers with nonsense words (texaco, citgo, sunoco, exxon) printed on their sides, a billion pine-boughs they’d hauled and stacked, it seemed-but they had no consequent plans to finish their drinking early. Depape might have done so if Her Nibs had been available, but that young beauty (actual name: Gert Moggins) had a ranch-job and wouldn’t be back until two nights hence. “And it’ll be a week if there’s hard cash on offer,” Depape said morosely. He pushed his spectacles up on his nose.

“Fuck her,” Reynolds said.

“That’s just what I’d do if I could, but I can’t.”

“I’m going to get me a plate of that free lunch,” Reynolds said, pointing down to the other end of the bar, where a tin bucket of steamed clams had just come out of the kitchen. “You want some?”

“Them look like hocks of snot and go down the same way. Bring me a strip of beef jerky.”

“All right, partner.” Reynolds went off down the bar. People gave him wide passage; gave even his silk-lined cloak wide passage.

Depape, more morose than ever now that he had thought of Her Nibs gobbling cowboy spareribs out there at the Piano Ranch, downed his drink, winced at the stench of pine-gum on his hand, then held his glass out in Stanley Ruiz’s direction. “Fill this up, you dog!” he shouted. A cowhand leaning with his back, butt, and elbows against the bar jerked forward at the sound of Depape’s bellow, and that was all it took to start trouble.

Sheemie was bustling toward the pass through from which the steamers had just appeared, now holding the camel bucket out before him in both hands. Later, when the Travellers’ began to empty out, his job would he to clean up. For now, however, it was simply to circulate with the camel bucket, dumping in every unfinished drink he found. This combined elixir ended up in a jug behind the bar. The jug was labelled fairly enough-camel piss-and a double shot could be obtained for three pennies. It was a drink only for the reckless or the impecunious, but a fair number of both passed beneath the stem gaze of The Romp each night; Stanley rarely had a problem emptying the jug. And if it wasn’t empty at the end of the night, why, there was always a fresh night coming along. Not to mention a fresh supply of thirsty fools.

But on this occasion Sheemie never made it to the Camel Piss jug behind the end of the bar. He tripped over the boot of the cowboy who had jerked forward, and went to his knees with a grunt of surprise. The contents of the bucket sloshed out ahead of him, and, following Satan’s First Law of Malignity-to wit, if the worst can happen, it usually will-they drenched Roy Depape from the knees down in an eye watering mixture of beer, graf, and white lightning.

Conversation at the bar stopped, and that stopped the talk of the men gathered around the dice-chute. Sheb turned, saw Sheemie kneeling before one of Jonas’s men, and stopped playing. Pettie, her eyes squeezed shut as she poured her entire soul into her singing, continued on a capella for three or four bars before registering the silence which was spreading out like a ripple. She stopped singing and opened her eyes. That sort of silence usually meant that someone was going to be killed. If so, she didn’t intend to miss it.

Depape stood perfectly still, inhaling the raw stench of alcohol as it rose. He didn’t mind the smell; on the whole, it had the stink of pine-gum beat six ways to the Peddler. He didn’t mind the way his pants were sticking to his knees, either. It might have been a bit of an irritation if some of that joy-juice had gotten down inside his boots, but none had.

His hand fell to the butt of his gun. Here, by god and by goddess, was something to take his mind off his sticky hands and absent whore. And good entertainment was ever worth a little wetting.

Silence blanketed the place now. Stanley stood as stiff as a soldier behind the bar, nervously plucking at one of his arm-garters. At the bar’s other end, Reynolds looked back toward his partner with bright interest. He took a clam from the steaming bucket and cracked it on the edge of the bar like a boiled egg. At Depape’s feet, Sheemie looked up, his eyes big and fearful beneath the wild snarl of his black hair. He was trying his best to smile.

“Well now, boy,” Depape said. “You have wet me considerable.”

“Sorry, big fella, I go trippy-trip.” Sheemie jerked a hand back over his shoulder; a little spray of camel piss flew from the tips of his fingers. Somewhere someone cleared his throat nervously-raa-aach! The room was full of eyes, and quiet enough so that they all could hear both the wind in the eaves and the waves breaking on the rocks of Hambry Point, two miles away.

“The hell you did,” said the cowpoke who had jerked. He was about twenty, and suddenly afraid he might never see his mother again. “Don’t you go tryin to put your trouble off on me, you damned feeb.”

“I don’t care how it happened,” Depape said. He was aware he was playing for an audience, and knew that what an audience mostly wants is to be entertained. Sai R. B. Depape, always a trouper, intended to oblige.

He pinched the corduroy of his pants above the knees and pulled the legs up, revealing the toes of his boots. They were shiny and wet.

“See there. Look at what you got on my boots.”

Sheemie looked up at him, grinning and terrified.

Stanley Ruiz decided he couldn’t let this happen without at least trying to stop it. He had known Dolores Sheemer, the boy’s mother; there was even a possibility that he himself was the boy’s father. In any case, he liked Sheemie. The boy was foolish, but his heart was good, he never took a drink, and he always did his work. Also, he could find a smile for you even on the coldest, foggiest winter’s day. That was a talent many people of normal intelligence did not have.

“Sai Depape,” he said, taking a step forward and speaking in a low, respectful tone. “I’m very sorry about that. I’ll be happy to buy your drinks for the rest of the evening if we can just forget this regrettable-”

Depape’s movement was a blur almost too fast to see, but that wasn’t what amazed the people who were in the Rest that night; they would have expected a man running with Jonas to be fast. What amazed them was the fact that he never looked around to set his target. He located Stanley by his voice alone.

Depape drew his gun and swept it to the right in a rising arc. It struck Stanley Ruiz dead in the mouth, mashing his lips and shattering three of his teeth. Blood splashed the backbar mirror; several high-flying drops decorated the tip of The Romp’s lefthand nose. Stanley screamed, clapped his hands to his face, and staggered back against the shelf behind him. In the silence, the chattery clink of the bottles was very loud.

Down the bar, Reynolds cracked another clam and watched, fascinated. Good as a play, it was.

Depape turned his attention back to the kneeling boy. “Clean my boots,” he said.

A look of muddled relief came onto Sheemie’s face. Clean his boots! Yes! You bet! Right away! He pulled the rag he always kept in his back pocket. It wasn’t even dirty yet. Not very, at least.

“No,” Depape said patiently. Sheemie looked up at him, gaping and puzzled. “Put that nasty clout back where it come from-I don’t even want to look at it.”

Sheemie tucked it into his back pocket again.

“Lick em,” Depape said in that same patient voice. “That’s what I want. You lick my boots until they’re dry again, and so clean you can see your stupid rabbit’s face in em.”

Sheemie hesitated, as if still not sure what was required of him. Or perhaps he was only processing the information.

“I’d do it, boy,” Barkie Callahan said from what he hoped was a safe place behind Sheb’s piano. “If you want to see the sun come up, I’d surely do it.”

Depape had already decided the mush-brain wasn’t going to see another sunrise, not in this world, but kept quiet. He had never had his boots licked. He wanted to see what it felt like. If it was nice-kind of sexy-like-he could maybe try Her Nibs out on it.

“Does I have to?” Sheemie’s eyes were filling with tears. “Can’t just I-sorry and polish em real good?”

“Lick, you feeble-minded donkey,” Depape said.

Sheemie’s hair fell across his forehead. His tongue poked tentatively out between his lips, and as he bent his head toward Depape’s boots, the first of his tears fell.

“Stop it, stop it, stop it,” a voice said. It was shocking in the silence- not because it was sudden, and certainly not because it was angry. It was shocking because it was amused. “I simply can’t allow that. Nope. I would if I could, but I can’t. Unsanitary, you see. Who knows what disease might be spread in such fashion? The mind quails! Ab-so-lutely cuh-wails!”

Standing just inside the batwing doors was the purveyor of this idiotic and potentially fatal screed: a young man of middling height, his flat-crowned hat pushed back to reveal a tumbled comma of brown hair. Except young man didn’t really cover him, Depape realized; young man was drawing it heavy. He was only a kid. Around his neck, gods knew why, he wore a bird’s skull like an enormous comical pendant. It was hung on a chain that ran through the eyeholes. And in his hands was not a gun (where would an unwhiskered dribble like him get a gun in the first place? Depape wondered) but a goddam slingshot. Depape burst out laughing.

The kid laughed as well, nodding as if he understood how ridiculous the whole thing looked, how ridiculous the whole thing was. His laughter was infectious; Pettie, still up on her stool, tittered herself before clapping her hands over her mouth.

“This is no place for a boy such as you,” Depape said. His revolver, an old five-shooter, was still out; it lay in his fist on the bar, with Stanley Ruiz’s blood dripping off the gunsight. Depape, without raising it from the ironwood, waggled it slightly. “Boys who come to places like this learn had habits, kid. Dying is apt to be one of them. So I give you this one chance. Get out of here.”

“Thank you, sir, 1 appreciate my one chance,” the boy said. He spoke with great and winning sincerity… but didn’t move. Still he stood just inside the batwing doors, with the wide elastic strap of his sling pulled hack. Depape couldn’t quite make out what was in the cup, but it glittered in the gaslight. A metal ball of some sort.

“Well, then?” Depape snarled. This was getting old, and fast.

“I know I’m being a pain in the neck, sir-not to mention an ache in (he ass and a milky drip from the tip of a sore dick-but if it’s all the same to you, my dear friend, I’d like to give my chance to the young fellow on his knees before you. Let him apologize, let him polish your boots with his clout until you are entirely satisfied, and let him go on living his life.”

There was an unfocused murmur of approval at this from the area where the card-players were watching. Depape didn’t like the sound of it at all, and he made a sudden decision. The boy would die as well, executed for the crime of impertinence. The swabby who had spilled the bucket of dregs on him was clearly retarded. Yon brat had not even that excuse. He just thought he was funny.

From the comer of his eye, Depape saw Reynolds moving to flank the boy, smooth as oiled silk. Depape appreciated the thought, but didn’t believe he’d need much help with the slingshot specialist.

“Boy, I think you’ve made a mistake,” he said in a kindly voice. “I really believe-” The cup of the slingshot dipped a little… or Depape fancied it did. He made his move.

3

They talked about it in Hambry for years to come; three decades after the fall of Gilead and the end of the Affiliation, they were still talking. By that time there were better than five hundred old gaffers (and a few old gammers) claiming that they were drinking a beer in the Rest that night, and saw it all.

Depape was young, and had the speed of a snake. Nevertheless, he never came close to getting a shot off at Cuthbert Allgood. There was a thip-TWANG! as the elastic was released, a steel gleam that drew itself across the saloon’s smoky air like a line on a slateboard, and then Depape screamed. His revolver tumbled to the floor, and a foot spun it away from him across the sawdust (no one would claim that foot while the Big Coffin Hunters were still in Hambry; hundreds claimed it after they were gone). Still screaming-he could not bear pain-Depape raised his bleeding hand and looked at it with agonized, unbelieving eyes. Actually, he had been lucky. Cuthbert’s ball had smashed the tip of the second finger and torn off the nail. Lower, and Depape would have been able to blow smoke-rings through his own palm.

Cuthbert, meanwhile, had already reloaded the cup of his slingshot and drawn the elastic back again. “Now,” he said, “if I have your attention, good sir-”

“I can’t speak for his,” Reynolds said from behind him, “but you got mine, partner. I don’t know if you’re good with that thing or just shitass lucky, but either way, you’re done with it now. Relax the draw on it and put it down. That table in front of you’s the place I want to see it.”

“I’ve been blindsided,” Cuthbert said sadly. “Betrayed once more by my own callow youth.”

“I don’t know nothing about your callow youth, brother, but you’ve been blindsided, all right,” Reynolds agreed. He stood behind and slightly to the left of Cuthbert, and now he moved his gun forward until the boy could feel the muzzle against the back of his head. Reynolds thumbed the hammer. In the pool of silence which the Travellers’ Rest had become, the sound was very loud. “Now put that twanger down.”

“I think, good sir, that I must offer my regrets and decline.”

“What?”

“You see, I’ve got my trusty sling aimed at your pleasant friend’s head-” Cuthbert began, and when Depape shifted uneasily against the bar, Cuthbert’s voice rose in a whipcrack that did not sound callow in the least. “Stand still! Move again and you’re a dead man!”

Depape subsided, holding his bloody hand against his pine-tacky shirt. For the first time he looked frightened, and for the first time that night-for the first time since hooking up with Jonas, in fact-Reynolds felt mastery of a situation on the verge of slipping away… except how could it be? How could it be when he’d been able to circle around this smart-talking squint and get the drop on him? This should be over.

Lowering his voice to its former conversational-not to say playful-pitch, Cuthbert said: “If you shoot me, the ball flies and your friend dies, too.”

“I don’t believe that,” Reynolds said, but he didn’t like what he heard in his own voice. It sounded like doubt. “No man could make a shot like that.”

“Why don’t we let your friend decide?” Cuthbert raised his voice in a good-humored hail. “Hi-ho, there, Mr. Spectacles! Would you like your pal to shoot me?”

“No!” Depape’s cry was shrill, verging on panic. “No, Clay! Don’t shoot!”

“So it’s a standoff,” Reynolds said, bemused. And then bemusement changed to horror as he felt the blade of a very large knife slip against his throat. It pressed the tender skin just over his adam’s apple.

“No, it’s not,” Alain said softly. “Put the gun down, my friend, or I’ll cut your throat.”

4

Standing outside the batwing doors, having arrived by simple good fortune in time for this Pinch and Jilly show, Jonas watched with amazement, contempt, and something close to horror. First one of the Affiliation brats gets the drop on Depape, and when Reynolds covers that one, the big kid with the round face and the plowboy’s shoulders puts a knife to Reynolds’s throat. Neither of the brats a day over fifteen, and neither with a gun. Marvelous. He would have thought it better than a travelling circus, if not for the problems that would follow if this were not put right. What sort of work could they do in Hambry if it got around that the boogeymen were afraid of the children, instead of vice-versa?

There’s time to stop this before there’s killing, mayhap. If you want to. Do you?

Jonas decided he did; that they could walk out winners if they played it just right. He also decided the Affiliation brats would not, unless they were very lucky indeed, be leaving Mejis Barony alive.

Where’s the other one? Dearborn?

A good question. An important question. Embarrassment would become outright humiliation if he found himself trumped in the same fashion as Roy and Clay.

Dearborn wasn’t in the bar, and that was sure. Jonas turned on his heels, scanning the South High Street in both directions. It was almost day-bright under a Kissing Moon only two nights past the full. No one there, not in the street, not on the far side, where Hambry’s mercantile store stood. The mercantile had a porch, but there was nothing on it save for a line of carved totems illustrating Guardians of the Beam: Bear, Turtle, Fish, Eagle, Lion, Bat, and Wolf. Seven of twelve, bright as marble in the moonlight, and no doubt great favorites of the kiddies. No men over there, though. Good. Lovely.

Jonas peered hard into the thread of alley between the mercantile and the butcher’s, glimpsed a shadow behind a tumble of cast-off boxes, tensed, then relaxed as he saw a cat’s shining green eyes. He nodded and turned to the business at hand, pushing back the lefthand batwing and stepping into the Travellers’ Rest. Alain heard the squeak of a hinge, but Jonas’s gun was at his temple before he could even begin to turn.

“Sonny, unless you’re a barber, I think you’d better put that pigsticker down. You don’t get a second warning.”

“No,” Alain said.

Jonas, who had expected nothing but compliance and had been prepared for nothing else, was thunderstruck. “What?”

“You heard me,” Alain said. “I said no.”

5

After making their manners and excusing themselves from Seafront, Roland had left his friends to their own amusements-they would finish up at the Travellers’ Rest, he supposed, but wouldn’t stay long or get into much trouble when they had no money for cards and could drink nothing more exciting than cold tea. He had ridden into town another way, tethered his mount at a public post in the lower of the two town squares (Rusher had offered a single puzzled nicker at this treatment, but no more), and had since been tramping the empty, sleeping streets with his hat yanked low over his eyes and his hands clasped into an aching knot at the small of his back.

His mind was full of questions-things were wrong here, very wrong. At first he’d thought that was just his imagination, the childish part of him finding make-believe troubles and storybook intrigue because he had been removed from the heart of the real action. But after his talk with “Rennie” Renfrew, he knew better. There were questions, outright mysteries, and the most hellish thing of all was that he couldn’t concentrate on them, let alone go any distance toward making sense of them. Every time he tried, Susan Delgado’s face intruded… her face, or the sweep of her hair, or even the pretty, fearless way her silk-slippered feet had followed his boots in the dance, never lagging or hesitating. Again and again he heard the last thing he had said to her, speaking in the stilted, priggish voice of a boy preacher. He would have given almost anything to take back both the tone and the words themselves. She’d be on Thorin’s pillow come Reap-tide, and kindle him a child before the first snow flew, perhaps a male heir, and what of it? Rich men, famous men, and well-blooded men had taken gilly-girls since the beginning of time; Arthur Eld had had better than forty himself, according to the tales. So, really, what was it to him?

I think I’ve gone and fallen in love with her. That’s what it is to me.

A dismaying idea, but not a dismissible one; he knew the landscape of his own heart too well. He loved her, very likely it was so, but part of him also hated her, and held to the shocking thought he’d had at dinner: that he could have shot Susan Delgado through the heart if he’d come armed. Some of this was jealousy, but not all; perhaps not even the greater part. He had made some indefinable but powerful connection between Olive Thorin-her sad but game little smile from the foot of the table-and his own mother. Hadn’t some of that same woeful, rueful look been in his mother’s eyes on the day when he had come upon her and his father’s advisor? Marten in an open-throated shirt, Gabrielle Deschain in a sacque that had slipped off one shoulder, the whole room reeking of what they had been up to that hot morning?

His mind, tough as it already was, shrank from the image, horrified. It returned instead to that of Susan Delgado-her gray eyes and shining hair. He saw her laughing, chin uptilted, hands clasped before the sapphire Thorin had given her.

Roland could forgive her the gilly business, he supposed. What he could not forgive, in spite of his attraction to Susan, was that awful smile on Olive Thorin’s face as she watched the girl sitting in what should have been her place. Sitting in her place and laughing.

These were the things that chased through his head as he paced off acres of moonlight. He had no business with such thoughts, Susan Delgado was not the reason he was here, nor was the ridiculous knuckle-cracking Mayor and his pitiable country-Mary of a wife… yet he couldn’t put them away and get to what was his business. He had forgotten the face of his father, and walked in the moonlight, hoping to find it again.

In such fashion he came along the sleeping, silver-gilded High Street, walking north to south, thinking vaguely that he would perhaps stand Cuthbert and Alain to a taste of something wet and toss the dice down Satan’s Alley a time or two before going back to get Rusher and call it a night. And so it was that he happened to spy Jonas-the man’s gaunt figure and fall of long white hair were impossible to mistake-standing outside the batwings of the Travellers’ Rest and peering in. Jonas did this with one hand on the butt of his gun and a tense set of body that put everything else from Roland’s mind at once. Something was going on, and if Bert and Alain were in there, it might involve them. They were the strangers in town, after all, and it was possible-even likely-that not everyone in Hambry loved the Affiliation with the fervor that had been professed at tonight’s dinner. Or perhaps it was Jonas’s friends who were in trouble. Something was brewing, in any case.

With no clear thought as to why he was doing it, Roland went softly up the steps to the mercantile’s porch. There was a line of carved animals there (and probably spiked firmly to the boards, so that drunken wags from the saloon across the street couldn’t carry them away, chanting the nursery rhymes of their childhood as they went). Roland stepped behind the last one in line-it was the Bear-and bent his knees so that the crown of his hat wouldn’t show. Then he went as still as the carving. He could see Jonas turn, look across the street, then look to his left, peering at something-

Very low, a sound: Waow! Waow!

It’s a cat. In the alley.

Jonas looked a moment longer, then stepped into the Rest. Roland was out from behind the carved bear, down the steps, and into the street at once. He hadn’t Alain’s gift of the touch, but he had intuitions that were sometimes very strong. This one was telling him he must hurry.

Overhead, the Kissing Moon drifted behind a cloud.

6

Pettie the Trotter still stood on her stool, but she no longer felt drunk and singing was the last thing on her mind. She could hardly believe what she was seeing: Jonas had the drop on a boy who had the drop on Reynolds who had the drop on another boy (this last one wearing a bird’s skull around his neck on a chain) who had the drop on Roy Depape. Who had, in fact, drawn some of Roy Depape’s blood. And when Jonas had told the big boy to put down the knife he was holding to Reynolds’s throat, the big boy had refused.

You can blow my lights out and send me to the clearing at the end of the path, thought Pettie, for now I’ve seen it all, so I have. She supposed she should get off the stool-there was apt to be shooting any second now, and likely a great lot of it-but sometimes you just had to take your chances.

Because some things were just too good to miss.

7

“We’re in this town on Affiliation business,” Alain said. He had one hand buried deep in Reynolds’s sweaty hair; the other maintained a steady pressure on the knife at Reynolds’s throat. Not quite enough to break the skin. “If you harm us, the Affiliation will take note. So will our fathers. You’ll be hunted like dogs and hung upside down, like as not, when you’re caught.”

“Sonny, there’s not an Affiliation patrol within two hundred wheels of here, probably three hundred,” Jonas said, “and I wouldn’t care a fart in a windstorm if there was one just over yon hill. Nor do your fathers mean a squitter to me. Put that knife down or I’ll blow your fucking brains out.”

“No.”

“Future developments in this matter should be quite wonderful,” Cuthbert said cheerily… although there was now a beat of nerves under his prattle. Not fear, perhaps not even nervous-ness, just nerves. The good kind, more likely than not, Jonas thought sourly. He had underestimated these boys at meat; if nothing else was clear, that was. “You shoot Richard, and Richard cuts Mr. Cloak’s throat just as Mr. Cloak shoots me; my poor dying fingers release my sling’s elastic and put a steel ball in what passes for Mr. Spectacles’s brain. You’ll walk away, at least, and I suppose that will be a great comfort to your dead friends.”

“Call it a draw,” Alain said to the man with the gun at his temple.

“We all stand back and walk away.”

“No, sonny,” Jonas said. His voice was patient, and he didn’t think his anger showed, but it was rising. Gods, to be outfaced like this, even temporarily! “No one does like that to the Big Coffin Hunters. This is your last chance to-”

Something hard and cold and very much to the point pressed against the back of Jonas’s shirt, dead center between the shoulderblades. He knew what it was and who held it at once, understood the game was lost, but couldn’t understand how such a ludicrous, maddening turn of events could have happened.

“Holster the gun,” the voice behind the sharp tip of metal said. It was empty, somehow-not just calm, but emotionless. “Do it now, or this goes in your heart. No more talk. Talking’s done. Do it or die.”

Jonas heard two things in that voice: youth and truth. He bolstered his gun.

“You with the black hair. Take your gun out of my friend’s ear and put it back in your holster. Now.”

Clay Reynolds didn’t have to be invited twice, and he uttered a long, shaky sigh when Alain took the blade off his throat and stood back. Cuthbert did not look around, only stood with the elastic of his slingshot pulled and his elbow cocked.

“You at the bar,” Roland said. “Holster up.”

Depape did so, grimacing with pain as he bumped his hurt finger against his gunbelt. Only when this gun was put away did Cuthbert relax his hold on his sling and drop the ball from the cup into the palm of his hand.

The cause of all this had been forgotten as the effects played themselves out. Now Sheemie got to his feet and pelted across the room. His cheeks were wet with tears. He grasped one of Cuthbert’s hands, kissed it several times (loud smacking noises that would have been comic under other circumstances), and held the hand to his cheek for a moment. Then he dodged past Reynolds, pushed open the righthand batwing, and flew right into the arms of a sleepy-eyed and still half-drunk Sheriff. Avery had been fetched by Sheb from the jailhouse, where the Sheriff o’ Barony had been sleeping off the Mayor’s ceremonial dinner in one of his own cells.

8

“This is a nice mess, isn’t it?”

Avery speaking. No one answering. He hadn’t expected they would, not if they knew what was good for them.

The office area of the jail was too small to hold three men, three strapping not-quite-men, and one extra-large Sheriff comfortably, so Avery had herded them into the nearby Town Gathering Hall, which echoed to the soft flutter of the pigeons in the rafters and the steady beat-beat-beat of the grandfather clock behind the podium.

It was a plain room, but an inspired choice all the same. It was where the townsfolk and Barony landowners had come for hundreds of years to make their decisions, pass their laws, and occasionally send some especially troublesome person west. There was a feeling of seriousness in its moon-glimmered darkness, and Roland thought even the old man, Jonas, felt a little of it. Certainly it invested Sheriff Herk Avery with an authority he might not otherwise have been able to project.

The room was filled with what were in that place and time called “bareback benches”-oaken pews with no cushions for either butt or back. There were sixty in all, thirty on each side of a wide center aisle. Jonas, Depape, and Reynolds sat on the front bench to the left of the aisle. Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain sat across from them on the right. Reynolds and Depape looked sullen and embarrassed; Jonas looked remote and composed. Will Dearborn’s little crew was quiet. Roland had given Cuthbert a look which he hoped the boy could read: One smart remark and I’ll rip the tongue right out of your head. He thought the message had been received. Bert had stowed his idiotic “lookout” somewhere, which was a good sign.

“A nice mess,” Avery repeated, and blew liquor-scented wind at them in a deep sigh. He was sitting on the edge of the stage with his short legs hanging down, looking at them with a kind of disgusted wonder.

The side door opened and in came Deputy Dave, his white service jacket laid aside, his monocle tucked into the pocket of his more usual khaki shirt. In one hand he carried a mug; in the other a folded scrap of what looked to Roland like birch-bark.

“Did ye boil the first half, David?” Avery asked. He now wore a put-upon expression.

“Aye.”

“Boiled it twice?”

“Aye, twice.”

“For that was the directions.”

“Aye,” Dave repeated in a resigned voice. He handed Avery the cup and dumped the remaining contents of the birch-bark scrap in when the Sheriff held the cup out for them.

Avery swirled the liquid, peered in with a doubtful, resigned expression, then drank. He grimaced. “Oh, foul!” he cried. “What’s so nasty as this?”

“What is it?” Jonas asked.

“Headache powder. Hangover powder, ye might say. From the old witch. The one who lives up the Coos. Know where I mean?” Avery gave Jonas a knowing look. The old gunny pretended not to see it, but Roland thought he had. And what did it mean? Another mystery.

Depape looked up at the word Coos, then went back to sucking his wounded finger. Beyond Depape, Reynolds sat with his cloak drawn about him, looking grimly down at his lap.

“Does it work?” Roland asked.

“Aye, boy, but ye pay a price for witch’s medicine. Remember that: ye always pay. This 'un takes away the headache if ye drink too much of Mayor Thorin’s damned punch, but it gripes the bowels somethin fierce, so it does. And the farts-!” He waved a hand in front of his face to demonstrate, took another sip from the cup, then set it aside. He returned to his former gravity, but the mood in the room had lightened just a little; they all felt it. “Now what are we to do about this business?”

Herk Avery swept them slowly with his eyes, from Reynolds on his far right to Alain-“Richard Stockworth”-on his far left. “Eh, boys? We’ve got the Mayor’s men on one side and the Affiliation’s… men… on the other, six fellows at the point of murder, and over what? A halfwit and a spilled bucket of slops.” He pointed first at the Big Coffin Hunters, then to the Affiliation’s counters. “Two powderkegs and one fat sheriff in the middle. So what’s yer thoughts on’t? Speak up, don’t be shy, you wasn’t shy in Coral’s whoreden down the road, don’t be shy in here!”

No one said anything. Avery sipped some more of his foul drink, then set it down and looked at them decisively. What he said next didn’t surprise Roland much; it was exactly what he would have expected of a man like Avery, right down to the tone which implied that he considered himself a man who could make the hard decisions when he had to, by the gods.

“I’ll tell yer what we’re going to do: We’re going to forget it.”

He now assumed the air of one who expects an uproar and is prepared to handle it. When no one spoke or even shuffled a foot, he looked discomfited. Yet he had a job to do, and the night was growing old. He squared his shoulders and pushed on.

“I’ll not spend the next three or four months waiting to see who among you’s killed who. Nay! Nor will I be put in a position where I might have to take the punishment for your stupid quarrel over that halfwit Sheemie.

“I appeal to your practical natures, boys, when I point out that I may he either your friend or your enemy during your time here… but I’d be wrong if 1 didn’t also appeal to your more noble natures, which I am sure are both large and sensitive.”

The Sheriff now tried on an exalted expression, which was not, in Roland’s estimation, notably successful. Avery turned his attention to Jonas.

“Sai, I can’t believe ye’ll want to be causin trouble for three young men from the Affiliation-the Affiliation that’s been like mother’s milk and father’s shelterin hand since aye or oh fifty generations back; ye’d not be so disrespectful as all that, would ye?”

Jonas shook his head, smiling his thin smile.

Avery nodded again. Things were going along well, that nod said. “Ye’ve all yer own cakes to bake and oats to roll, and none of ye wants something like this to get in the way of doin yer jobs, do yer?”

They all shook their heads this time.

“So what I want you to do is to stand up, face each other, shake hands, and cry each other’s pardon. If ye don’t do that, ye can all ride west out of town by sunrise, far as I’m concerned.”

He picked up the mug and took a bigger drink this time. Roland saw that the man’s hand was trembling the tiniest bit, and wasn’t surprised. It was all bluff and blow, of course. The Sheriff would have understood that Jonas, Reynolds, and Depape were beyond his authority as soon as he saw the small blue coffins on their hands; after tonight, he must feel the same way about Dearborn, Stockworth, and Heath. He could only hope that all would see where their self-interest lay. Roland did. So, apparently, did Jonas, for even as Roland got up, Jonas did the same.

Avery recoiled a little bit, as if expecting Jonas to go for his gun and Dearborn for the knife in his belt, the one he’d been holding against Jonas’s back when Avery came puffing up to the saloon.

There was no gun or knife drawn, however. Jonas turned toward Roland and held out his hand.

“He’s right, lad,” Jonas said in his reedy, quavering voice.

“Yes.”

“Will you shake with an old man, and vow to start over?”

“Yes.” Roland held out his hand.

Jonas took it. “I cry your pardon.”

“I cry your own, Mr. Jonas.” Roland tapped left-hand at his throat, as was proper when addressing an elder in such fashion.

As the two of them sat down, Alain and Reynolds rose, as neatly as men in a prerehearsed ceremony. Last of all, Cuthbert and Depape rose. Roland was all but positive that Cuthbert’s foolishness would pop out like Jack from his box-the idiot would simply not be able to help himself, although he must surely realize that Depape was no man to make sport of tonight.

“Cry your pardon,” Bert said, with an admirable lack of laughter in his voice.

“Cryerown,” Depape mumbled, and held out his bloodstreaked hand. Roland had a nightmare vision of Bert squeezing down on it as hard as he could, making the redhead yowl like an owl on a hot stove, but Bert’s grip was as restrained as his voice.

Avery sat on the edge of the stage with his pudgy legs hanging down, watching it all with avuncular good cheer. Even Deputy Dave was smiling.

“Now I propose to shake hands with yer all myself, ’ then send yer on yer ways, for the hour’s late, so it is, and such as me needs my beauty rest.” He chuckled, and again looked uncomfortable when no one joined in. But he slipped off the stage and began to shake hands, doing so with the enthusiasm of a minister who has finally succeeded in marrying a headstrong couple after a long and stormy courtship.

9

When they stepped outside, the moon was down and the first lightening in the sky had begun to show at the far edge of the Clean Sea. “Mayhap we’ll meet again, sai,” Jonas said. “Mayhap we will,” Roland said, and swung up into his saddle.

10

The Big Coffin Hunters were staying in the watchman’s house about a mile south of Seafront-five miles out of town, this was.

Halfway there, Jonas stopped at a turnout beside the road. From here the land made a steep, rocky descent to the brightening sea.

“Get down, mister,” he said. It was Depape he was looking at.

“Jonas…Jonas, I…”

“Get down.”

Biting his lip nervously, Depape got down.

“Take off your spectacles.”

“Jonas, what’s this about? I don’t-”

“Or if you want em broke, leave em on. It’s all the same to me.”

Biting his lip harder now, Depape took off his gold-rimmed spectacles. They were barely in his hand before Jonas had fetched him a terrific clip on the side of the head. Depape cried out and reeled toward the drop. Jonas drove forward, moving as fast as he had struck, and seized him by the shirt just before he went tumbling over the edge. Jonas twisted his hand into the shirt material and yanked Depape toward him. He breathed deep, inhaling the scent of pine-tar and Depape’s sweat.

“I ought to toss you right over the edge,” he breathed. “Do you know how much harm you’ve done?”

“I… Jonas, I never meant… just a little fun is all I… how was we supposed to know they…”

Slowly, Jonas’s hand relaxed. That last bit of babble had gone home. How was they supposed to know, that was ungrammatical but right. And if not for tonight, they might not have known. If you looked at it that way, Depape had actually done them a favor. The devil you knew was always preferable to the devil you didn’t. Still, word would get around, and people would laugh. Maybe even that was all right, though. The laughter would stop in due time.

“Jonas, I cry your pardon.”

“Shut up,” Jonas said. In the east, the sun would shortly heave itself over the horizon, casting its first gleams on a new day in this world of toil and sorrow. “I ain’t going to toss you over, because then I’d have to toss Clay over and follow along myself. They got the drop on us the same as you, right?”

Depape wanted to agree, but thought it might be dangerous to do so. He was prudently silent.

“Get down here, Clay.”

Clay slid off his mount.

“Now hunker.”

The three of them hunkered on their bootsoles, heels up. Jonas plucked a shoot of grass and put it between his lips. “Affiliation brats is what we were told, and we had no reason not to believe it,” he said. “The bad boys are sent all the way to Mejis, a sleepy Barony on the Clean Sea, on a make-work detail that’s two pans penance and three parts punishment. Ain’t that what we were told?”

They nodded.

“Either of you believe it after tonight?”

Depape shook his head. So did Clay.

“They may be rich boys, but that’s not all they are,” Depape said. “The way they were tonight… they were like… “He trailed off, not quite willing to finish the thought. It was too absurd.

Jonas was willing. “They acted like gunslingers.”

Neither Jonas nor Reynolds replied at first. Then Clay Reynolds said, “They’re too young, Eldred. Too young by years.”

“Not too young to be 'prentices, mayhap. In any case, we’re going to find out.” He turned to Depape. “You’ve got some riding to do, cully.”

“Aww, Jonas-!”

“None of us exactly covered ourselves with glory, but you were the fool that started the pot boiling.” He looked at Depape, but Depape only looked down at the ground between them. “You’re going to ride their backtrail, Roy, and you’re going to ask questions until you’ve got the answers you think will satisfy my curiosity. Clay and I are mostly going to wait. And watch. Play Castles with em, if you like. When I feel like enough time’s gone by for us to be able to do a little snooping without being trigged, mayhap we’ll do it.”

He bit on the piece of grass in his mouth. The larger piece tumbled out and lay between his boots.

“Do you know why I shook his hand? That boy Dearborn’s damned hand? Because we can’t rock the boat, boys. Not just when it’s edging in toward harbor. Latigo and the folks we’ve been waiting for will be moving toward us very soon, now.

Until they get into these parts, it’s in our interest to keep the peace. But I tell you this: no one puts a knife to Eldred Jonas’s back and lives. Now listen, Roy. Don’t make me tell you any of this twice.”

Jonas began to speak, leaning forward over his knees toward Depape as he did. After awhile, Depape began to nod. He might like a little trip, actually. After the recent comedy in the Travellers’ Rest, a change of air might be just the ticket.

11

The boys were almost back to the Bar K and the sun was coming over the horizon before Cuthbert broke the silence. “Well! That was an amusing and instructive evening, was it not?” Neither Roland nor Alain replied, so Cuthbert leaned over to the rook’s skull, which he had returned to its former place on the horn of his saddle. “What say you, old friend? Did we enjoy our evening? Dinner, a circle-dance, and almost killed to top things off. Did you enjoy?”

The lookout only stared ahead of Cuthbert’s horse with its great dark eyes.

“He says he’s too tired for talk,” Cuthbert said, then yawned. “So'm I, actually.” He looked at Roland. “I got a good look into Mr. Jonas’s eyes after he shook hands with you, Will. He means to kill you.”

Roland nodded.

“They mean to kill all of us,” Alain said.

Roland nodded again. “We’ll make it hard for them, but they know more about us now than they did at dinner. We’ll not get behind them that way again.”

He stopped, just as Jonas had stopped not three miles from where they now were. Only instead of looking directly out over the Clean Sea, Roland and his friends were looking down the long slope of the Drop. A herd of horses was moving from west to east, barely more than shadows in this light.

“What do you see, Roland?” Alain asked, almost timidly.

“Trouble,” Roland said, “and in our road.” Then he gigged his horse and rode on. Before they got back to the Bar K bunkhouse, he was thinking about Susan again. Five minutes after he dropped his head on his flat burlap pillow, he was dreaming of her.

1

Three weeks had passed since the welcoming dinner at Mayor’s House and the incident at the Travellers’ Rest. There had been no more trouble between Roland’s ka-tet and Jonas’s. In the night sky, Kissing Moon had waned and Peddler’s Moon had made its first thin appearance. The days were bright and warm; even the oldtimers admitted it was one of the most beautiful summers in memory.

On a mid-morning as beautiful as any that summer, Susan Delgado galloped a two-year-old rosillo named Pylon north along the Drop. The wind dried the tears on her cheeks and yanked her unbound hair out behind her as she went. She urged Pylon to go faster yet, lightly thumping his sides with her spurless boots. Pylon turned it up a notch at once, ears flattening, tail flagging. Susan, dressed in jeans and the faded, oversized khaki shirt (one of her da’s) that had caused all the trouble, leaned over the light practice saddle, holding to the horn with one hand and rubbing the other down the side of the horse’s strong, silky neck.

“More!” she whispered. “More and faster! Go on, boy!”

Pylon let it out yet another notch. That he had at least one more in him she knew; that he had even one more beyond that she suspected.

They sped along the Drop’s highest ridge, and she barely saw the magnificent slope of land below her, all green and gold, or the way it faded into the blue haze of the Clean Sea. On any other day the view and the cool, salt-smelling breeze would have uplifted her. Today she only wanted to hear the steady low thunder of Pylon’s hoofs and feel the flex of his muscles beneath her; today she wanted to outrun her own thoughts.

And all because she had come downstairs this morning dressed for riding in one of her father’s old shirts.

2

Aunt Cord had been at the stove, wrapped in her dressing gown and with her hair still netted. She dished herself up a bowl of oatmeal and brought it to the table. Susan had known things weren’t good as soon as her aunt I timed toward her, bowl in hand; she could see the discontented twitch of Aunt Cord’s lips, and the disapproving glance she shot at the orange Susan was peeling. Her aunt was still rankled by the silver and gold she had expected to have in hand by now, coins which would be withheld yet awhile due to the witch’s prankish decree that Susan should remain a virgin until autumn.

But that wasn’t the main thing, and Susan knew it. Quite simply put, the two of them had had enough of each other. The money was only one of Aunt Cord’s disappointed expectations; she had counted on having the house at the edge of the Drop to herself this summer… except, perhaps, (or the occasional visit from Mr. Eldred Jonas, with whom Cordelia seemed quite taken. Instead, here they still were, one woman growing toward the end of her courses, thin, disapproving lips in a thin, disapproving face, tiny apple-breasts under her high-necked dresses with their choker collars (The Neck, she frequently told Susan, is the First Thing to Go), her hair losing its former chestnut shine and showing wire-threads of gray; the other young, intelligent, agile, and rounding toward the peak of her physical beauty. They grated against each other, each word seeming to produce a spark, and that was not surprising. The man who had loved them both enough to make them love each other was gone.

“Are ye going out on that horse?” Aunt Cord had said, putting her bowl down and sitting in a shaft of early sun. It was a bad location, one she never would have allowed herself to be caught in had Mr. Jonas been in attendance. The strong light made her face look like a carved mask. There was a cold-sore growing at one corner other mouth; she always got them when she was not sleeping well.

“Aye,” Susan said.

“Ye should eat more’n that, then. 'Twon’t keep ye til nine o’ the clock, girl.”

“It’ll keep me fine,” Susan had replied, eating the sections of orange faster. She could see where this was tending, could see the look of dislike and disapproval in her aunt’s eyes, and wanted to get away from the table before trouble could begin.

“Why not let me get ye a dish of this?” Aunt Cord asked, and plopped her spoon into her oatmeal. To Susan it sounded like a horse’s hoof stamping down in mud-or shit-and her stomach clenched. “It’ll hold ye to lunch, if ye plan to ride so long. I suppose a fine young lady such as yerself can’t be bothered with chores-”

“They’re done.” And you know they ’re done, she did not add. I did em while you were sitting before your glass, poking at that sore on your mouth.

Aunt Cord dropped a chunk of creamery butter into her muck-Susan had no idea how the woman stayed so thin, really she didn’t-and watched it begin to melt. For a moment it seemed that breakfast might end on a reasonably civilized note, after all.

Then the shirt business had begun.

“Before ye go out, Susan, I want ye to take off that rag you’re wearing and put on one of the new riding blouses Thorin sent ye week before last. It’s the least ye can do to show yer-”

Anything her aunt might have said past that point would have been lost in anger even if Susan hadn’t interrupted. She passed a hand down the sleeve of her shirt, loving its texture-it was almost velvety from so many washings. “This rag belonged to my father!”

“Aye, Pat’s.” Aunt Cord sniffed. “It’s too big for ye, and worn out, and not proper, in any case. When you were young it was mayhap all right to wear a man’s button-shirt, but now that ye have a woman’s bustline…”

The riding blouses were on hangers in the comer; they had come four days ago and Susan hadn’t even deigned to take them up to her room. There were three of them, one red, one green, one blue, all silk, all undoubtedly worth a small fortune. She loathed their pretension, and the overblown, blushy-frilly look of them: full sleeves to flutter artistically in the wind, great floppy foolish collars… and, of course, the low-scooped fronts which were probably all Thorin would see if she appeared before him dressed in one. As she wouldn’t, if she could possibly help it.

“My 'woman’s bust-line,' as you call it, is of no interest to me and can’t possibly be of any interest to anyone else when I’m out riding,” Susan said.

“Perhaps, perhaps not. If one of the Barony’s drovers should see you-even Rennie, he’s out that way all the time, as ye well know-it wouldn’t hurt for him to mention to Hart that he saw yer wearing one of the camisas that he so kindly gave to ye. Now would it? Why do ye have lo he such a stiffkins, girl? Why always so unwilling, so unfair?”

“What does it matter to ye, one way or t'other?” Susan had asked. “Ye have the money, don’t ye? And ye’ll have more yet. After he fucks me.”

Aunt Cord, her face white and shocked and furious, had leaned across the table and slapped her. “How dare thee use that word in my house, ye malhablada? How dare ye?”

That was when her tears began to flow-at hearing her call it her house. “It was my father’s house! His and mine! Ye were all on yer own with no real place to go, except perhaps to the Quarters, and he took ye in! He took ye in, Aunt!”

The last two orange sections were still in her hand. She threw them into her aunt’s face, then pushed herself back from the table so violently that her chair tottered, tipped, and spilled her to the floor. Her aunt’s shadow fell over her. Susan crawled frantically out of it, her hair hanging, her slapped cheek throbbing, her eyes burning with tears, her throat swelled and hot. At last she found her feet.

“Ye ungrateful girl,” her aunt said. Her voice was soft and so full of venom it was almost caressing. “After all I have done for thee, and all Hart Thorin has done for thee. Why, the very nag ye mean to ride this morning was Hart’s gift of respect to-”

“PYLON WAS OURS!” she shrieked, almost maddened with fury at this deliberate blurring of the truth. “ALL OF THEM WERE! THE HORSES, THE LAND-THEY WERE OURS!”

“Lower thy voice,” Aunt Cord said.

Susan took a deep breath and tried to find some control. She swept her hair back from her face, revealing the red print of Aunt Cord’s hand on her cheek. Cordelia flinched a little at the sight of it.

“My father never would have allowed this,” Susan said. “He never would have allowed me to go as Hart Thorin’s gilly. Whatever he might have felt about Hart as the Mayor… or as his patrono… he never would have allowed this. And ye know it. Thee knows it.”

Aunt Cord rolled her eyes, then twirled a finger around her ear as if Susan had gone mad. “Thee agreed to it yerself, Miss Oh So Young and Pretty. Aye, so ye did. And if yer girlish megrims now cause ye to want to cry off what’s been done-“

“Aye,” Susan agreed. “I agreed to the bargain, so I did. After ye’d dunned me about it day and night, after ye’d come to me in tears-”

“I never did!” Cordelia cried, stung.

“Have ye forgotten so quick. Aunt? Aye, I suppose. As by tonight ye’ll have forgotten slapping me at breakfast. Well, I haven’t forgotten. Thee cried, all right, cried and told me ye feared we might be turned off the land, since we had no more legal right to it, that we’d be on the road, thee wept and said-”

“Stop calling me that!” Aunt Cord shouted. Nothing on earth maddened her so much as having her own thees and thous turned back at her. “Thee has no more right to the old tongue than thee has to thy stupid sheep’s complaints! Go on! Get out!”

But Susan went on. Her rage was at the flood and would not be turned aside.

“Thee wept and said we’d be turned out, turned west, that we’d never see my da’s homestead or Hambry again… and then, when I was frightened enough, ye talked of the cunning little baby I’d have. The land that was ours to begin with given back again. The horses that were ours likewise given back. As a sign of the Mayor’s honesty, I have a horse I myself helped to foal. And what have I done to deserve these things that would have been mine in any case, but for the loss of a single paper? What have I done so that he should give ye money? What have I done save promise to fuck him while his wife of forty year sleeps down the hall?”

“Is it the money ye want, then?” Aunt Cord asked, smiling furiously. “Do ye and do ye and aye? Ye shall have it, then. Take it, keep it, lose it, feed it to the swine, I care not!”

She turned to her purse, which hung on a post by the stove. She began to fumble in it, but her motions quickly lost speed and conviction. There was an oval of mirror mounted to the left of the kitchen doorway, and in it Susan caught sight other aunt’s face. What she saw there-a mixture of hatred, dismay, and greed-made her heart sink.

“Never mind, Aunt. I see thee’s loath to give it up, and I wouldn’t have it, anyway. It’s whore’s money.”

Aunt Cord turned back to her, face shocked, her purse conveniently forgotten.” ’tis not whoring, ye stupid get! Why, some of the greatest women in history have been gillys, and some of the greatest men have been born of gillys. ’tis not whoring!”

Susan ripped the red silk blouse from where it hung and held it up. The shirt moulded itself to her breasts as if it had been longing all the while to touch them. “Then why does he send me these whore’s clothes?”

“Susan!” Tears stood in Aunt Cord’s eyes.

Susan flung the shirt at her as she had the orange slices. It landed on her shoes. “Pick it up and put it on yerself, if ye fancy. You spread yer legs for him, if ye fancy."

She turned and hurled herself out the door. Her aunt’s half-hysterical shriek had followed her: “Don’t thee go off thinking foolish thoughts, Susan! Foolish thoughts lead to foolish deeds, and it’s too late for either! Thee’s agreed!”

She knew that. And however fast she rode Pylon along the Drop, she could not outrace her knowing. She had agreed, and no matter how horrified Pat Delgado might have been at the fix she had gotten herself into, he would have seen one thing clear-she had made a promise, and promises must be kept. Hell awaited those who would not do so.

3

She eased the rosillo back while he still had plenty of wind. She looked behind her, saw that she had come nearly a mile, and brought him down further-to a canter, a trot, a fast walk. She took a deep breath and let it out. For the first time that morning she registered the day’s bright beauty-gulls circling in the hazy air off to the west, high grasses all around her, and flowers in every shaded cranny: cornflowers and lupin and phlox and her favorites, the delicate blue silkflowers. From everywhere came the somnolent buzz of bees. The sound soothed her, and with the high surge of her emotions subsiding a little, she was able to admit something to herself… admit it, and then voice it aloud.

“Will Dearborn,” she said, and shivered at the sound of his name on her lips, even though there was no one to hear it but Pylon and the bees. So she said it again, and when the words were out she abruptly turned her own wrist inward to her mouth and kissed it where the blood beat close to the surface. The action shocked her because she hadn’t known she was going to do it, and shocked her more because the taste of her own skin and sweat aroused her immediately. She felt an urge to cool herself off as she had in her bed after meeting him. The way she felt, it would be short work.

Instead, she growled her father’s favorite cuss-“Oh, bite it!”-and spat past her boot. Will Dearborn had been responsible for all too much upset in her life these last three weeks; Will Dearborn with his unsettling blue eyes, his dark tumble of hair, and his stiff-necked. judgmental attitude. I can be discreet, madam. As for propriety? I’m amazed you even know the word.

Every time she thought of that, her blood sang with anger and shame. Mostly anger. How dare he presume to make judgments? He who had grown up possessing every luxury, no doubt with servants to tend his every whim and so much gold that he likely didn’t even need it-he would be given the things he wanted free, as a way of currying favor. What would a boy like that-for that was all he was, really, just a boy- know about the hard choices she had made? For that matter, how could such as Mr. Will Dearborn of Hemphill understand that she hadn’t really made those choices at all? That she had been carried to them the way a mother cat carries a wayward kitten back to the nesting-box, by the scruff of the neck?

Still, he wouldn’t leave her mind; she knew, even if Aunt Cord didn’t, that there had been an unseen third present at their quarrel this morning.

She knew something else as well, something that would have upset her aunt to no end.

Will Dearborn hadn’t forgotten her, either.

4

About a week after the welcoming dinner and Dearborn’s disastrous, hurtful remark to her, the retarded slops-fella from the Travellers’ Rest- Sheemie, folks called him-had appeared at the house Susan and her aunt shared. In his hands he held a large bouquet, mostly made up of the wild-flowers that grew out on the Drop, but with a scattering of dusky wild roses, as well. They looked like pink punctuation marks. On the boy’s face there had been a wide, sunny grin as he swung the gate open, not waiting for an invitation.

Susan had been sweeping the front walk at the time; Aunt Cord had been out back, in the garden. That was fortunate, but not very surprising; these days the two of them got on best when they kept apart as much as they could.

Susan had watched Sheemie come up the walk, his grin beaming out from behind his upheld freight of flowers, with a mixture of fascination and horror.

“G'day, Susan Delgado, daughter of Pat,” Sheemie said cheerfully. “I come to you on an errand and cry yer pardon at any troubleation I be, oh aye, for I am a problem for folks, and know it same as them. These be for you. Here.”

He thrust them out, and she saw a small, folded envelope tucked amongst them.

“Susan?” Aunt Cord’s voice, from around the side of the house… and getting closer. “Susan, did I hear the gate?”

“Yes, Aunt!” she called back. Curse the woman’s sharp ears! Susan nimbly plucked the envelope from its place among the phlox and daisies. Into her dress pocket it went.

“They from my third-best friend,” Sheemie said. “I got three different friends now. This many.” He held up two fingers, frowned, added two more, and then grinned splendidly. “Arthur Heath my first-best friend, Dick Stockworth my second-best friend. My third-best friend-”

“Hush!” Susan said in a low, fierce voice that made Sheemie’s smile fade. “Not a word about your three friends.”

A funny little flush, almost like a pocket fever, raced across her skin-it seemed to run down her neck from her cheeks, then slip all the way to her feet. There had been a lot of talk in Hambry about Sheemie’s new friends during the past week-talk about little else, it seemed. The stories she had heard were outlandish, but if they weren’t true, why did the versions told by so many different witnesses sound so much alike?

Susan was still trying to get herself back under control when Aunt Cord swept around the comer. Sheemie fell back a step at the sight of her, puzzlement becoming outright dismay. Her aunt was allergic to beestings, and was presently swaddled from the top of her straw 'brera to the hem of her faded garden dress in gauzy stuff that made her look peculiar in strong light and downright eerie in shade. Adding a final touch to her costume, she carried a pair of dirt-streaked garden shears in one gloved hand.

She saw the bouquet and bore down on it, shears raised. When she reached her niece, she slid the scissors into a loop on her belt (almost reluctantly, it seemed to the niece herself) and parted the veil on her face. “Who sent ye those?”

“I don’t know. Aunt,” Susan said, much more calmly than she felt. “This is the young man from the inn-”

“Inn!” Aunt Cord snorted.

“He doesn’t seem to know who sent him,” Susan carried on. If only she could get him out of here! “He’s, well, I suppose you’d say he’s-”

“He’s a fool, yes, I know that.” Aunt Cord cast Susan a brief, irritated look, then bent her attention on Sheemie. Talking with her gloved hands upon her knees, shouting directly into his face, she asked: “WHO… SENT… THESE… FLOWERS… YOUNG… MAN?”

The wings of her face-veil, which had been pushed aside, now fell back into place. Sheemie took another step backward. He looked frightened.

“WAS IT… PERHAPS… SOMEONE FROM… SEAFRONT?… FROM… MAYOR… THORIN?… TELL…ME… AND… I’LL… GIVE… YOU… A PENNY.”

Susan’s heart sank, sure he would tell-he’d not have the wit to understand he’d be getting her into trouble. Will, too, likely.

But Sheemie only shook his head. “Don’t 'member. I got a empty head, sai, so I do. Stanley says I a bugwit.”

His grin shone out again, a splendid thing full of white, even teeth. Aunt Cord answered it with a grimace. “Oh, foo! Be gone, then. Straight back to town, too-don’t be hanging around hoping for a goose-feather. For a boy who can’t remember deserves not so much as a penny! And don’t you come back here again, no matter who wants you to carry flowers for the young sai. Do you hear me?”

Sheemie had nodded energetically. Then: “Sai?”

Aunt Cord glowered at him. The vertical line on her forehead had been very prominent that day.

“Why you all wropped up in cobwebbies, sai?”

“Get out of here, ye impudent cull!” Aunt Cord cried. She had a good loud voice when she wanted to use it, and Sheemie jumped back from her in alarm. When she was sure he was headed back down the High Street toward town and had no intention of returning to their gate and hanging about in hopes of a tip, Aunt Cord had turned to Susan.

“Get those in some water before they wilt, Miss Oh So Young and Pretty, and don’t go mooning about, wondering who yer secret admirer might be.”

Then Aunt Cord had smiled. A real smile. What hurt Susan the most, confused her the most, was that her aunt was no cradle-story ogre, no witch like Rhea of the Coos. There was no monster here, only a maiden lady with some few social pretensions, a love of gold and silver, and a tear of being turned out, penniless, into the world.

“For folks such as us, Susie-pie,” she said, speaking with a terrible heavy kindness,” ’tis best to stick to our housework and leave dreams to them as can afford them.”

5

She had been sure the flowers were from Will, and she was right. His note was written in a hand which was clear and passing fair.

Dear Susan Delgado,

I spoke out of turn the other night, and cry your pardon. May I see you and speak to you? It must be private. This is a matter of importance. If you will see me, get a message to the boy who brings this. He is safe.

Will Dearborn

A matter of importance. Underlined. She felt a strong desire to know what was so important to him, and cautioned herself against doing anything foolish. Perhaps he was smitten with her… and if so, whose fault was that? Who had talked to him, ridden his horse, showed him her legs in a flashy carnival dismount? Who had put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him?

Her cheeks and forehead burned at the thought of that, and another hot ring seemed to go slipping down her body. She wasn’t sure she regretted the kiss, but it had been a mistake, regrets or no regrets. Seeing him again now would be a worse one.

Yet she wanted to see him, and knew in her deepest heart that she was ready to set her anger at him aside. But there was the promise she had made.

The wretched promise.

That night she lay sleepless, tossing about in her bed, first thinking it would be better, more dignified, just to keep her silence, then composing mental notes anyway-some haughty, some cold, some with a lace-edge of flirtation.

When she heard the midnight bell ring, passing the old day out and calling the new one in, she decided enough was enough. She’d thrown herself from her bed, gone to her door, opened it, and thrust her head out into the hall. When she heard Aunt Cord’s flutelike snores, she had closed her door again, crossed to her little desk by the window, and lit her lamp. She took one of her sheets of parchment paper from the top drawer, tore it in half (in Hambry, the only crime greater than wasting paper was wasting threaded stockline), and then wrote quickly, sensing that the slightest hesitation might condemn her to more hours of indecision. With no salutation and no signature, her response took only a breath to write:

I may not see you. ’Twould not be proper.

She had folded it small, blew out her lamp, and returned to bed with the note safely tucked under her pillow. She was asleep in two minutes. The following day, when the marketing took her to town, she had gone by the Travellers’ Rest, which, at eleven in the morning, had all the charm of something which has died badly at the side of the road.

The saloon’s door-yard was a beaten dirt square bisected by a long hitching rail with a watering trough beneath. Sheemie was trundling a wheelbarrow along the rail, picking up last night’s horse-droppings with a shovel. He was wearing a comical pink sombrero, and singing “Golden Slippers.” Susan doubted if many of the Rest’s patrons would wake up feeling as well as Sheemie obviously did this morning… so who, when you came right down to it, was more soft-headed?

She looked around to make sure no one was paying heed to her, then went over to Sheemie and tapped him on the shoulder. He looked frightened at first, and Susan didn’t blame him-according to the stories she’d been hearing, Jonas’s friend Depape had almost killed the poor kid for spilling a drink on his boots.

Then Sheemie recognized her. “Hello, Susan Delgado from out there by the edge of town,” he said companionably. “It’s a good day I wish you, sai.”

He bowed-an amusing imitation of the Inner Baronies bow favored by his three new friends. Smiling, she dropped him a bit of curtsey (wearing jeans, she had to pretend at the skirt-holding part, but women in Mejis got used to curtseying in pretend skirts).

“See my flowers, sai?” he asked, and pointed toward the unpainted side of the Rest. What she saw touched her deeply: a line of mixed blue and white silkflowers growing along the base of the building. They looked both brave and pathetic, flurrying there in the faint morning breeze with the bald, turd-littered yard before them and the splintery public house behind them.

“Rid you grow those, Sheemie?”

“Aye, so I did. And Mr. Arthur Heath of Gilead has promised me yellow ones.”

“I’ve never seen yellow silkflowers.”

“Noey-no, me neither, but Mr. Arthur Heath says they have them in Gilead.” He looked at Susan solemnly, the shovel held in his hands as a soldier would hold a gun or spear at port arms. “Mr. Arthur Heath saved my life. I’d do anything for him.”

“Would you, Sheemie?” she asked, touched.

“Also, he has a lookout! It’s a bird’s head! And when he talks to it, tendy-pretend, do I laugh? Aye, fit to split!”

She looked around again to make sure no one was watching (save for the carved totems across the street), then removed her note, folded small, from her jeans pocket.

“Would you give this to Mr. Dearborn for me? He’s also your friend, is he not?”

“Will? Aye!” He took the note and put it carefully into his own pocket.

“And tell no one.”

“Shhhhh!” he agreed, and put a finger to his lips. His eyes had been amusingly round beneath the ridiculous pink lady’s straw he wore. “Like when I brought you the flowers. Hushaboo!”

“That’s right, hushaboo. Fare ye well, Sheemie.”

“And you, Susan Delgado.”

He went back to his cleanup operations. Susan had stood watching him for a moment, feeling uneasy and out of sorts with herself. Now that the note was successfully passed, she felt an urge to ask Sheemie to give it back, to scratch out what she had written, and promise to meet him. If only to see his steady blue eyes again, looking into her face.

Then Jonas’s other friend, the one with the cloak, came sauntering out of the mercantile. She was sure he didn’t see her-his head was down and he was rolling a cigarette-but she had no intention of pressing her luck. Reynolds talked to Jonas, and Jonas talked-all too much!-to Aunt Cord. If Aunt Cord heard she had been passing the time of day with the boy who had brought her the flowers, there were apt to be questions. Ones she didn’t want to answer.

6

All that’s history now, Susan-water under the bridge. Best to get your thoughts out of the past.

She brought Pylon to a stop and looked down the length of the Drop at the horses that moved and grazed there. Quite a surprising number of them this morning.

It wasn’t working. Her mind kept turning back to Will Dearborn.

What bad luck meeting him had been! If not for that chance encounter on her way back down from the Coos, she might well have made peace with her situation by now-she was a practical girl, after all, and a promise was a promise. She certainly never would have expected herself to get all goosy-gushy over losing her maidenhead, and the prospect of carrying and bearing a child actually excited her.

But Will Dearborn had changed things; had gotten into her head and now lodged there, a tenant who defied eviction. His remark to her as they danced stayed with her like a song you can’t stop humming, even though you hate it. It had been cruel and stupidly self-righteous, that remark… but was there not also a grain of truth in it? Rhea had been right about Hart Thorin, of that much Susan no longer had any doubt. She supposed that witches were right about men’s lusts even when they were wrong about everything else. Not a happy thought, but likely a true one.

It was Will Be Damned to You Dearborn who had made it difficult for her to accept what needed accepting, who had goaded her into arguments in which she could hardly recognize her own shrill and desperate voice, who came to her in her dreams-dreams where he put his arms around her waist and kissed her, kissed her, kissed her.

She dismounted and walked downhill a little way with the reins looped in her fist. Pylon followed willingly enough, and when she stopped to look off into the blue haze to the southwest, he lowered his head and began to crop again.

She thought she needed to see Will Dearborn once more, if only to give her innate practicality a chance to reassert itself. She needed to see him at his right size, instead of the one her mind had created for him in her warm thoughts and warmer dreams. Once that was done, she could get on with her life and do what needed doing. Perhaps that was why she had taken this path-the same one she’d ridden yesterday, and the day before yesterday, and the day before that. He rode this part of the Drop; that much she had heard in the lower market.

She turned away from the Drop, suddenly knowing he would be there, as if her thought had called him-or her ka.

She saw only blue sky and low ridgeline hills that curved gently like the line of a woman’s thigh and hip and waist as she lies on her side in bed. Susan felt a bitter disappointment fill her. She could almost taste it in her mouth, like wet tea leaves.

She started back to Pylon, meaning to return to the house and take care of the apology she reckoned she must make. The sooner she did it, the sooner it would be done. She reached for her left stirrup, which was twisted a little, and as she did, a rider came over the horizon, breaking against the sky at the place which looked to her like a woman’s hip. He sat there, only a silhouette on horseback, but she knew who it was at once.

Run! she told herself in a sudden panic. Mount and gallop! Get out of here! Quickly! Before something terrible happens… before it really is ka, come like a wind to take you and all your plans over the sky and far away!

She didn’t run. She stood with Pylon’s reins in one hand, and murmured to him when the rosillo looked up and nickered a greeting to the big bay-colored gelding coming down the hill.

Then Will was there, first above her and looking down, then dismounted in an easy, liquid motion she didn’t think she could have matched, for all her years of horsemanship. This time there was no kicked-out leg and planted heel, no hat swept over a comically solemn bow; this time the gaze he gave her was steady and serious and disquietingly adult.

They looked at each other in the Drop’s big silence, Roland of Gilead and Susan of Mejis, and in her heart she felt a wind begin to blow. She feared it and welcomed it in equal measure.

7

“Goodmorn, Susan,” he said. “I’m glad to see you again.”

She said nothing, waiting and watching. Could he hear her heart beating as clearly as she could? Of course not; that was so much romantic twaddle. Yet it still seemed to her that everything within a fifty-yard radius should be able to hear that thumping.

Will took a step forward. She took a step back, looking at him mistrustfully. He lowered his head for a moment, then looked up again, his lips set.

“I cry your pardon,” he said.

“Do you?” Her voice was cool.

“What I said that night was unwarranted.”

At that she felt a spark of real anger. “I care not that it was unwarranted; I care that it was unfair. That it hurt me.”

A tear overbrimmed her left eye and slipped down her cheek. She wasn’t all cried out after all, it seemed.

She thought what she said would perhaps shame him, but although faint color came into his cheeks, his eyes remained firmly on hers.

“I fell in love with you,” he said. “That’s why I said it. It happened even before you kissed me, I think.”

She laughed at that… but the simplicity with which he had spoken made her laughter sound false in her own ears. Tinny. “Mr. Dearborn-”

“Will. Please.”

“Mr. Dearborn,” she said, patiently as a teacher working with a dull student, “the idea is ridiculous. On the basis of one single meeting? One single kiss? A sister’s kiss?” Now she was the one who was blushing, but she hurried on. “Such things happen in stories, but in real life? I think not.”

But his eyes never left hers, and in them she saw some of Roland’s truth: the deep romance of his nature, buried like a fabulous streak of alien metal in the granite of his practicality. He accepted love as a fact rather than a flower, and it rendered her genial contempt powerless over both of them.

“I cry your pardon,” he repeated. There was a kind of brute stubbornness in him. It exasperated her, amused her, and appalled her, all at the same time. “I don’t ask you to return my love, that’s not why I spoke. You told me your affairs were complicated…” Now his eyes did leave hers, and he looked off toward the Drop. He even laughed a little. “I called him a bit of a fool, didn’t I? To your face. So who’s the fool, after all?”

She smiled; couldn’t help it. “Ye also said ye’d heard he was fond of strong drink and berry-girls.”

Roland hit his forehead with the heel of his hand. If his friend Arthur Heath had done that, she would have taken it as a deliberate, comic gesture. Not with Will. She had an idea he wasn’t much for comedy.

Silence between them again, this time not so uncomfortable. The two horses, Rusher and Pylon, cropping contentedly, side by side. If we were horses, all this would be much easier, she thought, and almost giggled.

“Mr. Dearborn, ye understand that I have agreed to an arrangement?”

“Aye.” He smiled when she raised her eyebrows in surprise. “It’s not mockery but the dialect. It just… seeps in.”

“Who told ye of my business?”

“The Mayor’s sister.”

“Coral.” She wrinkled her nose and decided she wasn’t surprised. And she supposed there were others who could have explained her situation even more crudely. Eldred Jonas, for one. Rhea of the Coos, for another. Best to leave it. “So if ye understand, and if ye don’t ask me to return your… whatever it is ye think ye feel… why are we talking? Why do ye seek me out? I think it makes ye passing uncomfortable-”

“Yes,” he said, and then, as if stating a simple fact: “It makes me uncomfortable, all right. I can barely look at you and keep my head.”

“Then mayhap it’d be best not to look, not to speak, not to think!” Her voice was both sharp and a little shaky. How could he have the courage to say such things, to just state them straight out and starey-eyed like that? “Why did ye send me the bouquet and that note? Are ye not aware of the trouble ye could’ve gotten me into? If y'knew my aunt…! She’s already spoken to me about ye, and if she knew about the note… or saw us together out here…”

She looked around, verifying that they were still unobserved. They were, at least as best she could tell. He reached out, touched her shoulder. She looked at him, and he pulled his fingers back as if he had put them on something hot.

“I said what I did so you’d understand,” he said. “That’s all. I feel how I feel, and you’re not responsible for that.”

But I am, she thought. I kissed you. I think I’m more than a little responsible for how we both feel. Will.

“What I said while we were dancing I regret with all my heart. Won’t you give me your pardon?”

“Aye,” she said, and if he had taken her in his arms at that moment, she would have let him, and damn the consequences. But he only took off his hat and made her a charming little bow, and the wind died.

“Thankee-sai.”

“Don’t call me that. I hate it. My name is Susan.”

“Will you call me Will?” '

She nodded.

“Good. Susan, I want to ask you something-not as the fellow who insulted you and hurt you because he was jealous. This is something else entirely. May I?”

“Aye, I suppose,” she said warily.

“Are you for the Affiliation?”

She looked at him, flabbergasted. It was the last question in the world she had expected… but he was looking at her seriously.

“I’d expected ye and yer friends to count cows and guns and spears and boats and who knows what else,” she said, “but I didn’t think thee would also count Affiliation supporters.”

She saw his look of surprise, and a little smile at the comers of his mouth. This time the smile made him look older than he could possibly be. Susan thought back across what she’d just said, realized what must have struck him, and gave a small, embarrassed laugh. “My aunt has a way of lapsing into thee and thou. My father did, too. It’s from a sect of the Old People who called themselves Friends.”

“I know. We have the Friendly Folk in my part of the world still.”

“Do you?”

“Yes… or aye, if you like the sound of that better; I’m coming to. And I like the way the Friends talk. It has a lovely sound.”

“Not when my aunt uses it,” Susan said, thinking back to the argument over the shirt. “To answer your question, aye-I’m for the Affiliation, I suppose. Because my da was. If ye ask am I strong for the Affiliation, I suppose not. We see and hear little enough of them, these days. Mostly rumors and stories carried by drifters and far-travelling drummers. Now that there’s no railway…” She shrugged.

“Most of the ordinary day-to-day folk I’ve spoken to seem to feel the same. And yet your Mayor Thorin-”

“He’s not my Mayor Thorin,” she said, more sharply than she had intended.

“And yet the Barony’s Mayor Thorin has given us every help we’ve asked for, and some we haven’t. I have only to snap my fingers, and Kimba Rimer stands before me.”

“Then don’t snap them,” she said, looking around in spite of herself. She tried to smile and show it was a joke, but didn’t make much success of it.

“The townsfolk, the fisherfolk, the farmers, the cowboys… they all speak well of the Affiliation, but distantly. Yet the Mayor, his Chancellor, and the members of the Horsemen’s Association, Lengyll and Garber and that lot-”

“I know them,” she said shortly.

“They’re absolutely enthusiastic in their support. Mention the Affiliation to Sheriff Avery and he all but dances. In every ranch parlor we’re offered a drink from an Eld commemorative cup, it seems.”

“A drink of what?” she asked, a trifle roguishly. “Beer? Ale? Graf?”

“Also wine, whiskey, and pettibone,” he said, not responding to her smile. “It’s almost as if they wish us to break our vow. Does that strike you as strange?”

“Aye, a little; or just as Hambry hospitality. In these parts, when someone-especially a young man-says he’s taken the pledge, folks tend to think him coy, not serious.”

“And this joyful support of the Affiliation amongst the movers and the shakers? How does that strike you?”

“Queer.”

And it did. Pat Delgado’s work had brought him in almost daily contact with these landowners and horsebreeders, and so she, who had tagged after her da any time he would let her, had seen plenty of them. She thought them a cold bunch, by and large. She couldn’t imagine John Croydon or Jake White waving an Arthur Eld stein in a sentimental toast… especially not in the middle of the day, when there was stock to be run and sold.

Will’s eyes were full upon her, as if he were reading these thoughts.

“But you probably don’t see as much of the big fellas as you once did,” he said. “Before your father passed, I mean.”

“Perhaps not… but do bumblers learn to speak backward?”

No cautious smile this time; this time he outright grinned. It lit his whole face. Gods, how handsome he was! “I suppose not. No more than cats change their spots, as we say. And Mayor Thorin doesn’t speak of such as us-me and my friends-to you when you two are alone? Or is that question beyond what I have a right to ask? I suppose it is.”

“I care not about that,” she said, tossing her head pertly enough to make her long braid swing. “I understand little of propriety, as some have been good enough to point out.” But she didn’t care as much for his downcast look and flush of embarrassment as she had expected. She knew girls who liked to tease as well as flirt and to tease hard, some of them- but it seemed she had no taste for it. Certainly she had no desire to set her claws in him, and when she went on, she spoke gently. “I’m not alone with him, in any case.”

And oh how ye do lie, she thought mournfully, remembering how Thorin had embraced her in the hall on the night of the party, groping at her breasts like a child trying to get his hand into a candy-jar; telling her that he burned for her. Oh ye great liar.

“In any case, Will, Hart’s opinion of you and yer friends can hardly concern ye, can it? Ye have a job to do, that’s all. If he helps ye, why not just accept and be grateful?”

“Because something’s wrong here,” he said, and the serious, almost somber quality of his voice frightened her a little.

“Wrong? With the Mayor? With the Horsemen’s Association? What are ye talking about?”

He looked at her steadily, then seemed to decide something. “I’m going to trust you, Susan.”

“I’m not sure I want thy trust any more than I want thy love,” she said.

He nodded. “And yet, to do the job I was sent to do, I have to trust someone. Can you understand that?”

She looked into his eyes, then nodded.

He stepped next to her, so close she fancied she could feel the warmth of his skin. “Look down there. Tell me what you see.”

She looked, then shrugged. “The Drop. Same as always.” She smiled a little. “And as beautiful. This has always been my favorite place in all the world.”

“Aye, it’s beautiful, all right. What else do you see?”

“Horses, of courses.” She smiled to show this was a joke (an old one of her da’s, in fact), but he didn’t smile back. Fair to look at, and courageous, if the stories they were already telling about town were true- quick in both thought and movement, too. Really not much sense of humor, though. Well, there were worse failings. Grabbing a girl’s bosom when she wasn’t expecting it might be one of them.

“Horses. Yes. But does it look like the right number of them? You’ve been seeing horses on the Drop all your life, and surely no one who’s not in the Horsemen’s Association is better qualified to say.”

“And ye don’t trust them?”

“They’ve given us everything we’ve asked for, and they’re as friendly as dogs under the dinner-table, but no-1 don’t think 1 do.”

“Yet ye’d trust me.”

He looked at her steadily with his beautiful and frightening eyes-a darker blue than they would later be, not yet faded out by the suns of ten thousand drifting days. “I have to trust someone,” he repeated.

She looked down, almost as though he had rebuked her. He reached out, put gentle fingers beneath her chin, and tipped her face up again. “Does it seem the right number? Think carefully!”

But now that he’d brought it to her attention, she hardly needed to think about it at all. She had been aware of the change for some time, she supposed, but it had been gradual, easy to overlook.

“No,” she said at last. “It’s not right.”

“Too few or too many? Which?”

She paused for a moment. Drew in breath. Let it out in a long sigh. “Too many. Far too many.”

Will Dearborn raised his clenched fists to shoulder-height and gave them a single hard shake. His blue eyes blazed like the spark-lights of which her grand-da had told her. “I knew it,” he said. “I knew it.”

8

“How many horses are down there?” he asked.

“Below us? Or on the whole Drop?”

“Just below us.”

She looked carefully, making no attempt to actually count. That didn’t work; it only confused you. She saw four good-sized groups of about twenty horses each, moving about on the green almost exactly as birds moved about in the blue above them. There were perhaps nine smaller groups, ranging from octets to quartets… several pairs (they reminded her of lovers, but everything did today, it seemed)… a few galloping loners-young stallions, mostly…

“A hundred and sixty?” he asked in a low, almost hesitant voice.

She looked at him, surprised. “Aye. A hundred sixty’s the number I had in mind. To a pin.”

“And how much of the Drop are we looking at? A quarter? A third?”

“Much less.” She tilted him a small smile. “As I think thee knows. A sixth of the total open graze, perhaps.”

“If there are a hundred and sixty horses free-grazing on each sixth, that comes to…”

She waited for him to come up with nine hundred and sixty. When he did, she nodded. He looked down a moment longer, and grunted with surprise when Rusher nosed him in the small of the back. Susan put a curled hand to her mouth to stifle a laugh. From the impatient way he pushed the horse’s muzzle away, she guessed he still saw little that was funny.

“How many more are stabled or training or working, do you reckon?” he asked.

“One for every three down there. At a guess.”

“So we’d be talking twelve hundred head of horses. All threaded stock, no muties.”

She looked at him with faint surprise. “Aye. There’s almost no mutie stock here in Mejis… in any of the Outer Baronies, for that matter.”

“You true-breed more than three out of every five?”

“We breed em all! Of course every now and then we get a freak that has to be put down, but-”

“Not one freak out of every five livebirths? One out of five born with-” How had Renfrew put it? “With extra legs or its guts on the outside?”

Her shocked look was enough answer. “Who’s been telling ye such?”

“Renfrew. He also told me that there was about five hundred and seventy head of threaded stock here in Mejis.”

“That’s just… “She gave a bewildered little laugh. “Just crazy! If my da was here-”

“But he’s not,” Roland said, his tone as dry as a snapping twig. “He’s dead.”

For a moment she seemed not to register the change in that tone. Then, as if an eclipse had begun to happen somewhere inside her head, her entire aspect darkened. “My da had an accident. Do you understand that, Will Dearborn? An accident. It was terribly sad, but the sort of thing that happens, sometimes. A horse rolled on him. Ocean Foam. Fran says Foam saw a snake in the grass.”

“Fran Lengyll?”

“Aye.” Her skin was pale, except for two wild roses-pink, like those in the bouquet he’d sent her by way of Sheemie-glowing high up on her cheekbones. “Fran rode many miles with my father. They weren’t great friends-they were of different classes, for one thing-but they rode together. I’ve a cap put away somewhere that Fran’s first wife made for my christening. They rode the trail together. 1 can’t believe Fran Lengyll would lie about how my da died, let alone that he had… anything to do with it.”

Yet she looked doubtfully down at the running horses. So many. Too many. Her da would have seen. And her da would have wondered what she was wondering now: whose brands were on the extras?

“It so happens Fran Lengyll and my friend Stockworth had a discussion about horses,” Will said. His voice sounded almost casual, but there was nothing casual on his face. “Over glasses of spring water, after beer had been offered and refused. They spoke of them much as I did with Renfrew at Mayor Thorin’s welcoming dinner. When Richard asked sai Lengyll to estimate riding horses, he said perhaps four hundred.”

“Insane.”

“It would seem so,” Will agreed.

“Do they not kennit the horses are out here where ye can see em?”

“They know we’ve barely gotten started,” he said, “and that we’ve begun with the fisherfolk. We’ll be a month yet, I’m sure they think, before we start to concern ourselves with the horseflesh hereabouts. And in the meantime, they have an attitude about us of… how shall I put it? Well, never mind how I’d put it. I’m not very good with words, but my friend Arthur calls it 'genial contempt.' They leave the horses out in front of our eyes, I think, because they don’t believe we’ll know what we’re looking at. Or because they think we won’t believe what we’re seeing. I’m very glad I found you out here.”

Just so I could give you a more accurate horse-count? Is that the only reason?

“But ye will get around to counting the horses. Eventually. I mean, that must surely be one of the Affiliation’s main needs.”

He gave her an odd look, as if she had missed something that should have been obvious. It made her feel self-conscious.

“What? What is it?”

“Perhaps they expect the extra horses to be gone by the time we get around to this side of the Barony’s business.”

“Gone where?”

“I don’t know. But I don’t like this. Susan, you will keep this just between the two of us, won’t you?”

She nodded. She’d be insane to tell anyone she had been with Will Dearborn, unchaperoned except by Rusher and Pylon, out on the Drop.

“It may all turn out to be nothing, but if it doesn’t, knowing could be dangerous.”

Which led back to her da again. Lengyll had told her and Aunt Cord that Pat had been thrown, and that Ocean Foam had then rolled upon him. Neither of them had had any reason to doubt the man’s story. But Fran Lengyll had also told Will’s friend that there were only four hundred head of riding stock in Mejis, and that was a bald lie.

Will turned to his horse, and she was glad.

Part of her wanted him to stay-to stand close to her while the clouds sent their long shadows flying across the grassland-but they had been together out here too long already. There was no reason to think anyone would come along and see them, but instead of comforting her, that idea for some reason made her more nervous than ever.

He straightened the stirrup hanging beside the scabbarded shaft of his lance (Rusher whickered way back in his throat, as if to say About time we got going), then turned to her again. She felt actually faint as his gaze fell upon her, and now the idea of ka was almost too strong to deny. She tried to tell herself it was just the dim-that feeling of having lived a thing before-but it wasn’t the dim; it was a sense of finding a road one had been searching for all along.

“There’s something else I want to say. I don’t like returning to where we started, but I must.”

“No,” she said faintly. “That’s closed, surely.”

“I told you that I loved you, and that I was jealous,” he said, and for the first time his voice had come unanchored a little, wavering in his throat. She was alarmed to see that there were tears standing in his eyes. “There was more. Something more.”

“Will, I don’t want to-” She turned blindly for her horse. He took her shoulder and turned her back. It wasn’t a harsh touch, but there was an inexorability to it that was dreadful. She looked helplessly up into his face, saw that he was young and far from home, and suddenly understood she could not stand against him for long. She wanted him so badly that she ached with it. She would have given a year of her life just to be able to put her palms on his cheeks and feel his skin.

“You miss your father, Susan?”

“Aye,” she whispered. “With all my heart I do.”

“I miss my mother the same way.” He held her by both shoulders now. One eye overbrimmed; one tear drew a silver line down his cheek.

“Is she dead?”

“No, but something happened. About her. To her. Shit! How can I talk about it when I don’t even know how to think about it? In a way, she did die. For me.”

“Will, that’s terrible.”

He nodded. “The last time I saw her, she looked at me in a way that will haunt me to my grave. Shame and love and hope, all of them bound up together. Shame at what I’d seen and knew about her, hope, maybe, that I’d understand and forgive… “He took a deep breath. “The night of the party, toward the end of the meal, Rimer said something funny. You all laughed-”

“If I did, it was only because it would have looked strange if I was the only one who didn’t,” Susan said. “I don’t like him. I think he’s a schemer and a conniver.”

“You all laughed, and I happened to look down toward the end of the table. Toward Olive Thorin. And for a moment-only a moment-I thought she was my mother. The expression was the same, you see. The same one I saw on the morning when I opened the wrong door at the wrong time and came upon my mother and her-”

“Stop it!” she cried, pulling back from his hands. Inside her, everything was suddenly in motion, all the mooring-lines and buckles and clamps she’d been using to hold herself together seeming to melt at once. “Stop it, just stop it, I can’t listen to you talk about her!”

She groped out for Pylon, but now the whole world was wet prisms. She began to sob. She felt his hands on her shoulders, turning her again, and she did not resist them.

“I’m so ashamed,” she said. ''I’m so ashamed and so frightened and I’m sorry. I’ve forgotten my father’s face and… and…”

And I’ll never be able to find it again, she wanted to say, but she didn’t have to say anything. He stopped her mouth with his kisses. At first she just let herself be kissed… and then she was kissing him back, kissing him almost furiously. She wiped the wetness from beneath his eyes with soft little sweeps of her thumbs, then slipped her palms up his cheeks as she had longed to do. The feeling was exquisite; even the soft rasp of the stubble close to the skin was exquisite. She slid her arms around his neck, her open mouth on his, holding him and kissing him as hard as she could, kissing him there between the horses, who simply looked at each other and then went back to cropping grass.

9

They were the best kisses of his whole life, and never forgotten: the yielding pliancy of her lips and the strong shape of her teeth under them, urgent and not shy in the least; the fragrance of her breath, the sweet line of her body pressed against his. He slipped a hand up to her left breast, squeezed it gently, and felt her heart speeding under it. His other hand went to her hair and combed along the side of it, silk at her temple. He never forgot its texture.

Then she was standing away from him, her face flaming with blush and passion, one hand going to her lips, which he had kissed until they were swollen. A little trickle of blood ran from the comer of the lower one. Her eyes, wide on his. Her bosom rising and falling as if she had just run a race. And between them a current that was like nothing he had ever felt in his life. It ran like a river and shook like a fever.

“No more,” she said in a trembling voice. “No more, please. If you really do love me, don’t let me dishonor myself. I’ve made a promise. Anything might come later, after that promise was fulfilled, I suppose… if you still wanted me…”

“I would wait forever,” he said calmly, “and do anything for you but stand away and watch you go with another man.”

“Then if you love me, go away from me. Please, Will!”

“Another kiss.”

She stepped forward at once, raising her face trustingly up to his, and he understood he could do whatever he wanted with her. She was, at least for the moment, no longer her own mistress; she might consequently be his. He could do to her what Marten had done to his own mother, if that was his fancy.

The thought broke his passion apart, turned it to coals that fell in a bright shower, winking out one by one in a dark bewilderment. His father’s acceptance

(I have known for two years)

was in many ways the worst part of what had happened to him this year; how could he fall in love with this girl-any girl-in a world where such evils of the heart seemed necessary, and might even be repeated?

Yet he did love her.

Instead of the passionate kiss he wanted, he placed his lips lightly on the corner of her mouth where the little rill of blood flowed. He kissed, tasting salt like the taste of his own tears. He closed his eyes and shivered when her hand stroked the hair at the nape of his neck.

“I’d not hurt Olive Thorin for the world,” she whispered in his ear. “No more than I’d hurt thee, Will. I didn’t understand, and now ’tis too late to be put right. But thank you for not… not taking what you could. And I’ll remember you always. How it was to be kissed by you. It’s the best thing that ever happened to me, I think. Like heaven and earth all wrapped up together, aye.”

“I’ll remember, too.” He watched her swing up into the saddle, and remembered how her bare legs had flashed in the dark on the night he had met her. And suddenly he couldn’t let her go. He reached forward, touched her boot.

“Susan-”

“No,” she said. “Please.”

He stood back. Somehow.

“This is our secret,” she said. “Yes?”

“Aye.”

She smiled at that… but it was a sad smile. “Stay away from me from now on, Will. Please. And I’ll stay away from you.”

He thought about it. “If we can.”

“We must, Will. We must.”

She rode away fast. Roland stood beside Rusher’s stirrup, watching her go. And when she was out of sight over the horizon, still he watched.

10

Sheriff Avery, Deputy Dave, and Deputy George Riggins were sitting on the porch in front of the Sheriff’s office and jail when Mr. Stockworth and Mr. Heath (the latter with that idiotic bird’s skull still mounted on the horn of his saddle) went past at a steady walk. The bell o’ noon had rung fifteen minutes before, and Sheriff Avery reckoned they were on their way to lunch, perhaps at The Millbank, or perhaps at the Rest, which put on a fair noon meal. Popkins and such. Avery liked something a little more filling; half a chicken or a haunch of beef suited him just fine.

Mr. Heath gave them a wave and a grin. “Good day, gents! Long life! Gentle breezes! Happy siestas!”

They waved and smiled back. When they were out of sight, Dave said: “They spent all mornin down there on the piers, countin nets. Nets! Do you believe it?”

“Yessir,” Sheriff Avery said, lifting one massive cheek a bit out of his rocker and letting off a noisy pre-luncheon fart. “Yessir, I do. Aye.”

George said: “If not for them facing off Jonas’s boys the way they done, I’d think they was a pack of fools.”

“Nor would they likely mind,” Avery said. He looked at Dave, who was twirling his monocle on the end of its ribbon and looking off in the direction the boys had taken. There were folks in town who had begun calling the Affiliation brats Little Coffin Hunters. Avery wasn’t sure what to make of that. He’d soothed it down between them and Thorin’s hard boys, and had gotten both a commendation and a piece of gold from Rimer for his efforts, but still… what to make of them?

“The day they came in,” he said to Dave, “ye thought they were soft. How do ye say now?”

“Now?” Dave twirled his monocle a final time, then popped it in his eye and stared at the Sheriff through it. “Now I think they might have been a little harder than I thought, after all.”

Yes indeed, Avery thought. But hard don’t mean smart, thank the gods. Aye, thank the gods for that.

“I’m hungry as a bull, so I am,” he said, getting up. He bent, put his hands on his knees, and ripped off another loud fart. Dave and George looked at each other. George fanned a hand in front of his face. Sheriff Herkimer Avery, Barony Sheriff, straightened up, looking both relieved and anticipatory. “More room out than there is in,” he said. “Come on, boys. Let’s go downstreet and tuck into a little.”

11

Not even sunset could do much to improve the view from the porch of the Bar K bunkhouse. The building-except for the cook-shack and the stable, the only one still standing on what had been the home acre-was L-shaped, and the porch was built on the inside of the short arm. Left for them on it had been just the right number of seats: two splintery rockers and a wooden crate to which an unstable board back had been nailed.

On this evening. Alain sat in one of the rockers and Cuthbert sat on the box-seat, which he seemed to fancy. On the rail, peering across the beaten dirt of the dooryard and toward the burned-out hulk of the Garber home place, was the lookout.

Alain was bone-tired, and although both of them had bathed in the stream near the west end of the home acre, he thought he still smelled fish and seaweed on himself. They had spent the day counting nets. He was not averse to hard work, even when it was monotonous, but he didn’t like pointless work. Which this was. Hambry came in two parts: the fishers and the horse-breeders. There was nothing for them among the fishers, and after three weeks all three of them knew it. Their answers were out on the Drop, at which they had so far done no more than look. At Roland’s order.

The wind gusted, and for a moment they could hear the low, grumbling, squealing sound of the thinny.

“I hate that sound,” Alain said.

Cuthbert, unusually silent and introspective tonight, nodded and said only “Aye.” They were all saying that now, not to mention So you do and So I am and So it is. Alain suspected the three of them would have Hambry on their tongues long after they had wiped its dust from their boots.

From behind them, inside the bunkhouse door, came a less unpleasant sound-the cooing of pigeons. And then, from around the side of the bunkhouse, a third, for which he and Cuthbert had unconsciously been listening as they sat watching the sun go down: horse’s hoofs. Rusher’s.

Roland came around the comer, riding easy, and as he did, something happened that struck Alain as oddly portentous… a kind of omen. There was a flurry-flutter of wings, a dark shape in the air, and suddenly a bird was roosting on Roland’s shoulder.

He didn’t jump; barely looked around. He rode up to the hitching rail and sat there, holding out his hand. “Hile,” he said softly, and the pigeon stepped into his palm. Bound to one of its legs was a capsule. Roland removed it, opened it, and took out a tiny strip of paper, which had been rolled tight. In his other hand he held the pigeon out.

“Hile,” Alain said, holding out his own hand. The pigeon flew to it. As Roland dismounted, Alain took the pigeon into the bunkhouse, where the cages had been placed beneath an open window. He ungated the center one and held out his hand. The pigeon which had just arrived hopped in; the pigeon in the cage hopped out and into his palm. Alain shut the cage door, latched it, crossed the room, and turned up the pillow of Bert’s bunk. Beneath it was a linen envelope containing a number of blank paper strips and a tiny storage-pen. He took one of the strips and the pen, which held its own small reservoir of ink and did not have to be dipped. He went back out on the porch. Roland and Cuthbert were studying the unrolled strip of paper the pigeon had delivered from Gilead. On it was a line of tiny geometric shapes:

“What does it say?” Alain asked. The code was simple enough, but he could not get it by heart or read it on sight, as Roland and Bert had been able to, almost immediately. Alain’s talents-his ability to track, his easy access to the touch-lay in other directions.

“Farson moves east,'” Cuthbert read.” 'Forces split, one big, one small. Do you see anything unusual.'” He looked at Roland, almost offended. “Anything unusual, what does that mean?”

Roland shook his head. He didn’t know. He doubted if the men who had sent the message-of whom his own father was almost surely one- did, either.

Alain handed Cuthbert the strip and the pen. With one finger Bert stroked the head of the softly cooing pigeon. It ruffled its wings as if already anxious to be off to the west.

“What shall I write?” Cuthbert asked. “The same?”

Roland nodded.

“But we have seen things that are unusual!” Alain said. “And we know things are wrong here! The horses… and at that small ranch way south… I can’t remember the name…”

Cuthbert could. “The Rocking H.”

“Aye, the Rocking H. There are oxen there. Oxen! My gods, I’ve never seen them, except for pictures in a book!”

Roland looked alarmed. “Does anyone know you saw?”

Alain shrugged impatiently. “I don’t think so. There were drovers about-three, maybe four-”

“Four, aye,” Cuthbert said quietly.

“-but they paid no attention to us. Even when we see things, they think we don’t.”

“And that’s the way it must stay.” Roland’s eyes swept them, but there was a kind of absence in his face, as if his thoughts were far away. He turned to look toward the sunset, and Alain saw something on the collar of his shirt. He plucked it, a move made so quickly and nimbly that not even Roland felt it. Bert couldn’t have done that, Alain thought with some pride.

“Aye, but-”

“Same message,” Roland said. He sat down on the top step and looked off toward the evening redness in the west. “Patience, Mr. Richard Stock-worth and Mr. Arthur Heath. We know certain things and we believe certain other things. But would John Farson come all this way simply to resupply horses? I don’t think so. I’m not sure, horses are valuable, aye, so they are… but I’m not sure. So we wait.”

“All right, all right, same message.” Cuthbert smoothed the scrap of paper flat on the porch rail, then made a small series of symbols on it. Alain could read this message; he had seen the same sequence several times since they had come to Hambry. “Message received. We are fine. Nothing to report at this time.”

The message was put in the capsule and attached to the pigeon’s leg. Alain went down the steps, stood beside Rusher (still waiting patiently to be unsaddled), and held the bird up toward the fading sunset. “Hile!”

It was up and gone in a flutter of wings. For a moment only they saw it, a dark shape against the deepening sky.

Roland sat looking after. The dreamy expression was still on his face. Alain found himself wondering if Roland had made the right decision this evening. He had never in his life had such a thought. Nor expected to have one.

“Roland?”

“Hmmm?” Like a man half-awakened from some deep sleep.

“I’ll unsaddle him, if you want.” He nodded at Rusher. “And rub him down.”

No answer for a long time. Alain was about to ask again when Roland said, “No. I’ll do it. In a minute or two.” And went back to looking at the sunset.

Alain climbed the porch steps and sat down in his rocker. Bert had resumed his place on the box-seat. They were behind Roland now, and Cuthbert looked at Alain with his eyebrows raised. He pointed to Roland and then looked at Alain again.

Alain passed over what he had plucked from Roland’s collar. Although it was almost too fine to be seen in this light, Cuthbert’s eyes were gunslinger’s eyes, and he took it easily, with no fumbling.

It was a long strand of hair, the color of spun gold. He could see from Bert’s, face that Bert knew whose head it had come from. Since arriving in Hambry, they’d met only one girl with long blonde hair. The two boys’ eyes met. In Bert’s Alain saw dismay and laughter in equal measure.

Cuthbert Allgood raised his forefinger to his temple and mimed pulling the trigger.

Alain nodded.

Sitting on the steps with his back to them, Roland looked toward the dying sunset with dreaming eyes.

1

The town of Ritzy, nearly four hundred miles west of Mejis, was anything but. Roy Depape reached it three nights before the Peddler’s Moon- called Late-summer’s Moon by some-came full, and left it a day later.

Ritzy was, in fact, a miserable little mining village on the eastern slope of the Vi Castis Mountains, about fifty miles from Vi Castis Cut. The town had but one street; it was engraved with iron-hard wheelruts now, and would become a lake of mud roughly three days after the storms of autumn set in. There was the Bear and Turtle Mercantile amp; Sundrie Items, where miners were forbidden by the Vi Castis Company to shop, and a company store where no one but grubbies would shop; there was a combined jailhouse and Town Gathering Hall with a windmill-cum-gallows out front; there were six roaring barrooms, each more sordid, desperate, and dangerous than the last.

Ritzy was like an ugly lowered head between a pair of huge shrugged shoulders-the foothills. Above town to the south were the clapped-out shacks where the Company housed its miners; each puff of breeze brought the stench of their unlimed communal privies. To the north were the mines themselves: dangerous, undershored scratch drifts that went down fifty feet or so and then spread like fingers clutching for gold and silver and copper and the occasional nest of firedims. From the outside they were just holes punched into the bare and rocky earth, holes like staring eyes, each with its own pile of till and scrapings beside the adit.

Once there had been freehold mines up there, but they were all gone, regulated out by the Vi Castis Company. Depape knew all about it, because the Big Coffin Hunters had been a part of that little spin and raree. Just after he’d hooked up with Jonas and Reynolds, that had been. Why, they had gotten those coffins tattooed on their hands not fifty miles from here, in the town of Wind, a mudpen even less ritzy than Ritzy. How long ago? He couldn’t rightly say, although it seemed to him that he should be able to. But when it came to reckoning times past, Depape often felt lost. It was hard even to remember how old he was. Because the world had moved on, and time was different, now. Softer.

One thing he had no trouble remembering at all-his recollection was refreshed by the miserable flare of pain he suffered each time he bumped his wounded finger. That one thing was a promise to himself that he would see Dearborn, Stockworth, and Heath laid out dead in a row, hand to outstretched hand like a little girl’s paper dolls. He intended to unlimber the part of him which had longed so bootlessly for Her Nibs these last three weeks and use it to hose down their dead faces. The majority of his squirt would be saved for Arthur Heath of Gilead, New Canaan. That laughing chatterbox motherfucker had a serious hosing-down coming.

Depape rode out the sunrise end of Ritzy’s only street, trotted his horse up the flank of the first hill, and paused at the top for a single look back. Last night, when he’d been talking to the old bastard behind Hattigan’s, Ritzy had been roaring. This morning at seven, it looked as ghostly as the Peddler’s Moon, which still hung in the sky above the rim of the plundered hills. He could hear the mines tink-tonking away, though. You bet. Those babies tink-tonked away seven days a week. No rest for the wicked… and he supposed that included him. He dragged his horse’s head around with his usual unthinking and ham-handed force, booted its flanks, and headed east, thinking of the old bastard as he went. He had treated the old bastard passing fair, he reckoned. A reward had been promised, and had been paid for information given.

“Yar,” Depape said, his glasses flashing in the new sun (it was a rare morning when he had no hangover, and he felt quite cheerful), “I reckon the old bugger can’t complain.”

Depape had had no trouble following the young culls’ backtrail; they had come east on the Great Road the whole way from New Canaan, it appeared, and at every town where they had stopped, they had been marked. In most they were marked if they did no more than pass through. And why not? Young men on good horses, no scars on their faces, no regulator tattoos on their hands, good clothes on their backs, expensive hats on their heads. They were remembered especially well at the inns and saloons, where they had stopped to refresh themselves but had drunk no hard liquor. No beer or graf, either, for that matter. Yes, they were remembered. Boys on the road, boys that seemed almost to shine. As if they had come from an earlier, better time.

Piss in their faces, Depape thought as he rode. One by one. Mr. Arthur “Ha-Ha” Heath last. I’ll save enough so it ’d drown you, were you not already at the end of the path and into the clearing.

They had been noticed, all right, but that wasn’t good enough-if he went back to Hambry with no more than that, Jonas would likely shoot his nose off. And he would deserve it. They may be rich boys, but that’s not all they are. Depape had said that himself. The question was, what else were they? And finally, in the shit-and-sulfur stench of Ritzy, he had found out. Not everything, perhaps, but enough to allow him to turn his horse around before he found himself all the way back in fucking New Canaan.

He had hit two other saloons, sipping watered beer in each, before rolling into Hattigan’s. He ordered yet another watered beer, and prepared to engage the bartender in conversation. Before he even began to shake the tree, however, the apple he wanted fell off and dropped into his hand, neat as you please.

It was an old man’s voice (an old bastard’s voice), speaking with the shrill, head-hurting intensity which is the sole province of old bastards in their cups. He was talking about the old days, as old bastards always did, and about how the world had moved on, and how things had been ever so much better when he was a boy. Then he had said something which caused Depape’s ears to prick up: something about how the old days might be coming again, for hadn’t he seen three young lords not two months a-gone, mayhap less, and even bought one of them a drink, even if ’twas only sasparilly soda?

“You wouldn’t know a young lord from a young turd,” said a miss who appeared to have all of four teeth left in her charming young head.

There was general laughter at this. The old bastard looked around, offended. “I know, all right,” he said. “I’ve forgot more than you’ll ever learn, so I have. One of them at least came from the Eld line, for I saw his father in his face… just as clear as I see your saggy tits, Jolene.” And then the old bastard had done something Depape rather admired-yanked out the front of the saloon-whore’s blouse and poured the remainder of his beer down it. Even the roars of laughter and heavy applause which greeted this couldn’t entirely drown the girl’s caw of rage, or the old man’s cries when she began to slap and punch him about the head and shoulders. These latter cries were only indignant at first, but when the girl grabbed the old bastard’s own beer-stein and shattered it against the side of his head, they became screams of pain. Blood-mixed with a few watery dregs of beer-began to run down the old bastard’s face.

“Get out of here!” she yelled, and gave him a shove toward the door. Several healthy kicks from the miners in attendance (who had changed sides as easily as the wind changes directions) helped him along. “And don’t come back! I can smell the weed on your breath, you old cock-sucker! Get out and take your gods-cussed stories of old days and young lords with you!”

The old bastard was in such manner conveyed across the room, past the tootling trumpet-player who served as entertainment for the patrons of Hattigan’s (that young bowler-hatted worthy added his own kick in the seat of the old bastard’s dusty trousers without ever missing so much as a single note of “Play, Ladies, Play”), and out through the batwing doors, where he collapsed face-first into the street.

Depape had sauntered after him and helped him up. As he did so, he smelled an acrid odor-not beer-on the old man’s breath, and saw the telltale greenish-gray discolorations at the comers of his lips. Weed, all right. The old bastard was probably just getting started on it (and for the usual reason: devil-grass was free in the hills, unlike the beer and whiskey that was sold in town), but once they started, the finish came quick.

“They got no respect,” the old bastard said thickly. “Nor understanding, either.”

“Aye, so they don’t,” said Depape, who had not yet gotten the accents of the seacoast and the Drop out of his speech.

The old bastard stood swaying, looking up at him, wiping ineffectually at the blood which ran down his wrinkled cheeks from his lacerated scalp. “Son, do you have the price of a drink? Remember the face of your father and give an old soul the price of a drink!”

“I’m not much for charity, old-timer,” Depape said, “but mayhap you could earn yourself the price of a drink. Step on over here, into my office, and let’s us see.”

He’d led the old bastard out of the street and back to the boardwalk, angling well to the left of the black batwings with their golden shafts of light spilling out above and below. He waited for a trio of miners to go by, singing at the top of their lungs (“Woman I love… is long and tall… she moves her body… like a cannonball… “), and then, still holding the old bastard by the elbow, hail guided him into the alley between Hattigan’s and the undertaking establishment next door. For some people, Depape mused, a visit to Ritzy could damn near amount to one-stop shopping: get your drink, get your bullet, get laid out next door.

“Yer office,” the old bastard cackled as Depape led him down the alley toward the board fence and the heaps of rubbish at the far end. The wind blew, stinging Depape’s nose with odors of sulfur and carbolic from the mines. From their right, the sounds of drunken revelry pounded through the side of Hattigan’s. “Your office, that’s good.”

“Aye, my office.”

The old man gazed at him in the light of the moon, which rode the slot of sky above the alley. “Are you from Mejis? Or Tepachi?”

“Maybe one, maybe t'other, maybe neither.”

“Do I know you?” The old bastard was looking at him even more closely, standing on tiptoe as if hoping for a kiss. Ugh.

Depape pushed him away. “Not so close, dad.” Yet he felt marginally encouraged. He and Jonas and Reynolds had been here before, and if the old man remembered his face, likely he wasn’t talking through his hat about fellows he’d seen much more recently.

“Tell me about the three young lords, old dad.” Depape rapped on the wall of Hattigan’s. “Them in there may not be interested, but I am.”

The old bastard looked at him with a bleary, calculating eye. “Might there be a bit o’ metal in it for me?”

“Yar,” Depape said. “If you tell me what I want to hear, I’ll give you metal.”

“Gold?”

“Tell me, and we’ll see.”

“No, sir. Dicker first, tell second.”

Depape seized him by the arm, whirled him around, and yanked a wrist which felt like a bundle of sticks up to the old bastard’s scrawny shoulderblades. “Fuck with me, dad, and we’ll start by breaking your arm.”

“Let go!” the old bastard screamed breathlessly. “Let go, I’ll trust to your generosity, young sir, for you have a generous face! Yes! Yes indeed!”

Depape let him go. The old bastard eyed him warily, rubbing his shoulder. In the moonlight the blood drying on his cheeks looked black.

“Three of them, there were,” he said. “Fine-born lads.”

“Lads or lords? Which is it, dad?”

The old bastard had taken the question thoughtfully. The whack on the head, the night air, and having his arm twisted seemed to have sobered him up, at least temporarily.

“Both, I do believe,” he said at last. “One was a lord for sure, whether them in there believe it or not. For I saw his father, and his father bore the guns. Not such poor things such as you wear-beggin your pardon, I know they’re the best to be had these days-but real guns, such as were seen when my own dad was a boy. The big ones with the sandalwood grips.”

Depape had stared at the old man, feeling a rise of excitement… and a species of reluctant awe, as well. They acted like gunslingers, Jonas had said. When Reynolds protested they were too young, Jonas had said they might be apprentices, and now it seemed the boss had likely been right.

“Sandal-wood grips?” he had asked. “Sandalwood grips, old dad?”

“Yep.” The old man saw his excitement, and his belief. He expanded visibly.

“A gunslinger, you mean. This one young fellow’s father carried the big irons.”

“Yep, a gunslinger. One of the last lords. Their line is passing, now, but my dad knew him well enough. Steven Deschain, of Gilead. Steven, son of Henry.”

“And this one you saw not long ago-”

“His son. Henry the Tail’s grandson. The others looked well-born, as if they might also come from the line of lords, but the one I saw come down all the way from Arthur Eld, by one line or another. Sure as you walk on two legs. Have I earned my metal yet?”

Depape thought to say yes, then realized he didn’t know which of the three culls this old bastard was talking about.

“Three young men,” he mused. “Three high-borns. And did they have guns?”

“Not out where the drift-diggers of this town could see em,” the old bastard said, and laughed nastily. “But they had em, all right. Probably hid in their bedrolls. I’d set my watch and warrant on it.”

“Aye,” Depape said. “I suppose you would. Three young men, one the son of a lord. Of a gunslinger, you think. Steven of Gilead.” And the name was familiar to him, aye, it was.

“Steven Deschain of Gilead, that’s it.”

“And what name did he give, this young lord?”

The old bastard had screwed his face up alarmingly in an effort to remember. “Deerfield? Deerstine? I don’t quite remember-”

“That’s all right, I know it. And you’ve earned your metal.”

“Have I?” the old bastard had edged close again, his breath gagging-sweet with the weed. “Gold or silver? Which is it, my friend?”

“Lead,” Depape replied, then hauled leather and shot the old man twice in the chest. Doing him a favor, really.

Now he rode back toward Mejis-it would be a faster trip without having to stop in every dipshit little town and ask questions.

There was a flurry of wings close above his head. A pigeon-dark gray, it was, with a white ring around its neck-fluttered down on a rock just ahead of him, as if to rest. An interesting-looking bird. Not, Depape thought, a wild pigeon. Someone’s escaped pet? He couldn’t imagine anyone in this desolate quarter of the world keeping anything but a half-wild dog to bite the squash off any would-be robber (although what these folks might have worth robbing was another question he couldn’t answer), but he supposed anything was possible. In any case, roast pigeon would go down a treat when he stopped for the night.

Depape drew his gun, but before he could cock the hammer, the pigeon was off and flying east. Depape took a shot after it, anyway. Sometimes you got lucky, but apparently not this time; the pigeon dipped a little, then straightened out and disappeared in the direction Depape himself was going. He sat astride his horse for a moment, not much put out of countenance; he thought Jonas was going to be very pleased with what he had found out.

After a bit, he booted his horse in the sides and began to canter east along the Barony Sea Road, back toward Mejis, where the boys who had embarrassed him were waiting to be dealt with. Lords they might be, sons of gunslingers they might be, but in these latter days, even such as those could die. As the old bastard himself would undoubtedly have pointed out, the world had moved on.

2

On a late afternoon three days after Roy Depape left Ritzy and headed his horse toward Hambry again, Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain rode north and west of town, first down the long swell of the Drop, then into the freeland Hambry folk called the Bad Grass, then into deserty waste lands. Ahead of them and clearly visible once they were back in the open were crumbled and eroded bluffs. In the center of these was a dark, almost vaginal cleft; its edges so splintered it looked as if it had been whacked into reality by an ill-tempered god wielding a hatchet.

The distance between the end of the Drop and the bluffs was perhaps six miles. Three quarters of the way across, they passed the flatlands’ only real geographic feature: a jutting upthrust of rock that looked like a finger bent at the first knuckle. Below it was a small, boomerang-shaped greensward, and when Cuthbert gave a ululating yell to hear his voice bounce back at him from the bluffs ahead, a pack of chattering billy-bumblers broke from this greenplace and went racing back southeast, toward the Drop.

“That’s Hanging Rock,” Roland said. “There’s a spring at the base of it-only one in these parts, they say.”

It was all the talk that passed between them on the ride out, but a look of unmistakable relief passed between Cuthbert and Alain behind Roland’s back. For the last three weeks they had pretty much marched in place as summer rolled around them and past them. It was all well for Roland to say they must wait, they must pay greatest attention to the things that didn’t matter and count the things which did from the comers of their eyes, but neither of them quite trusted the dreamy, disconnected air which Roland wore these days like his own special version of Clay Reynolds’s cloak. They didn’t talk about this between themselves; they didn’t have to. Both knew that if Roland began courting the pretty girl whom Mayor Thorin meant for his gilly (and who else could that long blonde hair have belonged to?), they would be in very bad trouble. But Roland showed no courting plumage, neither of them spied any more blonde hairs on his shirt-collars, and tonight he seemed more himself, as if he had put that cloak of abstraction aside. Temporarily, mayhap. Permanently, if they were lucky. They could only wait and see. In the end, ka would tell, as it always did.

A mile or so from the bluffs, the strong sea breeze which had been at their backs for the whole ride suddenly dropped, and they heard the low, atonal squalling from the cleft that was Eyebolt Canyon. Alain pulled up, grimacing like a man who has bitten into a fruit of extravagant sourness. All he could think of was a handful of sharp pebbles, squeezed and ground together in a strong hand. Buzzards circled above the canyon as if drawn to the sound.

“The lookout don’t like it. Will.” Cuthbert said, knocking his knuckles on the skull. “I don’t like it much, either. What are we out here for?”

“To count,” Roland said. “We were sent to count everything and see everything, and this is something to count and see.”

“Oh, aye,” Cuthbert said. He held his horse in with some effort; the low, grinding wail of the thinny had made it skittish. “Sixteen hundred and fourteen fishing nets, seven hundred and ten boats small, two hundred and fourteen boats large, seventy oxen that nobody will admit to, and, on the north of town, one thinny. Whatever the hell that is.”

“We’re going to find out,” Roland said.

They rode into the sound, and although none of them liked it, no one suggested they go back. They had come all the way out here, and Roland was right-this was their job. Besides, they were curious.

The mouth of the canyon had been pretty well stopped up with brush, as Susan had told Roland it would be. Come fall, most of it would probably be dead, but now the stacked branches still bore leaves and made it hard to see into the canyon. A path led through the center of the brush-pile, but it was narrow for the horses (who might have balked at going through, anyway), and in the failing light Roland could make out hardly anything.

“Are we going in?” Cuthbert asked. “Let the Recording Angel note that I’m against, although I’ll offer no mutiny.”

Roland had no intention of taking them through the brush and toward the source of that sound. Not when he had only the vaguest idea of what a thinny was. He had asked a few questions about it over the last few weeks, and gotten little useful response. “I’d stay away,” was the extent of Sheriff Avery’s advice. So far his best information was still what he had gotten from Susan on the night he met her.

“Sit easy, Bert. We’re not going in.”

“Good,” Alain said softly, and Roland smiled.

There was a path up the canyon’s west side, steep and narrow, but passable if they were careful. They went single file, stopping once to clear a rockfall, pitching splintered chunks of shale and hornfels into the groaning trench to their right. When this was done and just as the three of them were preparing to mount up again, a large bird of some sort-perhaps a grouse, perhaps a prairie chicken-rose above the lip of the canyon in an explosive whir of feathers. Roland dipped for his guns, and saw both Cuthbert and Alain doing the same. Quite funny, considering that their firearms were wrapped in protective oilcloth and secreted beneath the floorboards of the Bar K bunkhouse.

They looked at each other, said nothing (except with their eyes, which said plenty), and went on. Roland found that the effect of being this close to the thinny was cumulative-it wasn’t a sound you could get used to. Quite the contrary, in fact: the longer you were in the immediate vicinity of Eye-bolt Canyon, the more that sound scraped away at your brain. It got into your teeth as well as your ears; it vibrated in the knot of nerves below the breastbone and seemed to eat at the damp and delicate tissue behind the eyes. Most of all, though, it got into your head, telling you that everything you had ever been afraid of was just behind the next curve of the trail or yonder pile of tumbled rock, waiting to snake out of its place and get you.

Once they got to the flat and barren ground at the top of the path and the sky opened out above them again it was a little better, but by then the light was almost gone, and when they dismounted and walked to the canyon’s crumbling edge, they could see little but shadows.

“No good,” Cuthbert said disgustedly. “We should have left earlier, Roland… Will, I mean. What dummies we are!”

“I can be Roland to you out here, if you like. And we’ll see what we came to see and count what we came to count-one thinny, just as you said. Only wait.”

They waited, and not twenty minutes later the Peddler’s Moon rose above the horizon-a perfect summer moon, huge and orange. It loomed in the darkening violet swim of the sky like a crashing planet. On its face, as clear as anyone had ever seen it, was the Peddler, he who came out of Nones with his sackful of squealing souls. A hunched figure made of smudged shadows with a pack clearly visible over one cringing shoulder. Behind it, the orange light seemed to flame like hellfire.

“Ugh,” Cuthbert said. “That’s an ill sight to see with that sound coming up from below.”

Yet they held their ground (and their horses, which periodically yanked back on their reins as if to tell them they should already be gone from this place), and the moon rose in the sky, shrinking a little as it went and turning silver. Eventually it rose enough to cast its bony light into Eyebolt Canyon. The three boys stood looking down. None of them spoke. Roland didn’t know about his friends, but he didn’t think he himself could have spoken even if called on to do so.

A box canyon, very short and steep-sided, Susan had said, and the description was perfectly accurate. She’d also said Eyebolt looked like a chimney lying on its side, and Roland supposed that was also true, if you allowed that a falling chimney might break up a little on impact, and lie with one crooked place in its middle.

Up to that crook, the canyon floor looked ordinary enough; even the litter of bones the moon showed them was not extraordinary. Many animals which wandered into box canyons hadn’t the wit to find their way hack out again, and with Eyebolt the possibility of escape was further reduced by the choke of brush piled at the canyon’s mouth. The sides were much too steep to climb except maybe for one place, just before that crooked little jog. There Roland saw a kind of groove running up the canyon wall, with enough jutting spurs inside it to-maybe!-provide handholds. There was no real reason for him to note this; he just did, as he would go on noting potential escape-routes his entire life.

Beyond the jag in the canyon floor was something none of them had ever seen before… and when they got back to the bunkhouse several hours later, they all agreed that they weren’t sure exactly what they had seen. The latter part of Eyebolt Canyon was obscured by a sullen, silvery liquescence from which snakes of smoke or mist were rising in streamers. The liquid seemed to move sluggishly, lapping at the walls which held it in. Later, they would discover that both liquid and mist were a light green; it was only the moonlight that had made them look silver.

As they watched, a dark flying shape-perhaps it was the same one that had frightened them before-skimmed down toward the surface of the thinny. It snatched something out of the air-a bug? another, smaller, bird?-and then began to rise again. Before it could, a silvery arm of liquid rose from the canyon’s floor. For a moment that soupy, grinding grumble rose a notch, and became almost a voice. It snatched the bird out of the air and dragged it down. Greenish light, brief and unfocused, flashed across the surface of the thinny like electricity, and was gone.

The three boys stared at each other with frightened eyes.

Jump in, gunslinger, a voice suddenly called. It was the voice of the thinny; it was the voice of his father; it was also the voice of Marten the enchanter, Marten the seducer. Most terrible of all, it was his own voice.

Jump in and let all these cares cease. There is no love of girls to worry you here, and no mourning of lost mothers to weigh your child’s heart. Only the hum of the growing cavity at the center of the universe; only the punky sweetness of rotting flesh.

Come, gunslinger. Be apart of the thinny.

Dreamy-faced and blank-eyed, Alain began walking along the edge of the drop, his right boot so close to it that the heel puffed little clouds of dust over the chasm and sent clusters of pebbles down into it. Before he could get more than five steps, Roland grabbed him by the belt and yanked him roughly back.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

Alain looked at him with sleepwalker’s eyes. They began to clear, but slowly. “I don’t… know, Roland.”

Below them, the thinny hummed and growled and sang. There was a sound, as well: an oozing, sludgy mutter.

“I know,” Cuthbert said. “I know where we’re all going. Back to the Bar K. Come on, let’s get out of here.” He looked pleadingly at Roland. “Please. It’s awful.”

“All right.”

But before he led them back to the path, he stepped to the edge and looked down at the smoky silver ooze below him. “Counting,” he said with a kind of clear defiance. “Counting one thinny.” Then, lowering his voice: “And be damned to you.”

3

Their composure returned as they rode back-the sea-breeze in their faces was wonderfully restorative after the dead and somehow baked smell of the canyon and the thinny.

As they rode up the Drop (on a long diagonal, so as to save the horses a little), Alain said: “What do we do next, Roland? Do you know?”

“No. As a matter of fact, I don’t.”

“Supper would be a start,” Cuthbert said brightly, and tapped the lookout’s hollow skull for emphasis.

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes,” Cuthbert agreed. “And I’ll tell you something, Roland-”

“Will, please. Now that we’re back on the Drop, let me be Will.”

“Aye, fine. I’ll tell you something, Will: we can’t go on counting nets and boats and looms and wheel-irons much longer. We’re running out of things that don’t matter. I believe that looking stupid will become a good deal harder once we move to the horse-breeding side of life as it’s lived in Hambry.”

“Aye,” Roland said. He stopped Rusher and looked back the way they had come. He was momentarily enchanted by the sight of horses, apparently infected with a kind of moon-madness, frolicking and racing across the silvery grass. “But I tell you both again, this is not just about horses. Does Farson need them? Aye, mayhap. So does the Affiliation. Oxen as well. But there are horses everywhere-perhaps not as good as these, I’ll admit, but any port does in a storm, so they say. So, if it’s not horses, what is it? Until we know, or decide we’ll never know, we go on as we are.”

Part of the answer was waiting for them back at the Bar K. It was perched on the hitching rail and flicking its tail saucily. When the pigeon hopped into Roland’s hand, he saw that one of its wings was oddly frayed. Some animal-likely a cat-had crept up on it close enough to pounce, he reckoned.

The note curled against the pigeon’s leg was short, but it explained a good deal of what they hadn’t understood.

I’ll have to see her again, Roland thought after reading it, and felt a surge of gladness. His pulse quickened, and in the cold silver light of the Peddler’s Moon, he smiled.

1

The Peddler’s Moon began to wane; it would take the hottest, fairest part of the summer with it when it went. On an afternoon four days past the full, the old mozo from Mayor’s House (Miguel had been there long before Hart Thorin’s time and would likely be there long after Thorin had gone back to his ranch) showed up at the house Susan shared with her aunt. He was leading a beautiful chestnut mare by a hack'. It was the second of the three promised horses, and Susan recognized Felicia at once. The mare had been one other childhood’s favorites.

Susan embraced Miguel and covered his bearded cheeks with kisses. The old man’s wide grin would have showed every tooth in his head, if he’d had any left to show. “Gracias, gracias, a thousand thanks, old father,” she told him.

“Da nada,” he replied, and handed her the bridle. “It is the Mayor’s earnest gift.”

She watched him away, the smile slowly fading from her lips. Felicia stood docilely beside her, her dark brown coat shining like a dream in the summer sunlight. But this was no dream. It had seemed like one at first- that sense of unreality had been another inducement to walk into the trap, she now understood-but it was no dream. She had been proved honest; now she found herself the recipient of “earnest gifts” from a rich man. The phrase was a sop to conventionality, of course… or a bitter joke, depending on one’s mood and outlook. Felicia was no more a gift than Pylon had been-they were step-by-step fulfillments of the contract into which she had entered. Aunt Cord could express shock, but Susan knew the truth: what lay directly ahead was whoring, pure and simple.

Aunt Cord was in the kitchen window as Susan walked her gift (which was really just returned property, in her view) to the stable. She called out something passing cheery about how the horse was a good thing, that caring for it would give Susan less time for her megrims. Susan felt a hot reply rise to her lips and held it back. There had been a wary truce between the two of them since the shouting match about the shirts, and Susan didn’t want to be the one to break it. There was too much on her mind and heart. She thought that one more argument with her aunt and she might simply snap like a dry twig under a boot. Because often silence is best, her father had told her when, at age ten or so, she had asked him why he was always so quiet. The answer had puzzled her then, but now she understood better.

She stabled Felicia next to Pylon, rubbed her down, fed her. While the mare munched oats, Susan examined her hooves. She didn’t care much for the look of the iron the mare was wearing-that was Seafront for you-and so she took her father’s shoebag from its nail beside the stable door, slung the strap over her head and shoulder so the bag hung on her hip, and walked the two miles to Hockey’s Stable and Fancy Livery. Feeling the leather bag bang against her hip brought back her father in a way so fresh and clear that grief pricked her again and made her feel like crying. She thought he would have been appalled at her current situation, perhaps even disgusted. And he would have liked Will Dearborn, of that she was sure-liked him and approved of him for her. It was the final miserable touch.

2

She had known how to shoe most of her life, and even enjoyed it, when her mood was right; it was dusty, elemental work, with always the possibility of a healthy kick in the slats to relieve the boredom and bring a girl back to reality. But of making shoes she knew nothing, nor wished to. Brian Hookey made them at the forge behind his barn and hostelry, however; Susan easily picked out four new ones of the right size, enjoying the smell of horseflesh and fresh hay as she did. Fresh paint, too. Hockey’s Stable amp; Smithy looked very well, indeed. Glancing up, she saw not so much as a single hole in the barn roof. Times had been good for Hookey, it seemed.

He wrote the new shoes up on a beam, still wearing his blacksmith’s apron and squinting horribly out of one eye at his own figures. When Susan began to speak haltingly to him about payment, he laughed, told her he knew she’d settle her accounts as soon as she could, gods bless her, yes. ’sides, they weren’t any of them going anywhere, were they? Nawp, nawp. All the time gently propelling her through the fragrant smells of hay and horses toward the door. He would not have treated even so small a matter as four iron shoes in such a carefree manner a year ago, but now she was Mayor Thorin’s good friend, and things had changed.

The afternoon sunlight was dazzling after the dimness of Hockey’s barn, and she was momentarily blinded, groping forward toward the street with the leather bag bouncing on her hip and the shoes clashing softly inside. She had just a moment to register a shape looming in the brightness, and then it thumped into her hard enough to rattle her teeth and make Felicia’s new shoes clang. She would have fallen, but for strong hands that quickly reached out and grasped her shoulders. By then her eyes were adjusting and she saw with dismay and amusement that the young man who had almost knocked her sprawling into the dirt was one of Will’s friends- Richard Stockworth.

“Oh, sai, your pardon!” he said, brushing the arms of her dress as if he had knocked her over. “Are you well? Are you quite well?”

“Quite well,” she said, smiling. “Please don’t apologize.” She felt a sudden wild impulse to stand on tiptoe and kiss his mouth and say, Give that to Will and tell him to never mind what I said! Tell him there are a thousand more where that came from! Tell him to come and get every one!

Instead, she fixed on a comic image: this Richard Stockworth smacking Will full on the mouth and saying it was from Susan Delgado. She began to giggle. She put her hands to her mouth, but it did no good. Sai Stockworth smiled back at her… tentatively, cautiously. He probably thinks I’m mad… and I am! I am!

“Good day, Mr. Stockworth,” she said, and passed on before she could embarrass herself further.

“Good day, Susan Delgado,” he called in return.

She looked back once, when she was fifty yards or so farther up the street, but he was already gone. Not into Hockey’s, though; of that she was quite sure. She wondered what Mr. Stockworth had been doing at that end of town to begin with.

Half an hour later, as she took the new iron from her da’s shoebag, she found out. There was a folded scrap of paper tucked between two of the shoes, and even before she unfolded it, she understood that her collision with Mr. Stockworth hadn’t been an accident.

She recognized Will’s handwriting at once from the note in the bouquet.

Susan,

Can you meet me at Citgo this evening or tomorrow evening? Very important. Has to do with what we discussed before. Please.

W.

P.S. Best you bum this note.

She burned it at once, and as she watched the flames first flash up and then die down, she murmured over and over the one word in it which had struck her the hardest: Please.

3

She and Aunt Cord ate a simple, silent evening meal-bread and soup- and when it was done, Susan rode Felicia out to the Drop and watched the sun go down. She would not be meeting him this evening, no. She already owed too much sorrow to impulsive, unthinking behavior. But tomorrow?

Why Citgo?

Has to do with what we discussed before.

Yes, probably. She did not doubt his honor, although she had much come to wonder if he and his friends were who they said they were. He probably did want to see her for some reason which bore on his mission (although how the oilpatch could have anything to do with too many horses on the Drop she did not know), but there was something between them now, something sweet and dangerous. They might start off talking but would likely end up kissing… and kissing would just be the start. Knowing didn’t change feeling, though; she wanted to see him. Needed to see him.

So she sat astride her new horse-another of Hart Thorin’s payments-in-advance on her virginity-and watched the sun swell and turn red in the west. She listened to the faint grumble of the thinny, and for the first time in her sixteen years was truly torn by indecision. All she wanted stood against all she believed of honor, and her mind roared with conflict. Around all, like a rising wind around an unstable house, she felt the idea of ka growing. Yet to give over one’s honor for that reason was so easy, wasn’t it? To excuse the fall of virtue by invoking all-powerful ka. It was soft thinking.

Susan felt as blind as she’d been when leaving the darkness of Brian Hockey’s bam for the brightness of the street. At one point she cried silently in frustration without even being aware of it, and pervading her every effort to think clearly and rationally was her desire to kiss him again, and to feel his hand cupping her breast.

She had never been a religious girl, had little faith in the dim gods of Mid-World, so at the last of it, with the sun gone and the sky above its point of exit going from red to purple, she tried to pray to her father. And an answer came, although whether from him or from her own heart she didn’t know.

Let ka mind itself, the voice in her mind said. It will, anyway; it always does. If ka. should overrule your honor, so it will be; in the meantime, Susan, there’s no one to mind it but yourself. Let ka go and mind the virtue of your promise, hard as that may be.

“All right,” she said. In her current state she discovered that any decision-even one that would cost her another chance to see Will-was a relief. “I’ll honor my promise. Ka can take care of itself.”

In the gathering shadows, she clucked sidemouth to Felicia and turned for home.

4

The next day was Sanday, the traditional cowboys’ day of rest. Roland’s little band took this day off as well. “It’s fair enough that we should,” Cuthbert said, “since we don’t know what the hell we’re doing in the first place.”

On this particular Sanday-their sixth since coming to Hambry- Cuthbert was in the upper market (lower market was cheaper, by and large, but too fishy-smelling for his liking), looking at brightly colored scrapes and trying not to cry. For his mother had a serape, it was a great favorite others, and thinking of how she would ride out sometimes with it flowing back from her shoulders had filled him with homesickness so strong it was savage. “Arthur Heath,” Roland’s ka-mai, missing his mama so badly his eyes were wet! It was a joke worthy of… well, worthy of Cuthbert Allgood.

As he stood so, looking at the serapes and a hanging rack of dolina blankets with his hands clasped behind his back like a patron in an art gallery (and blinking back tears all the while), there came a light tap on his shoulder. He turned, and there was the girl with the blonde hair.

Cuthbert wasn’t surprised that Roland was smitten with her. She was nothing short of breathtaking, even dressed in jeans and a farmshirt. Her hair was tied back with a series of rough rawhide hanks, and she had eyes of the brightest gray Cuthbert had ever seen. Cuthbert thought it was a wonder that Roland had been able to continue with any other aspect of his life at all, even down to the washing of his teeth. Certainly she came with a cure for Cuthbert; sentimental thoughts of his mother disappeared in an instant.

“Sai,” he said. It was all he could manage, at least to start with.

She nodded and held out what the folk of Mejis called a corvette- “little packet” was the literal definition; “little purse” was the practical one. These small leather accessories, big enough for a few coins but not much more, were more often carried by ladies than gentlemen, although that was not a hard-and-fast rule of fashion.

“Ye dropped this, cully,” she said.

“Nay, thankee-sai.” This one well might have been the property of a man-plain black leather, and unadorned by foofraws-but he had never seen it before. Never carried a corvette, for that matter.

“It’s yours,” she said, and her eyes were now so intense that her gaze felt hot on his skin. He should have understood at once, but he had been blinded by her unexpected appearance. Also, he admitted, by her cleverness. You somehow didn’t expect cleverness from a girl this beautiful; beautiful girls did not, as a rule, have to be clever. So far as Bert could tell, all beautiful girls had to do was wake up in the morning. “It is.”

“Oh, aye,” he said, almost snatching the little purse from her. He could feel a foolish grin overspreading his face. “Now that you mention it, sai-”

“Susan.” Her eyes were grave and watchful above her smile. “Let me be Susan to you, I pray.”

“With pleasure. I cry your pardon, Susan, it’s just that my mind and memory, realizing it’s Sanday, have joined hands and gone off on holiday together-eloped, you might say-and left me temporarily without a brain in my head.”

He might well have rattled on like that for another hour (he had before; to that both Roland and Alain could testify), but she stopped him with the easy briskness of an older sister. “I can easily believe ye have no control over yer mind, Mr. Heath-or the tongue hung below it- but perhaps ye’ll take better care of yer purse in the future. Good day.” She was gone before he could get another word out.

5

Bert found Roland where he so often was these days: out on the part of the Drop that was called Town Lookout by many of the locals. It gave a fair view of Hambry, dreaming away its Sanday afternoon in a blue haze, but Cuthbert rather doubted the Hambry view was what drew his oldest friend back here time after time. He thought that its view of the Delgado house was the more likely reason.

This day Roland was with Alain, neither of them saying a word. Cuthbert had no trouble accepting the idea that some people could go long periods of time without talking to each other, but he did not think he would ever understand it.

He came riding up to them at a gallop, reached inside his shirt, and pulled out the corvette. “From Susan Delgado. She gave it to me in the upper market. She’s beautiful, and she’s also as wily as a snake. I say that with utmost admiration.”

Roland’s face filled with light and life. When Cuthbert tossed him the corvette, he caught it one-handed and pulled the lace-tie with his teeth. Inside, where a travelling man would have kept his few scraps of money, there was a single folded piece of paper. Roland read this quickly, the light going out of his eyes, the smile fading off his mouth.

“What does it say?” Alain asked.

Roland handed it to him and then went back to looking out at the Drop. It wasn’t until he saw the very real desolation in his friend’s eyes that Cuthbert fully realized how far into Roland’s life-and hence into all their lives-Susan Delgado had come.

Alain handed him the note. It was only a single line, two sentences:

It’s best we don’t meet. I’m sorry.

Cuthbert read it twice, as if rereading might change it, then handed it back to Roland. Roland put the note back into the corvette, tied the lace, and then tucked the little purse into his own shirt.

Cuthbert hated silence worse than danger (it was danger, to his mind), but every conversational opening he tried in his mind seemed callow and unfeeling, given the look on his friend’s face. It was as if Roland had been poisoned. Cuthbert was disgusted at the thought of that lovely young girl bumping hips with the long and bony Mayor of Hambry, but the look on Roland’s face now called up stronger emotions. For that he could hate her.

At last Alain spoke up, almost timidly. “And now, Roland? Shall we have a hunt out there at the oilpatch without her?”

Cuthbert admired that. Upon first meeting him, many people dismissed Alain Johns as something of a dullard. That was very far from the truth. Now, in a diplomatic way Cuthbert could never have matched, he had pointed out that Roland’s unhappy first experience with love did not change their responsibilities.

And Roland responded, raising himself off the saddle-horn and sitting up straight. The strong golden light of that summer’s afternoon lit his face in harsh contrasts, and for a moment that face was haunted by the ghost of the man he would become. Cuthbert saw that ghost and shivered-not knowing what he saw, only knowing that it was awful.

“The Big Coffin Hunters,” he said. “Did you see them in town?”

“Jonas and Reynolds,” Cuthbert answered. “Still no sign of Depape. I think Jonas must have choked him and thrown him over the sea cliffs in a fit of pique after that night in the bar.”

Roland shook his head. “Jonas needs the men he trusts too much to waste them-he’s as far out on thin ice as we are. No, Depape’s just been sent off for awhile.”

“Sent where?” Alain asked.

“Where he’ll have to shit in the bushes and sleep in the rain if the weather’s bad.” Roland laughed shortly, without much humor. “Jonas has got Depape running our backtrail, more likely than not.”

Alain grunted softly, in surprise that wasn’t really surprise. Roland sat easily astride Rusher, looking out over the dreamy depths of land, at the grazing horses. With one hand he unconsciously rubbed the corvette he had tucked into his shirt. At last he looked around at them again.

“We’ll wait a bit longer,” he said. “Perhaps she’ll change her mind.”

“Roland-” Alain began, and his tone was deadly in its gentleness.

Roland raised his hands before Alain could go on. “Doubt me not, Alain-I speak as my father’s son.”

“All right.” Alain reached out and briefly gripped Roland’s shoulder. As for Cuthbert, he reserved judgment. Roland might or might not be acting as his father’s son; Cuthbert guessed that at this point Roland hardly knew his own mind at all.

“Do you remember what Cort used to say was the primary weakness of maggots such as us?” Roland asked with a trace of a smile.

“You run without consideration and fall in a hole,'” Alain quoted in a gruff imitation that made Cuthbert laugh aloud.

Roland’s smile broadened a touch. “Aye. They’re words I mean to remember, boys. I’ll not upset this cart in order to see what’s in it… not unless there’s no other choice. Susan may come around yet, given time to think. I believe she would have agreed to meet me already, if not for… other matters between us.”

He paused, and for a little while there was quiet among them.

“I wish our fathers hadn’t sent us,” Alain said at last… although it was Roland’s father who had sent them, and all three knew it. “We’re too young for matters such as these. Too young by years.”

“We did all right that night in the Rest,” Cuthbert said.

“That was training, not guile-and they didn’t take us seriously. That won’t happen again.”

“They wouldn’t have sent us-not my father, not yours-if they’d known what we’d find,” Roland said. “But now we’ve found it, and now we’re for it. Yes?”

Alain and Cuthbert nodded. They were for it, all right-there no longer seemed any doubt of that.

“In any case, it’s too late to worry about it now. We’ll wait and hope for Susan. I’d rather not go near Citgo without someone from Hambry who knows the lay of the place… but if Depape comes back, we’ll have to take our chance. God knows what he may find out, or what stories he may invent to please Jonas, or what Jonas may do after they palaver. There may be shooting.”

“After all this creeping around, I’d almost welcome it,” Cuthbert said.

“Will you send her another note, Will Dearborn?” Alain asked.

Roland thought about it. Cuthbert laid an interior bet with himself on which way Roland would go. And lost.

“No,” he said at last. “We’ll have to give her time, hard as that is. And hope her curiosity will bring her around.”

With that he turned Rusher toward the abandoned bunkhouse which now served them as home. Cuthbert and Alain followed.

6

Susan, worked herself hard the rest of that Sanday, mucking out the stables, carrying water, washing down all the steps. Aunt Cord watched all this in silence, her expression one of mingled doubt and amazement. Susan cared not a bit for how her aunt looked-she wanted only to exhaust herself and avoid another sleepless night. It was over. Will would know it as well now, and that was to the good. Let done be done.

“Are ye daft, girl?” was all Aunt Cord asked her as Susan dumped her last pail of dirty rinse-water behind the kitchen. “It’s Sanday!”

“Not daft a bit,” she replied shortly, without looking around.

She accomplished the first half of her aim, going to bed just after moonrise with tired arms, aching legs, and a throbbing back-but sleep still did not come. She lay in bed wide-eyed and unhappy. The hours passed, the moon set, and still Susan couldn’t sleep. She looked into the dark and wondered if there was any possibility, even the slightest, that her father had been murdered. To stop his mouth, to close his eyes.

Finally she reached the conclusion Roland had already come to: if there had been no attraction for her in those eyes of his, or the touch of his hands and lips, she would have agreed in a flash to the meeting he wanted. If only to set her troubled mind to rest.

At this realization, relief overspread her and she was able to sleep.

7

Late the next afternoon, while Roland and his friends were at fives in the Travellers’ Rest (cold beef sandwiches and gallons of white iced tea-not as good as that made by Deputy Dave’s wife, but not bad), Sheemie came in from outside, where he had been watering his flowers. He was wearing his pink sombrero and a wide grin. In one hand he held a little packet.

“Hello, there, you Little Coffin Hunters!” he cried cheerfully, and made a bow which was an amusingly good imitation of their own. Cuthbert particularly enjoyed seeing such a bow done in gardening sandals. “How be you? Well, I’m hoping, so I do!”

“Right as rainbarrels,” Cuthbert said, “but none of us enjoys being called Little Coffin Hunters, so maybe you could just play soft on that, all right?”

“Aye,” Sheemie said, as cheerful as ever. “Aye, Mr. Arthur Heath, good fella who saved my life!” He paused and looked puzzled for a moment, as if unable to remember why he had approached them in the first place. Then his eyes cleared, his grin shone out, and he held the packet out to Roland. “For you, Will Dearborn!”

“Really? What is it?”

“Seeds! So they are!”

“From you, Sheemie?”

“Oh, no.”

Roland took the packet-just an envelope which had been folded over and sealed. There was nothing written on the front or back, and the tips of his fingers felt no seeds within.

“Who from, then?”

“Can’t remember,” said Sheemie, who then cast his eyes aside. His brains had been stirred just enough, Roland reflected, so that he would never be unhappy for long, and would never be able to lie at all. Then his eyes, hopeful and timid, came back to Roland’s. “I remember what I was supposed to say to you, though.”

“Aye? Then say it, Sheemie.”

Speaking as one who recites a painfully memorized line, both proud and nervous, he said: “These are the seeds you scattered on the Drop.”

Roland’s eyes blazed so fiercely that Sheemie stumbled back a step. He gave his sombrero a quick tug, turned, and hurried back to the safety of his flowers. He liked Will Dearborn and Will’s friends (especially Mr. Arthur Heath, who sometimes said things that made Sheemie laugh fit to split), but in that moment he saw something in Will-sai’s eyes that frightened him badly. In that instant he understood that Will was as much a killer as the one in the cloak, or the one who had wanted Sheemie to lick his boots clean, or old white-haired Jonas with the trembly voice.

As bad as them, or even worse.

8

Roland slipped the “seed-packet” into his shirt and didn’t open it until the three of them were back on the porch of the Bar K. In the distance, the thinny grumbled, making their horses twitch their ears nervously.

“Well?” Cuthbert asked at last, unable to restrain himself any longer. Roland took the envelope from inside his shirt, and tore it open. As he did, he reflected that Susan had known exactly what to say. To a nicety.

The others bent in, Alain (mm his left and Cuthbert from his right, as he unfolded the single scrap of paper. Again he saw her simple, neatly made writing, the message not much longer than the previous one. Very different in content, however.

There is an orange grove a mile off the road on the town side of Citgo. Meet me there at moonrise. Come alone. S.

And below that, printed in emphatic little letters: burn this. “We’ll keep a lookout,” Alain said. Roland nodded. “Aye. But from a distance.” Then he burned the note.

9

The orange grove was a neatly kept rectangle of about a dozen rows at the end of a partly overgrown cart-track. Roland arrived there after dark but still a good half hour before the rapidly thinning Peddler would haul himself over the horizon once more.

As the boy wandered along one of the rows, listening to the somehow skeletal sounds from the oilpatch to the north (squealing pistons, grinding gears, thudding driveshafts), he was struck by deep homesickness. It was the fragile fragrance of orange-blossoms-a bright runner laid over the darker stench of oil-that brought it on. This toy grove was nothing like the great apple orchards of New Canaan… except somehow it was. There was the same feeling of dignity and civilization here, of much time devoted to something not strictly necessary. And in this case, he suspected, not very useful, either. Oranges grown this far north of the warm latitudes were probably almost as sour as lemons. Still, when the breeze stirred the trees, the smell made him think of Gilead with bitter longing, and for the first time he considered the possibility that he might never see home again-that he had become as much a wanderer as old Peddler Moon in the sky.

He heard her, but not until she was almost on top of him-if she’d been an enemy instead of a friend, he might still have had time to draw and fire, but it would have been close. He was filled with admiration, and as he saw her face in the starlight, he felt his heart gladden.

She halted when he turned and merely looked at him, her hands linked before her at her waist in a way that was sweetly and unconsciously childlike. He took a step toward her and they came up in what he took for alarm. He stopped, confused. But he had misread her gesture in the chancy light. She could have stopped then, but chose not to. She stepped toward him deliberately, a tall young woman in a split riding skirt and plain black boots. Her sombrero hung down on her back, against the bound rope of her hair.

“Will Dearborn, we are met both fair and ill,” she said in a trembling voice, and then he was kissing her; they burned against one another as the Peddler rose in the famine of its last quarter.

10

Inside her lonely hut high on the Coos, Rhea sat at her kitchen table, bent over the glass the Big Coffin Hunters had brought her a month and a half ago. Her face was bathed in its pink glow, and no one would have mistaken it for the face of a girl any longer. She had extraordinary vitality, and it had carried her for many years (only the longest-lived residents of Hambry had any idea of how old Rhea of the Coos actually was, and they only the vaguest), but the glass was finally sapping it-sucking it out of her as a vampire sucks blood. Behind her, the hut’s larger room was even dingier and more cluttered than usual. These days she had no time for even a pretense of cleaning; the glass ball took up all her time. When she wasn’t looking into it, she was thinking of looking into it… and, oh! Such things she had seen!

Ermot twined around one of her scrawny legs, hissing with agitation, but she barely noticed him. Instead she bent even closer into the ball’s poison pink glow, enchanted by what she saw there.

It was the girl who had come to her to be proved honest, and the young man she had seen the first time she’d looked into the ball. The one she had mistaken for a gunslinger, until she had realized his youth.

The foolish girl, who had come to Rhea singing and left in a more proper silence, had proved honest, and might well be honest yet (certainly she kissed and touched the boy with a virgin’s mingled greed and timidity), but she wouldn’t be honest much longer if they kept on the way they were going. And wouldn’t Hart Thorin be in for a surprise when he took his supposedly pure young gilly to bed? There were ways to fool men about that (men practically begged to be fooled about that), a thimble of pig’s blood would serve nicely, but she wouldn’t know that. Oh, this was too good! And to think she could watch Miss Haughty brought low, right here, in this wonderful glass! Oh, it was too good! Too wonderful!

She leaned closer still, the deep sockets of her eyes filling with pink fire. Ermot, sensing that she remained immune to his blandishments, crawled disconsolately away across the floor, in search of bugs. Musty pranced away from him, spitting feline curses, his six-legged shadow huge and misshapen on the firestruck wall.

11

Roland sensed the moment rushing at them. Somehow he managed to step away from her, and she stepped back from him, her eyes wide and her cheeks flushed-he could see that flush even in the light of the newly risen moon. His balls were throbbing. His groin felt full of liquid lead.

She half-turned away from him, and Roland saw that her sombrero had gone askew on her back. He reached out one trembling hand and straightened it. She clasped his fingers in a brief but strong grip, then bent to pick up her riding gloves, which she had stripped off in her need to touch him skin to skin. When she stood again, the wash of blood abruptly left her face, and she reeled. But for his hands on her shoulders, steadying her, she might have fallen. She turned toward him, eyes rueful.

“What are we to do? Oh, Will, what are we to do?”

“The best we can,” he said. “As we both always have. As our fathers taught us.”

“This is mad.”

Roland, who had never felt anything so sane in his life-even the deep ache in his groin felt sane and right-said nothing.

“Do ye know how dangerous ’tis?” she asked, and went on before he could reply. “Aye, ye do. I can see ye do. If we were seen together at all, 'twould be serious. To be seen as we just were-”

She shivered. He reached for her and she stepped back. “Best ye don’t, Will. If ye do, won’t be nothing done between us but spooning. Unless that was your intention?”

“You know it wasn’t.”

She nodded. “Have ye set your friends to watch?”

“Aye,” he said, and then his face opened in that unexpected smile she loved so well. “But not where they can watch us.”

“Thank the gods for that,” she said. and laughed rather distractedly. Then she stepped closer to him, so close that he was hard put not to take her in his arms again. She looked curiously up into his face. “Who are you, really. Will?”

“Almost who I say I am. That’s the joke of this, Susan. My friends and I weren’t sent here because we were drunk and belling, but we weren’t sent here to uncover any fell plot or secret conspiracy, either. We were just boys to be put out of the way in a time of danger. All that’s happened since-” He shook his head to show how helpless he felt, and Susan thought again of her father saying ka was like a wind-when it came it might take your chickens, your house, your bam. Even your life.

“And is Will Dearborn your real name?”

He shrugged. “One name’s as good as another, I wot, if the heart that answers to it is true. Susan, you were at Mayor’s House today, for my friend Richard saw you ride up-”

“Aye, fittings,” she said. “For I am to be this year’s Reaping Girl- it’s Hart’s choice, nothing I ever would have had on my own, mark I say it. A lot of foolishness, and hard on Olive as well, I warrant.”

“You will make the most beautiful Reap-Girl that ever was,” he said, and the clear sincerity in his voice made her tingle with pleasure; her cheeks grew warm again. There were five changes of costume for the Reaping Girl between the noon feast and the bonfire at dusk, each more elaborate than the last (in Gilead there would have been nine; in that way, Susan didn’t know how lucky she was), and she would have worn all five happily for Will, had he been the Reaping Lad. (This year’s Lad was Jamie McCann, a pallid and whey-faced stand-in for Hart Thorin, who was approximately forty years too old and gray for the job.) Even more happily would she have worn the sixth-a silvery shift with wisp-thin straps and a hem that stopped high on her thighs. This was a costume no one but Maria, her maid, Conchetta, her seamstress, and Hart Thorin would ever see. It was the one she would be wearing when she went to the old man’s couch as his gilly, after the feast was over.

“When you were up there, did you see the ones who call themselves the Big Coffin Hunters?”

“I saw Jonas and the one with the cloak, standing together in the courtyard and talking,” she said. “Not Depape? The redhead?” She shook her head.

“Do you know the game Castles. Susan?”

“Aye. My father showed me when I was small.”

“Then you know how the red pieces stand at one end of the board and the white at the other. How they come around the Hillocks and creep toward each other, setting screens for cover. What’s going on here in Ham-Dry is very like that. And, as in the game, it has now become a question of who will break cover first. Do you understand?”

She nodded at once. “In the game, the first one around his Hillock is vulnerable.”

“In life, too. Always. But sometimes even staying in cover is difficult. My friends and I have counted nearly everything we dare count. To count the rest-”

“The horses on the Drop, for instance.”

“Aye, just so. To count them would be to break cover. Or the oxen we know about-”

Her eyebrows shot up. “There are no oxen in Hambry. Ye must be mistaken about that.”

“No mistake.”

“Where?”

“The Rocking H.”

Now her eyebrows drew back down, and knitted in a thoughtful frown. “That’s Laslo Rimer’s place.”

“Aye-Kimba’s brother. Nor are those the only treasures hidden away in Hambry these days. There are extra wagons, extra tack hidden in barns belonging to members of the Horsemen’s Association, extra caches of feed-”

“Will, no!”

“Yes. All that and more. But to count them-to be seen counting them-is to break cover. To risk being Castled. Our recent days have been pretty nightmarish-we try to look profitably busy without moving over to the Drop side of Hambry, where most of the danger lies. It’s harder and harder to do. Then we received a message-”

“A message? How? From whom?”

“Best you not know those things, I think. But it’s led us to believe that some of the answers we’re looking for may be at Citgo.”

“Will, d'ye think that what’s out here may help me to know more about what happened to my da?”

“I don’t know. It’s possible, I suppose, but not likely. All I know for sure is that I finally have a chance to count something that matters and not be seen doing it.” His blood had cooled enough for him to hold out his hand to her; Susan’s had cooled enough for her to take it in good confidence. She had put her glove back on again, however. Better safe than sorry.

“Come on,” she said. “I know a path.”

12

In the moon’s pale half-light, Susan led him out of the orange grove and toward the thump and squeak of the oilpatch. Those sounds made Roland’s back prickle; made him wish for one of the guns hidden under the bunk-house floorboards back at the Bar K.

“Ye can trust me, Will, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be much help to ye,” she said in a voice just a notch above a whisper. “I’ve been within hearing distance of Citgo my whole life, but I could count the number of times I’ve actually been in it on the fingers of both hands, so I could. The first two or three were on dares from my friends.”

“And then?”

“With my da. He were always interested in the Old People, and my Aunt Cord always said he’d come to a bad end, meddling in their leavings.” She swallowed hard. “And he did come to a bad end, although I doubt it were the Old People responsible. Poor Da.”

They had reached a smoothwire fence. Beyond it, the gantries of the oil wells stood against the sky like sentinels the size of Lord Perth. How many had she said were still working? Nineteen, he thought. The sound of them was ghastly-the sound of monsters being choked to death. Of course it was the kind of place that kids dared each other to go into; a kind of open-air haunted house.

He held two of the wires apart so she could slip between them, and she did the same for him. As he passed through, he saw a line of white porcelain cylinders marching down the post closest to him. A fencewire went through each.

“You understand what these are? Were?” he asked Susan, tapping one of the cylinders.

“Aye. When there was electricity, some went through here.” She paused, then added shyly: “It’s how I feel when you touch me.”

He kissed her cheek just below her ear. She shivered and pressed a hand briefly against his check before drawing away. “I hope your friends will watch well.” “They will.” “Is there a signal?”

“The whistle of the nighthawk. Let’s hope we don’t hear it.” “Aye, be it so.” She took his hand and drew him into the oilpatch.

13

The first time the gas-jet flared ahead of them, Will spat a curse under his breath (an obscenely energetic one she hadn’t heard since her father died) and dropped the hand not holding hers to his belt.

“Be easy! It’s only the candle! The gas-pipe!”

He relaxed slowly. “That they use, don’t they?”

“Aye. To run a few machines-little more than toys, they are. To make ice, mostly.”

“I had some the day we met the Sheriff.”

When the flare licked out again-bright yellow with a bluish core- he didn’t jump. He glanced at the three gas-storage tanks behind what Hambry-folk called “the candle” without much interest. Nearby was a stack of rusty canisters in which the gas could be bottled and carried.

“You’ve seen such before?” she asked.

He nodded.

“The Inner Baronies must be very strange and wonderful,” Susan said. •

“I’m beginning to think they’re no stranger than those of the Outer Arc,” he said, turning slowly. He pointed. “What’s yon building down there? Left over from the Old People?”

“Aye.”

To the east of Citgo, the ground dropped sharply down a thickly wooded slope with a lane cut through the middle of it-this lane was as clear in the moonlight as a part in hair. Not far from the bottom of the slope was a crumbling building surrounded by rubble. The tumble-and-strew was the detritus of many fallen smokestacks-that much could be extrapolated from the one which still stood. Whatever else the Old People had done, they had made lots of smoke.

“There were useful things in there when my da was a child,” she said.

“Paper and such-even a few ink-writers that would still work… for a little while, at least. If you shook them hard.” She pointed to the left of the building, where there was a vast square of crumbled paving, and a few rusting hulks that had been the Old People’s weird, horseless mode of travel. “Once there were things over there that looked like the gas-storage tanks, only much, much larger. Like huge silver cans, they were. They didn’t rust like those that are left. I can’t think what became of them, unless someone hauled them off for water storage. I never would. 'Twould be unlucky, even if they weren’t contaminated.”

She turned her face up to his, and he kissed her mouth in the moonlight.

“Oh, Will. What a pity this is for you.”

“What a pity for both of us,” he said, and then passed between them one of those long and aching looks of which only teenagers are capable. They looked away at last and walked on again, hand-in-hand.

She couldn’t decide which frightened her more-the few derricks that were still pumping or those dozens which had fallen silent. One thing she knew for sure was that no power on the face of the earth could have gotten her within the fence of this place without a friend close beside her. The pumps wheezed; every now and then a cylinder screamed like someone being stabbed; at periodic intervals “the candle” would fire off with a sound like dragon’s breath, throwing their shadows out long in front of them. Susan kept her ears pitched for the nighthawk’s piercing two-note whistle, and heard nothing.

They came to a wide lane-what had once undoubtedly been a maintenance road-that split the oilpatch in two. Running down the center was a steel pipe with rusting joints. It lay in a deep concrete trough, with the upper arc of its rusty circumference protruding above ground level.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“The pipe that took the oil to yon building, I reckon. It means nothing, ’tis been dry for years.”

He dropped to one knee, slid his hand carefully into the space between the concrete sleeve and the pipe’s rusty side. She watched him nervously, biting her lip to keep herself from saying something which would surely come out sounding weak or womanish: What if there were biting spiders down there in the forgotten dark? Or what if his hand got stuck? What would they do then?

Of that latter there had been no chance, she saw when he pulled his hand free. It was slick and black with oil.

“Dry for years?” he asked with a little smile. She could only shake her head, bewildered.

14

They followed the pipe toward a place where a rotten gate barred the road. The pipe (she could now see oil bleeding out of its old joints, even in the weak moonlight) ducked under the gate; they went over it. She thought his hands rather too intimate for polite company in their helping, and rejoiced at each touch. If he doesn’t stop, the top of my head will explode like “the candle,” she thought, and laughed.

“Susan?”

“Tis nothing, Will, only nerves.”

Another of those long glances passed between them as they stood on the far side of the gate, and then they went down the hill together. As they walked, she noticed an odd thing: many of the pines had been stripped of their lower branches. The hatchet marks and scabs of pine resin were clear in the moonlight, and looked new. She pointed this out to Will, who nodded but said nothing.

At the bottom of the hill, the pipe rose out of the ground and, supported on a series of rusty steel cradles, ran about seventy yards toward the abandoned building before stopping with the ragged suddenness of a battlefield amputation. Below this stopping point was what looked like a shallow lake of drying, tacky oil. That it had been there for awhile Susan could tell from the numerous corpses of birds she could see scattered across it-they had come down to investigate, become stuck, and stayed to die in what must have been an unpleasantly leisurely fashion.

She stared at this with wide, uncomprehending eyes until Will tapped her on the leg. He had hunkered down. She joined him knee-to-knee and followed the sweeping movement of his finger with growing disbelief and confusion. There were tracks here. Very big ones. Only one thing could have made them.

“Oxen,” she said.

“Aye. They came from there.” He pointed at the place where the pipe ended. “And they go-” He turned on the soles of his boots, still hunkered, and pointed back toward the slope where the woods started. Now that he pointed them out, she easily saw what she should have seen at once, horseman’s daughter that she was. A perfunctory effort had been made to hide the tracks and the churned-up ground where something heavy had been dragged or rolled. Time had smoothed away more of the mess, but the marks were still clear. She even thought she knew what the oxen had been dragging, and she could see that Will knew, as well.

The tracks split off from the end of the pipe in two arcs. Susan and “Will Dearborn” followed the right-hand one. She wasn’t surprised to see ruts mingled in with the tracks of the oxen. They were shallow-it had been a dry summer, by and large, and the ground was nearly as hard as concrete-but they were there. To still be able to see them at all meant that some goodly amount of weight had been moved. And aye, of course; why else would oxen be needed?

“Look,” Will said as they neared the hem of forest at the foot of the slope. She finally saw what had caught his attention, but she had to get down on her hands and knees to do it-how sharp his eyes were! Almost supernaturally so. There were boot-tracks here. Not fresh, but they were a lot newer than the tracks of the oxen and the wheelruts.

“This was the one with the cape,” he said, indicating a clear pair of tracks. “Reynolds.”

“Will! Thee can’t know it!”

He looked surprised, then laughed. “Sure I can. He walks with one foot turned in a little-the left foot. And here it is.” He stirred the air over the tracks with the tip of his finger, then laughed again at the way she was looking at him.” ’tisn’t sorcery, Susan daughter of Patrick; only trailcraft.”

“How do ye know so much, so young?” she asked. “Who are ye, Will?”

He stood up and looked down into her eyes. He didn’t have to look far; she was tall for a girl. “My name’s not Will but Roland,” he said. “And now I’ve put my life in your hands. That I don’t mind, but mayhap I’ve put your own life at risk, as well. You must keep it a dead secret.”

“Roland,” she said wonderingly. Tasting it.

“Aye. Which do you like better?”

“Your real one,” she said at once.” ’tis a noble name, so it is.”

He grinned, relieved, and this was the grin that made him look young again.

She raised herself on her toes and put her lips on his. The kiss, which was chaste and close-mouthed to begin with, bloomed like a flower: became open and slow and humid. She felt his tongue touch her lower lip and met it, shyly at first, with her own. His hands covered her back, then slipped around to her front. He touched her breasts, also shy to begin with, then slid his palms up their lower slopes to their tips. He uttered a small, moaning sigh directly into her mouth. And as he drew her closer and began to trail kisses down her neck, she felt the stone hardness of him below the buckle of his belt, a slim, warm length which exactly matched the melting she felt in the same place; those two places were meant for each other, as she was for him and he for her. It was ka, after all-ka like the wind, and she would go with it willingly, leaving all honor and promises behind.

She opened her mouth to tell him so, and then a queer but utterly persuasive sensation enfolded her: they were being watched. It was ridiculous, but it was there; she even felt she knew who was watching. She stepped back from Roland, her booted heels rocking unsteadily on the half-eroded oxen tracks. “Get out, ye old bitch,” she breathed. “If ye be spying on us in some way, I know not how, get thee gone!”

15

On the hill of the Coos, Rhea drew back from the glass, spitting curses in a voice so low and harsh that she sounded like her own snake. She didn’t know what Susan had said-no sound came through the glass, only sight-but she knew that the girl had sensed her. And when she did, all sight had been wiped out. The glass had flashed a brilliant pink, then had gone dark, and none of the passes she made over it would serve to brighten it again.

“Aye, fine, let it be so,” she said at last, giving up. She remembered the wretched, prissy girl (not so prissy with the young man, though, was she?) standing hypnotized in her doorway, remembered what she had told the girl to do after she had lost her maidenhead, and began to grin, all her good humor restored. For if she lost her maidenhead to this wandering boy instead of to Hart Thorin, Lord High Mayor of Mejis, the comedy would be even greater, would it not?

Rhea sat in the shadows of her stinking hut and began to cackle.

16

Roland stared at her, wide-eyed, and as Susan explained about Rhea a little more fully (she left out the humiliating final examinations which lay at the heart of “proving honesty”), his desire cooled just enough for him to reassert control. It had nothing to do with jeopardizing the position he and his friends were trying to maintain in Hambry (or so he told himself) and everything to do with maintaining Susan’s-her position was important, her honor even more so.

“I imagine it was your imagination,” he said when she had finished.

“I think not.” With a touch of coolness.

“Or conscience, even?”

At that she lowered her eyes and said nothing.

“Susan, I would not hurt you for the world.”

“And ye love me?” Still without looking up.

“Aye, I do.”

“Then it’s best you kiss and touch me no more-not tonight. I can’t stand it if ye do.”

He nodded without speaking and held out his hand. She took it, and they walked on in the direction they had been going when they had been so sweetly distracted.

While they were still ten yards from the hem of the forest, both saw the glimmer of metal despite the dense foliage-too dense, she thought. Too dense by far.

It was the pine-boughs, of course; the ones which had been whacked from the trees on the slope. What they had been interlaced to camouflage were the big silver cans now missing from the paved area. The silver storage containers had been dragged over here-by the oxen, presumably- and then concealed. But why?

Roland inspected along the line of tangled pine branches, then stopped and plucked several aside. This created an opening like a doorway, and he gestured her to go through. “Be sharp in your looks,” he said. “I doubt if they’ve bothered to set traps or tripwires, but ’tis always best to be careful.”

Behind the camouflaging boughs, the tankers had been as neatly lined up as toy soldiers at the end of the day, and Susan at once saw one reason why they had been hidden: they had been re-equipped with wheels, well-made ones of solid oak which came as high as her chest. Each had been rimmed with a thin iron strip. The wheels were new, so were the strips, and the hubs had been custom-made. Susan knew only one blacksmith in Barony capable of such fine work: Brian Hookey, to whom she had gone for Felicia’s new shoes. Brian Hookey, who had smiled and clapped her on the shoulder like a compadre when she had come in with her da’s shoebag hanging on her hip. Brian Hookey, who had been one of Pat Delgado’s best friends.

She recalled looking around and thinking that times had been good for sai Hookey, and of course she had been right. Work in the blacksmithing line had been plentiful. Hookey had been making lots of wheels and rims, for one thing, and someone must have been paying him to do it. Eldred Jonas was one possibility; Kimba Rimer an even better one. Hart? She simply couldn’t believe that. Hart had his mind-what little there was of it-fixed on other matters this summer.

There was a kind of rough path behind the tankers. Roland walked slowly along it, pacing like a preacher with his hands clasped at the small of his back, reading the incomprehensible words writ upon the tankers’ rear decks: citgo. sunoco. exxon. conoco. He paused once and read aloud, haltingly: “Cleaner fuel for a better tomorrow.” He snorted softly. “Rot! This is tomorrow.”

“Roland-Will, I mean-what are they for?”

He didn’t answer at first, but turned and walked back down the line of bright steel cans. Fourteen on this side of the mysteriously reactivated oil-supply pipe, and, she assumed, a like number on the other. As he walked, he rapped his fist on the side of each. The sound was dull and clunky. They were full of oil from the Citgo oilpatch.

“They were trigged quite some time ago, I imagine,” he said. “I doubt if the Big Coffin Hunters did it all themselves, but they no doubt oversaw it… first the fitting of the new wheels to replace the old rotten rubber ones, then the filling. They used the oxen to line them up here, at the base of the hill, because it was convenient. As it’s convenient to let the extra horses run free out on the Drop. Then, when we came, it seemed prudent to take the precaution of covering these up. Stupid babies we might be, but perhaps smart enough to wonder about twenty-eight loaded oil-carts with new wheels. So they came out here and covered them.”

“Jonas, Reynolds, and Depape.”

“Aye.”

“But why?” She took him by the arm and asked her question again. “What are they for?”

“For Parson,” Roland said with a calm he didn’t feel. “For the Good Man. The Affiliation knows he’s found a number of war-machines; they come either from the Old People or from some other where. Yet the Affiliation fears them not, because they don’t work. They’re silent. Some feel Farson has gone mad to put his trust in such broken things, but…”

“But mayhap they’re not broken. Mayhap they only need this stuff. And mayhap Farson knows it.”

Roland nodded.

She touched the side of one of the tankers. Her fingers came away oily. She rubbed the tips together, smelled them, then bent and picked up a swatch of grass to wipe her hands. “This doesn’t work in our machines. It’s been tried. It clogs them.”

Roland nodded again. “My fa-my folk in the Inner Crescent know that as well. And count on it. But if Farson has gone to this trouble-and split aside a troop of men to come and get these tankers, as we have word he has done-he either knows a way to thin it to usefulness, or he thinks he does. If he’s able to lure the forces of the Affiliation into a battle in some close location where rapid retreat is impossible, and if he can use machine-weapons like the ones that go on treads, he could win more than a battle. He could slaughter ten thousand horse-mounted fighting men and win the war.”

“But surely yer fathers know this…?”

Roland shook his head in frustration. How much their fathers knew was one question. What they made of what they knew was another. What forces drove them-necessity, fear, the fantastic pride which had also been handed down, father to son, along the line of Arthur Eld-was yet a third. He could only tell her his clearest surmise.

“I think they daren’t wait much longer to strike Farson a mortal blow. If they do, the Affiliation will simply rot out from the inside. And if that happens, a good deal of Mid-World will go with it.”

“But… “She paused, biting her lip, shaking her head. “Surely even Farson must know… understand…” She looked up at him with wide eyes. “The ways of the Old People are the ways of death. Everyone knows that, so they do.”

Roland of Gilead found himself remembering a cook named Hax, dangling at the end of a rope while the rooks pecked up scattered breadcrumbs from beneath the dead man’s feet. Hax had died for Farson. But before that, he had poisoned children for Farson.

“Death,” he said, “is what John Parson’s all about.”

17

In the orchard again.

It seemed to the lovers (for so they now were, in all but the most physical sense) that hours had passed, but it had been no more than forty-live minutes. Summer’s last moon, diminished but still bright, continued to shine above them.

She led him down one of the lanes to where she had tied her horse. Pylon nodded his head and whickered softly at Roland. He saw the horse had been rigged for silence-every buckle padded, and the stirrups themselves wrapped in felt.

Then he turned to Susan.

Who can remember the pangs and sweetness of those early years? We remember our first real love no more clearly than the illusions that caused us to rave during a high fever. On that night and beneath that fading moon, Roland Deschain and Susan Delgado were nearly torn apart by their desire for each other; they floundered for what was right and ached with feelings that were both desperate and deep.

All of which is to say that they stepped toward each other, stepped back, looked into each other’s eyes with a kind of helpless fascination, stepped forward again, and stopped. She remembered what he had said with a kind of horror: that he would do anything for her but share her with another man. She would not-perhaps could not-break her promise to Mayor Thorin, and it seemed that Roland would not (or could not) break it for her. And here was the most horrible thing of all: strong as the wind of ka might be, it appeared that honor and the promises they had made would prove stronger.

“What will ye do now?” she asked through dry lips.

“I don’t know. I must think, and I must speak with my friends. Will you have trouble with your aunt when you go home? Will she want to know where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing?”

“Is it me you’re concerned about or yourself and yer plans, Willy?”

He didn’t respond, only looked at her. After a moment, Susan dropped her eyes.

“I’m sorry, that was cruel. No, she’ll not tax me. I often ride at night, although not often so far from the house.”

“She won’t know how far you’ve ridden?”

“Nay. And these days we tread carefully around each other. It’s like having two powder magazines in the same house.” She reached out her hands. She had tucked her gloves into her belt, and the fingers which grasped his fingers were cold. “This’ll have no good end,” she said in a whisper.

“Don’t say that, Susan.”

“Aye, I do. I must. But whatever comes, I love thee, Roland.”

He took her in his arms and kissed her. When he released her lips, she put them to his ear and whispered, “If you love me, then love me. Make me break my promise.”

For a long moment when her heart didn’t beat, there was no response from him, and she allowed herself to hope. Then he shook his head-only the one time, but firmly. “Susan, I cannot.”

“Is yer honor so much greater than yer professed love for me, then? Aye? Then let it be so.” She pulled out of his arms, beginning to cry, ignoring his hand on her boot as she swung up into the saddle-his low call to wait, as well. She yanked free the slipknot with which Pylon had been tethered and turned him with one spurless foot. Roland was still calling to her, louder now, but she flung Pylon into a gallop and away from him before her brief flare of rage could go out. He would not take her used, and her promise to Thorin had been made before she knew Roland walked the face of the earth. That being so, how dare he insist that the loss of honor and consequent shame be hers alone? Later, lying in her sleepless bed, she would realize he had insisted nothing. And she was not even clear of the orange grove before raising her left hand to the side of her face, feeling the wetness there, and realizing that he had been crying, too.

18

Roland rode the lanes outside town until well past moonset, trying to get his roaring emotions under some kind of control. He would wonder for awhile what he was going to do about their discovery at Citgo, and then his thoughts would shift to Susan again. Was he a fool for not taking her when she wanted to be taken? For not sharing what she wanted to share? If you love me, then love me. Those words had nearly torn him open. Yet in the deep rooms of his heart rooms where the clearest voice was that of his father he felt he had not been wrong. Nor was it just a matter of honor, whatever she might think. But let her think that if she would; better she should hate him a little, perhaps, than realize how deep the danger was for both of them.

Around three o’ the clock, as he was about to turn for the Bar K, he heard the rapid drumming of hoofbeats on the main road, approaching from the west. Without thinking about why it seemed so important to do so, Roland swung back in that direction, then brought Rusher to a stop behind a high line of run-to-riot hedges. For nearly ten minutes the sound of the hoofbeats continued to swell-sound carried far in the deep quiet of early morning-and that was quite enough time for Roland to feel he knew who was riding toward Hambry hell-for-leather just two hours before dawn. Nor was he mistaken. The moon was down, but he had no trouble, even through the brambly interstices of the hedge, recognizing Roy Depape. By dawn the Big Coffin Hunters would be three again.

Roland turned Rusher back the way he had been heading, and rode to rejoin his own friends.

1

The most important day of Susan Delgado’s life-the day upon which her life turned like a stone upon a pivot-came about two weeks after her moonlit tour of the oilpatch with Roland. Since then she had seen him only half a dozen times, always at a distance, and they had raised their hands as passing acquaintances do when their errands bring them briefly into sight of one another. Each time this happened, she felt a pain as sharp as a knife twisting in her… and though it was no doubt cruel, she hoped he felt the same twist of the knife. If there was anything good about those two miserable weeks, it was only that her great fear-that gossip might begin about herself and the young man who called himself Will Dearborn-subsided, and she found herself actually sorry to feel it ebb. Gossip? There was nothing to gossip about.

Then, on a day between the passing of the Peddler’s Moon and the rise of the Huntress, ka finally came and blew her away-house and barn and all. It began with someone at the door.

2

She had been finishing the washing-a light enough chore with only two women to do it for-when the knock came.

“If it’s the ragman, send him away, ye mind!” Aunt Cord called from the other room, where she was turning bed linen.

But it wasn’t the ragman. It was Maria, her maid from Seafront, looking woeful. The second dress Susan was to wear on Reaping Day-the silk meant for luncheon at Mayor’s House and the Conversational after-ward-was ruined, Maria said, and she was in hack because of it. Would be sent back to Onnie’s Ford if she wasn’t lucky, and she the only support of her mother and father- oh, it was hard, much too hard, so it was. Could Susan come? Please?

Susan was happy to come-was always happy to get out of the house these days, and away from her aunt’s shrewish, nagging voice. The closer Reaping came, the less she and Aunt Cord could abide each other, it seemed.

They took Pylon, who was happy enough to carry two girls riding double through the morning cool, and Maria’s story was quickly told. Susan understood almost at once that Maria’s position at Seafront wasn’t really in much jeopardy; the little dark-haired maid had simply been using her innate (and rather charming) penchant for creating drama out of what was really not very dramatic at all.

The second Reaping dress (which Susan thought of as Blue Dress With Beads; the first, her breakfast dress, was White Dress With High Waist and Puffed Sleeves) had been kept apart from the others-it needed a bit of work yet-and something had gotten into the first-floor sewing room and gnawed it pretty much to rags. If this had been the costume she was to wear to the bonfire lighting, or the one she was to wear to the ballroom dance after the bonfire had been lit, the matter would indeed have been serious. But Blue Dress With Beads was essentially just a fancified day receiving dress, and could easily be replaced in the two months between now and the Reap. Only two! Once-on the night the old witch had granted her her reprieve-it had seemed like eons before she would have to begin her bed-service to Mayor Thorin. And now it was only two months! She twisted in a kind of involuntary protest at the thought.

“Mum?” Maria asked. Susan wouldn’t allow the girl to call her sai, and Maria, who seemed incapable of calling her mistress by her given name, had settled on this compromise. Susan found the term amusing, given the fact that she was only sixteen, and Maria herself probably just two or three years older. “Mum, are you all right?”

“Just a crick in my back, Maria, that’s all.”

“Aye, I get those. Fair bad, they are. I’ve had three aunts who’ve died of the wasting disease, and when I get those twinges, I’m always afeard that-”

“What kind of animal chewed up Blue Dress? Do ye know?”

Maria leaned forward so she could speak confidentially into her mistress’s ear, as if they were in a crowded marketplace alley instead of on the road to Seafront. “It’s put about that a raccoon got in through a window that 'us opened during the heat of the day and was then forgot at day’s end, but I had a good sniff of that room, and Kimba Rimer did, too, when he came down to inspect. Just before he sent me after you, that was.”

“What did you smell?”

Maria leaned close again, and this time she actually whispered, although there was no one on the road to overhear: “Dog farts.”

There was a moment of thunderstruck silence, and then Susan began to laugh. She laughed until her stomach hurt and tears went streaming down her cheeks.

“Are ye saying that W-W-Wolf… the Mayor’s own d-d-dog… got into the downstairs seamstress’s closet and chewed up my Conversational d-d-” But she couldn’t finish. She was simply laughing too hard.

“Aye,” Maria said stoutly. She seemed to find nothing unusual about Susan’s laughter… which was one of the things Susan loved about her. “But he’s not to be blamed, so I say, for a dog will follow his natural instincts, if the way is open for him to do so. The downstairs maids-” She broke off. “You’d not tell the Mayor or Kimba Rimer this, I suppose, Mum?”

“Maria, I’m shocked at you-ye play me cheap.”

“No, Mum, I play ye dear, so I do, but it’s always best to be safe. All I meant to say was that, on hot days, the downstairs maids sometimes go into that sewing closet for their fives. It lies directly in the shadow of the watchtower, ye know, and is the coolest room in the house-even cooler than the main receiving rooms.”

“I’ll remember that,” Susan said. She thought of holding the Luncheon and Conversational in the seamstress’s beck beyond the kitchen when the great day came, and began to giggle again. “Go on.”

“No more to say, Mum,” Maria told her, as if all else were too obvious for conversation. “The maids eat their cakes and leave the crumbs. I reckon Wolf smelled em and this time the door was left open. When the crumbs was gone, he tried the dress. For a second course, like.”

This time they laughed together.

3

But she wasn’t laughing when she came home.

Cordelia Delgado, who thought the happiest day of her life would be the one when she finally saw her troublesome niece out the door and the annoying business other defloration finally over, bolted out other chair and hurried to the kitchen window when she heard the gallop of approaching hoofs about two hours after Susan had left with that little scrap of a maid to have one of her dresses refitted. She never doubted that it was Susan returning, and she never doubted it was trouble. In ordinary circumstances, the silly twist would never gallop one of her beloved horses on a hot day.

She watched, nervously dry-washing her hands, as Susan pulled Pylon up in a very unDelgado-like scrunch, then dismounted in an unladylike leap. Her braid had come half undone, spraying that damned blonde hair that was her vanity (and her curse) in all directions. Her skin was pale, except for twin patches of color flaring high on her cheekbones. Cordelia didn’t like the look of those at all. Pat had always flared in that same place when he was scared or angry.

She stood at the sink, now biting her lips as well as working her hands. Oh, 'twould be so good to see the back of that troublesome she. “Ye haven’t made trouble, have ye?” she whispered as Susan pulled the saddle from Pylon’s back and then led him toward the barn. “You better not have, Miss Oh So Young and Pretty. Not at this late date. You better not have.”

4

When Susan came in twenty minutes later, there was no sign of her aunt’s strain and rage; Cordelia had put them away as one might store a dangerous weapon-a gun, say-on a high closet shelf. She was back in her rocker, knitting, and the face she turned to Susan’s entry had a surface serenity. She watched the girl go to the sink, pump cold water into the basin, and then splash it on her face. Instead of reaching for a towel to pat herself dry, Susan only looked out the window with an expression that frightened Cordelia badly. The girl no doubt fancied that look haunted and desperate; to Cordelia, it looked only childishly willful.

“All right, Susan,” she said in a calm, modulated voice. The girl would never know what a strain it was to achieve that tone, let alone maintain it. Unless she was faced with a willful teenager of her own one day, that was. “What’s fashed thee so?”

Susan turned to her-Cordelia Delgado, just sitting there in her rocker, calm as a stone. In that moment Susan felt she could fly at her aunt and claw her thin, self-righteous face to strings, screaming This is your fault! Yours! All yours! She felt soiled-no, that wasn’t strong enough; she felt filthy, and nothing had really happened. In a way, that was the horror of it. Nothing had really happened yet.

“It shows?” was all she said.

“Of course it does,” Cordelia replied. “Now tell me, girl. Has he been on thee?”

“Yes… no… no.”

Aunt Cord sat in her chair, knitting in her lap, eyebrows raised, waiting for more.

At last Susan told her what had happened, speaking in a tone that was mostly flat-a little tremble intruded toward the end, but that was all. Aunt Cord began to feel a cautious sort of relief. Perhaps more goose-girl nerves was all it came down to, after all!

The substitute gown, like all the substitutes, hadn’t been finished off; there was too much else to do. Maria had therefore turned Susan over to blade-faced Conchetta Morgenstem, the chief seamstress, who had led Susan into the downstairs sewing room without saying anything-if saved words were gold, Susan had sometimes reflected, Conchetta would be as rich as the Mayor’s sister was reputed to be.

Blue Dress With Beads was draped over a headless dressmaker’s dummy crouched beneath one low eave, and although Susan could see ragged places on the hem and one small hole around to the back, it was by no means the tattered ruin she had been expecting.

“Can it not be saved?” she asked, rather timidly.

“No,” Conchetta said curtly. “Get out of those trousers, girl. Shirt, too.”

Susan did as she was bid, standing barefoot in the cool little room with her arms crossed over her bosom… not that Conchetta had ever shown the slightest interest in what she had, back or front, above or below.

Blue Dress With Beads was to be replaced by Pink Dress With Applique, it seemed. Susan stepped into it, raised the straps, and stood patiently while Conchetta bent and measured and muttered, sometimes using a bit of chalk to write numbers on a wall-stone, sometimes grabbing a swag of material and pulling it tighter against Susan’s hip or waist, checking the look in the full-length mirror on the far wall. As always during this process, Susan slipped away mentally, allowing her mind to go where it wanted. Where it wanted to go most frequently these days was into a daydream of riding along the Drop with Roland, the two of them side by side, finally stopping in a willow grove she knew that overlooked Hambry Creek.

“Stand there still as you can,” Conchetta said curtly. “I be back.”

Susan was hardly aware she was gone; was hardly aware she was in Mayor’s House at all. The part of her that really mattered wasn’t there. That part was in the willow grove with Roland. She could smell the faint half-sweet, half-acrid perfume of the trees and hear the quiet gossip of the stream as they lay down together forehead to forehead. He traced the shape of her face with the palm of his hand before taking her in his arms…

This daydream was so strong that at first Susan responded to the arms which curled around her waist from behind, arching her back as they first caressed her stomach and then rose to cup her breasts. Then she heard a kind of plowing, snorting breath in her ear, smelled tobacco, and understood what was happening. Not Roland touching her breasts, but Hart Thorin’s long and skinny fingers. She looked in the mirror and saw him looming over her left shoulder like an incubus. His eyes were bulging, there were big drops of sweat on his forehead in spite of the room’s coolness, and his tongue was actually hanging out, like a dog’s on a hot day. Revulsion rose in her throat like the taste of rotten food. She tried to pull away and his hands tightened their hold, pulling her against him. His knuckles cracked obscenely, and now she could feel the hard lump at the center of him.

At times over the last few weeks, Susan had allowed herself to hope that, when the time came, Thorin would be incapable-that he would be able to make no iron at the forge. She had heard this often happened to men when they got older. The hard, throbbing column which lay against her bottom disabused her of that wistful notion in a hurry.

She had managed at least a degree of diplomacy by simply putting her hands over his and attempting to draw them off her breasts instead of pulling away from him again (Cordelia, impassive, not showing the great relief she felt at this).

“Mayor Thorin-Hart-you mustn’t-this is hardly the place and not yet the time-Rhea said-”

“Balls to her and all witches!” His cultured politician’s tones had been replaced by an accent as thick as that in the voice of any back-country farmhand from Onnie’s Ford. “I must have something, a bonbon, aye, so I must. Balls to the witch, I say! Owlshit to 'er!” The smell of tobacco a thick reek around her head. She thought that she would vomit if she had to smell it much longer. “Just stand still, girl. Stand still, my temptation. Mind me well!”

Somehow she did. There was even some distant part of her mind, a part totally dedicated to self-preservation, that hoped he would mistake her shudders of revulsion for maidenly excitement. He had drawn her tight against him, hands working energetically on her breasts, his respiration a stinky steam-engine in her ear. She stood back to him, her eyes closed, tears squeezing out from beneath the lids and through the fringes of her lashes.

It didn’t take him long. He rocked back and forth against her, moaning like a man with stomach cramps. At one point he licked the lobe of her ear, and Susan thought her skin would crawl right off her body in its revulsion. Finally, thankfully, she felt him begin to spasm against her.

“Oh, aye, get out, ye damned poison!” he said in a voice that was almost a squeal. He pushed so hard she had to brace her hands against the wall to keep from being driven face-first into it. Then he at last stepped back.

For a moment Susan only stood as she was, with her palms against the rough cold stone of the sewing room wall. She could see Thorin in the mirror, and in his image she saw the ordinary doom that was rushing at her, the ordinary doom of which this was but a foretaste: the end of girlhood, the end of romance, the end of dreams where she and Roland lay together in the willow grove with their foreheads touching. The man in the mirror looked oddly like a boy himself, one who’s been up to something he wouldn’t tell his mother about. Just a tall and gangly lad with strange gray hair and narrow twitching shoulders and a wet spot on the front of his trousers. Hart Thorin looked as if he didn’t quite know where he was. In that moment the lust was flushed out of his face, but what replaced it was no better-that vacant confusion. It was as if he were a bucket with a hole in the bottom: no matter what you put in it, or how much, it always ran out before long.

He’ll do it again, she thought, and felt an immense tiredness creep over her. Now that he’s done it once, he’ll do it every chance he gets, likely. From now on coming up here is going to be like… well…

Like Castles. Like playing at Castles.

Thorin looked at her a moment longer. Slowly, like a man in a dream, he pulled the tail of his billowy white shirt out of his pants and let it drop around him like a skirt, covering the wet spot. His chin gleamed; he had drooled in his excitement. He seemed to feel this and wiped the wetness away with the heel of one hand, looking at her with those empty eyes all the while. Then some expression at last came into them, and without another word he turned and left the room.

There was a little scuffling thud in the hall as he collided with someone out there. Susan heard him mutter “Sorry! Sorry!” under his breath (it was more apology than he’d given her, muttered or not), and then Conchetta stepped back into the room. The swatch of cloth she’d gone after was draped around her shoulders like a stole. She took in Susan’s pale face and tearstained cheeks at once. She’ll say nothing, Susan thought. None of them will, just as none of them will lift a finger to help me off this stick I’ve run myself on. “Ye sharpened it yourself, gilly,” they’d say if I called for help, and that’ll be their excuse for leaving me to wriggle.

But Conchetta had surprised her. “Life’s hard, missy, so it is. Best get used to it.”

5

Susan’s voice-dry, by now pretty much stripped of emotion-at last ceased. Aunt Cord put her knitting aside, got up, and put the kettle on for tea.

“Ye dramatize, Susan.” She spoke in a voice that strove to be both kind and wise, and succeeded at neither. “It’s a trait ye get from your Manchester side-half of them fancied themselves poets, t'other half fancied themselves painters, and almost all of them spent their nights too drunk to tapdance. He grabbed yer titties and gave yer a dry-hump, that’s all. Nothing to be so upset over. Certainly nothing to lose sleep over.”

“How would you know?” Susan asked. It was disrespectful, but she was beyond caring. She thought she’d reached a point where she could bear anything from her aunt except that patronizing worldly-wise tone of voice. It stung like a fresh scrape.

Cordelia raised an eyebrow and spoke without rancor. “How ye do love to throw that up to me! Aunt Cord, the dry old stick. Aunt Cord the spinster. Aunt Cord the graying virgin. Aye? Well, Miss Oh So Young and Pretty, virgin I might be, but I had a lover or two back when I was young… before the world moved on, ye might say. Mayhap one was the great Fran Lengyll.”

And mayhap not, Susan thought; Fran Lengyll was her aunt’s senior by at least fifteen years, perhaps as many as twenty-five.

“I’ve felt old Tom’s goat on my backside a time or two, Susan. Aye, and on my frontside as well.”

“And were any of these lovers sixty, with bad breath and knuckles that cracked when they squeezed your titties, Aunt? Did any of them try to push you through the nearest wall when old Tom began to wag his beard and say baa-baa-baa?”

The rage she expected did not come. What did was worse-an expression close to the look of emptiness she had seen on Thorin’s face in the mirror. “Deed’s done, Susan.” A smile, short-lived and awful, nickered like an eyelid on her aunt’s narrow face. “Deed’s done, aye.”

In a kind of terror Susan cried: “My father would have hated this! Hated it! And hated you for allowing it to happen! For encouraging it to happen!”

“Mayhap,” Aunt Cord said, and the awful smile winked at her again. “Mayhap so. And the only thing he’d hate more? The dishonor of a broken promise, the shame of a faithless child. He would want thee to go on with it, Susan. If thee would remember his face, thee must go on with it.”

Susan looked at her, mouth drawn down in a trembling arc, eyes filling with tears again. I’ve met someone I love! That was what she would have told her if she could. Don’t you understand how that changes things? I’ve met someone I love! But if Aunt Cord had been the sort of person to whom she could have said such a thing, Susan would likely never have been impaled on this stick to begin with. So she turned and stumbled from the house without saying anything, her streaming eyes blurring her vision and filling the late summer world with rueful color.

6

She rode with no conscious idea of where she was going, yet some part of her must have had a very specific destination in mind, because forty minutes after leaving her house, she found herself approaching the very grove of willows she had been daydreaming about when Thorin had crept up behind her like some bad elf out of a gammer’s story.

It was blessedly cool in the willows. Susan tied Felicia (whom she had ridden out bareback) to a branch, then walked slowly across the little clearing which lay at the heart of the grove. Here the stream passed, and here she sat on the springy moss which carpeted the clearing. Of course she had come here; it was where she had brought all her secret griefs and joys since she had discovered the clearing at the age of eight or nine. It was here she had come, time and time again, in the nearly endless days after her father’s death, when it had seemed to her that the very world-her version of it, at least-had ended with Pat Delgado. It was only this clearing that had heard the full and painful measure of her grief; to the stream she had spoken it, and the stream had carried it away.

Now a fresh spate of tears took her. She put her head on her knees and sobbed-loud, unladylike sounds like the caw of squabbling crows. In that moment she thought she would have given anything-everything- to have her father back for one minute, to ask him if she must go on with this.

She wept above the brook, and when she heard the sound of a snapping branch, she started and looked back over her shoulder in terror and chagrin. This was her secret place and she didn’t want to be found here, especially not when she was bawling like a kiddie who has fallen and bumped her head. Another branch snapped. Someone was here, all right, invading her secret place at the worst possible time.

“Go away!” she screamed in a tear-clotted voice she barely recognized. “Go away, whoever ye are, be decent and leave me alone!”

But the figure-she could now see it-kept coming. When she saw who it was, she at first thought that Will Dearborn (Roland, she thought, his real name is Roland) must be a figment of her overstrained imagination. She wasn’t entirely sure he was real until he knelt and put his arms around her. Then she hugged him with panicky tightness. “How did you know I was-”

“Saw you riding across the Drop. I was at a place where I go to think sometimes, and I saw you. I wouldn’t have followed, except I saw that you were riding bareback. I thought something might be wrong.”

“Everything’s wrong.”

Deliberately, with his eyes wide open and serious, he began kissing her cheeks. He had done it several times on both sides of her face before she realized he was kissing her tears away. Then he took her by the shoulders and held her back from him so he could look into her eyes.

“Say it again and I will, Susan. I don’t know if that’s a promise or a warning or both at the same time, but… say it again and I will.”

There was no need to ask him what he meant. She seemed to feel the ground move beneath her, and later she would think that for the first and only time in her life she had actually felt ka, a wind that came not from the sky but from the earth. It has come to me, after all, she thought. My ka, for good or ill.

“Roland!”

“Yes, Susan.”

She dropped her hand below his belt-buckle and grasped what was there, her eyes never leaving his.

“If you love me, then love me.”

“Aye, lady. I will.”

He unbuttoned his shirt, made in a part of Mid-World she would never see, and took her in his arms.

7

Ka:

They helped each other with their clothes; they lay naked in each other’s arms on summer moss as soft as the finest goosedown. They lay with their foreheads touching, as in her daydream, and when he found his way into her, she felt pain melt into sweetness like some wild and exotic herb that may only be tasted once in each lifetime. She held that taste as long as she could, until at last the sweetness overcame it and she gave in to that, moaning deep in her throat and rubbing her forearms against the sides of his neck. They made love in the willow grove, questions of honor put aside, promises broken without so much as a look back, and at the end of it Susan discovered there was more than sweetness; there was a kind of delirious clinching of the nerves that began in the part of her that had opened before him like a flower; it began there and then filled her entire body. She cried out again and again, thinking there could not be so much pleasure in the mortal world; she would die of it. Roland added his voice to hers, and the sound of water rushing over stones wrapped around both. As she pulled him closer to her, locking her ankles together behind his knees and covering his face with fierce kisses, his going out rushed after hers as if trying to catch up. So were lovers joined in the Barony of Mejis, near the end of the last great age, and the green moss beneath the place where her thighs joined turned a pretty red as her virginity passed; so were they joined and so were they doomed.

Ka.

8

They lay together in each other’s arms, sharing afterglow kisses beneath Felicia’s mild gaze, and Roland felt himself drowsing. This was understandable-the strain on him that summer had been enormous, and he had been sleeping badly. Although he didn’t know it then, he would sleep badly for the rest of his life.

“Roland?” Her voice, distant. Sweet, as well.

“Yes?”

“Will thee take care of me?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t go to him when the time comes. I can bear his touching, and his little thefts-if I have you, I can-but I can’t go to him on Reap Night. I don’t know if I’ve forgotten the face of my father or not, but I cannot go lo Hart Thorin’s bed. There are ways the loss of a girl’s virginity can be concealed, I think, but I won’t use them. I simply cannot go to his bed.”

“All right,” he said, “good.” And then, as her eyes widened in startlement, he looked around. No one was there. He looked back at Susan, fully awake now. “What? What is it?”

“I might already be carrying your child,” she said. “Has thee thought of that?”

He hadn’t. Now he did. A child. Another link in the chain stretching hack into the dimness where Arthur Eld had led his gunslingers into battle with the great sword Excalibur raised above his head and the crown of All-World on his brow. But never mind that; what would his father think? Ur Gabrielle, to know she had become a grandmother?

A little smile had formed at the comers of his mouth, but the thought of his mother drove it away. He thought of the mark on her neck. When his mother came to his mind these days, he always thought of the mark he’d seen on her neck when he came unexpected into her apartment. And the small, rueful smile on her face.

“If you carry my child, such is my good fortune,” he said.

“And mine.” It was her turn to smile, but it had a sad look to it all the same, that smile. “We’re too young, I suppose. Little more than kiddies ourselves.”

He rolled onto his back and looked up at the blue sky. What she said might be true, but it didn’t matter. Truth was sometimes not the same as reality-this was one of the certainties that lived in the hollow, cavey place at the center of his divided nature. That he could rise above both and willingly embrace the insanity of romance was a gift from his mother. All else in his nature was humorless… and, perhaps more important, without metaphor. That they were too young to be parents? What of that? If he had planted a seed, it would grow.

“Whatever comes, we’ll do as we must. And I’ll always love you, no matter what comes.”

She smiled. He said it as a man would state any dry fact: sky is up, earth is down, water flows south.

“Roland, how old are you?” She was sometimes troubled by the idea that, young as she herself was, Roland was even younger. When he was concentrating on something, he could look so hard he frightened her. When he smiled, he looked not like a lover but a kid brother.

“Older than I was when I came here,” he said. “Older by far. And if I have to stay in sight of Jonas and his men another six months, I’ll be hobbling and needing a boost in the arse to get aboard my horse.”

She grinned at that, and he kissed her nose.

“And thee’ll take care of me?”

“Aye,” he said, and grinned back at her. Susan nodded, then also turned on her back. They lay that way, hip to hip, looking up at the sky. She took his hand and placed it on her breast. As he stroked the nipple with his thumb, it raised its head, grew hard, and began to tingle. This sensation slipped quickly down her body to the place that was still throbbing between her legs. She squeezed her thighs together and was both delighted and dismayed to find that doing so only made matters worse.

“Ye must take care of me,” she said in a low voice. “I’ve pinned everything on you. All else is cast aside.”

“I’ll do my best,” he said. “Never doubt it. But for now, Susan, you must go on as you have been. There’s more time yet to pass; I know that because Depape is back and will have told his tale, but they still haven’t moved in any way against us. Whatever he found out, Jonas still thinks it’s in his interest to wait. That’s apt to make him more dangerous when he does move, but for now it’s still Castles.”

“But after the Reaping Bonfire-Thorin-”

“You’ll never go to his bed. That you can count on. I set my warrant on it.”

A little shocked at her own boldness, she reached below his waist. “Here’s a warrant ye can set on me, if ye would,” she said.

He would. Could. And did.

When it was over (for Roland it had been even sweeter than the first time, if that was possible), he asked her: “That feeling you had out at Citgo, Susan-of being watched. Did you have it this time?”

She looked at him long and thoughtfully. “I don’t know. My mind was in other places, ye ken.” She touched him gently, then laughed as he jumped-the nerves in the half-hard, half-soft place where her palm stroked were still very lively, it seemed.

She took her hand away and looked up at the circle of sky above the grove. “So beautiful here,” she murmured, and her eyes drifted closed.

Roland also felt himself drifting. It was ironic, he thought. This time she hadn’t had that sensation of being watched… but the second time, he had. Yet he would have sworn there was no one near this grove.

No matter. The feeling, megrim or reality, was gone now. He took Susan’s hand, and felt her fingers slip naturally through his, entwining.

He closed his eyes.

9

All of this Rhea saw in the glass, and wery interesting viewing it made, aye, wery interesting, indeed. But she’d seen shagging before-sometimes with three or four or even more doing it all at the same time (sometimes with partners who were not precisely alive)-and the hokey-pokey wasn’t very interesting to her at her advanced age. What she was interested in was what would come after the hokey-pokey.

Is our business done? the girl had asked.

Mayhap there’s one more little thing, Rhea had responded, and then she told the impudent trull what to do.

Aye, she’d given the girl very clear instructions as the two of them stood in the hut doorway, the Kissing Moon shining down on them as Susan Delgado slept the strange sleep and Rhea stroked her braid and whispered instructions in her ear. Now would come the fulfillment of that interlude… and that was what she wanted to see, not two babbies shagging each other like they were the first two on earth to discover how ’twas done.

Twice they did it with hardly a pause to natter in between (she would have given a good deal to hear that natter, too). Rhea wasn’t surprised; at his young age, she supposed the brat had enough spunkum in his sack to give her a week’s worth of doubles, and from the way the little slut acted, that might be to her taste. Some of them discovered it and never wanted aught else; this was one, Rhea thought.

But let’s see how sexy you feel in a few minutes, you snippy bitch, she thought, and leaned deeper into the pulsing pink light thrown from the glass. She could sometimes feel that light aching in the very bones of her face… but it was a good ache. Aye, wery good indeed.

They were at last done… for the time being, at least. They clasped hands and drifted off to sleep.

“Now,” Rhea murmured. “Now, my little one. Be a good girl and do as ye were told.”

As if hearing her, Susan’s eyes opened-but there was nothing in them. They woke and slept at the same time. Rhea saw her gently pull her hand free of the boy’s. She sat up, bare breasts against bare thighs, and looked around. She got to her feet-

That was when Musty, the six-legged cat, jumped into Rhea’s lap, waowing for either food or affection. The old woman shrieked with surprise, and the wizard’s glass at once went dark-puffed out like a candle-flame in a gust of wind.

Rhea shrieked again, this time with rage, and seized the cat before it could flee. She hurled it across the room, into the fireplace. That was as dead a hole as only a summer fireplace can be, but when Rhea cast a bony, misshapen hand at it, a yellow gust of flame rose from the single half-charred log lying in there. Musty screamed and fled from the hearth with his eyes wide and his split tail smoking like an indifferently butted cigar.

“Run, aye!” Rhea spat after him. “Begone, ye vile cusk!”

She turned back to the glass and spread her hands over it, thumb to thumb. But although she concentrated with all her might, willed until her heart was beating with a sick fury in her chest, she could do no more than bring back the ball’s natural pink glow. No images appeared. This was bitterly disappointing, but there was nothing to be done. And in time she would be able to see the results with her own two natural eyes, if she cared to go to town and do so.

Everybody would be able to see.

Her good humor restored, Rhea returned the ball to its hiding place.

10

Only moments before he would have sunk too deep in sleep to have heard it, a warning bell went off in Roland’s mind. Perhaps it was the faint realization that her hand was no longer entwined with his; perhaps it was raw intuition. He could have ignored that faint bell, and almost did, but in the end his training was too strong. He came up from the threshold of real sleep, fighting his way back to clarity as a diver kicks for the surface of a quarry. It was hard at first, but became easier; as he neared wakefulness, his alarm grew.

He opened his eyes and looked to his left. Susan was no longer there. He sat up, looked to his right, and saw nothing above the cut of the stream… yet he felt that she was in that direction, all the same.

“Susan?”

No response. He got up, looked at his pants, and Cort-a visitor he never would have expected in such a romantic bower as this-spoke up gruffly in his mind. No time, maggot.

He walked naked to the bank and looked down. Susan was there, all right, also naked, her back to him. She had unbraided her hair. It hung, loose gold, almost all the way to the lyre other hips. The chill air rising from the surface of the stream shivered the tips of it like mist.

She was down on one knee at the edge of the running water. One arm was plunged into it almost to the elbow; she searched for something, it seemed.

“Susan!”

No answer. And now a cold thought came to him: She’s been infested by a demon. While I slept, heedless, beside her, she’s been infested by a demon. Yet he did not think he really believed that. If there had been a demon near this clearing, he would have felt it. Likely both of them would have felt it; the horses, too. But something was wrong with her.

She brought an object up from the streambed and held it before her eyes in her dripping hand. A stone. She examined it, then tossed it back- plunk. She reached in again, head bent, two sheafs of her hair now actually floating on the water, the stream prankishly tugging them in the direction it flowed. “Susan!”

No response. She plucked another stone out of the stream. This one was a triangular white quartz, shattered into a shape that was almost like the head of a spear. Susan tilted her head to the left and took a sheaf of her hair in her hand, like a woman who means to comb out a nest of tangles. But there was no comb, only the rock with its sharp edge, and for a moment longer Roland remained on the bank, frozen with horror, sure that she meant to cut her own throat out of shame and guilt over what they’d done. In the weeks to come, he was haunted by a clear knowledge: if it had been her throat she’d intended, he wouldn’t have been in time to stop her.

Then the paralysis broke and he hurled himself down the bank, unmindful of the sharp stones that gouged the soles of his feet. Before he reached her, she had already used the edge of the quartz to cut off part of the golden tress she held.

Roland seized her wrist and pulled it back. He could see her face clearly now. What could have been mistaken for serenity from the top of the bank now looked like what it really was: vacuity, emptiness.

When he took hold of her, the smoothness of her face was replaced by a dim and fretful smile; her mouth quivered as if she felt distant pain, and an almost formless sound of negation came from her mouth:

“Nnnnnnnnn-”

Some of the hair she had cut off lay on her thigh like gold wire; most had fallen into the stream and been carried away. Susan pulled against Roland’s hand, trying to get the sharp edge back to her hair, wanting to continue her mad barbering. The two of them strove together like arm-wrestlers in a barroom contest. And Susan was winning. He was physically the stronger, but not stronger than the enchantment which held her. Little by little the white triangle of quartz moved back toward her hanging hair. That frightening sound-Nnnnnnnnnn-kept drifting from her mouth.

“Susan! Stop it! Wake up!”

“Nnnnnnnn-”

Her bare arm quivering visibly in the air, the muscles bunched like hard little rocks. And the quartz moving closer and closer to her hair, her cheek, the socket of her eye.

Without thinking about it-it was the way he always acted most successfully-Roland moved his face close to the side others, giving up another four inches to the fist holding the stone in order to do it. He put his lips against the cup of her ear and then clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. Clucked sidemouth, in fact.

Susan jerked back from that sound, which must have gone through her head like a spear. Her eyelids fluttered rapidly, and the pressure she was exerting against Roland’s grip eased a little. He took the chance and twisted her wrist.

“Ow!Owwww!”

The stone flew out of her opening hand and splashed into the water. Susan gazed at him, now fully awake, her eyes filled with tears and bewilderment. She was rubbing her wrist… which, Roland thought, was likely to swell.

“Ye hurt me, Roland! Why did ye hurt m…”

She trailed off, looking around. Now not just her face but the whole set other body expressed bewilderment. She moved to cover herself with her hands, then realized they were still alone and dropped them to her sides. She glanced over her shoulder at the footprints-all of them bare- leading down the bank.

“How did I get down here?” she asked. “Did thee carry me, after I fell asleep? And why did thee hurt me? Oh, Roland, I love thee-why did ye hurt me?”

He picked up the strands of hair that still lay on her thigh and held them in front of her. “You had a stone with a sharp edge. You were trying to cut yourself with it, and you didn’t want to stop. I hurt you because I was scared. I’m just glad I didn’t break your wrist… at least, I don’t think I did.”

Roland took it and rotated it gently in either direction, listening for the grate of small bones.

He heard nothing, and the wrist turned freely. As Susan watched, stunned and confused, he raised it to his lips and kissed the inner part, above the delicate tracery of veins.

11

Roland had tied Rusher just far enough into the willows so the big gelding could not be seen by anyone who happened to come riding along the Drop.

“Be easy,” Roland said, approaching. “Be easy a little longer, good-heart.”

Rusher stamped and whickered, as if to say he could be easy until the end of the age, if that was what were required.

Roland nipped open his saddlebag and took out the steel utensil that served as either a pot or a frypan, depending on his needs. He started away, then turned back. His bedroll was tied behind Pusher’s saddle he had planned to spend the night camped out on the Drop, thinking. There had been a lot to think about, and now there was even more.

He pulled one of the rawhide ties, reached inside the blankets, and pulled out a small metal box. This he opened with a tiny key he drew from around his neck. Inside the box was a small square locket on a fine silver chain (inside the locket was a line-drawing of his mother), and a handful of extra shells-not quite a dozen. He took one, closed it in his fist, and went back to Susan. She looked at him with wide, frightened eyes.

“I don’t remember anything after we made love the second time,” she said. “Only looking up at the sky and thinking how good I felt and going to sleep. Oh, Roland, how bad does it look?”

“Not bad, I should think, but you’ll know better than I. Here.”

He dipped his cooker full of water and set it on the bank. Susan bent over it apprehensively, laying the hair on the left side of her head across her forearm, then moving the arm slowly outward, extending the tress in a band of bright gold. She saw the ragged cut at once. She examined it carefully, then let it drop with a sigh more relieved than rueful.

“I can hide it,” she said. “When it’s braided, no one will know. And after all, ’tis only hair-no more than woman’s vanity. My aunt has told me so often enough, certainly. But Roland, why? Why did I do it?”

Roland had an idea. If hair was a woman’s vanity, then hair-chopping would likely be a woman’s bit of nastiness-a man would hardly think of it at all. The Mayor’s wife, had it been her? He thought not. It seemed more likely that Rhea, up there on her height of land looking north toward the Bad Grass, Hanging Rock, and Eyebolt Canyon, had set this ugly trap. Mayor Thorin had been meant to wake up on the morning after the Reap with a hangover and a bald-headed gilly.

“Susan, can I try something?”

She gave him a smile. “Something ye didn’t try already up yonder? Aye, what ye will.”

“Nothing like that.” He opened the hand he had held closed, showing the shell. “I want to try and find out who did this to you, and why.” And other things, too. He just didn’t know what they were yet.

She looked at the shell. Roland began to move it along the back of his hand, dancing it back and forth in a dexterous weaving. His knuckles rose and fell like the heddles of a loom. She watched this with a child’s fascinated delight. “Where did ye learn that?”

“At home. It doesn’t matter.”

“Ye’d hypnotize me?”

“Aye… and I don’t think it would be for the first time.” He made the shell dance a bit faster-now east along his rippling knuckles, now west. “May I?”

“Aye,” she said. “If you can.”

12

He could, all right; the speed with which she went under confirmed that this had happened to Susan before, and recently. Yet he couldn’t get what lie wanted from her. She was perfectly cooperative (some sleep eager, fort would have said), but beyond a certain point she would not go. It wasn’t decorum or modesty, either-as she slept open-eyed before the stream, she told him in a far-off but calm voice about the old woman’s examination, and the way Rhea had tried to “fiddle her up.” (At this Poland’s fists clenched so tightly his nails bit into his palms.) But there came a point where she could no longer remember.

She and Rhea had gone to the door of the hut, Susan said, and there they had stood with the Kissing Moon shining down on their faces. The old woman had been touching her hair, Susan remembered that much. The touch revolted her, especially after the witch’s previous touches, but Susan had been unable to do anything about it. Arms too heavy to raise; tongue too heavy to speak. She could only stand there while the witch whispered in her ear.

“What?” Roland asked. “What did she whisper?”

“I don’t know,” Susan said. “The rest is pink.”

“Pink? What do you mean?”

“Pink,” she repeated. She sounded almost amused, as if she believed Roland was being deliberately dense. “She says, 'Aye, lovely, just so, it’s a good girl y’are,' then everything’s pink. Pink and bright.”

“Bright.”

“Aye, like the moon. And then… “She paused. “Then I think it becomes the moon. The Kissing Moon, mayhap. A bright pink Kissing Moon, as round and full as a grapefruit.”

He tried other ways into her memory with no success-every path he tried ended in that bright pinkness, first obscuring her recollection and then coalescing into a full moon. It meant nothing to Roland; he’d heard of blue moons, but never pink ones. The only thing of which he was sure was that the old woman had given Susan a powerful command to forget.

He considered taking her deeper-she would go-but didn’t dare. Most of his experience came from hypnotizing his friends-classroom exercises that were larky and occasionally spooky. Always there had been Cort or Vannay present to make things right if they went off-track. Now there were no teachers to step in; for better or worse, the students had been left in charge of the school. What if he took her deep and couldn’t get her back up again? And he had been told there were demons in the below-mind as well. If you went down to where they were, they sometimes swam out of their caves to meet you…

All other considerations aside, it was getting late. It wouldn’t be prudent to stay here much longer.

“Susan, do you hear me?”

“Aye, Roland, I hear you very well.”

“Good. I’m going to say a rhyme. You’ll wake up as I say it. When I’m done, you’ll be wide awake and remember everything we’ve said. Do you understand?”

“Aye.”

“Listen: Bird and bear and hare and fish, Give my love her fondest wish.”

Her smile as she rose to consciousness was one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen. She stretched, then put her arms around his neck and covered his face with kisses. “You, you, you, you,” she said. “You’re my fondest wish, Roland. You’re my only wish. You and you, forever and ever.”

They made love again there on the bank, beside the babbling stream, holding each other as tightly as they could, breathing into each other’s mouths and living on each other’s breath. You, you, you, you.

13

Twenty minutes later, he boosted her onto Felicia’s back. Susan leaned down, took his face in her hands, and kissed him soundly.

“When will I see ye again?” she asked.

“Soon. But we must be careful.”

“Aye. Careful as two lovers ever were, I think. Thank God thee’s clever.”

“We can use Sheemie, if we don’t use him too often.”

“Aye. And, Roland-do ye know the pavilion in Green Heart? Close to where they serve tea and cakes and things when the weather’s fair?”

Roland did. Fifty yards or so up Hill Street from the jail and the Town Gathering Hall, Green Heart was one of the most pleasant places in town, with its quaint paths, umbrella-shaded tables, grassy dancing pavilion, and menagerie.

“There’s a rock wall at the back,” she said. “Between the pavilion and the menagerie. If you need me badly-”

“I’ll always need you badly,” he said.

She smiled at his gravity. “There’s a stone on one of the lower courses-a reddish one. You’ll see it. My friend Amy and I used to leave messages there for each other when we were little girls. I’ll look there when I can. Ye do the same.”

“Aye.” Sheemie would work for awhile, if they were careful. The red rock might also work for awhile, if they were careful. But no matter how careful they were, they would slip eventually, because the Big Coffin Hunters now probably knew more about Roland and his friends than Roland ever would have wished. But he had to see her, no matter what the risks. If he didn’t, he felt he might die. And he only had to look at her to know she felt the same.

“Watch special for Jonas and the other two,” he said.

“I will. Another kiss, if ye favor?”

He kissed her gladly, and would just as gladly have pulled her off the mare’s back for a fourth go-round… but it was time to stop being delirious and start being careful.

“Fare you well, Susan. I love y-” He paused, then smiled. “I love thee.”

“And I thee, Roland. What heart I have is yours.”

She had a great heart, he thought as she slipped through the willows, and already he felt its burden on his own. He waited until he felt sure she must be well away. Then he went to Rusher and rode off in the opposite direction, knowing that a new and dangerous phase of the game had begun.

14

Not too long after Susan and Roland had parted, Cordelia Delgado stepped out of the Hambry Mercantile with a box of groceries and a troubled mind. The troubled mind was caused by Susan, of course, always Susan, and Cordelia’s fear that the girl would do something stupid before Reaping finally came around.

These thoughts were snatched out of her mind just as hands-strong ones-snatched the box of groceries from her arms. Cordelia cawed in surprise, shaded her eyes against the sun, and saw Eldred Jonas standing there between the Bear and Turtle totems, smiling at her. His hair, long and white (and beautiful, in her opinion), lay over his shoulders. Cordelia felt her heart beat a little faster. She had always been partial to men like Jonas, who could smile and banter their way to the edge of risqueness… but who carried their bodies like blades.

“I startled you. I cry your pardon, Cordelia.”

“Nay,” she said, sounding a little breathless to her own ears. “It’s just the sun-so bright at this time of day-”

“I’d help you a bit on your way, if you give me leave. I’m only going up High as far as the comer, then I turn up the Hill, but may I help you that far?”

“With thanks,” she said. They walked down the steps and up the board sidewalk, Cordelia looking around in little pecking glances to see who was observing them-she beside the handsome sai Jonas, who just happened to be carrying her goods. There was a satisfying number of onlookers. She saw Millicent Ortega, for one, looking out of Ann’s Dresses with a satisfying 0 of surprise on her stupid cow’s puss.

“I hope you don’t mind me calling you Cordelia.” Jonas shifted the box, which she’d needed two hands to carry, casually under one arm. “I feel, since the welcoming dinner at Mayor Thorin’s house, that I know you.”

“Cordelia’s fine.”

“And may I be Eldred to you?”

“I think 'Mr. Jonas’ will do a bit longer,” she said, then favored him with what she hoped was a coquettish smile. Her heart beat faster yet. (It did not occur to her that perhaps Susan was not the only silly goose in the Delgado family.)

“So be it,” Jonas said, with a look of disappointment so comic that she laughed. “And your niece? Is she well?”

“Quite well, thank ye for asking. A bit of a trial, sometimes-”

“Was there ever a girl of sixteen who wasn’t?”

“I suppose not.”

“Yet you have additional burdens regarding her this fall. I doubt if \he realizes that, though.”

Cordelia said nothing-'twouldn’t be discreet-but gave him a meaningful look that said much.

“Give her my best, please.”

“I will.” But she wouldn’t. Susan had conceived a great (and irrational, in Cordelia’s view) dislike for Mayor Thorin’s regulators. Trying to talk her out of these feelings would likely do no good; young girls thought they knew everything. She glanced at the star peeking unobtrusively out from beneath the flap of Jonas’s vest. “I understand ye’ve taken on an additional responsibility in our undeserving town, sai Jonas.”

“Aye, I’m helping out Sheriff Avery,” he agreed. His voice had a reedy little tremble which Cordelia found quite endearing, somehow. “One of his deputies-Claypool, his name is-”

“Frank Claypool, aye.”

“-fell out of his boat and broke his leg. How do you fall out of a boat and break your leg, Cordelia?”

She laughed merrily (the idea that everyone in Hambry was watching them was surely wrong… but it felt that way, and the feeling was not unpleasant) and said she didn’t know.

He stopped on the comer of High and Camino Vega, looking regretful. “Here’s where I turn.” He handed the box back to her. “Are you sure you can carry that? I suppose I could go on with you to your house-”

“No need, no need. Thank you. Thank you, Eldred.” The blush which crept up her neck and cheeks felt as hot as fire, but his smile was worth every degree of heat. He tipped her a little salute with two fingers and sauntered up the hill toward the Sheriff’s office.

Cordelia walked on home. The box, which had seemed such a burden when she stepped out of the mercantile, now seemed to weigh next to nothing. This feeling lasted for half a mile or so, but by the time her house came into view, she was once again aware of the sweat trickling down her sides, and the ache in her arms. Thank the gods summer was almost over… and wasn’t that Susan, just leading her mare in through the gate?

“Susan!” she called, now enough returned to earth for her former irritation with the girl to sound clear in her voice. “Come and help me, 'fore I drop this and break the eggs!”

Susan came, leaving Felicia to crop grass in the front yard. Ten minutes earlier, Cordelia would have noticed nothing of how the girl looked- her thoughts had been too wrapped up in Eldred Jonas to admit of much else. But the hot sun had taken some of the romance out of her head and returned her feet to earth. And as Susan took the box from her (handling it almost as easily as Jonas had done), Cordelia thought she didn’t much care for the girl’s appearance. Her temper had changed, for one thing- from the half-hysterical confusion in which she’d left to a pleasant and happy-eyed calmness. That was the Susan of previous years to the sleeve and seam… but not this year’s moaning, moody breast-beater. There was nothing else Cordelia could put her finger on, except-

But there was, actually. One thing. She reached out and grasped the girl’s braid, which looked uncharacteristically sloppy this afternoon. Of course Susan had been riding; that could explain the mess. But it didn’t explain how dark her hair was, as if that bright mass of gold had begun to tarnish. And she jumped, almost guiltily, when she felt Cordelia’s touch. Why, pray tell, was that?

“Yer hair’s damp, Susan,” she said. “Have ye been swimming somewhere?”

“Nay! I stopped and ducked my head at the pump outside Hockey’s barn. He doesn’t mind-'tis a deep well he has. It’s so hot. Perhaps there’ll be a shower later. I hope so. I gave Felicia to drink as well.”

The girl’s eyes were as direct and as candid as ever, but Cordelia thought there was something off in them, just the same. She couldn’t say what. The idea that Susan might be hiding something large and serious did not immediately cross Cordelia’s mind; she would have said her niece was incapable of keeping a secret any greater than a birthday present or a surprise party… and not even such secrets as those for more than a day or two. And yet something was off here. Cordelia dropped her fingers to the collar of the girl’s riding shirt.

“Yet this is dry.”

“I was careful,” she said, looking at her aunt with a puzzled eye. “Dirt sticks worse to a wet shirt. You taught me that, Aunt.”

“Ye flinched when I touched yer hair, Susan.”

“Aye,” Susan said, “so I did. The weird-woman touched it just that same way. I haven’t liked it since. Now may I take these groceries in and get my horse out of the hot sun?”

“Don’t be pert, Susan.” Yet the edginess in her niece’s voice actually eased her in some strange way. That feeling that Susan had changed, somehow-that feeling of offness-began to subside.

“Then don’t be tiresome.”

“Susan! Apologize to me!”

Susan took a deep breath, held it, then let it out. “Yes, Aunt. I do. But it’s hot.”

“Aye. Put those in the pantry. And thankee.”

Susan went on toward the house with the box in her arms. When the girl had enough of a lead so they wouldn’t have to walk together, Cordelia followed. It was all foolishness on her part, no doubt-suspicions brought on by her flirtation with Eldred-but the girl was at a dangerous age, and much depended on her good behavior over the next seven weeks. After that she would be Thorin’s problem, but until then she was Cordelia’s. Cordelia thought that, in the end, Susan would be true to her promise, but until Reaping Fair she would bear close watching. About such matters as a girl’s virginity, it was best to be vigilant.