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-”
