“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.
Chapter X
BIRD AND BEAR AND HARE AND FISH
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.
