“I know them both,” she replied in offhand fashion. “I met them at the party. So did you. Ye frightened me, Aunt.”
“Why did he salute ye so?”
“How can I know? Perhaps he just felt like it.”
Her aunt bolted forward, slipped in her muddy boots, regained her balance, and seized Susan by the arms. Now her eyes were blazing. “Be'n’t insolent with me, girl! Be'n’t haughty with me, Miss Oh So Young and Pretty, or I’ll-”
Susan pulled backward so hard that Cordelia staggered and might have fallen again, if the table had not been handy to grab. Behind her, muddy foot-tracks stood out on the clean kitchen floor like accusations. “Call me that again and I’ll… I’ll slap thee!” Susan cried. “So I will!”
Cordelia’s lips drew back from her teeth in a dry, ferocious smile. “Ye’d slap your father’s only living blood kin? Would ye be so bad?”
“Why not? Do ye not slap me, Aunt?”
Some of the heat went out of her aunt’s eyes, and the smile left her mouth. “Susan! Hardly ever! Not half a dozen times since ye were a toddler who would grab anything her hands could reach, even a pot of boiling water on the-”
“It’s with thy mouth thee mostly hits nowadays,” Susan said. “I’ve put up with it-more fool me-but am done with it now. I’ll have no more. If I’m old enough to be sent to a man’s bed for money, I’m old enough for ye to keep a civil tongue when ye speak to me.”
Cordelia opened her mouth to defend herself-the girl’s anger had startled her, and so had her accusations-and then she realized how cleverly she was being led away from the subject of the boys. Of the boy.
“Ye only know him from the party, Susan? It’s Dearborn I mean.” As I think ye well know.
“I’ve seen him about town,” Susan said. She met her aunt’s eyes steadily, although it cost her an effort; lies would follow half-truths as dark followed dusk. “I’ve seen all three of them about town. Are ye satisfied?” No, Susan saw with mounting dismay, she was not. “Do ye swear to me, Susan-on your father’s name-that ye’ve not been meeting this boy Dearborn?”
All the rides in the late afternoon, Susan thought. All the excuses. All the care that no one should see us. And it all comes down to a careless wave on a rainy morning. That easily all’s put at risk. Did we think it could be otherwise? Were we that foolish?
Yes… and no. The truth was they had been mad. And still were. Susan kept remembering the look of her father’s eyes on the few occasions when he had caught her in a fib. That look of half- curious disappointment. The sense that her fibs, innocuous as they might be, had hurt him like the scratch of a thorn.
“I will swear to nothing,” she said. “Ye’ve no right to ask it of me.” “Swear!” Cordelia cried shrilly. She groped out for the table again and grasped it, as if for balance. “Swear it! Swear it! This is no game of jacks or tag or Johnny-jump-my-pony! Thee’s not a child any longer! Swear to me! Swear that thee’re still pure!”
“No,” Susan said, and turned to leave. Her heart was beating madly, but still that awful clarity informed the world. Roland would have known it for what it was: she was seeing with gunslinger’s eyes. There was a glass window in the kitchen, looking out toward the Drop, and in it she saw the ghostly reflection of Aunt Cord coming toward her, one arm raised, the hand at the end of it knotted into a fist. Without turning, Susan put up her own hand in a halting gesture. “Raise that not to me,” she said. “Raise it not, ye bitch.”
She saw the reflection’s ghost-eyes widen in shock and dismay. She saw the ghost-fist relax, become a hand again, fall to the ghost-woman’s side.
“Susan,” Cordelia said in a small, hurt voice. “How can ye call me so? What’s so coarsened your tongue and your regard for me?”
Susan went out without replying. She crossed the yard and entered the bam. Here the smells she had known since childhood-horses, lumber, hay-filled her head and drove the awful clarity away. She was tumbled back into childhood, lost in the shadows of her confusion again. Pylon turned to look at her and whickered. Susan put her head against his neck and cried.
7
“There!” Sheriff Avery said when sais Dearborn and Heath were gone. “It’s as ye said-just slow is all they are; just creeping careful.” He held the meticulously printed list up, studied it a moment, then cackled happily. “And look at this! What a beauty! Har! We can move anything we don’t want em to see days in advance, so we can.”
“They’re fools,” Reynolds said… but he pined for another chance at them, just the same. If Dearborn really thought bygones were bygones over that little business in the Travellers’ Rest, he was way past foolishness and dwelling in the land of idiocy.
Deputy Dave said nothing. He was looking disconsolately through his monocle at the Castles board, where his white army had been laid waste in six quick moves. Jonas’s forces had poured around Red Hillock like water, and Dave’s hopes had been swept away in the flood.
“I’m tempted to wrap myself up dry and go over to Seafront with this,” Avery said. He was still gloating over the paper, with its neat list of farms and ranches and proposed dates of inspection. Up to Year’s End and beyond it ran. Gods!
“Why don’t ye do that?” Jonas said, and got to his feet. Pain ran up his leg like bitter lightning.
“Another game, sai Jonas?” Dave asked, beginning to reset the pieces.
“I’d rather play a weed-eating dog,” Jonas said, and took malicious pleasure at the flush that crept up Dave’s neck and stained his guileless fool’s face. He limped across to the door, opened it, and went out on the porch. The drizzle had become a soft, steady rain. Hill Street was deserted, the cobbles gleaming wetly.
Reynolds had followed him out. “Eldred-”
“Get away,” Jonas said without turning.
Clay hesitated a moment, then went back inside and closed the door.
What the hell’s wrong with you? Jonas asked himself.
He should have been pleased at the two young pups and their list-as pleased as Avery was, as pleased as Rimer would be when he heard about this morning’s visit. After all, hadn’t he told Rimer not three days ago that the boys would soon be over on the Drop, counting their little hearts out? Yes. So why did he feel so unsettled? So fucking jittery? Because there ^Bt still hadn’t been any contact from Parson’s man, Latigo? Because Reynolds came back empty from Hanging Rock on one day and Depape came back empty the next? Surely not. Latigo would come, along with a goodly troop of men, but it was still too soon for them, and Jonas knew it. Reaping was still almost a month away.
So is it just the bad weather working on your leg, stirring up that old wound and making you ugly?
No. The pain was bad, but it had been worse before. The trouble was his head. Jonas leaned against a post beneath the overhang, listened to the rain plinking on the tiles, and thought how, sometimes in a game of Castles, a clever player would peek around his Hillock for just a moment, then duck back. That was what this felt like-it was so right it smelled wrong. Crazy idea, but somehow not crazy at all.
“Are you trying to play Castles with me, sprat?” Jonas murmured. “If so, you’ll soon wish you’d stayed home with your mommy. So you will.”
8
Roland and Cuthbert headed back to the Bar K along the Drop-there would be no counting done today. At first, in spite of the rain and the gray skies, Cuthbert’s good humor was almost entirely restored.
“Did you see them?” he asked with a laugh. “Did you see them, Roland… Will, I mean? They bought it, didn’t they? Swallowed that honey whole, they did!”
“Yes.”
“What do we do next? What’s our next move?”
Roland looked at him blankly for a moment, as if startled out of a doze. “The next move is theirs. We count. And we wait.”
Cuthbert’s good cheer collapsed in a puff, and he once more found himself having to restrain a flood of recrimination, all whirling around two basic ideas: that Roland was shirking his duty so he could continue to wallow in the undeniable charms of a certain young lady, and-more important-that Roland had lost his wits when all of Mid-World needed them the most.
Except what duty was Roland shirking? And what made him so sure Roland was wrong? Logic? Intuition? Or just shitty old catbox jealousy? Cuthbert found himself thinking of the effortless way Jonas had ripped up Deputy Dave’s army when Deputy Dave had moved too soon. But life was not like Castles… was it? He didn’t know. But he thought he had at least one valid intuition: Roland was heading for disaster. And so they all were.
Wake up, Cuthbert thought. Please, Roland, wake up before it’s too late.
Chapter III
PLAYING CASTLES
1
There followed a week of the sort of weather that makes folk apt to crawl back into bed after lunch, take long naps, and wake feeling stupid and disoriented. It was far from flood-weather, but it made the final phase of the apple-picking dangerous (there were several broken legs, and in Seven-Mile Orchard a young woman fell from the top of her ladder, breaking her back), and the potato- fields became difficult to work; almost as much time was spent freeing wagons stuck in the gluey rows as was spent actually picking. In Green Heart, what decorations had been done for the Reaping Fair grew sodden and had to be pulled down. The work volunteers waited with increasing nervousness for the weather to break so they could begin again.
It was bad weather for young men whose job it was to take inventory, although they were at least able to begin visiting barns and counting stock. It was good weather for a young man and young woman who had discovered the joys of physical love, you would have said, but Roland and Susan met only twice during the run of gray weather. The danger of what they were doing was now almost
