In Mejis, as in every other Barony of Mid-World, the week before a Fair-Day was a political week. Important people came in from the farther corners of the Barony, and there were a good many Conversationals leading up to the main Conversational on Reaping Day. Susan was expected to be present at these-mostly as a decorative testimony to the Mayor’s continuing puissance. Olive was also present, and, in a cruelly comic dumb-show that only the women truly appreciated, they sat on either side of the aging cockatoo, Susan pouring the coffee, Olive passing the cake, both of them gracefully accepting compliments on food and drink they’d had no hand in preparing.
Susan found it almost impossible to look at Olive’s smiling, unhappy face. Her husband would never lie with Pat Delgado’s daughter… but sai Thorin didn’t know that, and Susan couldn’t tell her. She had only to glimpse the Mayor’s wife from the comer other eye to remember what Roland had said that day on the Drop: For a moment I thought she was my mother. But that was the problem, wasn’t it? Olive Thorin was nobody’s mother. That was what had opened the door to this horrible situation in the first place.
There had been something much on Susan’s mind to do, but with the round of activities at Mayor’s House, it was but three days to Reaping before she got the chance. Finally, following this latest Conversational, she was able to slip out of Pink Dress with Applique (how she hated it! how she hated them all!) and jump back into jeans, a plain riding shirt, and a ranch-coat. There was no time to braid her hair, as she was expected back for Mayor’s Tea, but Maria tied it back for her and off she had gone to the house she would shortly be leaving forever.
Her business was in the back room of the stable-the room her father had used as an office-but she went into the house first and heard what she’d hoped to hear: her aunt’s ladylike, whistling snores. Lovely.
Susan got a slice of bread and honey and took it out to the barn-stable, protecting it as best she could from the clouds of dust that blew across the yard in the wind. Her aunt’s stuffy-guy rattled on his post in the garden.
She ducked into the sweet-smelling shadows of the barn. Pylon and Felicia nickered hello, and she divided what she hadn’t eaten between them. They seemed pleased enough to get it. She made especially of Felicia, whom she would soon be leaving behind.
She had avoided the little office since her father died, afraid of exactly the sort of pang that struck her when she lifted the latch and went in. The narrow windows were now covered with cobwebs, but they still let in autumn’s bright light, more than enough for her to be able to see the pipe in the ashtray-the red one, his favorite, the one he called his thinking-pipe- and a bit of tack laid over the back of his desk chair. He had probably been mending it by gaslight, had put it by thinking to finish the next day… then the snake had done its dance under Foam’s hoofs and there had never been a next day. Not for Pat Delgado.
“Oh, Da,” she said in a small and broken voice. “How I do miss thee.”
She crossed to the desk and ran her fingers along its surface, leaving trails of dust. She sat down in his chair, listened to it creak under her as it had always creaked under him, and that pushed her over the edge. For the next five minutes she sat there and wept, screwing her fists into her eyes as she had as a wee shim. Only now, of course, there was no Big Pat to come upon her and jolly her out of it, taking her on his lap and kissing her in that sensitive place under her chin (especially sensitive to the bristles on his upper lip, it had been) until her tears turned to giggles. Time was a face on the water, and this time it was the face of her father.
At last her tears tapered to sniffles. She opened the desk drawers, one after another, finding more pipes (many rendered useless by his constant stem-chewing), a hat, one of her own dolls (it had a broken arm Pat had apparently never gotten around to putting right), quill-pens, a little flask- empty but with a faint smell of whiskey still present around its neck. The only item of interest was in the bottom drawer: a pair of spurs. One still had its star rowel, but the other had been broken off. These were, she was almost positive, the spurs he had been wearing on the day he died.
If my da was here, she had begun that day on the Drop. But he’s not, Roland had said. He’s dead.
A pair of spurs, a broken-off rowel.
She bounced them in her hand, in her mind’s eye seeing Ocean Foam rear, spilling her father (one spur catches in a stirrup; the rowel breaks free), then stumbling sideways and falling atop him. She saw this clearly, but she didn’t see the snake Fran Lengyll had told them about. That she didn’t see at all.
She put the spurs back where she had found them, got up, and looked at the shelf to the right of the desk, handy to Pat Delgado’s smart hand. Here was a line of leather-bound ledgers, a priceless trove of books in a society that had forgotten how to make paper. Her father had been the man in charge of the Barony’s horse for almost thirty years, and here were his stockline books to prove it.
Susan took down the last one and began to page through it. This time she almost welcomed the pang that struck her as she saw her father’s familiar hand-the labored script, the steep and somehow more confident numbers.
Born of HENRIETTA, (2) foals both well
Stillborn of DELIA, a roan (MUTANT)
Born of YOLANDA, a THOROUGHBRED, a GOOD MALE COLT
And, following each, the date. So neat, he had been. So thorough. So…
She stopped suddenly, aware that she had found what she was looking for even without any clear knowledge of what she was doing in here. I he last dozen pages of her da’s final stockline book had been torn out.
Who had done it? Not her father; a largely self-taught man, he revered paper the way some people revered gods or gold.
And why had it been done?
That she thought she knew: horses, of courses. There were too many on the Drop. And the ranchers-Lengyll, Croydon, Renfrew-were lying about the threaded quality of the stockline. So was Henry Wertner, the man who had succeeded to her father’s job.
If my da was here-
But he’s not. He’s dead.
She had told Roland she couldn’t believe Fran Lengyll would lie about her father’s death… but she could believe it now.
Gods help her, she could believe it now.
“What are ye doing in here?”
She gave a little scream, dropped the book, and whirled around. Cordelia stood there in one of her rusty black dresses. The top three buttons were undone, and Susan could see her aunt’s collarbones sticking out above the plain white cotton of her shift. It was only on seeing those protruding bones that Susan realized how much weight Aunt Cord had lost over the last three months or so. She could see the red imprint of the pillow on her aunt’s left cheek, like the mark of a slap. Her eyes glittered from dark, bruised-looking hollows of flesh.
“Aunt Cord! You startled me! You-”
“What are ye doing in here?” Aunt Cord repeated.
Susan bent and picked up the book. “I came to remember my father,” she said, and put the book back on the shelf. Who had torn those pages out? Lengyll? Rimer? She doubted it. She thought it more likely that the woman standing before her right now had done it. Perhaps for as little as a single piece of red gold. Nothing asked, nothing told, so all is well, she would have thought, popping the coin into her money-box, after first biting its edge to make sure it was true.
“Remember him? It’s ask his forgiveness, ye should do. For ye’ve forgotten his face, so ye have. Most grievous have ye forgotten it, Sue.”
Susan only looked at her.
“Have ye been with him today?” Cordelia asked in a brittle, laughing voice. Her hand went to the red pillow-mark on her cheek and began rubbing it. She had been getting bad by degrees, Susan realized, but had become ever so much worse since the gossip about Jonas and Coral Thorin had started. “Have ye been with sai Dearborn? Is yer crack still dewy from his spend? Here, let me see for myself!”
Her aunt glided forward-spectral in her black dress, her bodice open, her slippered feet peeping-and Susan pushed her back. In her fright and disgust, she pushed hard. Cordelia struck the wall beside the cobwebbed window.
“Ye should ask forgiveness yerself,” Susan said. “To speak to his daughter so in this place. In this place.” She let her eyes turn to the shelf of ledgers, then return to her aunt. The look of frightened calculation she saw on Cordelia Delgado’s face told her all she wanted or needed to know. She hadn’t been a party to her brother’s murder, that Susan could not believe, but she had known something of it. Yes, something.
“Ye faithless bitch,” Cordelia whispered.
“No,” Susan said, “I have been true.”
And so, she realized, she had been. A great weight seemed to slip off her shoulders at the thought. She walked to the door of the office and turned back to her aunt. “I’ve slept my last night here,” she said. “I’ll not listen to more such as this. Nor look at ye as ye are now. It hurts my heart and steals the love I’ve kept for ye since I was little, when ye did the best ye could to be my ma.”
Cordelia clapped her hands over her face, as if looking at Susan hurt her.
“Get out, then!” she screamed. “Go back to Seafront or wherever it is thee rolls with that boy! If I never see thy trollop’s face again, I’ll count my life good!”
Susan led Pylon from the stable. When she got him into the yard, she was sobbing almost too hard to mount up. Yet mount she did, and she couldn’t deny that there was relief in her heart as well as sorrow. When she turned onto the High Street and booted Pylon into a gallop, she didn’t look back.
9
In a dark hour of the following morning, Olive Thorin crept from the room where she now slept to the one she had shared for almost forty years with her husband. The floor was cold under her bare feet and she was shivering by the time she reached the bed… but the chilly floor wasn’t the only reason she was shivering. She slid in beside the gaunt, snoring man in the nightcap, and when he turned away from her (his knees and back crackling loudly as he did), she pressed against him and hugged him tightly. There was no passion in this, but only a need to share a bit of his warmth. His chest-narrow but almost as well-known to her as her own plump one-rose and fell under her hands, and she began to quiet a little. He stirred, and she thought for a moment he would wake and find her sharing his bed for the first time in gods knew how long.
Yes, wake, she thought, do. She didn’t dare wake him of her own-all her courage had been exhausted just getting here, creeping through the dark following one of the worst dreams she had ever had in her life-but if he woke, she would take it as a sign and tell him she had dreamed of a vast bird, a cruel golden-eyed roc that flew above the Barony on wings that dripped blood.
Wherever its shadow fell, there was blood, she would tell him, and its shadow fell everywhere. The Barony ran with it, from Hambry all the way out to Eyebolt. And I swelled big fire in the wind. I ran to tell you and you were dead in your study, sitting by the hearth with your eyes gouged out and a skull in your lap.
But instead of waking, in his sleep he took her hand, as he had used to, do before he had begun to look at the young girls-even the serving-wenches-when they passed, and Olive decided she would only lie here, and be still and let him hold her hand. Let it be like the old days for a bit, when everything had been right between them.
She slept a little herself. When she woke, dawn’s first gray light was creeping in through the windows. He had dropped her hand- had, in fact, scooted away from her entirely, to his edge of the bed. It wouldn’t do for him to wake and find her here, she decided, and the urgency of her nightmare was gone. She turned back the covers, swung her feet out, then looked at him once more. His nightcap had come askew. She put it right, her hands smoothing the cloth and the bony brow beneath. He stirred again. Olive waited until he had quieted, then got up. She slipped back to her own
