Wizard and Glass

disappeared, and concealment disappeared with it.

'I really can't believe it,' Alain said as they started back. It would be a long ride, including a wide swing around Hanging Rock to make sure they weren't seen. 'They must think we're blind.'

'It's stupid they think we are,' Cuthbert said, 'but I suppose it comes to the same.' Now that Eyebolt Canyon was falling behind them, he felt almost giddy with relief. Were they going in there a few days from now? Actually going in, riding to within mere yards of where that cursed puddle started? He couldn't believe it … and he made himself stop thinking about it before he could start believing it.

'More riders heading out to Hanging Rock,' Alain said, pointing back toward the woods beyond the canyon. 'Do you see them?'

They were small as ants from this distance, but Bert saw them very well. 'Changing the guard. The important thing is that they don't see us— you don't think they can, do you?'

'Over here? Not likely.'

Cuthbert didn't think so, either.

'They'll all be down come Reap, won't they?' Alain asked. 'It won't do us much good to only catch a few.'

'Yes—I'm pretty sure they all will.'

'Jonas and his pals?'

'Them, too.'

Ahead of them, the Bad Grass grew closer. The wind blew hard in their faces, making their eyes water, but Cuthbert didn't mind. The sound of the thinny was down to a faint drone behind him, and would soon be gone completely. Right now that was all he needed to make him happy.

'Do you think we'll get away with it, Bert?'

'Dunno,' Cuthbert said. Then he thought of the gunpowder trenches lying beneath the dry rolls of brush, and grinned. 'But I'll tell you one thing, Al: they'll know we were here.'

8

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—