1

Three weeks had passed since the welcoming dinner at Mayor's House and the incident at the Travellers' Rest. There had been no more trouble between Roland's ka-tet and Jonas's. In the night sky, Kissing Moon had waned and Peddler's Moon had made its first thin appearance. The days were bright and warm; even the oldtimers admitted it was one of the most beautiful summers in memory.

On a mid-morning as beautiful as any that summer, Susan Delgado galloped a two-year-old rosillo named Pylon north along the Drop. The wind dried the tears on her cheeks and yanked her unbound hair out behind her as she went. She urged Pylon to go faster yet, lightly thumping his sides with her spurless boots. Pylon turned it up a notch at once, ears flattening, tail flagging. Susan, dressed in jeans and the faded, oversized khaki shirt (one of her da's) that had caused all the trouble, leaned over the light practice saddle, holding to the horn with one hand and rubbing the other down the side of the horse's strong, silky neck.

"More!" she whispered. "More and faster! Go on, boy!"

Pylon let it out yet another notch. That he had at least one more in him she knew; that he had even one more beyond that she suspected.

They sped along the Drop's highest ridge, and she barely saw the magnificent slope of land below her, all green and gold, or the way it faded into the blue haze of the Clean Sea. On any other day the view and the cool, salt-smelling breeze would have uplifted her. Today she only wanted to hear the steady low thunder of Pylon's hoofs and feel the flex of his muscles beneath her; today she wanted to outrun her own thoughts.

And all because she had come downstairs this morning dressed for riding in one of her father's old shirts.

2

Aunt Cord had been at the stove, wrapped in her dressing gown and with her hair still netted. She dished herself up a bowl of oatmeal and brought it to the table. Susan had known things weren't good as soon as her aunt I timed toward her, bowl in hand; she could see the discontented twitch of Aunt Cord's lips, and the disapproving glance she shot at the orange Susan was peeling. Her aunt was still rankled by the silver and gold she had expected to have in hand by now, coins which would be withheld yet awhile due to the witch's prankish decree that Susan should remain a virgin until autumn.

But that wasn't the main thing, and Susan knew it. Quite simply put, the two of them had had enough of each other. The money was only one of Aunt Cord's disappointed expectations; she had counted on having the house at the edge of the Drop to herself this summer . . . except, perhaps, (or the occasional visit from Mr. Eldred Jonas, with whom Cordelia seemed quite taken. Instead, here they still were, one woman growing toward the end of her courses, thin, disapproving lips in a thin, disapproving face, tiny apple-breasts under her high-necked dresses with their choker collars (The Neck, she frequently told Susan, is the First Thing to Go), her hair losing its former chestnut shine and showing wire-threads of gray; the other young, intelligent, agile, and rounding toward the peak of her physical beauty. They grated against each other, each word seeming to produce a spark, and that was not surprising. The man who had loved them both enough to make them love each other was gone.

"Are ye going out on that horse?" Aunt Cord had said, putting her bowl down and sitting in a shaft of early sun. It was a bad location, one she never would have allowed herself to be caught in had Mr. Jonas been in attendance. The strong light made her face look like a carved mask. There was a cold-sore growing at one corner other mouth; she always got them when she was not sleeping well.

"Aye,"susan said.

"Ye should eat more'n that, then. 'Twon't keep ye til nine o' the clock, girl."

"It'll keep me fine," Susan had replied, eating the sections of orange faster. She could see where this was tending, could see the look of dislike and disapproval in her aunt's eyes, and wanted to get away from the table before trouble could begin.

"Why not let me get ye a dish of this?" Aunt Cord asked, and plopped her spoon into her oatmeal. To Susan it sounded like a horse's hoof stamping down in mud - or shit - and her stomach clenched. "It'll hold ye to lunch, if ye plan to ride so long. I suppose a fine young lady such as yerself can't be bothered with chores - "

"They're done." And you know they 're done, she did not add. Idid em while you were sitting before your glass, poking at that sore on your mouth.

Aunt Cord dropped a chunk of creamery butter into her muck - Susan had no idea how the woman stayed so thin, really she didn't - and watched it begin to melt. For a moment it seemed that breakfast might end on a reasonably civilized note, after all.

Then the shirt business had begun.

"Before ye go out, Susan, I want ye to take off that rag you're wearing and put on one of the new riding blouses Thorin sent ye week before last. It's the least ye can do to show yer - "

Anything her aunt might have said past that point would have been lost in anger even if Susan hadn't interrupted. She passed a hand down the sleeve of her shirt, loving its texture - it was almost velvety from so many washings. "This rag belonged to my father!"

"Aye, Pat's." Aunt Cord sniffed. "It's too big for ye, and worn out, and not proper, in any case. When you were young it was mayhap all right to wear a man's button-shirt, but now that ye have a woman's bustline ..."

The riding blouses were on hangers in the comer; they had come four days ago and Susan hadn't even deigned to take them up to her room. There were three of them, one red, one green, one blue, all silk, all undoubtedly worth a small fortune. She loathed their pretension, and the overblown, blushy-frilly look of them: full sleeves to flutter artistically in the wind, great floppy foolish collars . . . and, of course, the low-scooped fronts which were probably all Thorin would see if she appeared before him dressed in one. As she wouldn't, if she could possibly help it.

"My 'woman's bust-line,' as you call it, is of no interest to me and can't possibly be of any interest to anyone else when I'm out riding," Susan said.

"Perhaps, perhaps not. If one of the Barony's drovers should see you - even Rennie, he's out that way all the time, as ye well know - it wouldn't hurt for him to mention to Hart that he saw yer wearing one of the camisas that he so kindly gave to ye. Now would it? Why do ye have lo he such a stiffkins, girl? Why always so unwilling, so unfair?"

"What does it matter to ye, one way or t'other?" Susan had asked. "Ye have the money, don't ye? And ye'll have more yet. After he fucks me."

Aunt Cord, her face white and shocked and furious, had leaned across the table and slapped her. "How dare thee use that word in my house, ye malhablada? How dare ye?"

That was when her tears began to flow - at hearing her call it her house."it was my father's house! His and mine! Ye were all on yer own with no real place to go, except perhaps to the Quarters, and he took ye in! He took ye in, Aunt!"

The last two orange sections were still in her hand. She threw them into her aunt's face, then pushed herself back from the table so violently that her chair tottered, tipped, and spilled her to the floor. Her aunt's shadow fell over her. Susan crawled frantically out of it, her hair hanging, her slapped cheek throbbing, her eyes burning with tears, her throat swelled and hot. At last she found her feet.

"Ye ungrateful girl," her aunt said. Her voice was soft and so full of venom it was almost caressing. "After all I have done for thee, and all Hart Thorin has done for thee. Why, the very nag ye mean to ride this morning was Hart's gift of respect to - "

"PYLON WAS OURS!" she shrieked, almost maddened with fury at this deliberate blurring of the truth. "ALL OF THEM WERE! THE HORSES, THE LAND - THEY WERE OURS! "

"Lower thy voice," Aunt Cord said.

Susan took a deep breath and tried to find some control. She swept her hair back from her face, revealing the red print of Aunt Cord's hand on her cheek. Cordelia flinched a little at the sight of it.

"My father never would have allowed this," Susan said. "He never would have allowed me to go as Hart Thorin's gilly. Whatever he might have felt about Hart as the Mayor ... or as his patrono ... he never would have allowed this. And ye know it. Thee knows it."

Aunt Cord rolled her eyes, then twirled a finger around her ear as if Susan had gone mad. "Thee agreed to it yerself, Miss Oh So Young and Pretty. Aye, so ye did. And if yer girlish megrims now cause ye to want to cry off what's been done - "

"Aye," Susan agreed. "I agreed to the bargain, so I did. After ye'd dunned me about it day and night, after ye'd come to me in tears - "

"I never did!" Cordelia cried, stung.

"Have ye forgotten so quick. Aunt? Aye, I suppose. As by tonight ye'll have forgotten slapping me at breakfast. Well, I haven't forgotten. Thee cried, all right, cried and told me ye feared we might be turned off the land, since we had no more legal right to it, that we'd be on the road, thee wept and said - "

"Stop calling me that!" Aunt Cord shouted. Nothing on earth maddened her so much as having her own thees and thous turned back at her. "Thee has no more right to the old tongue than thee has to thy stupid sheep's complaints! Go on! Get out!"

But Susan went on. Her rage was at the flood and would not be turned aside.

"Thee wept and said we'd be turned out, turned west, that we'd never see my da's homestead or Hambry again . . . and then, when I was frightened enough, ye talked of the cunning little baby I'd have. The land that was ours to begin with given back again. The horses that were ours likewise given back. As a sign of the Mayor's honesty, I have a horse Imyself helped to foal. And what have I done to deserve these things that would have been mine in any case, but for the loss of a single paper? What have I done so that he should give ye money? What have I done save promise to fuck him while his wife of forty year sleeps down the hall?"

"Is it the money ye want, then?" Aunt Cord asked, smiling furiously. "Do ye and do ye and aye? Ye shall have it, then. Take it, keep it, lose it, feed it to the swine, I care not!"

She turned to her purse, which hung on a post by the stove. She began to fumble in it, but her motions quickly lost speed and conviction. There was an oval of mirror mounted to the left of the kitchen doorway, and in it Susan caught sight other aunt's face. What she saw there - a mixture of hatred, dismay, and greed - made her heart sink.

"Never mind, Aunt. I see thee's loath to give it up, and I wouldn't have it, anyway. It's whore's money."

Aunt Cord turned back to her, face shocked, her purse conveniently forgotten. " 'Tis not whoring, ye stupid get! Why, some of the greatest women in history have been gillys, and some of the greatest men have been born of gillys. 'Tis not whoring!"

Susan ripped the red silk blouse from where it hung and held it up. The shirt moulded itself to her breasts as if it had been longing all the while to touch them. "Then why does he send me these whore's clothes?"

"Susan!" Tears stood in Aunt Cord's eyes.

Susan flung the shirt at her as she had the orange slices. It landed on her shoes. "Pick it up and put it on yerself, if ye fancy. You spread yer legs for him, if ye fancy."

She turned and hurled herself out the door. Her aunt's half-hysterical shriek had followed her: "Don't thee go off thinking foolish thoughts, Susan! Foolish thoughts lead to foolish deeds, and it's too late for either! Thee's agreed!"

She knew that. And however fast she rode Pylon along the Drop, she could not outrace her knowing. She had agreed, and no matter how horrified Pat Delgado might have been at the fix she had gotten herself into, he would have seen one thing clear - she had made a promise, and promises must be kept. Hell awaited those who would not do so.

3

She eased the rosillo back while he still had plenty of wind. She looked behind her, saw that she had come nearly a mile, and brought him down further - to a canter, a trot, a fast walk. She took a deep breath and let it out. For the first time that morning she registered the day's bright beauty - gulls circling in the hazy air off to the west, high grasses all around her, and flowers in every shaded cranny: cornflowers and lupin and phlox and her favorites, the delicate blue silkflowers. From everywhere came the somnolent buzz of bees. The sound soothed her, and with the high surge of her emotions subsiding a little, she was able to admit something to herself... admit it, and then voice it aloud.

"Will Dearborn," she said, and shivered at the sound of his name on her lips, even though there was no one to hear it but Pylon and the bees. So she said it again, and when the words were out she abruptly turned her own wrist inward to her mouth and kissed it where the blood beat close to the surface. The action shocked her because she hadn't known she was going to do it, and shocked her more because the taste of her own skin and sweat aroused her immediately. She felt an urge to cool herself off as she had in her bed after meeting him. The way she felt, it would be short work.

Instead, she growled her father's favorite cuss - "Oh, bite it!" - and spat past her boot. Will Dearborn had been responsible for all too much upset in her life these last three weeks; Will Dearborn with his unsettling blue eyes, his dark tumble of hair, and his stiff-necked. judgmental attitude. Ican be discreet, madam. As for propriety? I'm amazed you even know the word.

Every time she thought of that, her blood sang with anger and shame. Mostly anger. How dare he presume to make judgments? He who had grown up possessing every luxury, no doubt with servants to tend his every whim and so much gold that he likely didn't even need it - he would be given the things he wanted free, as a way of currying favor. What would a boy like that - for that was all he was, really, just a boy -  know about the hard choices she had made? For that matter, how could such as Mr. Will Dearborn of Hemphill understand that she hadn't really made those choices at all? That she had been carried to them the way a mother cat carries a wayward kitten back to the nesting-box, by the scruff of the neck?

Still, he wouldn't leave her mind; she knew, even if Aunt Cord didn't, that there had been an unseen third present at their quarrel this morning.

She knew something else as well, something that would have upset her aunt to no end.

Will Dearborn hadn't forgotten her, either.

4

About a week after the welcoming dinner and Dearborn's disastrous, hurtful remark to her, the retarded slops-fella from the Travellers' Rest -  Sheemie, folks called him - had appeared at the house Susan and her aunt shared. In his hands he held a large bouquet, mostly made up of the wild-flowers that grew out on the Drop, but with a scattering of dusky wild roses, as well. They looked like pink punctuation marks. On the boy's face there had been a wide, sunny grin as he swung the gate open, not waiting for an invitation.

Susan had been sweeping the front walk at the time; Aunt Cord had been out back, in the garden. That was fortunate, but not very surprising;

these days the two of them got on best when they kept apart as much as they could.

Susan had watched Sheemie come up the walk, his grin beaming out from behind his upheld freight of flowers, with a mixture of fascination and horror.

"G'day, Susan Delgado, daughter of Pat," Sheemie said cheerfully. "I come to you on an errand and cry yer pardon at any troubleation I be, oh aye, for I am a problem for folks, and know it same as them. These be for you. Here."

He thrust them out, and she saw a small, folded envelope tucked amongst them.

"Susan?" Aunt Cord's voice, from around the side of the house . . . and getting closer. "Susan, did I hear the gate?"

"Yes, Aunt!" she called back. Curse the woman's sharp ears! Susan nimbly plucked the envelope from its place among the phlox and daisies. Into her dress pocket it went.

"They from my third-best friend," Sheemie said. "I got three different friends now. This many." He held up two fingers, frowned, added two more, and then grinned splendidly. "Arthur Heath my first-best friend, Dick Stockworth my second-best friend. My third-best friend - "

"Hush!" Susan said in a low, fierce voice that made Sheemie's smile fade. "Not a word about your three friends."

A funny little flush, almost like a pocket fever, raced across her skin - it seemed to run down her neck from her cheeks, then slip all the way to her feet. There had been a lot of talk in Hambry about Sheemie's new friends during the past week - talk about little else, it seemed. The stories she had heard were outlandish, but if they weren't true, why did the versions told by so many different witnesses sound so much alike?

Susan was still trying to get herself back under control when Aunt Cord swept around the comer. Sheemie fell back a step at the sight of her, puzzlement becoming outright dismay. Her aunt was allergic to beestings, and was presently swaddled from the top of her straw 'brera to the hem of her faded garden dress in gauzy stuff that made her look peculiar in strong light and downright eerie in shade. Adding a final touch to her costume, she carried a pair of dirt-streaked garden shears in one gloved hand.

She saw the bouquet and bore down on it, shears raised. When she reached her niece, she slid the scissors into a loop on her belt (almost reluctantly, it seemed to the niece herself) and parted the veil on her face. "Who sent ye those?"

"I don't know. Aunt," Susan said, much more calmly than she felt. "This is the young man from the inn - "

"Inn!" Aunt Cord snorted.

"He doesn't seem to know who sent him," Susan carried on. If only she could get him out of here! "He's, well, I suppose you'd say he's - "

"He's a fool, yes, I know that." Aunt Cord cast Susan a brief, irritated look, then bent her attention on Sheemie. Talking with her gloved hands upon her knees, shouting directly into his face, she asked: "WHO . . . SENT . . . THESE . . . FLOWERS . . . YOUNG... MAN? "

The wings of her face-veil, which had been pushed aside, now fell back into place. Sheemie took another step backward. He looked frightened.

"WAS IT . . . PERHAPS . . . SOMEONE FROM... SEAFRONT? . . . FROM . . . MAYOR . . . THORIN? . . . TELL ...ME... AND . . . I'LL . . . GIVE... YOU . . . A PENNY. "

Susan's heart sank, sure he would tell - he'd not have the wit to understand he'd be getting her into trouble. Will, too, likely.

But Sheemie only shook his head. "Don't 'member. I got a empty head, sai, so I do. Stanley says I a bugwit."

His grin shone out again, a splendid thing full of white, even teeth. Aunt Cord answered it with a grimace. "Oh, foo! Be gone, then. Straight back to town, too - don't be hanging around hoping for a goose-feather. For a boy who can't remember deserves not so much as a penny! And don't you come back here again, no matter who wants you to carry flowers for the young sai. Do you hear me?"

Sheemie had nodded energetically. Then: "Sai?"

Aunt Cord glowered at him. The vertical line on her forehead had been very prominent that day.

"Why you all wropped up in cobwebbies, sai?"

"Get out of here, ye impudent cull!" Aunt Cord cried. She had a good loud voice when she wanted to use it, and Sheemie jumped back from her in alarm. When she was sure he was headed back down the High Street toward town and had no intention of returning to their gate and hanging about in hopes of a tip, Aunt Cord had turned to Susan.

"Get those in some water before they wilt, Miss Oh So Young and Pretty, and don't go mooning about, wondering who yer secret admirer might be."

Then Aunt Cord had smiled. A real smile. What hurt Susan the most, confused her the most, was that her aunt was no cradle-story ogre, no witch like Rhea of the Coos. There was no monster here, only a maiden lady with some few social pretensions, a love of gold and silver, and a tear of being turned out, penniless, into the world.

"For folks such as us, Susie-pie," she said, speaking with a terrible heavy kindness, " 'tis best to stick to our housework and leave dreams to them as can afford them."

5

She had been sure the flowers were from Will, and she was right. His note was written in a hand which was clear and passing fair.

Dear Susan Delgado,

I spoke out of turn the other night, and cry your pardon. May I see you and speak to you? It must be private. This is a matter of importance. If you will see me, get a message to the boy who brings this. He is safe.

Will Dearborn

A matter of importance. Underlined. She felt a strong desire to know what was so important to him, and cautioned herself against doing anything foolish. Perhaps he was smitten with her ... and if so, whose fault was that? Who had talked to him, ridden his horse, showed him her legs in a flashy carnival dismount? Who had put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him?

Her cheeks and forehead burned at the thought of that, and another hot ring seemed to go slipping down her body. She wasn't sure she regretted the kiss, but it had been a mistake, regrets or no regrets. Seeing him again now would be a worse one.

Yet she wanted to see him, and knew in her deepest heart that she was ready to set her anger at him aside. But there was the promise she had made.

The wretched promise.

That night she lay sleepless, tossing about in her bed, first thinking it would be better, more dignified, just to keep her silence, then composing mental notes anyway - some haughty, some cold, some with a lace-edge of flirtation.

When she heard the midnight bell ring, passing the old day out and calling the new one in, she decided enough was enough. She'd thrown herself from her bed, gone to her door, opened it, and thrust her head out into the hall. When she heard Aunt Cord's flutelike snores, she had closed her door again, crossed to her little desk by the window, and lit her lamp. She took one of her sheets of parchment paper from the top drawer, tore it in half (in Hambry, the only crime greater than wasting paper was wasting threaded stockline), and then wrote quickly, sensing that the slightest hesitation might condemn her to more hours of indecision. With no salutation and no signature, her response took only a breath to write:

I may not see you. 'Twould not be proper.

She had folded it small, blew out her lamp, and returned to bed with the note safely tucked under her pillow. She was asleep in two minutes. The following day, when the marketing took her to town, she had gone by the Travellers' Rest, which, at eleven in the morning, had all the charm of something which has died badly at the side of the road.

The saloon's door-yard was a beaten dirt square bisected by a long hitching rail with a watering trough beneath. Sheemie was trundling a wheelbarrow along the rail, picking up last night's horse-droppings with a shovel. He was wearing a comical pink sombrero, and singing "Golden Slippers." Susan doubted if many of the Rest's patrons would wake up feeling as well as Sheemie obviously did this morning ... so who, when you came right down to it, was more soft-headed?

She looked around to make sure no one was paying heed to her, then went over to Sheemie and tapped him on the shoulder. He looked frightened at first, and Susan didn't blame him - according to the stories she'd been hearing, Jonas's friend Depape had almost killed the poor kid for spilling a drink on his boots.

Then Sheemie recognized her. "Hello, Susan Delgado from out there by the edge of town," he said companionably. "It's a good day I wish you, sai."

He bowed - an amusing imitation of the Inner Baronies bow favored by his three new friends. Smiling, she dropped him a bit of curtsey (wearing jeans, she had to pretend at the skirt-holding part, but women in Mejis got used to curtseying in pretend skirts).

"See my flowers, sai?" he asked, and pointed toward the unpainted side of the Rest. What she saw touched her deeply: a line of mixed blue and white silkflowers growing along the base of the building. They looked both brave and pathetic, flurrying there in the faint morning breeze with the bald, turd-littered yard before them and the splintery public house behind them.

"Rid you grow those, Sheemie?"

"Aye, so I did. And Mr. Arthur Heath of Gilead has promised me yellow ones."

"I've never seen yellow silkflowers."

"Noey-no, me neither, but Mr. Arthur Heath says they have them in Gilead." He looked at Susan solemnly, the shovel held in his hands as a soldier would hold a gun or spear at port arms. "Mr. Arthur Heath saved my life. I'd do anything for him."

"Would you, Sheemie?" she asked, touched.

"Also, he has a lookout! It's a bird's head! And when he talks to it, tendy-pretend, do I laugh? Aye, fit to split!"

She looked around again to make sure no one was watching (save for the carved totems across the street), then removed her note, folded small, from her jeans pocket.

"Would you give this to Mr. Dearborn for me? He's also your friend, is he not?"

"Will? Aye!" He took the note and put it carefully into his own pocket.

"And tell no one."

"Shhhhh!" he agreed, and put a finger to his lips. His eyes had been amusingly round beneath the ridiculous pink lady's straw he wore. "Like when I brought you the flowers. Hushaboo!"

"That's right, hushaboo. Fare ye well, Sheemie."

"And you, Susan Delgado."

He went back to his cleanup operations. Susan had stood watching him for a moment, feeling uneasy and out of sorts with herself. Now that the note was successfully passed, she felt an urge to ask Sheemie to give it back, to scratch out what she had written, and promise to meet him. If only to see his steady blue eyes again, looking into her face.

Then Jonas's other friend, the one with the cloak, came sauntering out of the mercantile. She was sure he didn't see her - his head was down and he was rolling a cigarette - but she had no intention of pressing her luck. Reynolds talked to Jonas, and Jonas talked - all too much! - to Aunt Cord. If Aunt Cord heard she had been passing the time of day with the boy who had brought her the flowers, there were apt to be questions. Ones she didn't want to answer.

6

All that's history now, Susan - water under the bridge. Best to get your thoughts out of the past.

She brought Pylon to a stop and looked down the length of the Drop at the horses that moved and grazed there. Quite a surprising number of them this morning.

It wasn't working. Her mind kept turning back to Will Dearborn.

What bad luck meeting him had been! If not for that chance encounter on her way back down from the Coos, she might well have made peace with her situation by now - she was a practical girl, after all, and a promise was a promise. She certainly never would have expected herself to get all goosy-gushy over losing her maidenhead, and the prospect of carrying and bearing a child actually excited her.

But Will Dearborn had changed things; had gotten into her head and now lodged there, a tenant who defied eviction. His remark to her as they danced stayed with her like a song you can't stop humming, even though you hate it. It had been cruel and stupidly self-righteous, that remark ... but was there not also a grain of truth in it? Rhea had been right about Hart Thorin, of that much Susan no longer had any doubt. She supposed that witches were right about men's lusts even when they were wrong about everything else. Not a happy thought, but likely a true one.

It was Will Be Damned to You Dearborn who had made it difficult for her to accept what needed accepting, who had goaded her into arguments in which she could hardly recognize her own shrill and desperate voice, who came to her in her dreams - dreams where he put his arms around her waist and kissed her, kissed her, kissed her.

She dismounted and walked downhill a little way with the reins looped in her fist. Pylon followed willingly enough, and when she stopped to look off into the blue haze to the southwest, he lowered his head and began to crop again.

She thought she needed to see Will Dearborn once more, if only to give her innate practicality a chance to reassert itself. She needed to see him at his right size, instead of the one her mind had created for him in her warm thoughts and warmer dreams. Once that was done, she could get on with her life and do what needed doing. Perhaps that was why she had taken this path - the same one she'd ridden yesterday, and the day before yesterday, and the day before that. He rode this part of the Drop; that much she had heard in the lower market.

She turned away from the Drop, suddenly knowing he would be there, as if her thought had called him - or her ka.

She saw only blue sky and low ridgeline hills that curved gently like the line of a woman's thigh and hip and waist as she lies on her side in bed. Susan felt a bitter disappointment fill her. She could almost taste it in her mouth, like wet tea leaves.

She started back to Pylon, meaning to return to the house and take care of the apology she reckoned she must make. The sooner she did it, the sooner it would be done. She reached for her left stirrup, which was twisted a little, and as she did, a rider came over the horizon, breaking against the sky at the place which looked to her like a woman's hip. He sat there, only a silhouette on horseback, but she knew who it was at once.

Run! she told herself in a sudden panic. Mount and gallop! Get out of here! Quickly! Before something terrible happens . . . before it really is ka, come like a wind to take you and all your plans over the sky and far away!

She didn't run. She stood with Pylon's reins in one hand, and murmured to him when the rosillo looked up and nickered a greeting to the big bay-colored gelding coming down the hill.

Then Will was there, first above her and looking down, then dismounted in an easy, liquid motion she didn't think she could have matched, for all her years of horsemanship. This time there was no kicked-out leg and planted heel, no hat swept over a comically solemn bow; this time the gaze he gave her was steady and serious and disquietingly adult.

They looked at each other in the Drop's big silence, Roland of Gilead and Susan of Mejis, and in her heart she felt a wind begin to blow. She feared it and welcomed it in equal measure.

7

"Goodmorn, Susan," he said. "I'm glad to see you again."

She said nothing, waiting and watching. Could he hear her heart beating as clearly as she could? Of course not; that was so much romantic twaddle. Yet it still seemed to her that everything within a fifty-yard radius should be able to hear that thumping.

Will took a step forward. She took a step back, looking at him mistrustfully. He lowered his head for a moment, then looked up again, his lips set.

"I cry your pardon," he said.

"Do you?" Her voice was cool.

"What I said that night was unwarranted."

At that she felt a spark of real anger. "I care not that it was unwarranted; I care that it was unfair. That it hurt me."

A tear overbrimmed her left eye and slipped down her cheek. She wasn't all cried out after all, it seemed.

She thought what she said would perhaps shame him, but although faint color came into his cheeks, his eyes remained firmly on hers.

"I fell in love with you," he said. "That's why I said it. It happened even before you kissed me, I think."

She laughed at that . . . but the simplicity with which he had spoken made her laughter sound false in her own ears. Tinny. "Mr. Dearborn - "

"Will. Please."

"Mr. Dearborn," she said, patiently as a teacher working with a dull student, "the idea is ridiculous. On the basis of one single meeting? One single kiss? A sister's kiss?" Now she was the one who was blushing, but she hurried on. "Such things happen in stories, but in real life? I think not."

But his eyes never left hers, and in them she saw some of Roland's truth: the deep romance of his nature, buried like a fabulous streak of alien metal in the granite of his practicality. He accepted love as a fact rather than a flower, and it rendered her genial contempt powerless over both of them.

"I cry your pardon," he repeated. There was a kind of brute stubbornness in him. It exasperated her, amused her, and appalled her, all at the same time. "I don't ask you to return my love, that's not why I spoke. You told me your affairs were complicated . .." Now his eyes did leave hers, and he looked off toward the Drop. He even laughed a little. "I called him a bit of a fool, didn't I? To your face. So who's the fool, after all?"

She smiled; couldn't help it. "Ye also said ye'd heard he was fond of strong drink and berry-girls."

Roland hit his forehead with the heel of his hand. If his friend Arthur Heath had done that, she would have taken it as a deliberate, comic gesture. Not with Will. She had an idea he wasn't much for comedy.

Silence between them again, this time not so uncomfortable. The two horses, Rusher and Pylon, cropping contentedly, side by side. If we were horses, all this would be much easier, she thought, and almost giggled.

"Mr. Dearborn, ye understand that I have agreed to an arrangement?"

"Aye." He smiled when she raised her eyebrows in surprise. "It's not mockery but the dialect. It just. . . seeps in."

"Who told ye of my business?"

"The Mayor's sister."

"Coral." She wrinkled her nose and decided she wasn't surprised. And she supposed there were others who could have explained her situation even more crudely. Eldred Jonas, for one. Rhea of the Coos, for another. Best to leave it. "So if ye understand, and if ye don't ask me to return your . . . whatever it is ye think ye feel . . . why are we talking? Why do ye seek me out? I think it makes ye passing uncomfortable - "

"Yes," he said, and then, as if stating a simple fact: "It makes me uncomfortable, all right. I can barely look at you and keep my head."

"Then mayhap it'd be best not to look, not to speak, not to think!" Her voice was both sharp and a little shaky. How could he have the courage to say such things, to just state them straight out and starey-eyed like that? "Why did ye send me the bouquet and that note? Are ye not aware of the trouble ye could've gotten me into? If y'knew my aunt. . . ! She's already spoken to me about ye, and if she knew about the note ... or saw us together out here ..."

She looked around, verifying that they were still unobserved. They were, at least as best she could tell. He reached out, touched her shoulder. She looked at him, and he pulled his fingers back as if he had put them on something hot.

"I said what I did so you'd understand," he said. "That's all. I feel how I feel, and you're not responsible for that."

But I am, she thought. I kissed you. I think I'm more than a little responsible for how we both feel. Will.

"What I said while we were dancing I regret with all my heart. Won't you give me your pardon?"

"Aye," she said, and if he had taken her in his arms at that moment, she would have let him, and damn the consequences. But he only took off his hat and made her a charming little bow, and the 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 - "

"Not one freak out of every five livebirths? One out of five born with - " How had Renfrew put it? "With extra legs or its guts on the outside?"

Her shocked look was enough answer. "Who's been telling ye such?"

"Renfrew. He also told me that there was about five hundred and seventy head of threaded stock here in Mejis."

"That's just . . ." She gave a bewildered little laugh. "Just crazy! If my da was here - "

"But he's not," Roland said, his tone as dry as a snapping twig. "He's dead."

For a moment she seemed not to register the change in that tone. Then, as if an eclipse had begun to happen somewhere inside her head, her entire aspect darkened. "My da had an accident. Do you understand that, Will Dearborn? An accident. It was terribly sad, but the sort of thing that happens, sometimes. A horse rolled on him. Ocean Foam. Fran says Foam saw a snake in the grass."

"Fran Lengyll?"

"Aye." Her skin was pale, except for two wild roses - pink, like those in the bouquet he'd sent her by way of Sheemie - glowing high up on her cheekbones. "Fran rode many miles with my father. They weren't great friends - they were of different classes, for one thing - but they rode together. I've a cap put away somewhere that Fran's first wife made for my christening. They rode the trail together. 1 can't believe Fran Lengyll would lie about how my da died, let alone that he had ... anything to do with it."

Yet she looked doubtfully down at the running horses. So many. Too many. Her da would have seen. And her da would have wondered what she was wondering now: whose brands were on the extras?

"It so happens Fran Lengyll and my friend Stockworth had a discussion about horses," Will said. His voice sounded almost casual, but there was nothing casual on his face. "Over glasses of spring water, after beer had been offered and refused. They spoke of them much as I did with Renfrew at Mayor Thorin's welcoming dinner. When Richard asked sai Lengyll to estimate riding horses, he said perhaps four hundred."

"Insane."

"It would seem so," Will agreed.

"Do they not kennit the horses are out here where ye can see em?"

"They know we've barely gotten started," he said, "and that we've begun with the fisherfolk. We'll be a month yet, I'm sure they think, before we start to concern ourselves with the horseflesh hereabouts. And in the meantime, they have an attitude about us of... how shall I put it? Well, never mind how I'd put it. I'm not very good with words, but my friend Arthur calls it 'genial contempt.' They leave the horses out in front of our eyes, I think, because they don't believe we'll know what we're looking at. Or because they think we won't believe what we're seeing. I'm very glad I found you out here."

Just so I could give you a more accurate horse-count? Is that the only reason?

"But ye will get around to counting the horses. Eventually. I mean, that must surely be one of the Affiliation's main needs."

He gave her an odd look, as if she had missed something that should have been obvious. It made her feel self-conscious.

"What? What is it?"

"Perhaps they expect the extra horses to be gone by the time we get around to this side of the Barony's business."

"Gone where?"

"I don't know. But I don't like this. Susan, you will keep this just between the two of us, won't you?"

She nodded. She'd be insane totell anyone she had been with willdearborn, unchaperoned except by Rusher and Pylon, out on the Drop.

"It may all turn out to be nothing, but if it doesn't, knowing could be dangerous."

Which led back to her da again. Lengyll had told her and Aunt Cord that Pat had been thrown, and that Ocean Foam had then rolled upon him. Neither of them had had any reason to doubt the man's story. But Fran Lengyll had also told Will's friend that there were only four hundred head of riding stock in Mejis, and that was a bald lie.

Will turned to his horse, and she was glad.

Part of her wanted him to stay - to stand close to her while the clouds sent their long shadows flying across the grassland - but they had been together out here too long already. There was no reason to think anyone would come along and see them, but instead of comforting her, that idea for some reason made her more nervous than ever.

He straightened the stirrup hanging beside the scabbarded shaft of his lance (Rusher whickered way back in his throat, as if to say About time we got going), then turned to her again. She felt actually faint as his gaze fell upon her, and now the idea of ka was almost too strong to deny. She tried to tell herself it was just the dim - that feeling of having lived a thing before - but it wasn't the dim; it was a sense of finding a road one had been searching for all along.

"There's something else I want to say. I don't like returning to where we started, but I must."

"No," she said faintly. "That's closed, surely."

"I told you that I loved you, and that I was jealous," he said, and for the first time his voice had come unanchored a little, wavering in his throat. She was alarmed to see that there were tears standing in his eyes. "There was more. Something more."

"Will, I don't want to - " She turned blindly for her horse. He took her shoulder and turned her back. It wasn't a harsh touch, but there was an inexorability to it that was dreadful. She looked helplessly up into his face, saw that he was young and far from home, and suddenly understood she could not stand against him for long. She wanted him so badly that she ached with it. She would have given a year of her life just to be able to put her palms on his cheeks and feel his skin.

"You miss your father, Susan?"

"Aye," she whispered. "With all my heart I do."

"I miss my mother the same way." He held her by both shoulders now. One eye overbrimmed; one tear drew a silver line down his cheek.

"Is she dead?"

"No, but something happened. About her. To her. Shit! How can I talk about it when I don't even know how to think about it? In a way, she did die. For me."

"Will, that's terrible."

He nodded. "The last time I saw her, she looked at me in a way that will haunt me to my grave. Shame and love and hope, all of them bound up together. Shame at what I'd seen and knew about her, hope, maybe, that I'd understand and forgive . . ." He took a deep breath. "The night of the party, toward the end of the meal, Rimer said something funny. You all laughed - "

"If I did, it was only because it would have looked strange if I was the only one who didn't," Susan said. "I don't like him. I think he's a schemer and a conniver."

"You all laughed, and I happened to look down toward the end of the table. Toward Olive Thorin. And for a moment - only a moment - I thought she was my mother. The expression was the same, you see. The same one I saw on the morning when I opened the wrong door at the wrong time and came upon my mother and her - "

"Stop it!" she cried, pulling back from his hands. Inside her, everything was suddenly in motion, all the mooring-lines and buckles and clamps she'd been using to hold herself together seeming to melt at once. "Stop it, just stop it, I can't listen to you talk about her!"

She groped out for Pylon, but now the whole world was wet prisms. She began to sob. She felt his hands on her shoulders, turning her again, and she did not resist them.

"I'm so ashamed," she said. ''I'm so ashamed and so frightened and I'm sorry. I've forgotten my father's face and . . . and ..."

And I'll never be able to find it again, she wanted to say, but she didn't have to say anything. He stopped her mouth with his kisses. At first she just let herself be kissed . . . and then she was kissing him back, kissing him almost furiously. She wiped the wetness from beneath his eyes with soft little sweeps of her thumbs, then slipped her palms up his cheeks as she had longed to do. The feeling was exquisite; even the soft rasp of the stubble close to the skin was exquisite. She slid her arms around his neck, her open mouth on his, holding him and kissing him as hard as she could, kissing him there between the horses, who simply looked at each other and then went back to cropping grass.

9

They were the best kisses of his whole life, and never forgotten: the yielding pliancy of her lips and the strong shape of her teeth under them, urgent and not shy in the least; the fragrance of her breath, the sweet line of her body pressed against his. He slipped a hand up to her left breast, squeezed it gently, and felt her heart speeding under it. His other hand went to her hair and combed along the side of it, silk at her temple. He never forgot its texture.

Then she was standing away from him, her face flaming with blush and passion, one hand going to her lips, which he had kissed until they were swollen. A little trickle of blood ran from the comer of the lower one. Her eyes, wide on his. Her bosom rising and falling as if she had just run a race. And between them a current that was like nothing he had ever felt in his life. It ran like a river and shook like a fever.

"No more," she said in a trembling voice. "No more, please. If you really do love me, don't let me dishonor myself. I've made a promise. Anything might come later, after that promise was fulfilled, I suppose .. . if you still wanted me . . ."

"I would wait forever," he said calmly, "and do anything for you but stand away and watch you go with another man."

"Then if you love me, go away from me. Please, Will!"

"Another kiss."

She stepped forward at once, raising her face trustingly up to his, and he understood he could do whatever he wanted with her. She was, at least for the moment, no longer her own mistress; she might consequently be his. He could do to her what Marten had done to his own mother, if that was his fancy.

The thought broke his passion apart, turned it to coals that fell in a bright shower, winking out one by one in a dark bewilderment. His father's acceptance

(Ihave known for two years)

was in many ways the worst part of what had happened to him this year; how could he fall in love with this girl - any girl - in a world where such evils of the heart seemed necessary, and might even be repeated?

Yet he did love her.

Instead of the passionate kiss he wanted, he placed his lips lightly on the corner of her mouth where the little rill of blood flowed. He kissed, tasting salt like the taste of his own tears. He closed his eyes and shivered when her hand stroked the hair at the nape of his neck.

"I'd not hurt Olive Thorin for the world," she whispered in his ear. "No more than I'd hurt thee, Will. I didn't understand, and now 'tis too late to be put right. But thank you for not... not taking what you could. And I'll remember you always. How it was to be kissed by you. It's the best thing that ever happened to me, I think. Like heaven and earth all wrapped up together, aye."

"I'll remember, too." He watched her swing up into the saddle, and remembered how her bare legs had flashed in the dark on the night he had met her. And suddenly he couldn't let her go. He reached forward, touched her boot.

"Susan - "

"No," she said. "Please."

He stood back. Somehow.

"This is our secret," she said. "Yes?"

"Aye."

She smiled at that ... but it was a sad smile. "Stay away from me from now on, Will. Please. And I'll stay away from you."

He thought about it. "If we can."

"We must, Will. We must."

She rode away fast. Roland stood beside Rusher's stirrup, watching her go. And when she was out of sight over the horizon, still he watched.

10

Sheriff Avery, Deputy Dave, and Deputy George Riggins were sitting on the porch in front of the Sheriff's office and jail when Mr. Stockworth and Mr. Heath (the latter with that idiotic bird's skull still mounted on the horn of his saddle) went past at a steady walk. The bell o' noon had rung fifteen minutes before, and Sheriff Avery reckoned they were on their way to lunch, perhaps at The Millbank, or perhaps at the Rest, which put on a fair noon meal. Popkins and such. Avery liked something a little more filling; half a chicken or a haunch of beef suited him just fine.

Mr. Heath gave them a wave and a grin. "Good day, gents! Long life! Gentle breezes! Happy siestas!"

They waved and smiled back. When they were out of sight, Dave said: "They spent all mornin down there on the piers, countin nets. Nets! Do you believe it?"

"Yessir," Sheriff Avery said, lifting one massive cheek a bit out of his rocker and letting off a noisy pre-luncheon fart. "Yessir, I do. Aye."

George said: "If not for them facing off Jonas's boys the way they done, I'd think they was a pack of fools."

"Nor would they likely mind," Avery said. He looked at Dave, who was twirling his monocle on the end of its ribbon and looking off in the direction the boys had taken. There were folks in town who had begun calling the Affiliation brats Little Coffin Hunters. Avery wasn't sure what to make of that. He'd soothed it down between them and Thorin's hard boys, and had gotten both a commendation and a piece of gold from Rimer for his efforts, but still. . . what to make of them?

"The day they came in," he said to Dave, "ye thought they were soft. How do ye say now?"

"Now?" Dave twirled his monocle a final time, then popped it in his eye and stared at the Sheriff through it. "Now I think they might have been a little harder than I thought, after all."

Yes indeed, Avery thought. But hard don't mean smart, thank the gods. Aye, thank the gods for that.

"I'm hungry as a bull, so I am," he said, getting up. He bent, put his hands on his knees, and ripped off another loud fart. Dave and George looked at each other. George fanned a hand in front of his face. Sheriff Herkimer Avery, Barony Sheriff, straightened up, looking both relieved and anticipatory. "More room out than there is in," he said. "Come on, boys. Let's go downstreet and tuck into a little."

11

Not even sunset could do much to improve the view from the porch of the Bar K bunkhouse. The building - except for the cook-shack and the stable, the only one still standing on what had been the home acre - was L-shaped, and the porch was built on the inside of the short arm. Left for them on it had been just the right number of seats: two splintery rockers and a wooden crate to which an unstable board back had been nailed.

On this evening. Alain sat in one of the rockers and Cuthbert sat on the box-seat, which he seemed to fancy. On the rail, peering across the beaten dirt of the dooryard and toward the burned-out hulk of the Garber home place, was the lookout.

Alain was bone-tired, and although both of them had bathed in the stream near the west end of the home acre, he thought he still smelled fish and seaweed on himself. They had spent the day counting nets. He was not averse to hard work, even when it was monotonous, but he didn't like pointless work. Which this was. Hambry came in two parts: the fishers and the horse-breeders. There was nothing for them among the fishers, and after three weeks all three of them knew it. Their answers were out on the Drop, at which they had so far done no more than look. At Roland's order.

The wind gusted, and for a moment they could hear the low, grumbling, squealing sound of the thinny.

"I hate that sound," Alain said.

Cuthbert, unusually silent and introspective tonight, nodded and said only "Aye." They were all saying that now, not to mention So you do and So I am and So it is. Alain suspected the three of them would have Hambry on their tongues long after they had wiped its dust from their boots.

From behind them, inside the bunkhouse door, came a less unpleasant sound - the cooing of pigeons. And then, from around the side of the bunkhouse, a third, for which he and Cuthbert had unconsciously been listening as they sat watching the sun go down: horse's hoofs. Rusher's.

Roland came around the comer, riding easy, and as he did, something happened that struck Alain as oddly portentous ... a kind of omen. There was a flurry-flutter of wings, a dark shape in the air, and suddenly a bird was roosting on Roland's shoulder.

He didn't jump; barely looked around. He rode up to the hitching rail and sat there, holding out his hand. "Hile," he said softly, and the pigeon stepped into his palm. Bound to one of its legs was a capsule. Roland removed it, opened it, and took out a tiny strip of paper, which had been rolled tight. In his other hand he held the pigeon out.

"Hile," Alain said, holding out his own hand. The pigeon flew to it. As Roland dismounted, Alain took the pigeon into the bunkhouse, where the cages had been placed beneath an open window. He ungated the center one and held out his hand. The pigeon which had just arrived hopped in; the pigeon in the cage hopped out and into his palm. Alain shut the cage door, latched it, crossed the room, and turned up the pillow of Bert's bunk. Beneath it was a linen envelope containing a number of blank paper strips and a tiny storage-pen. He took one of the strips and the pen, which held its own small reservoir of ink and did not have to be dipped. He went back out on the porch. Roland and Cuthbert were studying the unrolled strip of paper the pigeon had delivered from Gilead. On it was a line of tiny geometric shapes:

"What does it say?" Alain asked. The code was simple enough, but he could not get it by heart or read it on sight, as Roland and Bert had been able to, almost immediately. Alain's talents - his ability to track, his easy access to the touch - lay in other directions.

" 'Farson moves east,' " Cuthbert read. " 'Forces split, one big, one small. Do you see anything unusual.' " He looked at Roland, almost offended. "Anything unusual, what does that mean?"

Roland shook his head. He didn't know. He doubted if the men who had sent the message - of whom his own father was almost surely one -  did, either.

Alain handed Cuthbert the strip and the pen. With one finger Bert stroked the head of the softly cooing pigeon. It ruffled its wings as if already anxious to be off to the west.

"What shall I write?" Cuthbert asked. "The same?"

Roland nodded.

"But we have seen things that are unusual!" Alain said. "And we know things are wrong here! The horses ... and at that small ranch way south ... I can't remember the name . . ."

Cuthbert could. "The Rocking H."

"Aye, the Rocking H. There are oxen there. Oxen! My gods, I've never seen them, except for pictures in a book!"

Roland looked alarmed. "Does anyone know you saw?"

Alain shrugged impatiently. "I don't think so. There were drovers about - three, maybe four - "

"Four, aye," Cuthbert said quietly.

" - but they paid no attention to us. Even when we see things, they think we don't."

"And that's the way it must stay." Roland's eyes swept them, but there was a kind of absence in his face, as if his thoughts were far away. He turned to look toward the sunset, and Alain saw something on the collar of his shirt. He plucked it, a move made so quickly and nimbly that not even Roland felt it. Bert couldn't have done that, Alain thought with some pride.

"Aye, but - "

"Same message," Roland said. He sat down on the top step and looked off toward the evening redness in the west. "Patience, Mr. Richard Stock-worth and Mr. Arthur Heath. We know certain things and we believe certain other things. But would John Farson come all this way simply to resupply horses? I don't think so. I'm not sure, horses are valuable, aye, so they are . . . but I'm not sure. So we wait."

"All right, all right, same message." Cuthbert smoothed the scrap of paper flat on the porch rail, then made a small series of symbols on it. Alain could read this message; he had seen the same sequence several times since they had come to Hambry. "Message received. We are fine. Nothing to report at this time."

The message was put in the capsule and attached to the pigeon's leg. Alain went down the steps, stood beside Rusher (still waiting patiently to be unsaddled), and held the bird up toward the fading sunset. "Hile!"

It was up and gone in a flutter of wings. For a moment only they saw it, a dark shape against the deepening sky.

Roland sat looking after. The dreamy expression was still on his face. Alain found himself wondering if Roland had made the right decision this evening. He had never in his life had such a thought. Nor expected to have one.

"Roland?"

"Hmmm?" Like a man half-awakened from some deep sleep.

"I'll unsaddle him, if you want." He nodded at Rusher. "And rub him down."

No answer for a long time. Alain was about to ask again when Roland said, "No. I'll do it. In a minute or two." And went back to looking at the sunset.

Alain climbed the porch steps and sat down in his rocker. Bert had resumed his place on the box-seat. They were behind Roland now, and Cuthbert looked at Alain with his eyebrows raised. He pointed to Roland and then looked at Alain again.

Alain passed over what he had plucked fromroland's collar. although it was almost too fine to be seen in this light, Cuthbert's eyes were gunslinger's eyes, and he took it easily, with no fumbling.

It was a long strand of hair, the color of spun gold. He could see from Bert's, face that Bert knew whose head it had come from. Since arriving in Hambry, they'd met only one girl with long blonde hair. The two boys' eyes met. In Bert's Alain saw dismay and laughter in equal measure.

Cuthbert Allgood raised his forefinger to his temple and mimed pulling the trigger.

Alain nodded.

Sitting on the steps with his back to them, Roland looked toward the dying sunset with dreaming eyes.

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