She stepped forward, and before she could let herself think about what she was doing, she put her hands on his shoulders, stood on her toes, and kissed him on the mouth. The kiss was brief but not sisterly.
“Aye, very well met. Will.” But when he moved toward her (as thoughtlessly as a flower turning its face to follow the sun), wishing to repeat the experience, she pushed him back a step, gently but firmly.
“Nay, that was only a thank-you, and one thank-you should be enough for a gentleman. Go yer course in peace, Will.”
He took up the reins like a man in a dream, looked at them for a moment as if he didn’t know what in the world they were, and then looked hack at her. She could
see him working to clear his mind and emotions of the impact her kiss had made.
She liked him for it. And she was very glad she had done it.
“And you yours,” he said, swinging into the saddle. “I look forward to meeting you for the first time.”
He smiled at her, and she saw both longing and wishes in that smile. Then he gigged the horse, turned him, and started back the way they’d come—to have another look at the oil patch, mayhap. She stood where she was, by Mrs. Beech’s mailbox, willing him to turn around and wave so she could see his face once more.
She felt sure he would . . . but he didn’t. Then, just as she was about to turn away and start down the hill to town, he did turn, and his hand lifted, fluttering for a moment in the dark like a moth.
Susan lifted her own in return and then went her way, feeling happy and unhappy at the same time. Yet—and this was perhaps the most important thing—she no longer felt soiled. When she had touched the boy’s lips, Rhea’s touch seemed to have left her skin. A small magic, perhaps, but she welcomed it.
She walked on, smiling a little and looking up at the stars more frequently than was her habit when out after dark.
CHAPTER IV
LONG AFTER MOONSET
1
He rode restlessly for nearly two hours back and forth along what she called the Drop, never pushing Rusher above a trot, although what he wanted to do was gallop the big gelding under the stars until his own blood began to cool a little.
It’ll cool plenty if you draw attention to yourself, he thought, and likely you won’t even have to cool it yourself. Fools are the only folk on the earth who can absolutely count on getting what they deserve. That old saying made him think of the scarred and bowlegged man who had been his life’s greatest teacher, and he smiled.
At last he turned his horse down the slope to the trickle of brook which ran there, and followed it a mile and a half upstream (past several gathers of horse; they looked at Rusher with a kind of sleepy, wall-eyed surprise) to a grove of willows.
From the hollow within, a horse whickered softly. Rusher whickered in return, stamping one hoof and nodding his head up and down.
His rider ducked his own head as he passed through the willow fronds, and suddenly there was a narrow and inhuman white face hanging before him, its upper half all but swallowed by black, pupilless eyes.
He dipped for his guns—the third time tonight he’d done that, and for the third time there was nothing there. Not that it mattered; already he recognized what was hanging before him on a string: that idiotic rook’s skull.
The young man who was currently calling himself Arthur Heath had taken it off his saddle (it amused him to call the skull so perched their lookout, “ugly as an old gammer, but perfect cheap to feed”) and hung it here as a prank greeting. Him and his jokes! Rusher’s master batted it aside hard enough to break the string and send the skull flying into the dark.
“Fie, Roland,” said a voice from the shadows. It was reproachful, but there was laughter bubbling just beneath … as there always was. Cuthbert was his oldest friend—the marks of their first teeth had been embedded on many of the same toys—but Roland had in some ways never understood him. Nor was it just his laughter; on the long-ago day when Hax, the palace cook, was to be hung for a traitor on Gallows Hill, Cuthbert had been in an agony of terror and remorse. He’d told Roland he couldn’t stay, couldn’t watch . . . but in the end he had done both.
Because neither the stupid jokes nor the easy surface emotions were the truth of Cuthbert Allgood.
As Roland entered the hollow at the center of the grove, a dark shape stepped out from behind the tree where it had been keeping. Halfway across the clearing, it resolved itself into a tall, narrow-hipped boy who was barefooted below his jeans and bare-chested above them. In one hand he held an enormous antique
revolver—a kind which was sometimes called a beer-barrel because of the cylinder’s size.
“Fie,” Cuthbert repeated, as if he liked the sound of this word, not archaic only in forgotten backwaters like Mejis. “That’s a fine way to treat the guard o’ the watch, smacking the poor thin-faced fellow halfway to the nearest mountain-range!”
“If I’d been wearing a gun, I likely would have blown it to smithereens and woken half the countryside.”
“I knew you wouldn’t be going about strapped,” Cuthbert answered mildly.
“You’re remarkably ill-looking, Roland son of Steven, but nobody’s fool even as you approach the ancient age of fifteen.”
“I thought we agreed we’d use the names we’re travelling under. Even among ourselves.”
Cuthbert stuck out his leg, bare heel planted in the turf, and bowed with his arms outstretched and his hands strenuously bent at the wrist—an inspired imitation of the sort of man for whom court has become career. He also looked remarkably like a heron standing in a marsh, and Roland snorted laughter in spite of himself. Then he touched the inside of his left wrist to his forehead, to see if he had a fever. He felt feverish enough inside his head, gods knew, but the skin above his eyes felt cool.
“I cry your pardon, gunslinger,” Cuthbert said, his eyes and hands still turned humbly down.
The smile on Roland’s face died. “And don’t call me that again, Cuthbert. Please.
Not here, not anywhere. Not if you value me.”
Cuthbert dropped his pose at once and came quickly to where Roland sat his horse. He looked honestly humbled.
“Roland—Will—I’m sorry.”
Roland clapped him on the shoulder. “No harm done. Just remember from here on out. Mejis may be at the end of the world . . . but it still is the world. Where’s Alain?”
“Dick, do you mean? Where do you think?” Cuthbert pointed across the clearing, to where a dark hulk was either snoring or slowly choking to death.
“That one,” Cuthbert said, “would sleep through an earthquake.”
“But you heard me coming and woke.”
“Yes,” Cuthbert said. His eyes were on Roland’s face, searching it with an
intensity that made Roland feel a little uneasy. “Did something happen to you?
You look different.”
“Do I?”
“Yes. Excited. Aired out, somehow.”
If he was going to tell Cuthbert about Susan, now was the time. He decided without really thinking about it (most of his decisions, certainly the best of them, were made in this same way) not to tell. If he met her at Mayor’s House, it would be the first time as far as Cuthbert and Alain knew, as well. What harm in that?
“I’ve been properly aired, all right,” he said, dismounting and bending to uncinch the girths of his saddle. “I’ve seen some interesting things, too.”
“Ah? Speak, companion of my bosom’s dearest tenant.”
“I’ll wait until tomorrow, I think, when yon hibernating bear is finally awake. Then I only have to tell once. Besides, I’m tired. I’ll share you one thing, though: there are too many horses in these parts, even for a Barony renowned for its horseflesh.
Too many by far.”
Before Cuthbert could ask any questions, Roland pulled the saddle from Rusher’s back and set it down beside three small wicker cages which had been bound together with rawhide, making them into a carrier which could be secured to a horse’s back. Inside, three pigeons with white rings around their necks cooed sleepily. One took his head out from beneath his wing, had a peek at Roland, and then tucked himself away again.
“These fellows all right?” Roland asked.
“Fine. Pecking and shitting happily in their straw. As far as they’re concerned, they’re on vacation. What did you mean about—”
“Tomorrow,” Roland said, and Cuthbert, seeing that there would be no more, only nodded and went to find his lean and bony lookout.