Alain heard the squeak of a hinge, but Jonas’s gun was at his temple before he could even begin to turn.
“Sonny, unless you’re a barber, I think you’d better put that pigsticker down. You don’t get a second warning.”
“No,” Alain said.
Jonas, who had expected nothing but compliance and had been prepared for nothing else, was thunderstruck. “What? ”
“You heard me,” Alain said. “I said no.”
5
After making their manners and excusing themselves from Seafront, Roland had
left his friends to their own amusements—they would finish up at the Travellers’
Rest, he supposed, but wouldn’t stay long or get into much trouble when they had no money for cards and could drink nothing more exciting than cold tea. He had ridden into town another way, tethered his mount at a public post in the lower of the two town squares (Rusher had offered a single puzzled nicker at this treatment, but no more), and had since been tramping the empty, sleeping streets with his hat yanked low over his eyes and his hands clasped into an aching knot at the small of his back.
His mind was full of questions—things were wrong here, very wrong. At first he’d thought that was just his imagination, the childish part of him finding make-believe troubles and storybook intrigue because he had been removed from the heart of the real action. But after his talk with “Rennie” Renfrew, he knew better.
There were questions, outright mysteries, and the most hellish thing of all was that he couldn’t concentrate on them, let alone go any distance toward making sense of them. Every time he tried, Susan Delgado’s face intruded … her face, or the sweep of her hair, or even the pretty, fearless way her silk-slippered feet had followed his boots in the dance, never lagging or hesitating. Again and again he heard the last thing he had said to her, speaking in the stilted, priggish voice of a boy preacher. He would have given almost anything to take back both the tone and the words themselves. She’d be on Thorin’s pillow come Reap-tide, and kindle him a child before the first snow flew, perhaps a male heir, and what of it? Rich men, famous men, and well-blooded men had taken gilly-girls since the beginning of time; Arthur Eld had had better than forty himself, according to the tales. So, really, what was it to him?
I think I’ve gone and fallen in love with her. That’s what it is to me.
A dismaying idea, but not a dismissible one; he knew the landscape of his own heart too well. He loved her, very likely it was so, but part of him also hated her, and held to the shocking thought he’d had at dinner: that he could have shot Susan Delgado through the heart if he’d come armed. Some of this was jealousy, but not all; perhaps not even the greater part. He had made some indefinable but powerful connection between Olive Thorin—her sad but game little smile from the foot of the table—and his own mother. Hadn’t some of that same woeful, rueful look been in his mother’s eyes on the day when he had come upon her and his father’s advisor? Marten in an open-throated shirt, Gabrielle Deschain in a sacque that had
slipped off one shoulder, the whole room reeking of what they had been up to that hot morning?
His mind, tough as it already was, shrank from the image, horrified. It returned instead to that of Susan Delgado—her gray eyes and shining hair. He saw her laughing, chin uptilted, hands clasped before the sapphire Thorin had given her.
Roland could forgive her the gilly business, he supposed. What he could not forgive, in spite of his attraction to Susan, was that awful smile on Olive Thorin’s face as she watched the girl sitting in what should have been her place. Sitting in her place and laughing.
These were the things that chased through his head as he paced off acres of moonlight. He had no business with such thoughts, Susan Delgado was not the reason he was here, nor was the ridiculous knuckle-cracking Mayor and his pitiable country-Mary of a wife . . . yet he couldn’t put them away and get to what was his business. He had forgotten the face of his father, and walked in the moonlight, hoping to find it again.
In such fashion he came along the sleeping, silver-gilded High Street, walking north to south, thinking vaguely that he would perhaps stand Cuthbert and Alain to a taste of something wet and toss the dice down Satan’s Alley a time or two before going back to get Rusher and call it a night. And so it was that he happened to spy Jonas—the man’s gaunt figure and fall of long white hair were impossible to mistake—standing outside the batwings of the Travellers’ Rest and peering in.
Jonas did this with one hand on the butt of his gun and a tense set of body that put everything else from Roland’s mind at once. Something was going on, and if Bert and Alain were in there, it might involve them. They were the strangers in town, after all, and it was possible—even likely—that not everyone in Hambry loved the Affiliation with the fervor that had been professed at tonight’s dinner. Or perhaps it was Jonas’s friends who were in trouble. Something was brewing, in any case.
With no clear thought as to why he was doing it, Roland went softly up the steps to the mercantile’s porch. There was a line of carved animals there (and probably spiked firmly to the boards, so that drunken wags from the saloon across the street couldn’t carry them away, chanting the nursery rhymes of their childhood as they went). Roland stepped behind the last one in line—it was the Bear—and bent his knees so that the crown of his hat wouldn’t show. Then he went as still as the carving. He could see Jonas turn, look across the street, then look to his left,
peering at something—
Very low, a sound: Waow! Waow!
It’s a cat. In the alley.
Jonas looked a moment longer, then stepped into the Rest. Roland was out from behind the carved bear, down the steps, and into the street at once. He hadn’t Alain’s gift of the touch, but he had intuitions that were sometimes very strong.
This one was telling him he must hurry.
Overhead, the Kissing Moon drifted behind a cloud.
6
Pettie the Trotter still stood on her stool, but she no longer felt drunk and singing was the last thing on her mind. She could hardly believe what she was seeing: Jonas had the drop on a boy who had the drop on Reynolds who had the drop on another boy (this last one wearing a bird’s skull around his neck on a chain) who had the drop on Roy Depape. Who had, in fact, drawn some of Roy Depape’s blood. And when Jonas had told the big boy to put down the knife he was holding to Reynolds’s throat, the big boy had refused.
You can blow my lights out and send me to the clearing at the end of the path, thought Pettie, for now I’ve seen it all, so I have. She supposed she should get off the stool—there was apt to be shooting any second now, and likely a great lot of it—but sometimes you just had to take your chances.
Because some things were just too good to miss.
7
“We’re in this town on Affiliation business,” Alain said. He had one hand buried deep in Reynolds’s sweaty hair; the other maintained a steady pressure on the knife at Reynolds’s throat. Not quite enough to break the skin. “If you harm us, the Affiliation will take note. So will our fathers. You’ll be hunted like dogs and hung upside down, like as not, when you’re caught.”
“Sonny, there’s not an Affiliation patrol within two hundred wheels of here, probably three hundred,” Jonas said, “and I wouldn’t care a fart in a windstorm if there was one just over yon hill. Nor do your fathers mean a squitter to me. Put
that knife down or I’ll blow your fucking brains out.”
“No.”
“Future developments in this matter should be quite wonderful,” Cuthbert said cheerily . . . although there was now a beat of nerves under his prattle. Not fear, perhaps not even nervous-ness, just nerves. The good kind, more likely than not, Jonas thought sourly. He had underestimated these boys at meat; if nothing else was clear, that was. “You shoot Richard, and Richard cuts Mr. Cloak’s throat just as Mr. Cloak shoots me; my poor dying fingers release my sling’s elastic and put a steel ball in what passes for Mr. Spectacles’s brain. You’ll walk away, at least, and I suppose that will be a great comfort to your dead friends.”