Only instead of looking directly out over the Clean Sea, Roland and his friends were looking down the long slope of the Drop. A herd of horses was moving from west to east, barely more than shadows in this light.
“What do you see, Roland?” Alain asked, almost timidly.
“Trouble,” Roland said, “and in our road.” Then he gigged his horse and rode on.
Before they got back to the Bar K bunkhouse, he was thinking about Susan again.
Five minutes after he dropped his head on his flat burlap pillow, he was dreaming of her.
CHAPTER
VII
ON THE DROP
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. I did 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