“Far from that,” Cuthbert said. “I’ve just spared a little time to think about a problem that concerns us all. That concerns the entire Affiliation, mayhap. We need to think. Wouldn’t you say?”
Alain winced, but Roland didn’t seem to notice. He was still grinning. Even at fourteen, such an expression on his face was troubling. The truth was that when Roland grinned, he looked slightly mad. “Do you know, they may even move in a fair number of muties for us to look at, just so we’ll continue to believe the lies they’ve already told about the impurity of their stocklines.” He paused, seeming to think, and then said: “Why don’t you and Alain go and see the Sheriff, Bert? That would do very well, I think.”
At this point Cuthbert nearly threw himself at Roland, wanting to scream Yes, why not? Then you could spend tomorrow morning pronging her as well as tomorrow afternoon! You idiot! You thoughtless lovestruck idiot!
It was Al who saved him—saved them all, perhaps.
“Don’t be a fool,” he said sharply, and Roland wheeled toward him, looking surprised. He wasn’t used to sharpness from that quarter. “You’re our leader, Roland—seen that way by Thorin, by Avery, by the townsfolk. Seen that way by us as well.”
“No one appointed me—”
“No one needed to!” Cuthbert shouted. “You won your guns! These folk would hardly believe it—I hardly believe it myself just lately—but you are a gunslinger.
You have to go! Plain as the nose on your face! It doesn’t matter which of us accompanies you, but you have to go!” He could say more, much more, but if he did, where would it end? With their fellowship broken beyond repair, likely. So he
clamped his mouth shut— no need for Alain to kick him this time—and once again waited for the explosion. Once again, none came.
“All right,” Roland said in his new way—that mild it-doesn’t-much-matter way that made Cuthbert feel like biting him to wake him up. “Tomorrow morning.
You and I, Bert. Will eight suit you?”
“Down to the ground,” Cuthbert said. Now that the discussion was over and the decision made, Bert’s heart was beating wildly and the muscles in his upper thighs felt like rubber. It was the way he’d felt after their confrontation with the Big Coffin Hunters.
“We’ll be at our prettiest,” Roland said. “Nice boys from the Inners with good intentions but not many brains. Fine.” And he went inside, no longer grinning (which was a relief) but smiling gently.
Cuthbert and Alain looked at each other and let out their breath in a mutual rush.
Cuthbert cocked his head toward the yard, and went down the steps. Alain followed, and the two boys stood in the center of the dirt rectangle with the bunkhouse at their backs. To the east, the rising full moon was hidden behind a scrim of clouds.
‘
“She’s tranced him,” Cuthbert said. “Whether she means to or not, she’ll kill us all in the end. Wait and see if she don’t.”
“You shouldn’t say such, even in jest.”
“All right, she’ll crown us with the jewels of Eld and we’ll live forever.”
“You have to stop being angry at him, Bert. You have to.”
Cuthbert looked at him bleakly. “I can’t.”
4
The great storms of autumn were still a month or more distant, but the following morning dawned drizzly and gray. Roland and Cuthbert wrapped themselves in scrapes and headed for town, leaving Alain to the few home place chores. Tucked in Roland’s belt was the schedule of farms and ranches—beginning with the three small spreads owned by the Barony—the three of them had worked out the previous evening. The pace this schedule suggested was almost ludicrously slow—it would keep them on the Drop and in the orchards almost until Year’s End Fair—but it conformed to the pace they had already set on the docks.
Now the two of them rode silently toward town, both lost in their own thoughts.
Their way took them past the Delgado house. Roland looked up and saw Susan sitting in her window, a bright vision in the gray light of that fall morning. His heart leaped up and although he didn’t know it then, it was how he would remember her most clearly forever after—lovely Susan, the girl at the window.
So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the comers of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely if ever crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little.
Roland raised a hand to her. It went toward his mouth at first, wanting to send her a kiss, but that would be madness. He lifted the hand before it could touch his lips and ticked a finger off his forehead instead, offering a saucy little salute.
Susan smiled and returned it in kind. None saw Cordelia, who had gone out in the drizzle to check on the last of her squash and sharproot. That lady stood where she was, a sombrero yanked down on her head almost to the eyeline, half-hidden by the stuffy-guy guarding the pumpkin patch. She watched Roland and Cuthbert pass (Cuthbert she barely saw; her interest was in the other one). From the boy on horseback she looked up to Susan, sitting there in her window, humming as blithely as a bird in a gilded cage.
A sharp splinter of suspicion whispered its way into Cordelia’s heart. Susan’s change of temperament—from alternating bouts of sorrow and fearful anger to a kind of dazed but mainly cheerful acceptance—had been so sudden. Mayhap it wasn’t acceptance at all.
“Ye’re mad,” she whispered to herself, but her hand remained tight on the haft of the machete she held. She dropped to her knees in the muddy garden and abruptly began chopping sharproot vines, tossing the roots themselves toward the side of the house with quick, accurate throws. “There’s nothing between em. I’d know.
Children of such an age have no more discretion than . . . than the drunks in the Rest.”
But the way they had smiled. The way they had smiled at each other.
“Perfectly normal,” she whispered, chopping and throwing. She cut a sharproot nearly in half, ruining it, not noticing. The whispering was a habit she’d picked up
only recently, as Reap Day neared and the stresses of coping with her brother’s troublesome daughter mounted. “Folks smile at each other, that’s all.”
The same for the salute and Susan’s returning wave. Below, the handsome cavalier, acknowledging the pretty maid; above, the maid herself, pleased to be acknowledged by such as he. It was youth calling to youth, that was all. And yet…
The look in his eyes . . . and the look in hers.
Nonsense, of course. But—
But you saw something else.
Yes, perhaps. For a moment it had seemed to her that the young man was going to blow Susan a kiss . . . then had remembered himself at the last moment and turned it into a salute, instead.
Even if ye did see such a thing, it means nothing. Young cavaliers are saucy, especially when out from beneath the gaze of their fathers. And these three already have a history, as ye well know.
All true enough, but none of it removed that chilly splinter from her heart.
5
Jonas answered Roland’s knock and let the two boys into the Sheriff’s office. He was wearing a Deputy’s star on his shirt, and looked at them with expressionless eyes. “Boys,” he said. “Come in out of the wet.”
He stepped back to allow them entrance. His limp was more pronounced than Roland had ever seen it; the wet weather was playing it up, he supposed.
Roland and Cuthbert stepped in. There was a gas heater in the corner—tilled from
“the candle” at Citgo, no doubt—and the big room, which had been cool on the day they had first come here, was stuporously hot. The three cells held five woeful-looking drunks, two pairs of men and a woman in the center cell by herself, sitting on the bunk with her legs spread wide, displaying a broad expanse of red drawers.
Roland feared that if she got her finger any farther up her nose, she might never retrieve it. Clay Reynolds was leaning against the notice-board, picking his teeth with a broomstraw. Sitting at the rolltop desk was Deputy Dave, stroking his chin and frowning through his monocle at the board which had been set up there.
Roland wasn’t at all surprised to see that he and Bert had interrupted a game of Castles.
“Well, look here, Eldred!” Reynolds said. “It’s two of the In-World boys! Do your mommies know you’re out, fellas?”