Roland was waiting patiently. She nodded. “Sheemie and I’ll wait for thee. It’s my promise.”
He smiled, relieved.
“Now pay me back with honesty, Roland.”
“If I can.”
She looked up at the moon, shuddered at the ill-omened face she saw, and looked back at Roland. “What chance thee’ll come back to me?”
He thought about this very carefully, still holding to her arms. “Far better than Jonas thinks,” he said at last. “We’ll wait at the edge of the Bad Grass and should be able to mark his coming well enough.”
“Aye, the herd o’ horses I saw—”
“He may come without the horses,” Roland said, not knowing how well he had matched Jonas’s thinking, “but his folk will make noise even if they come without the herd. If there’s enough of them, we’ll see them, as well—they’ll cut a line through the grass like a part in hair.”
Susan nodded. She had seen this many times from the Drop—the mysterious parting of the Bad Grass as groups of men rode through it.
“If they’re looking for thee, Roland? If Jonas sends scouts ahead?”
“I doubt he’ll bother.” Roland shrugged. “If they do, why, we’ll kill them. Silent, if we can. Killing’s what we were trained to do; we’ll do it.”
She turned her hands over, and now she was gripping his arms instead of the other way around. She looked impatient and afraid. “Thee hasn’t answered my question.
What chance I’ll see thee back?”
He thought it over. “Even toss,” he said at last.
She closed her eyes as if struck, drew in a breath, let it out, opened her eyes again.
“Bad,” she said, “yet maybe not as bad as I thought. And if thee doesn’t come back? Sheemie and I go west, as thee said before?”
“Aye, to Gilead. There’ll be a place of safety and respect for you there, dear, no matter what . . . but it’s especially important that you go if you don’t hear the tankers explode. Thee knows that, doesn’t thee?”
“To warn yer people—thy ka-tet.”
Roland nodded.
“I’ll warn them, no fear. And keep Sheemie safe, too. He’s as much the reason we’ve got this far as anything I’ve done.”
Roland was counting on Sheemie for more than she knew. If he and Bert and Alain were killed, it was Sheemie who would stabilize her, give her reason to go on.
“When does thee leave?” Susan asked. “Do we have time to make love?”
“We have time, but perhaps it’s best we don’t,” he said. “It’s going to be hard enough to leave thee again without. Unless you really want to . . .” His eyes half-pleaded with her to say yes.
“Let’s just go back and lie down a bit,” she said, and took his hand. For a moment it trembled on her lips to tell him that she was kindled with his child, but at the last moment she kept silent. There was enough for him to think about without that added, mayhap … and she didn’t want to pass such happy news beneath such an ugly moon. It would surely be bad luck.
They walked back through high grass that was already springing together along their path. Outside the hut, he turned her toward him, put his hands on her cheeks, and softly kissed her again.
“I will love thee forever, Susan,” he said. “Come whatever storms.”
She smiled. The upward movement of her cheeks spilled a pair of tears from her eyes. “Come whatever storms,” she agreed. She kissed him again, and they went inside.
6
The moon had begun to descend when a party of eight rode out beneath the arch with come in peace writ upon it in the Great Letters. Jonas and Reynolds were in the lead. Behind them came Rhea’s black wagon, drawn by a trotting pony that looked strong enough to go all night and half the next day. Jonas had wanted to give her a driver, but Rhea refused—”Never was an animal I didn’t get on with better than any man ever could,” she’d told him, and that seemed to be true. The reins lay limp in her lap; the pony worked smart without them. The other five men consisted of Hash Renfrew, Quint, and three of Renfrew’s best vaqueros.
Coral had wanted to come as well, but Jonas had different ideas. “If we’re killed, you can go on more or less as before,” he’d said. “There’ll be nothing to tie you to us.”
“Without ye, I’m not sure there’d be any reason to go on,” she said.
“Ar, quit that schoolgirl shit, it don’t become you. You’d find plenty of reasons to keep staggerin down the path, if you had to put your mind to it. If all goes well—as I expect it will—and you still want to be with me, ride out of here as soon as you get word of our success. There’s a town west of here in the Vi Castis Mountains. Ritzy. Go there on the fastest horse you can swing a leg over. You’ll be there ahead of us by days, no matter how smart we’re able to push along. Find a respectable inn that’ll take a woman on her own . . . if there is such a thing in
Ritzy. Wait. When we get there with the tankers, you just fall into the column at my right hand. Have you got it?”
She had it. One woman in a thousand was Coral Thorin—sharp as Lord Satan, and able to fuck like Satan’s favorite harlot. Now if things only turned out to be as simple as he’d made them sound.
Jonas fell back until his horse was pacing alongside the black cart. The ball was out of its bag and lay in Rhea’s lap. “Anything?” he asked. He both hoped and dreaded to see that deep pink pulse inside it again.
“Nay. It’ll speak when it needs to, though—count on it.”
“Then what good are you, old woman?”
“Ye’ll know when the time comes,” Rhea said, looking at him with arrogance (and some fear as well, he was happy to see).
Jonas spurred his horse back to the head of the little column. He had decided to take the ball from Rhea at the slightest sign of trouble. In truth, it had already inserted its strange, addicting sweetness into his head; he thought about that single pink pulse of light he’d seen far too much.
Balls, he told himself. Battlesweat’s all I’ve got. Once this business is over, I’ll be my old self again.
Nice if true, but…
… but he had, in truth, begun to wonder.
Renfrew was now riding with Clay. Jonas nudged his horse in between them. His dicky leg was aching like a bastard; another bad sign.
“Lengyll?” he asked Renfrew.
“Putting together a good bunch,” Renfrew said, “don’t you fear Fran Lengyll.
Thirty men.”
“Thirty! God Harry’s body, I told you I wanted forty! Forty at least!”
Renfrew measured him with a pale-eyed glance, then winced at a particularly vicious gust of the freshening wind. He pulled his neckerchief up over his mouth and nose. The vaqs riding behind had already done so. “How afraid of these three boys are you, Jonas?”
“Afraid for both of us, I guess, since you’re too stupid to know who they are or what they’re capable of.” He raised his own neckerchief, then forced his voice into a more reasonable timbre. It was best he do so; he needed these bumpkins yet awhile longer. Once the ball was turned over to Latigo, that might change.
“Though mayhap we’ll never see them.”
“It’s likely they’re already thirty miles from here and riding west as fast as their horses’ll take em,” Renfrew agreed. “I’d give a crown to know how they got loose.”
What does it matter, you idiot? Jonas thought, but said nothing.
“As for Lengyll’s men, they’ll be the hardest boys he can lay hands on—if it comes to a fight, those thirty will fight like sixty.”
Jonas’s eyes briefly met Clay’s. I’ll believe it when I see it, Clay’s brief glance said, and Jonas knew again why he had always liked this one better than Roy Depape.
“How many armed?”
“With guns? Maybe half. They’ll be no more than an hour behind us.”
“Good.” At least their back door was covered. It would have to do. And he couldn’t wait to be rid of that thrice-cursed ball.
Oh? whispered a sly, half-mad voice from a place much deeper than his heart. Oh, can’t you?
Jonas ignored the voice until it stilled. Half an hour later, they turned off the road and onto the Drop. Several miles ahead, moving in the wind like a silver sea, was the Bad Grass.
7
Around the time that Jonas and his party were riding down the Drop, Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain were swinging up into their saddles. Susan and Sheemie stood by the doorway to the hut, holding hands and watching them solemnly.