Rhea cackled delightedly. “Aye, it’s Thorin’s gilly that never was! Dearborn’s lovergirl!” Her cackling stopped abruptly. “Lovergirl of the young proddy who killed my Ermot. And he’ll pay for it, aye, so he will. Look closer, sai Jonas! Look closer!”
He did. Everything was clear now, and he thought he should have seen it earlier.
Everything this girl’s aunt had feared had been true. Rhea had known, although why she hadn’t told anyone the girl had been screwing one of the In-World boys, Jonas didn’t know. And Susan had done more than just screw Will Dearborn; she’d helped him escape, him and his trail-mates, and she might well have killed two
lawmen for him, into the bargain.
The figure in the ball swam closer. Watching that made him feel a little dizzy, but it was a pleasant dizziness. Beyond the girl was the hut, faintly lit by a lamp which had been turned down to the barest core of flame. At first Jonas thought someone was sleeping in one comer, but on second glance he decided it was only a heap of hides that looked vaguely human.
“Do’ee spy the boys?” Rhea asked, seemingly from a great distance. “Do’ee spy em, m’lord sai?”
“No,” he said, his own voice seeming to come from that same distant place. His eyes were pinned to the ball. He could feel its light baking deeper and deeper into his brain. It was a good feeling, like a hot fire on a cold night. “She’s alone. Looks as if she’s waiting.”
“Aye.” Rhea gestured above the ball—a curt dusting-off movement of the hands—and the pink light was gone. Jonas gave a low, protesting cry, but no matter; the ball was dark again. He wanted to stretch his hands out and tell her to make the light return—to beg her, if necessary—and held himself back by pure force of will. He was rewarded by a slow return of his wits. It helped to remind himself that Rhea’s gestures were as meaningless as the puppets in a Pinch and Jilly show. The ball did what it wanted, not what she wanted.
Meanwhile, the ugly old woman was looking at him with eyes that were perversely shrewd and clear. “Waiting for what, do’ee suppose?” she asked.
There was only one thing she could be waiting for. Jonas thought with rising alarm. The boys. The three beardless sons of bitches from In-World. And if they weren’t with her, they might well be up ahead, doing their own waiting.
Waiting for him. Possibly even waiting for—
“Listen to me,” he said. “I’ll only speak once, and you best answer true. Do they know about that thing? Do those three boys know about the Rainbow?”
Her eyes shifted away from his. It was answer enough in one way, but not in another. She had had things her way all too long up there on her hill; she had to know who was boss down here. He leaned over again and grabbed her shoulder. It was horrible—like grabbing a bare bone that somehow still lived—but he made himself hold on all the same. And squeeze. She moaned and wriggled, but he held on.
“Tell me, you old bitch! Run your fucking gob!”
“They might know of it,” she whined. “The girl might’ve seen something the night she came to be—am-, let go, ye’re killing me!”
“If I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead.” He took another longing glance at the ball, then sat up straight in the saddle, cupped his hands around his mouth, and called:
“Clay! Hold up!” As Reynolds and Renfrew reined back, Jonas raised a hand to halt the vaqs behind him.
The wind whispered through the grass, bending it, rippling it, whipping up eddies of sweet smell. Jonas stared ahead into the dark, even though he knew it was fruitless to look for them. They could be anywhere, and Jonas didn’t like the odds in an ambush. Not one bit.
He rode to where Clay and Renfrew were waiting. Renfrew looked impatient.
“What’s the problem? Dawn’ll be breaking soon. We ought to get a move-on.”
“Do you know the huts in the Bad Grass?”
“Aye, most. Why—”
“Do you know one with a red door?”
Renfrew nodded and pointed northish. “Old Soony’s place. He had some sort of religious conversion—a dream or a vision or something. That’s when he painted the door of his hut red. He’s gone to the Manni-folk these last five years.” He no longer asked why, at least; he had seen something on Jonas’s face that had shut up his questions.
Jonas raised his hand, looked at the blue coffin tattooed there for a second, then turned and called for Quint. “You’re in charge,” Jonas told him.
Quint’s shaggy eyebrows shot up. “Me?”
“Yar. But you’re not going on—there’s been a change of plan.”
“What—”
“Listen and don’t open your mouth again unless there’s something you don’t understand. Get that damned black cart turned around. Put your men around it and hie on back the way we came. Join up with Lengyll and his men. Tell them Jonas says wait where you find em until he and Reynolds and Renfrew come. Clear?”
Quint nodded. He looked bewildered but said nothing.
“Good. Get about it. And tell the witch to put her toy back in its bag.” Jonas passed a hand over his brow. Fingers which had rarely shaken before had now picked up a minute tremble. “It’s distracting.”
Quint started away, then looked back when Jonas called his name.
“I think those In-World boys are out here, Quint. Probably ahead of where we are now, but if they’re back the way you’re going, they’ll probably set on you.”
Quint looked nervously around at the grass, which rose higher than his head. Then his lips tightened and he returned his attention to Jonas.
“If they attack, they’ll try to take the ball,” Jonas continued. “And sai, mark me well: any man who doesn’t die protecting it will wish he had.” He lifted his chin at the vaqs, who sat astride their horses in a line behind the black cart. “Tell them that.”
“Aye, boss,” Quint said.
“When you reach Lengyll’s party, you’ll be safe.”
“How long should we wait for yer if ye don’t come?”
“Til hell freezes over. Now go.” As Quint left, Jonas turned to Reynolds and Renfrew. “We’re going to make a little side-trip, boys,” he said.
10
“Roland.” Alain’s voice was low and urgent. “They’ve turned around.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. There’s another group coming along behind them. A much larger one. That’s where they’re headed.”
“Safety in numbers, that’s all,” Cuthbert said.
“Do they have the ball?” Roland asked. “Can you touch it yet?”
“Yes, they have it. It makes them easy to touch even though they’re going the other way now. Once you find it, it glows like a lamp in a mineshaft.”
“Does Rhea still have the keeping of it?”
“I think so. It’s awful to touch her.”
“Jonas is afraid of us,” Roland said. “He wants more men around him when he comes. That’s what it is, what it must be.” Unaware that he was both right and badly out in his reckoning. Unaware that for one of the few times since they had left Gilead, he had lapsed into a teenager’s disastrous certainty.
“What do we do?” Alain asked.
“Sit here. Listen. Wait. They’ll bring the ball this way again if they’re going to Hanging Rock. They’ll have to.”
“Susan?” Cuthbert asked. “Susan and Sheemie? What about them? How do we
know they’re all right?”
“I suppose that we don’t.” Roland sat down, cross-legged, with Pusher’s trailing reins in his lap. “But Jonas and his men will be back soon enough. And when they come, we’ll do what we must.”
11
Susan hadn’t wanted to sleep inside—the hut felt wrong to her without Roland.
She had left Sheemie huddled under the old hides in the comer and taken her own blankets outside. She sat in the hut’s doorway for a little while, looking up at the stars and praying for Roland in her own fashion. When she began to feel a little better, she lay down on one blanket and pulled the other over her. It seemed an eternity since Maria had shaken her out of her heavy sleep, and the open-mouthed, glottal snores drifting out of the hut didn’t bother her much. She slept with her head pillowed on one arm, and didn’t wake when, twenty minutes later, Sheemie came to the doorway, blinked at her sleepily, and then walked off into the grass to urinate. The only one to notice him was Caprichoso, who stuck out his long muzzle and took a nip at Sheemie’s butt as the boy passed him. Sheemie, still mostly asleep, reached back and pushed the muzzle away. He knew Capi’s tricks well enough, so he did.
Susan dreamed of the willow grove—bird and bear and hare and fish—and what woke her wasn’t Sheemie’s return from his necessary but a cold circle of steel pressing into her neck. There was a loud click that she recognized at once from the Sheriff’s office: a pistol being cocked. The willow grove faded from the eye of her mind.