“I wish ye wouldn’t. Really.” She brushed a hand across her forehead. “Easy for you to say there are no eyes to see, but sometimes there are eyes even where there shouldn’t be. And my position is … a little delicate just now.”
“I’ll walk with you, however,” he repeated, and now his face was somber. “These are not good times. Miss Delgado. Here in Mejis you are far from the worst of the troubles, but sometimes trouble reaches out.”
She opened her mouth—to protest again, she supposed, perhaps to tell him that Pat Delgado’s daughter could take care of herself—and then she thought of the Mayor’s new men, and the cold way they had run their eyes over her when Thorin’s attention had been elsewhere. She had seen those three this very night as she left on her way to the witch’s hut. Them she had heard approaching, and in plenty of time for her to leave the road and rest behind a handy pinon tree (she refused to think of it as hiding, exactly). Back toward town they had gone, and she supposed they were drinking at the Travellers’ Rest right now—and would continue to until Stanley Ruiz closed the bar—but she had no way of knowing that for sure. They could come back.
“If I can’t dissuade ye, very well,” she said, sighing with a vexed resignation she didn’t really feel. “But only to the first mailbox—Mrs. Beech’s. That marks the edge of town.”
He tapped his throat again, and made another of those absurd, enchanting bows—foot stuck out as if he would trip someone, heel planted in the dirt.
“Thankee, Miss Delgado!”
At least he didn’t ‘t call me sai, she thought. That’s a start.
2
She thought he’d chatter away like a magpie in spite of his promise to be silent, because that was what boys did around her—she was not vain of her looks, but she thought she was good-looking, if only because the boys could not shut up or stop shuffling their feet when they were around her. And this one would be full of questions the town boys didn’t need to ask—how old was she, had she always lived in Hambry, were her parents alive, half a hundred others just as boring—but they would all circle in on the same one: did she have a steady fellow?
But Will Dearborn of the Inner Baronies didn’t ask her about her schooling or
family or friends (the most common way of approaching any romantic rivals, she had found). Will Dearborn simply walked along beside her, one hand wrapped around Rusher’s bridle, looking off east toward the Clean Sea. They were close enough to it now so that the teary smell of salt mingled with the tarry stench of oil, even though the wind was from the south.
They were passing Citgo now, and she was glad for Will Dearborn’s presence, even if his silence was a little irritating. She had always found the oil patch, with its skeletal forest of gantries, a little spooky. Most of those steel towers had stopped pumping long since, and there was neither the parts, the need, nor the understanding to repair them. And those which did still labor along—nineteen out of about two hundred—could not be stopped. They just pumped and pumped, the supplies of oil beneath them seemingly inexhaustible. A little was still used, but a very little—most simply ran back down into the wells beneath the dead pumping stations. The world had moved on, and this place reminded her of a strange mechanical graveyard where some of the corpses hadn’t quite—
Something cold and smooth nuzzled the small of her back, and she wasn’t quite able to stifle a little shriek. Will Dearborn wheeled toward her, his hands dropping toward his belt. Then he relaxed and smiled.
“Rusher’s way of saying he feels ignored. I’m sorry, Miss Delgado.”
She looked at the horse. Rusher looked back mildly, then dipped his head as if to say he was also sorry for having startled her.
Foolishness, girl, she thought, hearing the hearty, no-nonsense voice of her father.
He wants to know why you ‘re being so standoffy, that’s all. And so do I. ‘Tisn’t like you, so it’s not.
“Mr. Dearborn, I’ve changed my mind,” she said. “I’d like to ride.”
3
He turned his back and stood looking out at Citgo with his hands in his pockets while Susan first laid the poncho over the cantle of the saddle (the plain black saddle of a working cowboy, without a Barony brand or even a ranch brand to mark it), and then mounted into the stirrup. She lifted her skirt and glanced around sharply, sure he would be stealing a peek, but his back was still to her. He seemed fascinated with the rusty oil derricks.
What’s so interesting about them, cully? she thought, a trifle crossly— it was the lateness of the hour and the residue of her stirred-up emotions, she supposed.
Filthy old things have been there six centuries and more, and I’ve been smelling their stink my whole life.
“Stand easy now, my boy,” she said once she had her foot fixed in the stirrup. One hand held the top of the saddle’s pommel, the other the reins. Rusher, meanwhile, flicked his ears as if to say he would stand easy all night, were that what she required.
She swung up, one long bare thigh flashing in the starlight, and felt the exhilaration of being horsed that she always felt . . . only tonight it seemed a little stronger, a little sweeter, a little sharper. Perhaps because the horse was such a beauty, perhaps because the horse was a stranger .. .
Perhaps because the horse’s owner is a stranger, she thought, and fair.
That was nonsense, of course . . . and potentially dangerous nonsense. Yet it was also true. He was fair.
As she opened the poncho and spread it over her legs, Dearborn began to whistle.
And she realized, with a mixture of surprise and superstitious fear, what the tune was: “Careless Love.” The very lay she had been singing on her way up to Rhea’s hut.
Mayhap it’s ka, girl, her father’s voice whispered.
No such thing, she thought right back at him. I’ll not see ka in every passing wind and shadow, like the old ladies who gather in Green Heart of a summer’s evening.
It’s an old tune: everyone knows it.
Mayhap better if you’re right. Pat Delgado’s voice returned. For if it’s ka, it ‘II come like a wind, and your plans will stand before it no more than my da’s barn stood before the cyclone when it came.
Not ka; she would not be seduced by the dark and the shadows and the grim shapes of the oil derricks into believing it was. Not ka but only a chance meeting with a nice young man on the lonely road back to town.
“I’ve made myself decent,” she said in a dry voice that didn’t sound much like her own. “Ye may turn back if you like, Mr. Dearborn.”
He did turn and gazed at her. For a moment he said nothing, but she could see the look in his eyes well enough to know that he found her fair as well. And although this disquieted her—perhaps because of what he’d been whistling—she was also
glad. Then he said, “You look well up there. You sit well.”
“And I shall have horses of my own to sit before long,” she said. Now the questions will come, she thought.
But he only nodded, as though he had known this about her already, and began to walk toward town again. Feeling a little disappointed and not knowing exactly why, she clucked sidemouth at Rusher and twitched her knees at him. He got moving, catching up with his master, who gave Rusher’s muzzle a companionable little caress.
“What do they call that place yonder?” he asked, pointing at the derricks.
“The oil patch? Citgo.”
“Some of the derricks still pump?”
“Aye, and no way to stop them. Not that anyone still knows.”
“Oh,” he said, and that was all—just oh. But he left his place by Rusher’s head for a moment when they came to the weedy track leading into Citgo, walking across to look at the old disused guard-hut. In her childhood there had been a sign on it reading authorized personnel only, but it had blown away in some windstorm or other. Will Dearborn had his look and then came ambling back to the horse, boots puffing up summer dust, easy in his new clothes.
They went toward town, a young walking man in a flat-crowned hat, a young riding woman with a poncho spread over her lap and legs. The starlight rained down on them as it has on young men and women since time’s first hour, and once she looked up and saw a meteor flash overhead—a brief and brilliant orange streak across the vault of heaven. Susan thought to wish on it, and then, with something like panic, realized she had no idea what to wish for. None at all.