“Aye, you may!” he cried in a strong, high voice. “Indeed you may, we’ve been waiting with impatience, great impatience, for this moment! Well met we are, very well met! Welcome, sirs! May your evening in this house of which I am the fleeting proprietor be happy, and may your days be long upon the earth!”
Roland took the bony outstretched hand, heard the knuckles crack beneath his grip, looked for an expression of discomfort on the Mayor’s face, and was relieved to see none. He bowed low over his outstretched leg.
“William Dearborn, Mayor Thorin, at your service. Thank you for your welcome, and may your own days be long upon the earth.”
“Arthur Heath” made his manners next, then “Richard Stockworth.” Thorin’s smile widened at each deep bow. Rimer did his best to beam, but looked unused to it.
The man with the long white hair took a glass of punch, passed it to his female companion, and continued to smile thinly. Roland was aware that everyone in the room—the guests numbered perhaps fifty in all—was looking at them, but what he felt most upon his skin, beating like a soft wing, was her regard. He could see the blue silk of her dress from the side of one eye, but did not dare look at her more directly.
“Was your trip difficult?” Thorin was asking. “Did you have adventures and experience perils? We would hear all the details at dinner, so we would, for we have few guests from the Inner Arc these days.” His eager, slightly fatuous smile faded; his tufted brows drew together. “Did ye encounter patrols of Farson?”
“No, Excellency,” Roland said. “We—”
“Nay, lad, nay—no Excellency, I won’t have it, and the fisherfolk and hoss
drovers I serve wouldn’t, even if I would. Just Mayor Thorin, if you please.”
“Thank you. We saw many strange things on our journey, Mayor Thorin, but no Good Men.”
“Good Men!” Rimer jerked out, and his upper lip lifted in a smile which made him look doglike. “Good Men, indeed!”
“We would hear it all, every word,” Thorin said. “But before I forget my manners in my eagerness, young gentlemen, let me introduce you to these close around me.
Kimba you’ve met; this formidable fellow to my left is Eldred Jonas, chief of my newly installed security staff.” Thorin’s smile looked momentarily embarrassed.
“I’m not convinced that I need extra security, Sheriff Avery’s always been quite enough to keep the peace in our comer of the world, but Kimba insists. And when Kimba insists, the Mayor must bow.”
“Very wise, sir,” Rimer said, and bowed himself. They all laughed, save for Jonas, who simply held onto his narrow smile.
Jonas nodded. “Pleased, gents, I’m sure.” The voice was a reedy quaver. He then wished them long days upon the earth, all three, coming to Roland last in his round of handshaking. His grip was dry and firm, utterly untouched by the tremor in his voice. And now Roland noticed the queer blue shape tattooed on the back of the man’s right hand, in the webbing between thumb and first finger. It looked like a coffin.
“Long days, pleasant nights,” Roland said with hardly a thought. It was a greeting from his childhood, and it was only later that he would realize it was one more apt
to be associated with Gilead than with any such rural place as Hemphill. Just a small slip, but he was beginning to believe that their margin for such slips might be a good deal less than his father had thought when he had sent Roland here to get him out of Marten’s way.
“And to you,” Jonas said. His bright eyes measured Roland with a thoroughness that was close to insolence, still holding his hand. Then he released it and stepped back.
“Cordelia Delgado,” Mayor Thorin said, next bowing to the woman who had been speaking to Jonas. As Roland also bowed in her direction, he saw the family resemblance . . . except that what looked generous and lovely on Susan’s face looked pinched and folded on the face before him now. Not the girl’s mother; Roland guessed that Cordelia Delgado was a bit too young for that.
“And our especial friend, Miss Susan Delgado,” Thorin finished, sounding flustered (Roland supposed she would have that effect on any man, even an old one like the Mayor). Thorin urged her forward, bobbing his head and grinning, one of his knuckle-choked hands pressed against the small of her back, and Roland felt an instant of poisonous jealousy. Ridiculous, given this man’s age and his plump, pleasant wife, but it was there, all right, and it was sharp. Sharp as a bee’s ass, Cort would have said.
Then her face tilted up to his, and he was looking into her eyes again.
He had heard of drowning in a woman’s eyes in some poem or story, and thought it ridiculous. He still thought it ridiculous, but understood it was perfectly possible, nonetheless. And she knew it. He saw concern in her eyes, perhaps even fear.
Promise me that if we meet at Mayor’s House, we meet for the first time.
The memory of those words had a sobering, clarifying effect, and seemed to widen his vision a little. Enough for him to be aware that the woman beside Jonas, the one who shared some of Susan’s features, was looking at the girl with a mixture of curiosity and alarm.
He bowed low, but did little more than touch her ringless outstretched hand. Even so, he felt something like a spark jump between their fingers. From the momentary widening of those eyes, he thought that she felt it, too.
“Pleased to meet you, sai,” he said. His attempt to be casual sounded tinny and false in his own ears. Still, he was begun, it felt like the whole world was watching
him (them), and there was nothing to do but go on with it. He tapped his throat three times. “May your days be long—”
“Aye, and yours, Mr. Dearborn. Thankee-sai.”
She turned to Alain with a rapidity that was almost rude, then to Cuthbert, who bowed, tapped, then said gravely: “Might I recline briefly at your feet, miss? Your beauty has loosened my knees. I’m sure a few moments spent looking up at your profile from below, with the back of my head on these cool tiles, would put me right.”
They all laughed at that—even Jonas and Miss Cordelia. Susan blushed prettily and slapped the back of Cuthbert’s hand. For once Roland blessed his friend’s relentless sense of foolery.
Another man joined the party by the punchbowl. This newcomer was blocky and blessedly un-thin in his boxtail coat. His cheeks burned with high color that looked like windburn rather than drink, and his pale eyes lay in nets of wrinkles. A rancher; Roland had ridden often enough with his father to know the look.
“There’ll be maids a-plenty to meet you boys tonight,” the newcomer said with a friendly enough smile. “Ye’ll find y’selves drunk on perfume if ye’re not careful.
But I’d like my crack at you before you meet em. Fran Lengyll, at your service.”
His grip was strong and quick; no bowing or other nonsense went with it.
“I own the Rocking B … or it owns me, whichever way ye want to look at it. I’m also boss of the Horsemen’s Association, at least until they fire me. The Bar K was my idea. Hope it’s all right.”
“It’s perfect, sir,” Alain said. “Clean and dry and room for twenty. Thank you.
You’ve been too kind.”
“Nonsense,” Lengyll said, looking pleased all the same as he knocked back a glass of punch. “We’re all in this together, boy. John Farson’s but one bad straw in a field of wrong-headedness these days. The world’s moved on, folks say. Huh! So it has, aye, and a good piece down the road to hell is where it’s moved on to. Our job is to hold the hay out of the furnace as well as we can, as long as we can. For the sake of our children even more than for that of our fathers.”
“Hear, hear,” Mayor Thorin said in a voice that strove for the high ground of solemnity and fell with a splash into fatuity instead. Roland noticed the scrawny old fellow was gripping one of Susan’s hands (she seemed almost unaware of it; was looking intently at Lengyll instead), and suddenly he understood: the Mayor
was either her uncle or perhaps a cousin of some close degree. Lengyll ignored both, looking at the three newcomers instead, scrutinizing each in turn and finishing with Roland.
“Anything us in Mejis can do to help, lad, just ask—me, John Croydon, Hash Renfrew, Jake White, Hank Wertner, any or all. Ye’ll meet em tonight, aye, their wives and sons and daughters as well, and ye need only ask. We may be a good piece out from the hub of New Canaan here, but we’re strong for the Affiliation, all the same. Aye, very strong.”