“See my flowers, sai?” he asked, and pointed toward the unpainted side of the Rest. What she saw touched her deeply: a line of mixed blue and white silkflowers growing along the base of the building. They looked both brave and pathetic, flurrying there in the faint morning breeze with the bald, turd-littered yard before them and the splintery public house behind them.
“Rid you grow those, Sheemie?”
“Aye, so I did. And Mr. Arthur Heath of Gilead has promised me yellow ones.”
“I’ve never seen yellow silkflowers.”
“Noey-no, me neither, but Mr. Arthur Heath says they have them in Gilead.” He looked at Susan solemnly, the shovel held in his hands as a soldier would hold a gun or spear at port arms. “Mr. Arthur Heath saved my life. I’d do anything for him.”
“Would you, Sheemie?” she asked, touched.
“Also, he has a lookout! It’s a bird’s head! And when he talks to it, tendy-pretend, do I laugh? Aye, fit to split!”
She looked around again to make sure no one was watching (save for the carved totems across the street), then removed her note, folded small, from her jeans pocket.
“Would you give this to Mr. Dearborn for me? He’s also your friend, is he not?”
“Will? Aye!” He took the note and put it carefully into his own pocket.
“And tell no one.”
“Shhhhh!” he agreed, and put a finger to his lips. His eyes had been amusingly round beneath the ridiculous pink lady’s straw he wore. “Like when I brought you the flowers. Hushaboo!”
“That’s right, hushaboo. Fare ye well, Sheemie.”
“And you, Susan Delgado.”
He went back to his cleanup operations. Susan had stood watching him for a moment, feeling uneasy and out of sorts with herself. Now that the note was successfully passed, she felt an urge to ask Sheemie to give it back, to scratch out what she had written, and promise to meet him. If only to see his steady blue eyes again, looking into her face.
Then Jonas’s other friend, the one with the cloak, came sauntering out of the mercantile. She was sure he didn’t see her—his head was down and he was rolling a cigarette—but she had no intention of pressing her luck. Reynolds talked to Jonas, and Jonas talked—all too much!—to Aunt Cord. If Aunt Cord heard she had been passing the time of day with the boy who had brought her the flowers, there were apt to be questions. Ones she didn’t want to answer.
6
All that’s history now, Susan—water under the bridge. Best to get your thoughts out of the past.
She brought Pylon to a stop and looked down the length of the Drop at the horses that moved and grazed there. Quite a surprising number of them this morning.
It wasn’t working. Her mind kept turning back to Will Dearborn.
What bad luck meeting him had been! If not for that chance encounter on her way back down from the Coos, she might well have made peace with her situation by now—she was a practical girl, after all, and a promise was a promise. She certainly never would have expected herself to get all goosy-gushy over losing her maidenhead, and the prospect of carrying and bearing a child actually excited her.
But Will Dearborn had changed things; had gotten into her head and now lodged there, a tenant who defied eviction. His remark to her as they danced stayed with her like a song you can’t stop humming, even though you hate it. It had been cruel and stupidly self-righteous, that remark … but was there not also a grain of truth in it? Rhea had been right about Hart Thorin, of that much Susan no longer had any doubt. She supposed that witches were right about men’s lusts even when they were wrong about everything else. Not a happy thought, but likely a true one.
It was Will Be Damned to You Dearborn who had made it difficult for her to accept what needed accepting, who had goaded her into arguments in which she
could hardly recognize her own shrill and desperate voice, who came to her in her dreams—dreams where he put his arms around her waist and kissed her, kissed her, kissed her.
She dismounted and walked downhill a little way with the reins looped in her fist.
Pylon followed willingly enough, and when she stopped to look off into the blue haze to the southwest, he lowered his head and began to crop again.
She thought she needed to see Will Dearborn once more, if only to give her innate practicality a chance to reassert itself. She needed to see him at his right size, instead of the one her mind had created for him in her warm thoughts and warmer dreams. Once that was done, she could get on with her life and do what needed doing. Perhaps that was why she had taken this path—the same one she’d ridden yesterday, and the day before yesterday, and the day before that. He rode this part of the Drop; that much she had heard in the lower market.
She turned away from the Drop, suddenly knowing he would be there, as if her thought had called him—or her ka.
She saw only blue sky and low ridgeline hills that curved gently like the line of a woman’s thigh and hip and waist as she lies on her side in bed. Susan felt a bitter disappointment fill her. She could almost taste it in her mouth, like wet tea leaves.
She started back to Pylon, meaning to return to the house and take care of the apology she reckoned she must make. The sooner she did it, the sooner it would be done. She reached for her left stirrup, which was twisted a little, and as she did, a rider came over the horizon, breaking against the sky at the place which looked to her like a woman’s hip. He sat there, only a silhouette on horseback, but she knew who it was at once.
Run! she told herself in a sudden panic. Mount and gallop! Get out of here!
Quickly! Before something terrible happens . . . before it really is ka, come like a wind to take you and all your plans over the sky and far away!
She didn’t run. She stood with Pylon’s reins in one hand, and murmured to him when the rosillo looked up and nickered a greeting to the big bay-colored gelding coming down the hill.
Then Will was there, first above her and looking down, then dismounted in an easy, liquid motion she didn’t think she could have matched, for all her years of horsemanship. This time there was no kicked-out leg and planted heel, no hat swept over a comically solemn bow; this time the gaze he gave her was steady and
serious and disquietingly adult.
They looked at each other in the Drop’s big silence, Roland of Gilead and Susan of Mejis, and in her heart she felt a wind begin to blow. She feared it and welcomed it in equal measure.
7
“Goodmorn, Susan,” he said. “I’m glad to see you again.”
She said nothing, waiting and watching. Could he hear her heart beating as clearly as she could? Of course not; that was so much romantic twaddle. Yet it still seemed to her that everything within a fifty-yard radius should be able to hear that thumping.
Will took a step forward. She took a step back, looking at him mistrustfully. He lowered his head for a moment, then looked up again, his lips set.
“I cry your pardon,” he said.
“Do you?” Her voice was cool.
“What I said that night was unwarranted.”
At that she felt a spark of real anger. “I care not that it was unwarranted; I care that it was unfair. That it hurt me.”
A tear overbrimmed her left eye and slipped down her cheek. She wasn’t all cried out after all, it seemed.
She thought what she said would perhaps shame him, but although faint color came into his cheeks, his eyes remained firmly on hers.
“I fell in love with you,” he said. “That’s why I said it. It happened even before you kissed me, I think.”
She laughed at that . . . but the simplicity with which he had spoken made her laughter sound false in her own ears. Tinny. “Mr. Dearborn—”
“Will. Please.”
“Mr. Dearborn,” she said, patiently as a teacher working with a dull student, “the idea is ridiculous. On the basis of one single meeting? One single kiss? A sister’s kiss?” Now she was the one who was blushing, but she hurried on. “Such things happen in stories, but in real life? I think not.”
But his eyes never left hers, and in them she saw some of Roland’s truth: the deep romance of his nature, buried like a fabulous streak of alien metal in the granite of