“In any case, Will, Hart’s opinion of you and yer friends can hardly concern ye, can it? Ye have a job to do, that’s all. If he helps ye, why not just accept and be grateful?”
“Because something’s wrong here,” he said, and the serious, almost somber quality of his voice frightened her a little.
“Wrong? With the Mayor? With the Horsemen’s Association? What are ye talking about?”
He looked at her steadily, then seemed to decide something. “I’m going to trust you, Susan.”
“I’m not sure I want thy trust any more than I want thy love,” she said.
He nodded. “And yet, to do the job I was sent to do, I have to trust someone. Can
you understand that?”
She looked into his eyes, then nodded.
He stepped next to her, so close she fancied she could feel the warmth of his skin.
“Look down there. Tell me what you see.”
She looked, then shrugged. “The Drop. Same as always.” She smiled a little. “And as beautiful. This has always been my favorite place in all the world.”
“Aye, it’s beautiful, all right. What else do you see?”
“Horses, of courses.” She smiled to show this was a joke (an old one of her da’s, in fact), but he didn’t smile back. Fair to look at, and courageous, if the stories they were already telling about town were true— quick in both thought and movement, too. Really not much sense of humor, though. Well, there were worse failings.
Grabbing a girl’s bosom when she wasn’t expecting it might be one of them.
“Horses. Yes. But does it look like the right number of them? You’ve been seeing horses on the Drop all your life, and surely no one who’s not in the Horsemen’s Association is better qualified to say.”
“And ye don’t trust them?”
“They’ve given us everything we’ve asked for, and they’re as friendly as dogs under the dinner-table, but no—1 don’t think 1 do.”
“Yet ye’d trust me.”
He looked at her steadily with his beautiful and frightening eyes—a darker blue than they would later be, not yet faded out by the suns of ten thousand drifting days. “I have to trust someone,” he repeated.
She looked down, almost as though he had rebuked her. He reached out, put gentle fingers beneath her chin, and tipped her face up again. “Does it seem the right number? Think carefully!”
But now that he’d brought it to her attention, she hardly needed to think about it at all. She had been aware of the change for some time, she supposed, but it had been gradual, easy to overlook.
“No,” she said at last. “It’s not right.”
“Too few or too many? Which?”
She paused for a moment. Drew in breath. Let it out in a long sigh. “Too many.
Far too many.”
Will Dearborn raised his clenched fists to shoulder-height and gave them a single hard shake. His blue eyes blazed like the spark-lights of which her grand-da had
told her. “I knew it,” he said. “I knew it.”
8
“How many horses are down there?” he asked.
“Below us? Or on the whole Drop?”
“Just below us.”
She looked carefully, making no attempt to actually count. That didn’t work; it only confused you. She saw four good-sized groups of about twenty horses each, moving about on the green almost exactly as birds moved about in the blue above them. There were perhaps nine smaller groups, ranging from octets to quartets …
several pairs (they reminded her of lovers, but everything did today, it seemed) …
a few galloping loners—young stallions, mostly . . .
“A hundred and sixty?” he asked in a low, almost hesitant voice.
She looked at him, surprised. “Aye. A hundred sixty’s the number I had in mind.
To a pin.”
“And how much of the Drop are we looking at? A quarter? A third?”
“Much less.” She tilted him a small smile. “As I think thee knows. A sixth of the total open graze, perhaps.”
“If there are a hundred and sixty horses free-grazing on each sixth, that comes to ..
.”
She waited for him to come up with nine hundred and sixty. When he did, she nodded. He looked down a moment longer, and grunted with surprise when Rusher nosed him in the small of the back. Susan put a curled hand to her mouth to stifle a laugh. From the impatient way he pushed the horse’s muzzle away, she guessed he still saw little that was funny.
“How many more are stabled or training or working, do you reckon?” he asked.
“One for every three down there. At a guess.”
“So we’d be talking twelve hundred head of horses. All threaded stock, no muties.”
She looked at him with faint surprise. “Aye. There’s almost no mutie stock here in Mejis … in any of the Outer Baronies, for that matter.”
“You true-breed more than three out of every five?”
“We breed em all! Of course every now and then we get a freak that has to be put down, but—”
“Not one freak out of every five livebirths? One out of five born with—” How had Renfrew put it? “With extra legs or its guts on the outside?”
Her shocked look was enough answer. “Who’s been telling ye such?”
“Renfrew. He also told me that there was about five hundred and seventy head of threaded stock here in Mejis.”
“That’s just . . .” She gave a bewildered little laugh. “Just crazy! If my da was here—”
“But he’s not,” Roland said, his tone as dry as a snapping twig. “He’s dead.”
For a moment she seemed not to register the change in that tone. Then, as if an eclipse had begun to happen somewhere inside her head, her entire aspect darkened. “My da had an accident. Do you understand that, Will Dearborn? An accident. It was terribly sad, but the sort of thing that happens, sometimes. A horse rolled on him. Ocean Foam. Fran says Foam saw a snake in the grass.”
“Fran Lengyll?”
“Aye.” Her skin was pale, except for two wild roses—pink, like those in the bouquet he’d sent her by way of Sheemie—glowing high up on her cheekbones.
“Fran rode many miles with my father. They weren’t great friends—they were of different classes, for one thing—but they rode together. I’ve a cap put away somewhere that Fran’s first wife made for my christening. They rode the trail together. 1 can’t believe Fran Lengyll would lie about how my da died, let alone that he had … anything to do with it.”
Yet she looked doubtfully down at the running horses. So many. Too many. Her da would have seen. And her da would have wondered what she was wondering now: whose brands were on the extras?
“It so happens Fran Lengyll and my friend Stockworth had a discussion about horses,” Will said. His voice sounded almost casual, but there was nothing casual on his face. “Over glasses of spring water, after beer had been offered and refused.
They spoke of them much as I did with Renfrew at Mayor Thorin’s welcoming dinner. When Richard asked sai Lengyll to estimate riding horses, he said perhaps four hundred.”
“Insane.”
“It would seem so,” Will agreed.
“Do they not kennit the horses are out here where ye can see em?”
“They know we’ve barely gotten started,” he said, “and that we’ve begun with the
fisherfolk. We’ll be a month yet, I’m sure they think, before we start to concern ourselves with the horseflesh hereabouts. And in the meantime, they have an attitude about us of… how shall I put it? Well, never mind how I’d put it. I’m not very good with words, but my friend Arthur calls it ‘genial contempt.’ They leave the horses out in front of our eyes, I think, because they don’t believe we’ll know what we’re looking at. Or because they think we won’t believe what we’re seeing.
I’m very glad I found you out here.”
Just so I could give you a more accurate horse-count? Is that the only reason?
“But ye will get around to counting the horses. Eventually. I mean, that must surely be one of the Affiliation’s main needs.”
He gave her an odd look, as if she had missed something that should have been obvious. It made her feel self-conscious.
“What? What is it?”
“Perhaps they expect the extra horses to be gone by the time we get around to this side of the Barony’s business.”
“Gone where?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t like this. Susan, you will keep this just between the two of us, won’t you?”
She nodded. She’d be insane to tell anyone she had been with Will Dearborn, unchaperoned except by Rusher and Pylon, out on the Drop.
“It may all turn out to be nothing, but if it doesn’t, knowing could be dangerous.”
Which led back to her da again. Lengyll had told her and Aunt Cord that Pat had been thrown, and that Ocean Foam had then rolled upon him. Neither of them had had any reason to doubt the man’s story. But Fran Lengyll had also told Will’s friend that there were only four hundred head of riding stock in Mejis, and that was a bald lie.