kick in the slats to relieve the boredom and bring a girl back to reality. But of making shoes she knew nothing, nor wished to. Brian Hookey made them at the forge behind his barn and hostelry, however; Susan easily picked out four new ones of the right size, enjoying the smell of horseflesh and fresh hay as she did.
Fresh paint, too. Hockey’s Stable & Smithy looked very well, indeed. Glancing up, she saw not so much as a single hole in the barn roof. Times had been good for Hookey, it seemed.
He wrote the new shoes up on a beam, still wearing his blacksmith’s apron and squinting horribly out of one eye at his own figures. When Susan began to speak haltingly to him about payment, he laughed, told her he knew she’d settle her accounts as soon as she could, gods bless her, yes. ‘Sides, they weren’t any of them going anywhere, were they? Nawp, nawp. All the time gently propelling her through the fragrant smells of hay and horses toward the door. He would not have treated even so small a matter as four iron shoes in such a carefree manner a year ago, but now she was Mayor Thorin’s good friend, and things had changed.
The afternoon sunlight was dazzling after the dimness of Hockey’s barn, and she was momentarily blinded, groping forward toward the street with the leather bag bouncing on her hip and the shoes clashing softly inside. She had just a moment to register a shape looming in the brightness, and then it thumped into her hard enough to rattle her teeth and make Felicia’s new shoes clang. She would have fallen, but for strong hands that quickly reached out and grasped her shoulders. By then her eyes were adjusting and she saw with dismay and amusement that the young man who had almost knocked her sprawling into the dirt was one of Will’s friends— Richard Stockworth.
“Oh, sai, your pardon!” he said, brushing the arms of her dress as if he had knocked her over. “Are you well? Are you quite well?”
“Quite well,” she said, smiling. “Please don’t apologize.” She felt a sudden wild impulse to stand on tiptoe and kiss his mouth and say, Give that to Will and tell him to never mind what I said! Tell him there are a thousand more where that came from! Tell him to come and get every one!
Instead, she fixed on a comic image: this Richard Stockworth smacking Will full on the mouth and saying it was from Susan Delgado. She began to giggle. She put her hands to her mouth, but it did no good. Sai Stockworth smiled back at her . . .
tentatively, cautiously. He probably thinks I’m mad . . . and I am! I am!
“Good day, Mr. Stockworth,” she said, and passed on before she could embarrass herself further.
“Good day, Susan Delgado,” he called in return.
She looked back once, when she was fifty yards or so farther up the street, but he was already gone. Not into Hockey’s, though; of that she was quite sure. She wondered what Mr. Stockworth had been doing at that end of town to begin with.
Half an hour later, as she took the new iron from her da’s shoebag, she found out.
There was a folded scrap of paper tucked between two of the shoes, and even before she unfolded it, she understood that her collision with Mr. Stockworth hadn’t been an accident.
She recognized Will’s handwriting at once from the note in the bouquet.
Susan,
Can you meet me at Citgo this evening or tomorrow evening? Very important. Has to do with what we discussed before. Please.
W.
P.S. Best you bum this note.
She burned it at once, and as she watched the flames first flash up and then die down, she murmured over and over the one word in it which had struck her the hardest: Please.
3
She and Aunt Cord ate a simple, silent evening meal—bread and soup— and when it was done, Susan rode Felicia out to the Drop and watched the sun go down. She would not be meeting him this evening, no. She already owed too much sorrow to impulsive, unthinking behavior. But tomorrow?
Why Citgo?
Has to do with what we discussed before.
Yes, probably. She did not doubt his honor, although she had much come to wonder if he and his friends were who they said they were. He probably did want to see her for some reason which bore on his mission (although how the oilpatch
could have anything to do with too many horses on the Drop she did not know), but there was something between them now, something sweet and dangerous.
They might start off talking but would likely end up kissing … and kissing would just be the start. Knowing didn’t change feeling, though; she wanted to see him.
Needed to see him.
So she sat astride her new horse—another of Hart Thorin’s payments-in-advance on her virginity—and watched the sun swell and turn red in the west. She listened to the faint grumble of the thinny, and for the first time in her sixteen years was truly torn by indecision. All she wanted stood against all she believed of honor, and her mind roared with conflict. Around all, like a rising wind around an unstable house, she felt the idea of ka growing. Yet to give over one’s honor for that reason was so easy, wasn’t it? To excuse the fall of virtue by invoking all-powerful ka. It was soft thinking.
Susan felt as blind as she’d been when leaving the darkness of Brian Hockey’s bam for the brightness of the street. At one point she cried silently in frustration without even being aware of it, and pervading her every effort to think clearly and rationally was her desire to kiss him again, and to feel his hand cupping her breast.
She had never been a religious girl, had little faith in the dim gods of Mid-World, so at the last of it, with the sun gone and the sky above its point of exit going from red to purple, she tried to pray to her father. And an answer came, although whether from him or from her own heart she didn’t know.
Let ka mind itself, the voice in her mind said. It will, anyway; it always does. If ka. should overrule your honor, so it will be; in the meantime, Susan, there’s no one to mind it but yourself. Let ka go and mind the virtue of your promise, hard as that may be.
“All right,” she said. In her current state she discovered that any decision—even one that would cost her another chance to see Will—was a relief. “I’ll honor my promise. Ka can take care of itself.”
In the gathering shadows, she clucked sidemouth to Felicia and turned for home.
4
The next day was Sanday, the traditional cowboys’ day of rest. Roland’s little band took this day off as well. “It’s fair enough that we should,” Cuthbert said, “since
we don’t know what the hell we’re doing in the first place.”
On this particular Sanday—their sixth since coming to Hambry— Cuthbert was in the upper market (lower market was cheaper, by and large, but too fishy-smelling for his liking), looking at brightly colored scrapes and trying not to cry. For his mother had a serape, it was a great favorite others, and thinking of how she would ride out sometimes with it flowing back from her shoulders had filled him with homesickness so strong it was savage. “Arthur Heath,” Roland’s ka-mai, missing his mama so badly his eyes were wet! It was a joke worthy of… well, worthy of Cuthbert Allgood.
As he stood so, looking at the serapes and a hanging rack of dolina blankets with his hands clasped behind his back like a patron in an art gallery (and blinking back tears all the while), there came a light tap on his shoulder. He turned, and there was the girl with the blonde hair.
Cuthbert wasn’t surprised that Roland was smitten with her. She was nothing short of breathtaking, even dressed in jeans and a farmshirt. Her hair was tied back with a series of rough rawhide hanks, and she had eyes of the brightest gray Cuthbert had ever seen. Cuthbert thought it was a wonder that Roland had been able to continue with any other aspect of his life at all, even down to the washing of his teeth. Certainly she came with a cure for Cuthbert; sentimental thoughts of his mother disappeared in an instant.
“Sai,” he said. It was all he could manage, at least to start with.
She nodded and held out what the folk of Mejis called a corvette— “little packet”
was the literal definition; “little purse” was the practical one. These small leather accessories, big enough for a few coins but not much more, were more often carried by ladies than gentlemen, although that was not a hard-and-fast rule of fashion.