She leaned closer still, the deep sockets of her eyes filling with pink fire. Ermot, sensing that she remained immune to his blandishments, crawled disconsolately away across the floor, in search of bugs. Musty pranced away from him, spitting feline curses, his six-legged shadow huge and misshapen on the firestruck wall.
11
Roland sensed the moment rushing at them. Somehow he managed to step away from her, and she stepped back from him, her eyes wide and her cheeks flushed—he could see that flush even in the light of the newly risen moon. His balls were throbbing. His groin felt full of liquid lead.
She half-turned away from him, and Roland saw that her sombrero had gone askew on her back. He reached out one trembling hand and straightened it. She clasped his fingers in a brief but strong grip, then bent to pick up her riding gloves, which she had stripped off in her need to touch him skin to skin. When she stood again, the wash of blood abruptly left her face, and she reeled. But for his hands on her shoulders, steadying her, she might have fallen. She turned toward him, eyes rueful.
“What are we to do? Oh, Will, what are we to do?”
“The best we can,” he said. “As we both always have. As our fathers taught us.”
“This is mad.”
Roland, who had never felt anything so sane in his life—even the deep ache in his groin felt sane and right—said nothing.
“Do ye know how dangerous ’tis?” she asked, and went on before he could reply.
“Aye, ye do. I can see ye do. If we were seen together at all, ‘twould be serious. To be seen as we just were—”
She shivered. He reached for her and she stepped back. “Best ye don’t, Will. If ye do, won’t be nothing done between us but spooning. Unless that was your intention?”
“You know it wasn’t.”
She nodded. “Have ye set your friends to watch?”
“Aye,” he said, and then his face opened in that unexpected smile she loved so well. “But not where they can watch us.”
“Thank the gods for that,” she said. and laughed rather distractedly. Then she stepped closer to him, so close that he was hard put not to take her in his arms again. She looked curiously up into his face. “Who are you, really. Will?”
“Almost who I say I am. That’s the joke of this, Susan. My friends and I weren’t sent here because we were drunk and belling, but we weren’t sent here to uncover any fell plot or secret conspiracy, either. We were just boys to be put out of the way in a time of danger. All that’s happened since—” He shook his head to show how helpless he felt, and Susan thought again of her father saying ka was like a
wind—when it came it might take your chickens, your house, your bam. Even your life.
“And is Will Dearborn your real name?”
He shrugged. “One name’s as good as another, I wot, if the heart that answers to it is true. Susan, you were at Mayor’s House today, for my friend Richard saw you ride up—”
“Aye, fittings,” she said. “For I am to be this year’s Reaping Girl— it’s Hart’s choice, nothing I ever would have had on my own, mark I say it. A lot of foolishness, and hard on Olive as well, I warrant.”
“You will make the most beautiful Reap-Girl that ever was,” he said, and the clear sincerity in his voice made her tingle with pleasure; her cheeks grew warm again.
There were five changes of costume for the Reaping Girl between the noon feast and the bonfire at dusk, each more elaborate than the last (in Gilead there would have been nine; in that way, Susan didn’t know how lucky she was), and she would have worn all five happily for Will, had he been the Reaping Lad. (This year’s Lad was Jamie McCann, a pallid and whey-faced stand-in for Hart Thorin, who was approximately forty years too old and gray for the job.) Even more happily would she have worn the sixth—a silvery shift with wisp-thin straps and a hem that stopped high on her thighs. This was a costume no one but Maria, her maid, Conchetta, her seamstress, and Hart Thorin would ever see. It was the one she would be wearing when she went to the old man’s couch as his gilly, after the feast was over.
“When you were up there, did you see the ones who call themselves the Big Coffin Hunters?”
“I saw Jonas and the one with the cloak, standing together in the courtyard and talking,” she said. “Not Depape? The redhead?” She shook her head.
“Do you know the game Castles. Susan?”
“Aye. My father showed me when I was small.”
“Then you know how the red pieces stand at one end of the board and the white at the other. How they come around the Hillocks and creep toward each other, setting screens for cover. What’s going on here in Ham-Dry is very like that. And, as in the game, it has now become a question of who will break cover first. Do you understand?”
She nodded at once. “In the game, the first one around his Hillock is vulnerable.”
“In life, too. Always. But sometimes even staying in cover is difficult. My friends and I have counted nearly everything we dare count. To count the rest—”
“The horses on the Drop, for instance.”
“Aye, just so. To count them would be to break cover. Or the oxen we know about—”
Her eyebrows shot up. “There are no oxen in Hambry. Ye must be mistaken about that.”
“No mistake.”
“Where?”
“The Rocking H.”
Now her eyebrows drew back down, and knitted in a thoughtful frown. “That’s Laslo Rimer’s place.”
“Aye—Kimba’s brother. Nor are those the only treasures hidden away in Hambry these days. There are extra wagons, extra tack hidden in barns belonging to members of the Horsemen’s Association, extra caches of feed—”
“Will, no!”
“Yes. All that and more. But to count them—to be seen counting them—is to break cover. To risk being Castled. Our recent days have been pretty nightmarish—we try to look profitably busy without moving over to the Drop side of Hambry, where most of the danger lies. It’s harder and harder to do. Then we received a message—”
“A message? How? From whom?”
“Best you not know those things, I think. But it’s led us to believe that some of the answers we’re looking for may be at Citgo.”
“Will, d’ye think that what’s out here may help me to know more about what happened to my da?”
“I don’t know. It’s possible, I suppose, but not likely. All I know for sure is that I finally have a chance to count something that matters and not be seen doing it.”
His blood had cooled enough for him to hold out his hand to her; Susan’s had cooled enough for her to take it in good confidence. She had put her glove back on again, however. Better safe than sorry.
“Come on,” she said. “I know a path.”
12
In the moon’s pale half-light, Susan led him out of the orange grove and toward the thump and squeak of the oilpatch. Those sounds made Roland’s back prickle; made him wish for one of the guns hidden under the bunk-house floorboards back at the Bar K.
“Ye can trust me, Will, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be much help to ye,” she said in a voice just a notch above a whisper. “I’ve been within hearing distance of Citgo my whole life, but I could count the number of times I’ve actually been in it on the fingers of both hands, so I could. The first two or three were on dares from my friends.”
“And then?”
“With my da. He were always interested in the Old People, and my Aunt Cord always said he’d come to a bad end, meddling in their leavings.” She swallowed hard. “And he did come to a bad end, although I doubt it were the Old People responsible. Poor Da.”
They had reached a smoothwire fence. Beyond it, the gantries of the oil wells stood against the sky like sentinels the size of Lord Perth. How many had she said were still working? Nineteen, he thought. The sound of them was ghastly—the sound of monsters being choked to death. Of course it was the kind of place that kids dared each other to go into; a kind of open-air haunted house.
He held two of the wires apart so she could slip between them, and she did the same for him. As he passed through, he saw a line of white porcelain cylinders marching down the post closest to him. A fencewire went through each.
“You understand what these are? Were?” he asked Susan, tapping one of the cylinders.