“Mr. Jonas? Eldred?”
He turned, smiling, to the owner of the voice. No dewy-complexioned flower-girl with wide eyes and moist, parted lips stood there, but a skinny woman edging into late middle age—flat chest, flat bum, tight pale lips, hair scrooped so tight against her skull that it fair screamed. Only the wide eyes corresponded with his daydream. I believe I’ve made a conquest, Jonas thought sardonically.
“Why, Cordelia!” he said, reaching out and taking one of her hands in both of his.
“How lovely you look this morning!”
Thin color came up in her cheeks and she laughed a little. For a moment she looked forty-five instead of sixty. And she’s not sixty, Jonas thought. The lines around her mouth and the shadows under her eyes . . . those are new.
“You’re very kind,” she said, “but I know better. I haven’t been sleeping, and when women my age don’t sleep, they grow old rapidly.”
“I’m sorry to hear you’re sleeping badly,” he said. “But now that the weather’s changed, perhaps—”
“It’s not the weather. Might I speak to you, Eldred? I’ve thought and thought, and you’re the only one I dare turn to for advice.”
His smile widened. He placed her hand through his arm, then covered it with his own. Now her blush was like fire. With all that blood in her head, she might talk for hours. And Jonas had an idea that every word would be interesting.
3
With women of a certain age and temperament, tea was more effective than wine when it came to loosening the tongue. Jonas gave up his plans for a lager (and, perhaps, a flower-girl) without so much as a second thought. He seated sai Delgado in a sunny comer of the Green Heart pavilion (it was not far from a red rock Roland and Susan knew well), and ordered a large pot of tea; cakes, too.
They watched the Reaping Fair preparations go forward as they waited for the food and drink. The sunswept park was full of hammering and sawing and shouts and bursts of laughter.
“All Fair-Days are pleasant, but Reaping turns us all into children again, don’t you find?” Cordelia asked.
“Yes, indeed,” said Jonas, who hadn’t felt like a child even when he had been one.
“What I still like best is the bonfire,” she said, looking toward the great pile of sticks and boards that was being constructed at the far end of the park, eater-corner from the stage. It looked like a large wooden tepee. “I love it when the townsfolk bring their stuffy-guys and throw them on. Barbaric, but it always gives me such a pleasant shiver.”
“Aye,” Jonas said, and wondered if it would give her a pleasant shiver to know that three of the stuffy-guys thrown onto the Reap Night bonfire this year were apt to smell like pork and scream like harpies as they burned. If his luck was in, the one that screamed the longest would be the one with the pale blue eyes.
The tea and cakes came, and Jonas didn’t so much as glance at the girl’s full bosom when she bent to serve. He had eyes only for the fascinating sai Delgado, with her
nervous little shifting movements and odd, desperate look.
When the girl was gone, he poured out, put the teapot back on its trivet, then covered her hand with his. “Now, Cordelia,” he said in his warmest tone. “I can see something troubles you. Out with it. Confide in your friend Eldred.”
Her lips pressed so tightly together that they almost disappeared, but not even that effort could stop their trembling. Her eyes filled with tears; swam with them; overspilled. He took his napkin and, leaning across the table, wiped the tears away.
“Tell me,” he said tenderly.
“I will. I must tell somebody or go mad. But you must make one promise, Eldred.”
“Of course, molly.” He saw her blush more furiously than ever at this harmless endearment, and squeezed her hand. “Anything.”
“You mustn’t tell Hart. That disgusting spider of a Chancellor, either, but especially not the Mayor. If I’m right in what I suspect and he found out, he could send her west!” She almost moaned this, as if comprehending it as a real fact for the first time. “He could send us both west!”
Maintaining his sympathetic smile, he said: “Not a word to Mayor Thorin, not a word to Kimba Rimer. Promise.”
For a moment he thought that she wouldn’t take the plunge … or perhaps couldn’t.
Then, in a low, gaspy voice that sounded like ripping cloth, she said a single word.
“Dearborn.”
He felt his heart take a bump as the name that had been so much in his mind now passed her lips, and although he continued to smile, he could not forbear a single hard squeeze of her fingers that made her wince.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just that you startled me a little. Dearborn … a well-spoken enough lad, but 1 wonder if he’s entirely trustworthy.”
“I fear he’s been with my Susan.” Now it was her turn to squeeze, but Jonas didn’t mind. He hardly felt it, in fact. He continued to smile, hoping he did not look as flabbergasted as he felt. “I fear he’s been with her… as a man is with a woman. Oh, how horrible this is!”
She wept with a silent bitterness, taking little pecking peeks around as she did to make sure they were not being observed. Jonas had seen coyotes and wild dogs look around from their stinking dinners in just that fashion. He let her get as much of it out of her system as he could—he wanted her calm; incoherencies wouldn’t
help him—and when he saw her tears slackening, he held out a cup of tea. “Drink this.”
“Yes. Thank you.” The tea was still hot enough to steam, but she drank it down greedily. Her old throat must be lined with slate, Jonas thought. She set the cup down, and while he poured out fresh, she used her frilly panuelo to scrub the tears almost viciously from her face.
“I don’t like him,” she said. “Don’t like him, don’t trust him, none of those three with their fancy In-World bows and insolent eyes and strange ways of talking, but him in particular. Yet if anything’s gone on betwixt the two of em (and I’m so afraid it has), it comes back to her, doesn’t it? It’s the woman, after all, who must refuse the bestial impulses.”
He leaned over the table, looking at her with warm sympathy. “Tell me everything, Cordelia.”
She did.
4
Rhea loved everything about the glass ball, but what she especially loved was the way it unfailingly showed her people at their vilest. Never in its pink reaches did she see one child comforting another after a fall at play, or a tired husband with his head in his wife’s lap, or old people supping peacefully together at the end of the day; these things held no more interest for the glass, it seemed, than they did for her.
Instead she had seen acts of incest, mothers beating children, husbands beating wives. She had seen a gang of boys out west’rds of town (it would have amused Rhea to know these swaggering eight-year-olds called themselves the Big Coffin Hunters) go about enticing stray dogs with a bone and then cutting off their tails for a lark. She had seen robberies, and at least one murder: a wandering man who had stabbed his companion with a pitchfork after some sort of trivial argument.
That had been on the first drizzly night. The body still lay mouldering in a ditch beside the Great Road West, covered with a layer of straw and weeds. It might be discovered before the autumn storms came to drown another year; it might not.
She also glimpsed Cordelia Delgado and that hard gun, Jonas, sitting in Green Heart at one of the outside tables and talking about . . . well, of course she didn’t
know, did she? But she could see the look in the spinster bitch’s eyes. Infatuated with him, she was, all pink in the face. Gone all hot and sweet over a backshooter and failed gunslinger. It was comical, aye, and Rhea thought she would keep an eye on them, from time to time. Wery entertaining, it would likely be.
After showing her Cordelia and Jonas, the glass veiled itself once more. Rhea put it back in the box with the eye on the lock. Seeing Cordelia in the glass had reminded the old woman that she had unfinished business regarding Cordelia’s sluttish niece. That Rhea still hadn’t done that business was ironic but understandable—as soon as she had seen how to fix the young sai’s wagon, Rhea’s mind and emotions had settled again, the images in the ball had reappeared, and in her fascination with them Rhea had temporarily forgotten that Susan Delgado was alive. Now, however, she remembered her plan. Set the cat among the pigeons.