(ye’ll never see sai Jonas again)

were in Coral’s head now; they echoed and would not leave.

2

Twelve o’ the clock sounded from the squat bell-tower atop the Town Gathering Hall. And if the unaccustomed silence which hung over the rest of Hambry seemed strange as that Reap morning passed into afternoon, the silence in the Travellers’ Rest was downright eerie. Better than two hundred souls were packed together beneath the dead gaze of The Romp,, all of them drinking hard, yet there was hardly a sound among them save for the shuffle of feet and the impatient rap of glasses on the bar, indicating that another drink was wanted.

Sheb had tried a hesitant tune on the piano-“Big Bottle Boogie,” everyone liked that one-and a cowboy with a mutie-mark on one cheek had put the tip of a knife in his ear and told him to shut up that noise if he wanted to keep what passed for his brains on the starboard side of his eardrum. Sheb, who would be happy to go on drawing breath for another thousand years if the gods so allowed, quit his piano-bench at once, and went to the bar to help Stanley and Pettie the Trotter serve up the booze.

The mood of the drinkers was confused and sullen. Reaping Fair had been stolen from them, and they didn’t know what to do about it. There would still be a bonfire, and plenty of stuffy-guys to bum on it, but there were no Reap-kisses today and would be no dancing tonight; no riddles, no races, no pig-wrestle, no jokes… no good cheer, dammit! No hearty farewell to the end of the year! Instead of joviality there had been murder in the dark, and the escape of the guilty, and now only the hope of retribution instead of the certainty of it. These folk, sullen-drunk and as potentially dangerous as stormclouds filled with lightning, wanted someone to focus on, someone to tell them what to do.

And, of course, someone to toss on the fire, as in the days of Eld.

It was at this point, not long after the last toll of noon had faded into the cold air, that the batwing doors opened and two women came in. A good many knew the crone in the lead, and several of them crossed their eyes with their thumbs as a ward against her evil look. A murmur ran through the room. It was the Coos, the old witch-woman, and although her face was pocked with sores and her eyes sunk so deep in their sockets they could barely be seen, she gave off a peculiar sense of vitality. Her lips were red, as if she had been eating winterberries.

The woman behind her walked slowly and stiffly, with one hand pressed against her midsection. Her face was as white as the witch-woman’s mouth was red.

Rhea advanced to the middle of the floor, passing the gawking trail-hands at the Watch Me tables without so much as a glance. When she reached the center of the bar and stood directly beneath The Romp’s glare, she turned to look at the silent drovers and townsfolk.

“Most of ye know me!” she cried in a rusty voice which stopped just short of stridency. “Those of ye who don’t have never wanted a love-potion or needed the ram put back in yer rod or gotten tired of a nagging mother-in-law’s tongue. I’m Rhea, the wise-woman of the Coos, and this lady beside me is aunt to the girl who freed three murderers last night… this same girl who murdered yer town’s Sheriff and a good young man- married, he was, and with a kid on the way. He stood before her with 'is defenseless hands raised, pleadin for his life on behalf of his wife and his babby to come, and still she shot 'im! Cruel, she is! Cruel and heartless!”

A mutter ran through the crowd. Rhea raised her twisted old claws and it stilled at once. She turned in a slow circle to see them all, hands still raised, looking like the world’s oldest, ugliest prizefighter.

“Strangers came and ye welcomed em in!” she cried in her rusty crow’s voice. “Welcomed em and gave em bread to eat, and it’s ruin they’ve fed ye in return! The deaths of those ye loved and depended on, spoilage to the time of the harvest, and gods know what curses upon the time to follow fin de ano!”

More murmurs, now louder. She had touched their deepest fear: that this year’s evil would spread, might even snarl the newly threaded stock which had so slowly and hopefully begun to emerge along the Outer Arc.

“But they’ve gone and likely won’t be back!” Rhea continued. “Mayhap just as well-why should their strange blood taint our ground? But there’s this other… one raised among us… a young woman gone traitor to her town and rogue among her own kind.”

Her voice dropped to a hoarse whisper on this last phrase; her listeners strained forward to hear, faces grim, eyes big. And now Rhea pulled the pallid, skinny woman in the rusty black dress forward. She stood Cordelia in front other like a doll or a ventriloquist’s dummy, and whispered in her ear… but the whisper travelled, somehow; they all heard it.

“Come, dear. Tell em what ye told me.”

In a dead, carrying voice, Cordelia said: “She said she wouldn’t be the Mayor’s gilly. He wasn’t good enough for such as her, she said. And then she seduced Will Dearborn. The price of her body was a fine position in Gilead as his consort… and the murder of Hart Thorin. Dearborn paid her price. Lusty as he was for her, he paid gladly. His friends helped; they may have had the use of 'er as well, for all I know. Chancellor Rimer must have gotten in their way. Or p'rhaps they just saw him, and felt like doing him, too.”

“Bastards!” Pettie cried. “Sneaking young culls!”

“Now tell cm what’s needed to clarify the new season before it’s sp'iled, dearie,” Rhea said in a crooning voice.

Cordelia Delgado raised her head and looked around at the men. She took a breath, pulling the sour, intermingled smells of gray and beer and smoke and whiskey deep into her spinster’s lungs.

“Take her. Ye must take her. I say it in love and sorrow, so I do.”

Silent. Their eyes.

“Paint her hands.”

The glass gaze of the thing on the wall, looking its stuffed judgment over the waiting room.

“Charyou tree,” Cordelia whispered.

They did not cry their agreement but sighed it, like autumn wind through stripped trees.

3

Sheemie ran after the bad Coffin Hunter and Susan-sai until he could literally run no more-his lungs were afire and the stitch which had formed in his side turned into a cramp. He pitched forward onto the grass of the Drop, his left hand clutching his right armpit, grimacing with pain.

He lay there for some time with his face deep in the fragrant grass, knowing they were getting farther and farther ahead but also knowing it would do him no good to get up and start running again until the stitch was good and gone. If he tried to hurry the process, the stitch would simply come back and lay him low again. So he lay where he was, lifting his head to look at the tracks left by Susan-sai and the bad Coffin Hunter, and he was just about ready to try his feet when Caprichoso bit him. Not a nip, mind you, but a good healthy chomp. Capi had had a difficult twenty-four hours, and he hadn’t much liked to see the author of all his misery lying on the grass, apparently taking a nap.

“Yeee-OWWWW-by-damn!” Sheemie cried, and rocketed to his feet. There was nothing so magical as a good bite on the ass, a man of more philosophic bent might have reflected; it made all other concerns, no matter how heavy or sorrowful, disappear like smoke.

He whirled about. “Why did you do that, you mean old sneak of a Capi?” Sheemie was rubbing his bottom vigorously, and large tears of pain stood out in his eyes. “That hurts like… like a big old sonovabitch!”

Caprichoso extended his neck to its maximum length, bared his teeth in the satanic grin which only mules and dromedaries can command, and brayed. To Sheemie that bray sounded very like laughter.