“Not as Sheriff' s deputies?”

“Nay, they answer to none but Thorin… or, mayhap, to Rimer. Their names are Jonas, Depape, and Reynolds. They look like hard boys to me… although Jonas’s boyhood is so long behind him that I imagine he’s forgot he ever had one.”

“Jonas is the leader?”

“Aye. He limps, has hair that falls to his shoulders pretty as any girl’s, and the quavery voice of an old gaffer who spends his days polishing the chimney-comer… but I think he’s the most dangerous of the three all the same. I’d guess these three have forgot more about helling than you and yer friends will ever learn.”

Now why had she told him all that? She didn’t know, exactly. Gratitude, perhaps. He had promised to keep the secret of this late-night meeting, and he had the look of a promise-keeper, in hack with his father or not.

“I’ll watch them. And I thank you for the advice.” They were now climbing a long, gentle slope. Overhead, Old Mother blazed relentlessly. “Bodyguards,” he mused. “Bodyguards in sleepy little Hambry. It’s strange times, Susan. Strange indeed.”

“Aye.” She had wondered about Jonas, Depape, and Reynolds herself, and could think of no good reason for them to be in town. Had they been Rimer’s doing. Rimer’s decision? It seemed likely-Thorin wasn’t the sort of man to even think about bodyguards, she would have said; the High Sheriff had always done well enough for him-but still… why?

They breasted the hill. Below them lay a nestle of buildings-the village of Hambry. Only a few lights still shone. The brightest cluster marked the Travellers’ Rest. From here, on the warm breeze, she could hear the piano beating out “Hey Jude” and a score of drunken voices gleefully murdering the chorus. Not the three men of whom she had warned Will Dearborn, though; they would be standing at the bar, watching the room with their flat eyes. Not the singing type were those three. Each had a small blue coffin-shape tattooed on his right hand, burned into the webbing between thumb and forefinger. She thought to tell Will this, then realized he’d see for himself soon enough. Instead, she pointed a little way down the slope, at a dark shape which overhung the road on a chain. “Do ye see that?”

''Yes.” He heaved a large and rather comical sigh. “Is it the object I fear beyond all others? Is it the dread shape of Mrs. Beech’s mailbox?”

“Aye. And it’s there we must part.”

“If you say we must, we must. Yet I wish-” Just then the wind shifted, as it sometimes did in the summer, and blew a strong gust out of the west. The smell of sea-salt was gone in an instant, and so was the sound of the drunken, singing voices. What replaced them was a sound infinitely more sinister, one that never failed to produce a scutter of gooseflesh up her back: a low, atonal noise, like the warble of a siren being turned by a man without much longer to live.

Will took a step backward, eyes widening, and again she noticed his hands take a dip toward his belt, as if reaching for something not there.

“What in gods’ name is that?”

“It’s a thinny,” she said quietly. “In Eyebolt Canyon. Have ye never heard of such?”

“Heard of, yes, but never heard until now. Gods, how do you stand it? It sounds alive!”

She had never thought of it quite like that, but now, in a way listening with his ears instead of her own, she thought he was right. It was as if some sick part of the night had gained a voice and was actually trying to sing.

She shivered. Rusher felt the momentary increased pressure of her knees and whickered softly, craning his head around to look at her.

“We don’t often hear it so clearly at this time of year,” she said. “In the fall, the men bum it to quiet.”

“I don’t understand.”

Who did? Who understood anything anymore? Gods, they couldn’t even turn off the few oil-pumps in Citgo that still worked, although half of them squealed like pigs in a slaughtering chute. These days you were usually just grateful to find things that still worked at all.

“In the summer, when there’s time, drovers and cowboys drag loads of brush to the mouth of Eyebolt,” she said. “Dead brush is all right, but live is better, for it’s smoke that’s wanted, and the heavier the better. Eye-bolt’s a box canyon, very short and steep-walled. Almost like a chimney lying on its side, you see?”

“Yes.”

“The traditional time for burning is Reap Mom-the day after the fair and the feast and the fire.”

“The first day of winter.”

“Aye although in these parts it doesn’t feel like winter so soon. In any case it’s no tradition; the brush is sometimes lit sooner, if the winds have been prankish or if the sound’s particularly strong. It upsets the livestock, you know-cows give poorly when the noise of the thinny’s strong-and it makes sleep difficult.”

“I should think it would.” Will was still looking north, and a stronger gust of wind blew his hat off. It fell to his back, the rawhide tugstring pulling against the line of his throat. The hair so revealed was a little long, and as black as a crow’s wing. She felt a sudden, greedy desire to run her hands through it, to let her fingers tell its texture-rough or smooth or silky? And how would it smell? At this she felt another shiver of heat down low in her belly. He turned to her as though he had read her mind, and she flushed, grateful that he wouldn’t be able to see the darkening of her cheek.

“How long has it been there?”

“Since before I was born,” she said, “but not before my da was born. He said that the ground shook in an earthquake just before it came. Some say the earthquake brought it, some say that’s superstitious nonsense. All I know is that it’s always been there. The smoke quiets it awhile, the way it will quiet a hive of bees or wasps, but the sound always comes back. The brush piled at the mouth helps to keep any wandering livestock out, too-sometimes they’re drawn to it, gods know why. But if a cow or sheep does happen to yet in-after the burning and before the next year’s pile has started to grow, mayhap-it doesn’t come back out. Whatever it is, it’s hungry.”

She put his poncho aside, lifted her right leg over the saddle without so much as touching the horn, and slipped off Rusher-all this in a single liquid movement. It was a stunt made for pants rather than a dress, and she knew from the further widening of his eyes that he’d seen a good lot of her… but nothing she had to wash with the bathroom door closed, so what of that? And that quick dismount had ever been a favorite trick of hers when she was in a showoffy mood.

“Pretty!” he exclaimed.

“I learned it from my da,” she said, responding to the more innocent interpretation of his compliment. Her smile as she handed him the reins, however, suggested that she was willing to accept the compliment any way it was meant.

“Susan? Have you ever seen the thinny?”

“Aye, once or twice. From above.”

“What does it look like?”

“Ugly,” she responded at once. Until tonight, when she had observed Rhea’s smile up close and endured her twiddling, meddling fingers, she would have said it was the ugliest thing she had ever seen. “It looks a little like a slow-burning peat fire, and a little like a swamp full of scummy green water. There’s a mist that rises off it. Sometimes it looks like long, skinny arms. With hands at the end of em.”

“Is it growing?”

“Aye, they say it is, that every thinny grows, but it grows slowly. 'Twon’t escape Eyebolt Canyon in your time or mine.”

She looked up at the sky, and saw that the constellations had continued to tilt along their tracks as they spoke. She felt she could talk to him all night-about the thinny, or Citgo, or her irritating aunt, or just about anything-and the idea dismayed her. Why should this happen to her now, for the gods’ sake? After three years of dismissing the Hambry boys, why should she now meet a boy who interested her so strangely? Why was life so unfair?