Her earlier thought, the one she’d heard in her father’s voice, recurred to her: If it’s ka, it’ll come like a wind, and your plans will stand before it no more than a barn before a cyclone.
But no. And no. And no. So set she, with all her considerable determination, her mind against the idea. This was no bam; this was her life.
Susan reached out and touched the rusty tin of Mrs. Beech’s mailbox, as if to steady herself in the world. Her little hopes and daydreams didn’t mean so much, perhaps, but her father had taught her to measure herself by her ability to do the things she’d said she would do, and she would not overthrow his teachings simply because she happened to encounter a good-looking boy at a time when her body and her emotions were in a stew.
“I’ll leave ye here to either rejoin yer friends or resume yer ride,” she said. The gravity she heard in her voice made her feel a bit sad, for it was an adult gravity. “But remember yer promise, Will-if ye see me at Seafront-Mayor’s House-and ifye’d be my friend, see me there for the first time. As I’d see you.”
He nodded, and she saw her seriousness now mirrored in his own face. And the sadness, mayhap. “I’ve never asked a girl to ride out with me, or if she’d accept a visit of me. I’d ask of you, Susan, daughter of Patrick-I’d even bring you flowers to sweeten my chances-but it would do no good, I think.”
She shook her head. “Nay. Twouldn’t.”
“Are you promised in marriage? It’s forward of me to ask, I know, but I mean no harm.”
“I’m sure ye don’t, but I’d as soon not answer. My position is a delicate one just now, as I told ye. Besides, it’s late. Here’s where we part, Will. But stay… one more moment…”
She rummaged in the pocket of her apron and brought out half a cake wrapped in a piece of green leaf. The other half she had eaten on her way up to the Coos… in what now felt like the other half of her life. She held what was left of her little evening meal out to Rusher, who sniffed it, then ate it and nuzzled her hand. She smiled, liking the velvet tickle in the cup of her palm. “Aye, thee’s a good horse, so ye are.”
She looked at Will Dearborn, who stood in the road, shuffling his dusty boots and gazing at her unhappily. The hard look was gone from his face, now; he looked her age again, or younger. “We were well met, weren’t we?” he asked.
She stepped forward, and before she could let herself think about what she was doing, she put her hands on his shoulders, stood on her toes, and kissed him on the mouth. The kiss was brief but not sisterly.
“Aye, very well met. Will.” But when he moved toward her (as thoughtlessly as a flower turning its face to follow the sun), wishing to repeat the experience, she pushed him back a step, gently but firmly.
“Nay, that was only a thank-you, and one thank-you should be enough for a gentleman. Go yer course in peace, Will.”
He took up the reins like a man in a dream, looked at them for a moment as if he didn’t know what in the world they were, and then looked hack at her. She could see him working to clear his mind and emotions of the impact her kiss had made. She liked him for it. And she was very glad she had done it.
“And you yours,” he said, swinging into the saddle. “I look forward to meeting you for the first time.”
He smiled at her, and she saw both longing and wishes in that smile. Then he gigged the horse, turned him, and started back the way they’d come-to have another look at the oil patch, mayhap. She stood where she was, by Mrs. Beech’s mailbox, willing him to turn around and wave so she could see his face once more. She felt sure he would… but he didn’t. Then, just as she was about to turn away and start down the hill to town, he did turn, and his hand lifted, fluttering for a moment in the dark like a moth.
Susan lifted her own in return and then went her way, feeling happy and unhappy at the same time. Yet-and this was perhaps the most important thing-she no longer felt soiled. When she had touched the boy’s lips, Rhea’s touch seemed to have left her skin. A small magic, perhaps, but she welcomed it.
She walked on, smiling a little and looking up at the stars more frequently than was her habit when out after dark.
Chapter IV
LONG AFTER MOONSET
1
He rode restlessly for nearly two hours back and forth along what she called the Drop, never pushing Rusher above a trot, although what he wanted to do was gallop the big gelding under the stars until his own blood began to cool a little.
It’ll cool plenty if you draw attention to yourself, he thought, and likely you won’t even have to cool it yourself. Fools are the only folk on the earth who can absolutely count on getting what they deserve. That old saying made him think of the scarred and bowlegged man who had been his life’s greatest teacher, and he smiled.
At last he turned his horse down the slope to the trickle of brook which ran there, and followed it a mile and a half upstream (past several gathers of horse; they looked at Rusher with a kind of sleepy, wall-eyed surprise) to a grove of willows. From the hollow within, a horse whickered softly. Rusher whickered in return, stamping one hoof and nodding his head up and down.
His rider ducked his own head as he passed through the willow fronds, and suddenly there was a narrow and inhuman white face hanging before him, its upper half all but swallowed by black, pupilless eyes.
He dipped for his guns-the third time tonight he’d done that, and for the third time there was nothing there. Not that it mattered; already he recognized what was hanging before him on a string: that idiotic rook’s skull.
The young man who was currently calling himself Arthur Heath had taken it off his saddle (it amused him to call the skull so perched their lookout, “ugly as an old gammer, but perfect cheap to feed”) and hung it here as a prank greeting. Him and his jokes! Rusher’s master batted it aside hard enough to break the string and send the skull flying into the dark.
“Fie, Roland,” said a voice from the shadows. It was reproachful, but there was laughter bubbling just beneath… as there always was. Cuthbert was his oldest friend-the marks of their first teeth had been embedded on many of the same toys-but Roland had in some ways never understood him. Nor was it just his laughter; on the long-ago day when Hax, the palace cook, was to be hung for a traitor on Gallows Hill, Cuthbert had been in an agony of terror and remorse. He’d told Roland he couldn’t stay, couldn’t watch… but in the end he had done both. Because neither the stupid jokes nor the easy surface emotions were the truth of Cuthbert Allgood.
As Roland entered the hollow at the center of the grove, a dark shape stepped out from behind the tree where it had been keeping. Halfway across the clearing, it resolved itself into a tall, narrow-hipped boy who was barefooted below his jeans and bare-chested above them. In one hand he held an enormous antique revolver-a kind which was sometimes called a beer-barrel because of the cylinder’s size.
“Fie,” Cuthbert repeated, as if he liked the sound of this word, not archaic only in forgotten backwaters like Mejis. “That’s a fine way to treat the guard o’ the watch, smacking the poor thin-faced fellow halfway to the nearest mountain-range!”
“If I’d been wearing a gun, I likely would have blown it to smithereens and woken half the countryside.”
“I knew you wouldn’t be going about strapped,” Cuthbert answered mildly. “You’re remarkably ill-looking, Roland son of Steven, but nobody’s fool even as you approach the ancient age of fifteen.”
“I thought we agreed we’d use the names we’re travelling under. Even among ourselves.”
Cuthbert stuck out his leg, bare heel planted in the turf, and bowed with his arms outstretched and his hands strenuously bent at the wrist-an inspired imitation of the sort of man for whom court has become career. He also looked remarkably like a heron standing in a marsh, and Roland snorted laughter in spite of himself. Then he touched the inside of his left wrist to his forehead, to see if he had a fever. He felt feverish enough inside his head, gods knew, but the skin above his eyes felt cool.