“So it’s a standoff,” Reynolds said, bemused. And then bemusement changed to horror as he felt the blade of a very large knife slip against his throat. It pressed the tender skin just over his adam’s apple.

“No, it’s not,” Alain said softly. “Put the gun down, my friend, or I’ll cut your throat.”

Standing outside the batwing doors, having arrived by simple good fortune in time for this Pinch and Jilly show, Jonas watched with amazement, contempt, and something close to horror. First one of the Affiliation brats gets the drop on Depape, and when Reynolds covers that one, the big kid with the round face and the plowboy’s shoulders puts a knife to Reynolds’s throat. Neither of the brats a day over fifteen, and neither with a gun. Marvelous. He would have thought it better than a travelling circus, if not for the problems that would follow if this were not put right. What sort of work could they do in Hambry if it got around that the boogeymen were afraid of the children, instead of vice-versa?

There’s time to stop this before there’s killing, mayhap. If you want to. Do you?

Jonas decided he did; that they could walk out winners if they played it just right. He also decided the Affiliation brats would not, unless they were very lucky indeed, be leaving Mejis Barony alive.

Where’s the other one? Dearborn?

A good question. An important question. Embarrassment would become outright humiliation if he found himself trumped in the same fashion as Roy and Clay.

Dearborn wasn’t in the bar, and that was sure. Jonas turned on his heels, scanning the South High Street in both directions. It was almost day-bright under a Kissing Moon only two nights past the full. No one there, not in the street, not on the far side, where Hambry’s mercantile store stood. The mercantile had a porch, but there was nothing on it save for a line of carved totems illustrating Guardians of the Beam: Bear, Turtle, Fish, Eagle, Lion, Bat, and Wolf. Seven of twelve, bright as marble in the moonlight, and no doubt great favorites of the kiddies. No men over there, though. Good. Lovely.

Jonas peered hard into the thread of alley between the mercantile and the butcher’s, glimpsed a shadow behind a tumble of cast-off boxes, tensed, then relaxed as he saw a cat’s shining green eyes. He nodded and turned to the business at hand, pushing back the lefthand batwing and stepping into the Travellers’ Rest. Alain heard the squeak of a hinge, but Jonas’s gun was at his temple before he could even begin to turn.

“Sonny, unless you’re a barber, I think you’d better put that pigsticker down. You don’t get a second warning.”

“No,” Alain said.

Jonas, who had expected nothing but compliance and had been prepared for nothing else, was thunderstruck. “What?”

“You heard me,” Alain said. “I said no.”

After making their manners and excusing themselves from Seafront, Roland had left his friends to their own amusements-they would finish up at the Travellers’ Rest, he supposed, but wouldn’t stay long or get into much trouble when they had no money for cards and could drink nothing more exciting than cold tea. He had ridden into town another way, tethered his mount at a public post in the lower of the two town squares (Rusher had offered a single puzzled nicker at this treatment, but no more), and had since been tramping the empty, sleeping streets with his hat yanked low over his eyes and his hands clasped into an aching knot at the small of his back.

His mind was full of questions-things were wrong here, very wrong. At first he’d thought that was just his imagination, the childish part of him finding make-believe troubles and storybook intrigue because he had been removed from the heart of the real action. But after his talk with “Rennie” Renfrew, he knew better. There were questions, outright mysteries, and the most hellish thing of all was that he couldn’t concentrate on them, let alone go any distance toward making sense of them. Every time he tried, Susan Delgado’s face intruded… her face, or the sweep of her hair, or even the pretty, fearless way her silk-slippered feet had followed his boots in the dance, never lagging or hesitating. Again and again he heard the last thing he had said to her, speaking in the stilted, priggish voice of a boy preacher. He would have given almost anything to take back both the tone and the words themselves. She’d be on Thorin’s pillow come Reap-tide, and kindle him a child before the first snow flew, perhaps a male heir, and what of it? Rich men, famous men, and well-blooded men had taken gilly-girls since the beginning of time; Arthur Eld had had better than forty himself, according to the tales. So, really, what was it to him?

I think I’ve gone and fallen in love with her. That’s what it is to me.

A dismaying idea, but not a dismissible one; he knew the landscape of his own heart too well. He loved her, very likely it was so, but part of him also hated her, and held to the shocking thought he’d had at dinner: that he could have shot Susan Delgado through the heart if he’d come armed. Some of this was jealousy, but not all; perhaps not even the greater part. He had made some indefinable but powerful connection between Olive Thorin-her sad but game little smile from the foot of the table-and his own mother. Hadn’t some of that same woeful, rueful look been in his mother’s eyes on the day when he had come upon her and his father’s advisor? Marten in an open-throated shirt, Gabrielle Deschain in a sacque that had slipped off one shoulder, the whole room reeking of what they had been up to that hot morning?

His mind, tough as it already was, shrank from the image, horrified. It returned instead to that of Susan Delgado-her gray eyes and shining hair. He saw her laughing, chin uptilted, hands clasped before the sapphire Thorin had given her.

Roland could forgive her the gilly business, he supposed. What he could not forgive, in spite of his attraction to Susan, was that awful smile on Olive Thorin’s face as she watched the girl sitting in what should have been her place. Sitting in her place and laughing.

These were the things that chased through his head as he paced off acres of moonlight. He had no business with such thoughts, Susan Delgado was not the reason he was here, nor was the ridiculous knuckle-cracking Mayor and his pitiable country-Mary of a wife… yet he couldn’t put them away and get to what was his business. He had forgotten the face of his father, and walked in the moonlight, hoping to find it again.

In such fashion he came along the sleeping, silver-gilded High Street, walking north to south, thinking vaguely that he would perhaps stand Cuthbert and Alain to a taste of something wet and toss the dice down Satan’s Alley a time or two before going back to get Rusher and call it a night. And so it was that he happened to spy Jonas-the man’s gaunt figure and fall of long white hair were impossible to mistake-standing outside the batwings of the Travellers’ Rest and peering in. Jonas did this with one hand on the butt of his gun and a tense set of body that put everything else from Roland’s mind at once. Something was going on, and if Bert and Alain were in there, it might involve them. They were the strangers in town, after all, and it was possible-even likely-that not everyone in Hambry loved the Affiliation with the fervor that had been professed at tonight’s dinner. Or perhaps it was Jonas’s friends who were in trouble. Something was brewing, in any case.

With no clear thought as to why he was doing it, Roland went softly up the steps to the mercantile’s porch. There was a line of carved animals there (and probably spiked firmly to the boards, so that drunken wags from the saloon across the street couldn’t carry them away, chanting the nursery rhymes of their childhood as they went). Roland stepped behind the last one in line-it was the Bear-and bent his knees so that the crown of his hat wouldn’t show. Then he went as still as the carving. He could see Jonas turn, look across the street, then look to his left, peering at something-