He’ll do it again, she thought, and felt an immense tiredness creep over her. Now that he’s done it once, he’ll do it every chance he gets, likely. From now on coming up here is going to be like… well…

Like Castles. Like playing at Castles.

Thorin looked at her a moment longer. Slowly, like a man in a dream, he pulled the tail of his billowy white shirt out of his pants and let it drop around him like a skirt, covering the wet spot. His chin gleamed; he had drooled in his excitement. He seemed to feel this and wiped the wetness away with the heel of one hand, looking at her with those empty eyes all the while. Then some expression at last came into them, and without another word he turned and left the room.

There was a little scuffling thud in the hall as he collided with someone out there. Susan heard him mutter “Sorry! Sorry!” under his breath (it was more apology than he’d given her, muttered or not), and then Conchetta stepped back into the room. The swatch of cloth she’d gone after was draped around her shoulders like a stole. She took in Susan’s pale face and tearstained cheeks at once. She’ll say nothing, Susan thought. None of them will, just as none of them will lift a finger to help me off this stick I’ve run myself on. “Ye sharpened it yourself, gilly,” they’d say if I called for help, and that’ll be their excuse for leaving me to wriggle.

But Conchetta had surprised her. “Life’s hard, missy, so it is. Best get used to it.”

5

Susan’s voice-dry, by now pretty much stripped of emotion-at last ceased. Aunt Cord put her knitting aside, got up, and put the kettle on for tea.

“Ye dramatize, Susan.” She spoke in a voice that strove to be both kind and wise, and succeeded at neither. “It’s a trait ye get from your Manchester side-half of them fancied themselves poets, t'other half fancied themselves painters, and almost all of them spent their nights too drunk to tapdance. He grabbed yer titties and gave yer a dry-hump, that’s all. Nothing to be so upset over. Certainly nothing to lose sleep over.”

“How would you know?” Susan asked. It was disrespectful, but she was beyond caring. She thought she’d reached a point where she could bear anything from her aunt except that patronizing worldly-wise tone of voice. It stung like a fresh scrape.

Cordelia raised an eyebrow and spoke without rancor. “How ye do love to throw that up to me! Aunt Cord, the dry old stick. Aunt Cord the spinster. Aunt Cord the graying virgin. Aye? Well, Miss Oh So Young and Pretty, virgin I might be, but I had a lover or two back when I was young… before the world moved on, ye might say. Mayhap one was the great Fran Lengyll.”

And mayhap not, Susan thought; Fran Lengyll was her aunt’s senior by at least fifteen years, perhaps as many as twenty-five.

“I’ve felt old Tom’s goat on my backside a time or two, Susan. Aye, and on my frontside as well.”

“And were any of these lovers sixty, with bad breath and knuckles that cracked when they squeezed your titties, Aunt? Did any of them try to push you through the nearest wall when old Tom began to wag his beard and say baa-baa-baa?”

The rage she expected did not come. What did was worse-an expression close to the look of emptiness she had seen on Thorin’s face in the mirror. “Deed’s done, Susan.” A smile, short-lived and awful, nickered like an eyelid on her aunt’s narrow face. “Deed’s done, aye.”

In a kind of terror Susan cried: “My father would have hated this! Hated it! And hated you for allowing it to happen! For encouraging it to happen!”

“Mayhap,” Aunt Cord said, and the awful smile winked at her again. “Mayhap so. And the only thing he’d hate more? The dishonor of a broken promise, the shame of a faithless child. He would want thee to go on with it, Susan. If thee would remember his face, thee must go on with it.”

Susan looked at her, mouth drawn down in a trembling arc, eyes filling with tears again. I’ve met someone I love! That was what she would have told her if she could. Don’t you understand how that changes things? I’ve met someone I love! But if Aunt Cord had been the sort of person to whom she could have said such a thing, Susan would likely never have been impaled on this stick to begin with. So she turned and stumbled from the house without saying anything, her streaming eyes blurring her vision and filling the late summer world with rueful color.

6

She rode with no conscious idea of where she was going, yet some part of her must have had a very specific destination in mind, because forty minutes after leaving her house, she found herself approaching the very grove of willows she had been daydreaming about when Thorin had crept up behind her like some bad elf out of a gammer’s story.

It was blessedly cool in the willows. Susan tied Felicia (whom she had ridden out bareback) to a branch, then walked slowly across the little clearing which lay at the heart of the grove. Here the stream passed, and here she sat on the springy moss which carpeted the clearing. Of course she had come here; it was where she had brought all her secret griefs and joys since she had discovered the clearing at the age of eight or nine. It was here she had come, time and time again, in the nearly endless days after her father’s death, when it had seemed to her that the very world-her version of it, at least-had ended with Pat Delgado. It was only this clearing that had heard the full and painful measure of her grief; to the stream she had spoken it, and the stream had carried it away.

Now a fresh spate of tears took her. She put her head on her knees and sobbed-loud, unladylike sounds like the caw of squabbling crows. In that moment she thought she would have given anything-everything- to have her father back for one minute, to ask him if she must go on with this.

She wept above the brook, and when she heard the sound of a snapping branch, she started and looked back over her shoulder in terror and chagrin. This was her secret place and she didn’t want to be found here, especially not when she was bawling like a kiddie who has fallen and bumped her head. Another branch snapped. Someone was here, all right, invading her secret place at the worst possible time.

“Go away!” she screamed in a tear-clotted voice she barely recognized. “Go away, whoever ye are, be decent and leave me alone!”

But the figure-she could now see it-kept coming. When she saw who it was, she at first thought that Will Dearborn (Roland, she thought, his real name is Roland) must be a figment of her overstrained imagination. She wasn’t entirely sure he was real until he knelt and put his arms around her. Then she hugged him with panicky tightness. “How did you know I was-”

“Saw you riding across the Drop. I was at a place where I go to think sometimes, and I saw you. I wouldn’t have followed, except I saw that you were riding bareback. I thought something might be wrong.”

“Everything’s wrong.”

Deliberately, with his eyes wide open and serious, he began kissing her cheeks. He had done it several times on both sides of her face before she realized he was kissing her tears away. Then he took her by the shoulders and held her back from him so he could look into her eyes.

“Say it again and I will, Susan. I don’t know if that’s a promise or a warning or both at the same time, but… say it again and I will.”

There was no need to ask him what he meant. She seemed to feel the ground move beneath her, and later she would think that for the first and only time in her life she had actually felt ka, a wind that came not from the sky but from the earth. It has come to me, after all, she thought. My ka, for good or ill.

“Roland!”

“Yes, Susan.”

She dropped her hand below his belt-buckle and grasped what was there, her eyes never leaving his.