The Dark Tower IV Wizard and Glass (34 page)

She turned away from the Drop, suddenly knowing he would be there, as if her thought had called him—or her
ka.

She saw only blue sky and low ridgeline hills that curved gently like the line of a woman’s thigh and hip and waist as she lies on her side in bed. Susan felt a bitter disappointment fill her. She could almost taste it in her mouth, like wet tea leaves.

She started back to Pylon, meaning to return to the house and take care of the apology she reckoned she must make. The sooner she did it, the sooner it would be done. She reached for her left stirrup, which was twisted a little, and as she did, a rider came over the horizon, breaking against the sky at the place which looked to her like a woman’s hip. He
sat there, only a silhouette on horseback, but she knew who it was at once.

Run!
she told herself in a sudden panic.
Mount and gallop! Get out of here! Quickly! Before something terrible happens . . . before it really is
ka,
come like a wind to take you and all your plans over the sky and far away!

She didn’t run. She stood with Pylon’s reins in one hand, and murmured to him when the
rosillo
looked up and nickered a greeting to the big bay-colored gelding coming down the hill.

Then Will was there, first above her and looking down, then dismounted in an easy, liquid motion she didn’t think she could have matched, for all her years of horsemanship. This time there was no kicked-out leg and planted heel, no hat swept over a comically solemn bow; this time the gaze he gave her was steady and serious and disquietingly adult.

They looked at each other in the Drop’s big silence, Roland of Gilead and Susan of Mejis, and in her heart she felt a wind begin to blow. She feared it and welcomed it in equal measure.

“Goodmorn, Susan,” he said. “I’m glad to see you again.”

She said nothing, waiting and watching. Could he hear her heart beating as clearly as she could? Of course not; that was so much romantic twaddle. Yet it still seemed to her that everything within a fifty-yard radius should be able to hear that thumping.

Will took a step forward. She took a step back, looking at him mistrustfully. He lowered his head for a moment, then looked up again, his lips set.

“I cry your pardon,” he said.

“Do you?” Her voice was cool.

“What I said that night was unwarranted.”

At that she felt a spark of real anger. “I care not that it was unwarranted; I care that it was unfair. That it hurt me.”

A tear overbrimmed her left eye and slipped down her cheek. She wasn’t all cried out after all, it seemed.

She thought what she said would perhaps shame him, but although faint color came into his cheeks, his eyes remained firmly on hers.

“I fell in love with you,” he said. “That’s why I said it. It happened even before you kissed me, I think.”

She laughed at that . . . but the simplicity with which he had spoken made her laughter sound false in her own ears. Tinny. “Mr. Dearborn—”

“Will. Please.”

“Mr. Dearborn,” she said, patiently as a teacher working with a dull student, “the idea is ridiculous. On the basis of one single meeting? One single kiss? A
sister’s
kiss?” Now she was the one who was blushing, but she hurried on. “Such things happen in stories, but in real life? I think not.”

But his eyes never left hers, and in them she saw some of Roland’s truth: the deep romance of his nature, buried like a fabulous streak of alien metal in the granite of his practicality. He accepted love as a fact rather than a flower, and it rendered her genial contempt powerless over both of them.

“I cry your pardon,” he repeated. There was a kind of brute stubbornness in him. It exasperated her, amused her, and appalled her, all at the same time. “I don’t ask you to return my love, that’s not why I spoke. You told me your affairs were complicated . . .” Now his eyes did leave hers, and he looked off toward the Drop. He even laughed a little. “I called him a bit of a fool, didn’t I? To your face. So who’s the fool, after all?”

She smiled; couldn’t help it. “Ye also said ye’d heard he was fond of strong drink and berry-girls.”

Roland hit his forehead with the heel of his hand. If his friend Arthur Heath had done that, she would have taken it as a deliberate, comic gesture. Not with Will. She had an idea he wasn’t much for comedy.

Silence between them again, this time not so uncomfortable. The two horses, Rusher and Pylon, cropping contentedly, side by side.
If we were horses, all this would be much easier,
she thought, and almost giggled.

“Mr. Dearborn, ye understand that I have agreed to an arrangement?”

“Aye.” He smiled when she raised her eyebrows in surprise. “It’s not mockery but the dialect. It just . . . seeps in.”

“Who told ye of my business?”

“The Mayor’s sister.”

“Coral.” She wrinkled her nose and decided she wasn’t surprised. And she supposed there were others who could have
explained her situation even more crudely. Eldred Jonas, for one. Rhea of the Cöos, for another. Best to leave it. “So if ye understand, and if ye don’t ask me to return your . . . whatever it is ye think ye feel . . . why are we talking? Why do ye seek me out? I think it makes ye passing uncomfortable—”

“Yes,” he said, and then, as if stating a simple fact: “It makes me uncomfortable, all right. I can barely look at you and keep my head.”

“Then mayhap it’d be best not to look, not to speak, not to think!” Her voice was both sharp and a little shaky. How could he have the courage to say such things, to just state them straight out and starey-eyed like that? “Why did ye send me the bouquet and that note? Are ye not aware of the trouble ye could’ve gotten me into? If y’knew my aunt . . . ! She’s already spoken to me about ye, and if she knew about the note . . . or saw us together out here . . .”

She looked around, verifying that they were still unobserved. They were, at least as best she could tell. He reached out, touched her shoulder. She looked at him, and he pulled his fingers back as if he had put them on something hot.

“I said what I did so you’d understand,” he said. “That’s all. I feel how I feel, and you’re not responsible for that.”

But I am,
she thought.
I kissed you. I think I’m more than a little responsible for how we both feel, Will.

“What I said while we were dancing I regret with all my heart. Won’t you give me your pardon?”

“Aye,” she said, and if he had taken her in his arms at that moment, she would have let him, and damn the consequences. But he only took off his hat and made her a charming little bow, and the wind died.

“Thankee-sai.”

“Don’t call me that. I hate it. My name is Susan.”

“Will you call me Will?”

She nodded.

“Good. Susan, I want to ask you something—not as the fellow who insulted you and hurt you because he was jealous. This is something else entirely. May I?”

“Aye, I suppose,” she said warily.

“Are you for the Affiliation?”

She looked at him, flabbergasted. It was the last question in the world she had expected . . . but he was looking at her seriously.

“I’d expected ye and yer friends to count cows and guns and spears and boats and who knows what else,” she said, “but I didn’t think thee would also count Affiliation supporters.”

She saw his look of surprise, and a little smile at the corners of his mouth. This time the smile made him look older than he could possibly be. Susan thought back across what she’d just said, realized what must have struck him, and gave a small, embarrassed laugh. “My aunt has a way of lapsing into thee and thou. My father did, too. It’s from a sect of the Old People who called themselves Friends.”

“I know. We have the Friendly Folk in my part of the world still.”

“Do you?”

“Yes . . . or aye, if you like the sound of that better; I’m coming to. And I like the way the Friends talk. It has a lovely sound.”

“Not when my aunt uses it,” Susan said, thinking back to the argument over the shirt. “To answer your question, aye—I’m for the Affiliation, I suppose. Because my da was. If ye ask am I
strong
for the Affiliation, I suppose not. We see and hear little enough of them, these days. Mostly rumors and stories carried by drifters and far-travelling drummers. Now that there’s no railway . . .” She shrugged.

“Most of the ordinary day-to-day folk I’ve spoken to seem to feel the same. And yet your Mayor Thorin—”

“He’s not
my
Mayor Thorin,” she said, more sharply than she had intended.

“And yet the
Barony’s
Mayor Thorin has given us every help we’ve asked for, and some we haven’t. I have only to snap my fingers, and Kimba Rimer stands before me.”

“Then don’t snap them,” she said, looking around in spite of herself. She tried to smile and show it was a joke, but didn’t make much success of it.

“The townsfolk, the fisherfolk, the farmers, the cowboys . . . they all speak well of the Affiliation, but distantly. Yet the Mayor, his Chancellor, and the members of the Horsemen’s Association, Lengyll and Garber and that lot—”

“I know them,” she said shortly.

“They’re absolutely enthusiastic in their support. Mention the Affiliation to Sheriff Avery and he all but dances. In every ranch parlor we’re offered a drink from an Eld commemorative cup, it seems.”

“A drink of what?” she asked, a trifle roguishly. “Beer? Ale?
Graf?
”

“Also wine, whiskey, and pettibone,” he said, not responding to her smile. “It’s almost as if they wish us to break our vow. Does that strike you as strange?”

“Aye, a little; or just as Hambry hospitality. In these parts, when someone—especially a young man—says he’s taken the pledge, folks tend to think him coy, not serious.”

“And this joyful support of the Affiliation amongst the movers and the shakers? How does
that
strike you?”

“Queer.”

And it did. Pat Delgado’s work had brought him in almost daily contact with these landowners and horsebreeders, and so she, who had tagged after her da any time he would let her, had seen plenty of them. She thought them a cold bunch, by and large. She couldn’t imagine John Croydon or Jake White waving an Arthur Eld stein in a sentimental toast . . . especially not in the middle of the day, when there was stock to be run and sold.

Will’s eyes were full upon her, as if he were reading these thoughts.

“But you probably don’t see as much of the big fellas as you once did,” he said. “Before your father passed, I mean.”

“Perhaps not . . . but do bumblers learn to speak backward?”

No cautious smile this time; this time he outright grinned. It lit his whole face. Gods, how handsome he was! “I suppose not. No more than cats change their spots, as we say. And Mayor Thorin doesn’t speak of such as us—me and my friends—to you when you two are alone? Or is that question beyond what I have a right to ask? I suppose it is.”

“I care not about that,” she said, tossing her head pertly enough to make her long braid swing. “I understand little of propriety, as some have been good enough to point out.” But she didn’t care as much for his downcast look and flush of embarrassment as she had expected. She knew girls who liked to tease as well as flirt—and to tease hard, some of them—but it seemed she had no taste for it. Certainly she had no desire to set her claws in him, and when she went on, she spoke gently. “I’m not alone with him, in any case.”

And oh how ye do lie,
she thought mournfully, remembering how Thorin had embraced her in the hall on the night of
the party, groping at her breasts like a child trying to get his hand into a candy-jar; telling her that he burned for her.
Oh ye great liar.

“In any case, Will, Hart’s opinion of you and yer friends can hardly concern ye, can it? Ye have a job to do, that’s all. If he helps ye, why not just accept and be grateful?”

“Because something’s wrong here,” he said, and the serious, almost somber quality of his voice frightened her a little.

“Wrong? With the Mayor? With the Horsemen’s Association? What are ye talking about?”

He looked at her steadily, then seemed to decide something. “I’m going to trust you, Susan.”

“I’m not sure I want thy trust any more than I want thy love,” she said.

He nodded. “And yet, to do the job I was sent to do, I have to trust
someone
. Can you understand that?”

She looked into his eyes, then nodded.

He stepped next to her, so close she fancied she could feel the warmth of his skin. “Look down there. Tell me what you see.”

She looked, then shrugged. “The Drop. Same as always.” She smiled a little. “And as beautiful. This has always been my favorite place in all the world.”

“Aye, it’s beautiful, all right. What else do you see?”

“Horses, of courses.” She smiled to show this was a joke (an old one of her da’s, in fact), but he didn’t smile back. Fair to look at, and courageous, if the stories they were already telling about town were true—quick in both thought and movement, too. Really not much sense of humor, though. Well, there were worse failings. Grabbing a girl’s bosom when she wasn’t expecting it might be one of them.

“Horses. Yes. But does it look like the right
number
of them? You’ve been seeing horses on the Drop all your life, and surely no one who’s not in the Horsemen’s Association is better qualified to say.”

“And ye don’t trust them?”

“They’ve given us everything we’ve asked for, and they’re as friendly as dogs under the dinner-table, but no—I don’t think I do.”

“Yet ye’d trust me.”

He looked at her steadily with his beautiful and frightening eyes—a darker blue than they would later be, not yet faded
out by the suns of ten thousand drifting days. “I have to trust someone,” he repeated.

She looked down, almost as though he had rebuked her. He reached out, put gentle fingers beneath her chin, and tipped her face up again. “Does it seem the right number? Think carefully!”

But now that he’d brought it to her attention, she hardly needed to think about it at all. She had been aware of the change for some time, she supposed, but it had been gradual, easy to overlook.