by Stephen King
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-1 don’t think 1 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.
“No,” she said at last. “It’s not right.”
“Too few or too many? Which?”
She paused for a moment. Drew in breath. Let it out in a long sigh. “Too many. Far too many.”
Will Dearborn raised his clenched fists to shoulder-height and gave them a single hard shake. His blue eyes blazed like the spark-lights of which her grand-da had told her. “I knew it,” he said. “I knew it.”
8
“How many horses are down there?” he asked.
“Below us? Or on the whole Drop?”
“Just below us.”
She looked carefully, making no attempt to actually count. That didn’t work; it only confused you. She saw four good-sized groups of about twenty horses each, moving about on the green almost exactly as birds moved about in the blue above them. There were perhaps nine smaller groups, ranging from octets to quartets… several pairs (they reminded her of lovers, but everything did today, it seemed)… a few galloping loners-young stallions, mostly…
“A hundred and sixty?” he asked in a low, almost hesitant voice.
She looked at him, surprised. “Aye. A hundred sixty’s the number I had in mind. To a pin.”
“And how much of the Drop are we looking at? A quarter? A third?”
“Much less.” She tilted him a small smile. “As I think thee knows. A sixth of the total open graze, perhaps.”
“If there are a hundred and sixty horses free-grazing on each sixth, that comes to…”
She waited for him to come up with nine hundred and sixty. When he did, she nodded. He looked down a moment longer, and grunted with surprise when Rusher nosed him in the small of the back. Susan put a curled hand to her mouth to stifle a laugh. From the impatient way he pushed the horse’s muzzle away, she guessed he still saw little that was funny.
“How many more are stabled or training or working, do you reckon?” he asked.
“One for every three down there. At a guess.”
“So we’d be talking twelve hundred head of horses. All threaded stock, no muties.”
She looked at him with faint surprise. “Aye. There’s almost no mutie stock here in Mejis… in any of the Outer Baronies, for that matter.”
“You true-breed more than three out of every five?”
“We breed em all! Of course every now and then we get a freak that has to be put down, but-”
“Not one freak out of every five livebirths? One out of five born with-” How had Renfrew put it? “With extra legs or its guts on the outside?”
Her shocked look was enough answer. “Who’s been telling ye such?”
“Renfrew. He also told me that there was about five hundred and seventy head of threaded stock here in Mejis.”
“That’s just… “She gave a bewildered little laugh. “Just crazy! If my da was here-”
“But he’s not,” Roland said, his tone as dry as a snapping twig. “He’s dead.”
For a moment she seemed not to register the change in that tone. Then, as if an eclipse had begun to happen somewhere inside her head, her entire aspect darkened. “My da had an accident. Do you understand that, Will Dearborn? An accident. It was terribly sad, but the sort of thing that happens, sometimes. A horse rolled on him. Ocean Foam. Fran says Foam saw a snake in the grass.”
“Fran Lengyll?”
“Aye.” Her skin was pale, except for two wild roses-pink, like those in the bouquet he’d sent her by way of Sheemie-glowing high up on her cheekbones. “Fran rode many miles with my father. They weren’t great friends-they were of different classes, for one thing-but they rode together. I’ve a cap put away somewhere that Fran’s first wife made for my christening. They rode the trail together. 1 can’t believe Fran Lengyll would lie about how my da died, let alone that he had… anything to do with it.”
Yet she looked doubtfully down at the running horses. So many. Too many. Her da would have seen. And her da would have wondered what she was wondering now: whose brands were on the extras?
“It so happens Fran Lengyll and my friend Stockworth had a discussion about horses,” Will said. His voice
sounded almost casual, but there was nothing casual on his face. “Over glasses of spring water, after beer had been offered and refused. They spoke of them much as I did with Renfrew at Mayor Thorin’s welcoming dinner. When Richard asked sai Lengyll to estimate riding horses, he said perhaps four hundred.”
“Insane.”
“It would seem so,” Will agreed.
“Do they not kennit the horses are out here where ye can see em?”
“They know we’ve barely gotten started,” he said, “and that we’ve begun with the fisherfolk. We’ll be a month yet, I’m sure they think, before we start to concern ourselves with the horseflesh hereabouts. And in the meantime, they have an attitude about us of… how shall I put it? Well, never mind how I’d put it. I’m not very good with words, but my friend Arthur calls it 'genial contempt.' They leave the horses out in front of our eyes, I think, because they don’t believe we’ll know what we’re looking at. Or because they think we won’t believe what we’re seeing. I’m very glad I found you out here.”
Just so I could give you a more accurate horse-count? Is that the only reason?
“But ye will get around to counting the horses. Eventually. I mean, that must surely be one of the Affiliation’s main needs.”
He gave her an odd look, as if she had missed something that should have been obvious. It made her feel self-conscious.
“What? What is it?”
“Perhaps they expect the extra horses to be gone by the time we get around to this side of the Barony’s business.”
“Gone where?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t like this. Susan, you will keep this just between the two of us, won’t you?”
She nodded. She’d be insane to tell anyone she had been with Will Dearborn, unchaperoned except by Rusher and Pylon, out on the Drop.
“It may all turn out to be nothing, but if it doesn’t, knowing could be dangerous.”
Which led back to her da again. Lengyll had told her and Aunt Cord that Pat had been thrown, and that Ocean Foam had then rolled upon him. Neither of them had had any reason to doubt the man’s story. But Fran Lengyll had also told Will’s friend that there were only four hundred head of riding stock in Mejis, and that was a bald lie.
Will turned to his horse, and she was glad.
Part of her wanted him to stay-to stand close to her while the clouds sent their long shadows flying across the grassland-but they had been together out here too long already. There was no reason to think anyone would come along and see them, but instead of comforting her, that idea for some reason made her more nervous than ever.
He straightened the stirrup hanging beside the scabbarded shaft of his lance (Rusher whickered way back in his throat, as if to say About time we got going), then turned to her again. She felt actually faint as his gaze fell upon her, and now the idea of ka was almost too strong to deny. She tried to tell herself it was just the dim-that feeling of having lived a thing before-but it wasn’t the dim; it was a sense of finding a road one had been searching for all along.
“There’s something else I want to say. I don’t like returning to where we started, but I must.”
“No,” she said faintly. “That’s closed, surely.”
“I told you that I loved you, and that I was jealous,” he said, and for the first time his voice had come unanchored a little, wavering in his throat. She was alarmed to see that there were tears standing in his eyes. “There was more. Something more.”
“Will, I don’t want to-” She turned blindly for her horse. He took her shoulder and turned her back. It wasn’t a harsh touch, but there was an inexorability to it that was dreadful. She looked helplessly up into his face, saw that he was young and far from home, and suddenly understood she could not stand against him for long. She wanted him so badly that she ached with it. She would have given a year of her life just to be able to put her palms on his cheeks and feel his skin.
“You miss your father, Susan?”
“Aye,” she whispered. “With all my heart I do.”
“I miss my mother the same way.” He held her by both shoulders now. One eye overbrimmed; one tear drew a silver line down his cheek.
“Is she dead?”
“No, but something happened. About her. To her. Shit! How can I talk about it when I don’t even know how to think about it? In a way, she did die. For me.”
“Will, that’s terrible.”
He nodded. “The last time I saw her, she looked at me in a way that will haunt me to my grave. Shame and love and hope, all of them bound up together. Shame at what I’d seen and knew about her, hope, maybe, that I’d understand and forgive… “He took a deep breath. “The night of the party, toward the end of the meal, Rimer said something funny. You all laughed-”
“If I did, it was only because it would have looked strange if I was the only one who didn’t,” Susan said. “I don’t like him. I think he’s a schemer and a conniver.”
“You all laughed, and I happened to look down toward the end of the table. Toward Olive Thorin. And for a moment-only a moment-I thought she was my mother. The expression was the same, you see. The same one I saw on the morning when I opened the wrong door at the wrong time and came upon my mother and her-”
“Stop it!” she cried, pulling back from his hands. Inside her, everything was suddenly in motion, all the mooring-lines and buckles and clamps she’d been using to hold herself together seeming to melt at once. “Stop it, just stop it, I can’t listen to you talk about her!”
She groped out for Pylon, but now the whole world was wet prisms. She began to sob. She felt his hands on her shoulders, turning her again, and she did not resist them.
“I’m so ashamed,” she said. ''I’m so ashamed and so frightened and I’m sorry. I’ve forgotten my father’s face and… and…”
And I’ll never be able to find it again, she wanted to say, but she didn’t have to say anything. He stopped her mouth with his kisses. At first she just let herself be kissed… and then she was kissing him back, kissing him almost furiously. She wiped the wetness from beneath his eyes with soft little sweeps of her thumbs, then slipped her palms up his cheeks as she had longed to do. The feeling was exquisite; even the soft rasp of the stubble close to the skin was exquisite. She slid her arms around his neck, her open mouth on his, holding him and kissing him as hard as she could, kissing him there between the horses, who simply looked at each other and then went back to cropping grass.
9
They were the best kisses of his whole life, and never forgotten: the yielding pliancy of her lips and the strong shape of her teeth under them, urgent and not shy in the least; the fragrance of her breath, the sweet line of her body pressed against his. He slipped a hand up to her left breast, squeezed it gently, and felt her heart speeding under it. His other hand went to her hair and combed along the side of it, silk at her temple. He never forgot its texture.
Then she was standing away from him, her face flaming with blush and passion, one hand going to her lips, which he had kissed until they were swollen. A little trickle of blood ran from the comer of the lower one. Her eyes, wide on his. Her bosom rising and falling as if she had just run a race. And between them a current that was like nothing he had ever felt in his life. It ran like a river and shook like a fever.
“No more,” she said in a trembling voice. “No more, please. If you really do love me, don’t let me dishonor myself. I’ve made a promise. Anything might come later, after that promise was fulfilled, I suppose… if you still wanted me…”
“I would wait forever,” he said calmly, “and do anything for you but stand away and watch you go with another man.”
“Then if you love me, go away from me. Please, Will!”
“Another kiss.”
She stepped forward at once, raising her face trustingly up to his, and he understood he could do whatever he wanted with her. She was, at least for the moment, no longer her own mistress; she might consequently be his. He could do to her
what Marten had done to his own mother, if that was his fancy.
The thought broke his passion apart, turned it to coals that fell in a bright shower, winking out one by one in a dark bewilderment. His father’s acceptance
(I have known for two years)
was in many ways the worst part of what had happened to him this year; how could he fall in love with this girl-any girl-in a world where such evils of the heart seemed necessary, and might even be repeated?
Yet he did love her.
Instead of the passionate kiss he wanted, he placed his lips lightly on the corner of her mouth where the little rill of blood flowed. He kissed, tasting salt like the taste of his own tears. He closed his eyes and shivered when her hand stroked the hair at the nape of his neck.
“I’d not hurt Olive Thorin for the world,” she whispered in his ear. “No more than I’d hurt thee, Will. I didn’t understand, and now ’tis too late to be put right. But thank you for not… not taking what you could. And I’ll remember you always. How it was to be kissed by you. It’s the best thing that ever happened to me, I think. Like heaven and earth all wrapped up together, aye.”
“I’ll remember, too.” He watched her swing up into the saddle, and remembered how her bare legs had flashed in the dark on the night he had met her. And suddenly he couldn’t let her go. He reached forward, touched her boot.
“Susan-”
“No,” she said. “Please.”
He stood back. Somehow.
“This is our secret,” she said. “Yes?”
“Aye.”
She smiled at that… but it was a sad smile. “Stay away from me from now on, Will. Please. And I’ll stay away from you.”
He thought about it. “If we can.”