Cordelia Delgado, wearing her best black dress and a lace mantilla over her hair, stood in front of the horse as if in her own parlor, taking no notice of the hooves cutting the air less than two feet in front other nose. In one gloved hand she held a wooden box.
Susan belatedly realized that this wasn’t Rhea, but the mistake really wasn’t that odd. Aunt Cord wasn’t as thin as Rhea (not yet, anyway), and more neatly dressed (except for her dirty gloves-why her aunt was wearing gloves in the first place Susan didn’t know, let alone why they looked so smudged), but the mad look in her eyes was horribly similar.
“Good day t'ye, Miss Oh So Young and Pretty!” Aunt Cord greeted her in a cracked, vivacious voice that made Susan’s heart tremble. Aunt Cord curtseyed one-handed, holding the little box curled against her chest with the other. “Where go ye on this fine autumn day? Where go ye so speedy? To no lover’s arms, that seems sure, for one’s dead and the other ta'en!”
Cordelia laughed again, thin lips drawing back from big white teeth. Horse teeth, almost. Her eyes glared in the sunlight.
Her mind’s broken, Susan thought. Poor thing. Poor old thing.
“Did thee put Dearborn up to it?” Aunt Cord asked. She crept to Pylon’s side and looked up at Susan with luminous, liquid eyes. “Thee did, didn’t thee? Aye! Perhaps thee even gave him the knife he used, after runnin yer lips o’er it for good luck. Ye’re in it together-why not admit it? At least admit thee’s lain with that boy, for I know it’s true. I saw the way he looked at ye the day ye were sitting in the window, and the way ye looked back at him!”
Susan said, “If ye’ll have truth, I’ll give it to ye. We’re lovers. And we’ll be man and wife ere Year’s End.”
Cordelia raised one dirty glove to the blue sky and waved it as if saying hello to the gods. She screamed with mingled triumph and laughter as she waved. “And t'be wed, she thinks! Ooooo! Ye’d no doubt drink the blood of your victims on the marriage altar, too, would ye not? Oh, wicked! It makes me weep!” But instead of weeping she laughed again, a howl of mirth into the blind blue face of the sky.
“We planned no murders,” Susan said, drawing-if only in her own mind-a line of difference between the killings at Mayor’s House and the trap they had hoped to spring on Parson’s soldiers. “And he did no murders. No, this is the business of your friend Jonas, I wot. His plan, his filthy work.”
Cordelia plunged her hand into the box she held, and Susan understood at once why the gloves she wore were dirty: she had been grubbing in the stove.
“I curse thee with the ashes!” Cordelia cried, flinging a black and gritty cloud of them at Susan’s leg and the hand which held Pylon’s reins. “I curse thee to darkness, both of thee! Be ye happy together, ye faithless! Ye murderers! Ye cozeners! Ye liars! Ye fornicators! Ye lost and renounced!”
With each cry, Cordelia Delgado threw another handful of ashes. And with each cry, Susan’s mind grew clearer, colder. She held fast and allowed her aunt to pelt her; in fact, when Pylon, feeling the gritty rain against his side, attempted to pull away, Susan gigged him set. There were spectators now, avidly watching this old ritual of renunciation (Sheemie was among them, eyes wide and mouth quivering), but Susan barely noticed. Her mind was her own again, she had an idea of what to do, and for that alone she supposed she owed her aunt some sort of thanks.
“I forgive ye, Aunt,” she said.
The box of stove-ashes, now almost empty, tumbled from Cordelia’s hands as if Susan had slapped her. “What?” she whispered. “What does thee say?”
“For what ye did to yer brother and my father,” Susan said. “For what ye were a part of.”
She rubbed a hand on her leg and bent with the hand held out before her. Before her aunt could pull away, Susan had wiped ashes down one of her cheeks. The smudge stood out there like a wide, dark scar. “But wear that, all the same,” she said. “Wash it off if ye like, but I think ye’ll wear it in yer heart yet awhile.” She paused. “I think ye already do. Goodbye.”
“Where does thee think thee’s going?” Aunt Cord was pawing at the soot-mark on her face with one gloved hand, and when she lunged forward in an attempt to grasp Pylon’s reins, she stumbled over the box and almost fell. It was Susan, still bent over to her aunt’s side, who grasped her shoulder and held her up. Cordelia pulled back as if from the touch of an adder. “Not to him! Ye’ll not go to him now, ye mad goose!”
Susan turned her horse away. “None of yer business. Aunt. This is the end between us. But mark what I say: we’ll be married by Year’s End. Our firstborn is already conceived.”
“Thee’ll be married tomorrow night if thee goes nigh him' Joined in smoke, wedded in fire, bedded in the ashes! Bedded in the ashes, do ye hear me?”
The madwoman advanced on her, railing, but Susan had no more time to listen. The day was fleeting. There would be time to do the things that needed doing, but only if she moved at speed.
“Goodbye,” she said again, and then galloped away. Her aunt’s last words followed her: In the ashes, do ye hear me?
3
On her way out of town along the Great Road, Susan saw riders coming toward her, and got off the highway. This would not, she felt, be a good time to meet pilgrims. There was an old granary nearby; she rode Pylon behind it, stroked his neck, murmured for him to be quiet.
It took the riders longer to reach her position than she would have expected, and when they finally got there, she saw why. Rhea was with them, sitting in a black cart covered with magical symbols. The witch had been scary when Susan had seen her on the night of the Kissing Moon, but still recognizably human; what the girl saw passing before her now, rocking from side to side in the black cart and clutching a bag in her lap, was an unsexed, sore-raddled creature that looked more like a troll than a human being. With her were the Big Coffin Hunters.
“To Seafront!” the thing in the cart screamed. “Hie you on, and at full speed! I’ll sleep in Thorin’s bed tonight or know the reason why! Sleep in it and piss in it, if I take a notion! Hie you on, I say!”
Depape-it was to his horse that the cart had been harnessed-turned around and looked at her with distaste and fear. “Still your mouth.”
Her answer was a fresh burst of laughter. She rocked from side to side, holding a bag on her lap with one hand and pointing at Depape with the twisted, long-nailed index finger of the other. Looking at her made Susan feel weak with terror, and she felt the panic around her again, like some dark fluid that would happily drown her brain if given half a chance.
She worked against the feeling as best she could, holding onto her mind, refusing to let it turn into what it had been before and would be again if she let it-a brainless bird trapped in a barn, bashing into the walls and ignoring the open window through which it had entered.
Even when the cart was gone below the next hill and there was nothing left of them but dust hanging in the air, she could hear Rhea’s wild cackling.
4
She reached the hut in the Bad Grass at one o’ the clock. For a moment she just sat astride Pylon, looking at it. Had she and Roland been here hardly twenty-four hours ago? Making love and making plans? It was hard to believe, but when she dismounted and went in, the wicker basket in which she had brought them a cold meal confirmed it. It still sat upon the rickety table.
Looking at the hamper, she realized she hadn’t eaten since the previous evening-a miserable supper with Hart Thorin that she’d only picked at, too aware of his eyes on her body. Well, they’d done their last crawl, hadn’t they? And she’d never have to walk down another Seafront hallway wondering what door he was going to come bursting out of like Jack out of his box, all grabbing hands and stiff, randy prick.
Ashes, she thought. Ashes and ashes. But not us, Roland. I swear, my darling, not us.
She was frightened and tense, trying to put everything she now must do in order-a process to be followed just as there was a process to be followed when saddling a horse-but she was also sixteen and healthy. One look at the hamper and she was ravenous.