Cuthbert, meanwhile, had already reloaded the cup of his slingshot and drawn the elastic back again. “Now,” he said, “if I have your attention, good sir-”
“I can’t speak for his,” Reynolds said from behind him, “but you got mine, partner. I don’t know if you’re good with that thing or just shitass lucky, but either way, you’re done with it now. Relax the draw on it and put it down. That table in front of you’s the place I want to see it.”
“I’ve been blindsided,” Cuthbert said sadly. “Betrayed once more by my own callow youth.”
“I don’t know nothing about your callow youth, brother, but you’ve been blindsided, all right,” Reynolds agreed. He stood behind and slightly to the left of Cuthbert, and now he moved his gun forward until the boy could feel the muzzle against the back of his head. Reynolds thumbed the hammer. In the pool of silence which the Travellers’ Rest had become, the sound was very loud. “Now put that twanger down.”
“I think, good sir, that I must offer my regrets and decline.”
“What?”
“You see, I’ve got my trusty sling aimed at your pleasant friend’s head-” Cuthbert began, and when Depape shifted uneasily against the bar, Cuthbert’s voice rose in a whipcrack that did not sound callow in the least. “Stand still! Move again and you’re a dead man!”
Depape subsided, holding his bloody hand against his pine-tacky shirt. For the first time he looked frightened, and for the first time that night-for the first time since hooking up with Jonas, in fact-Reynolds felt mastery of a situation on the verge of slipping away… except how could it be? How could it be when he’d been able to circle around this smart-talking squint and get the drop on him? This should be over.
Lowering his voice to its former conversational-not to say playful-pitch, Cuthbert said: “If you shoot me, the ball flies and your friend dies, too.”
“I don’t believe that,” Reynolds said, but he didn’t like what he heard in his own voice. It sounded like doubt. “No man could make a shot like that.”
“Why don’t we let your friend decide?” Cuthbert raised his voice in a good-humored hail. “Hi-ho, there, Mr. Spectacles! Would you like your pal to shoot me?”
“No!” Depape’s cry was shrill, verging on panic. “No, Clay! Don’t shoot!”
“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.”
4
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.”
5
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?