Wizard and glass - By Stephen King Page 0,111

enough to set it afire.

CHAPTER VI

SHEEMIE

1

Around ten o’ the clock, the trio of young men from the Inner Baronies made their manners to host and hostess, then slipped off into the fragrant summer night. Cordelia Delgado, who happened to be standing near Henry Wertner, the Barony’s stockliner, remarked that they must be tired. Wertner laughed at this and replied in an accent so thick it was almost comic: “Nay, ma’am, byes that age’re like rats explorin en woodpile after hokkut rain, so they are. It’ll be hours yet before the bunks out’ta Bar K sees em.”

Olive Thorin left the public rooms shortly after the boys, pleading a headache. She was pale enough to be almost believable.

By eleven, the Mayor, his Chancellor, and the chief of his newly inaugurated security staff were conversing in the Mayor’s study with the last few late-staying guests (all ranchers, all members of the Horsemen’s Association). The talk was brief but intense. Several of the ranchers present expressed relief that the Affiliation’s emissaries were so young. Eldred Jonas said nothing to this, only looked down at his pale, long-fingered hands and smiled his narrow smile.

By midnight, Susan was at home and undressing for bed. She didn’t have the sapphire to worry about, at least; that was a Barony jewel, and had been tucked back into the strongbox at Mayor’s House before she left, despite what Mr. Ain’t-We-Fine Will Dearborn might think about it and her. Mayor Thorin (she couldn’t bring herself to call him Hart, although he had asked her to do so—not even to herself could she do it) had taken it back from her himself. In the hallway just off from the reception room, that had been, by the tapestry showing Arthur Eld carrying his sword out of the pyramid in which it had been entombed. And he (Thorin, not the Eld) had taken the opportunity to kiss her mouth and have a quick fumble at her breasts—a part of her that had felt much too naked during that entire interminable evening. “I burn for Reaping,” he had whispered melodramatically in her ear. His breath had been redolent of brandy. “Each day of this summer seems an age.”

Now, in her room, brushing her hair with harsh, quick strokes and looking out at the waning moon, she thought she had never been so angry in her life as she was at this moment: angry at Thorin, angry at Aunt Cord, furious with that self-righteous prig of a Will Dearborn. Most of all, however, she was angry at herself.

“There’s three things ye can do in any situation, girl,” her father had told her once. “Ye can decide to do a thing, ye can decide not to do a thing . . . or ye can decide not to decide.” That last, her da had never quite come out and said (he hadn’t needed to) was the choice of weaklings and fools. She had promised herself she would never elect it herself . . . and yet she had allowed herself to drift into this ugly situation. Now all the choices seemed bad and honorless, all the roads either filled with rocks or hub-deep in mud.

In her room at Mayor’s House (she had not shared a chamber with Hart for ten years, or a bed, even briefly, for five), Olive sat in a nightdress of undecorated white cotton, also looking out at the waning moon. After closing herself into this safe and private place, she had wept . . . but not for long. Now she was dry-eyed, and felt as hollow as a dead tree.

And what was the worst? That Hart didn’t understand how humiliated she was, and not just for herself. He was too busy strutting and preening (also too busy trying to look down the front of sai Delgado’s dress at every opportunity) to know that people—his own Chancellor among them—were laughing at him behind his back. That might stop when the girl had returned to her aunt’s with a big belly, but that wouldn’t be for months yet. The witch had seen to that. It would be even longer if the girl kindled slowly. And what was the silliest, most humilating thing of all? That she, John Haverty’s daughter Olive, still loved her husband. Hart was an overweening, vainglorious, prancing loon of a man, but she still loved him.

There was something else, something quite apart from the matter of Hart’s turning into George o’ Goats in his late middle age: she thought there