She opened her mouth—to protest again, she supposed, perhaps to tell him that Pat Delgado’s daughter could take care of herself—and then she thought of the Mayor’s new men, and the cold way they had run their eyes over her when Thorin’s attention had been elsewhere. She had seen those three this very night as she left on her way to the witch’s hut. Them she had heard approaching, and in plenty of time for her to leave the road and rest behind a handy piñon tree (she refused to think of it as hiding, exactly). Back toward town they had gone, and she supposed they were drinking at the Travellers’ Rest right now—and would continue to until Stanley Ruiz closed the bar—but she had no way of knowing that for sure. They could come back.

“If I can’t dissuade ye, very well,” she said, sighing with a vexed resignation she didn’t really feel. “But only to the first mailbox—Mrs. Beech’s. That marks the edge of town.”

He tapped his throat again, and made another of those absurd, enchanting bows—foot stuck out as if he would trip someone, heel planted in the dirt. “Thankee, Miss Delgado!”

At least he didn’t call me sai, she thought. That’s a start.

2

She thought he’d chatter away like a magpie in spite of his promise to be silent, because that was what boys did around her—she was not vain of her looks, but she thought she was good-looking, if only because the boys could not shut up or stop shuffling their feet when they were around her. And this one would be full of questions the town boys didn’t need to ask—how old was she, had she always lived in Hambry, were her parents alive, half a hundred others just as boring—but they would all circle in on the same one: did she have a steady fellow?

But Will Dearborn of the Inner Baronies didn’t ask her about her schooling or family or friends (the most common way of approaching any romantic rivals, she had found). Will Dearborn simply walked along beside her, one hand wrapped around Rusher’s bridle, looking off east toward the Clean Sea. They were close enough to it now so that the teary smell of salt mingled with the tarry stench of oil, even though the wind was from the south.