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 Reaptide, 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?