“You will make the most beautiful Reap-Girl that ever was,” he said, and the clear sincerity in his voice made her tingle with pleasure; her cheeks grew warm again. There were five changes of costume for the Reaping Girl between the noon feast and the bonfire at dusk, each more elaborate than the last (in Gilead there would have been nine; in that way, Susan didn’t know how lucky she was), and she would have worn all five happily for Will, had he been the Reaping Lad. (This year’s Lad was Jamie McCann, a pallid and whey-faced stand-in for Hart Thorin, who was approximately forty years too old and gray for the job.) Even more happily would she have worn the sixth—a silvery shift with wisp-thin straps and a hem that stopped high on her thighs. This was a costume no one but Maria, her maid, Conchetta, her seamstress, and Hart Thorin would ever see. It was the one she would be wearing when she went to the old man’s couch as his gilly, after the feast was over.

“When you were up there, did you see the ones who call themselves the Big Coffin Hunters?”

“I saw Jonas and the one with the cloak, standing together in the courtyard and talking,” she said.

“Not Depape? The redhead?”

She shook her head.

“Do you know the game Castles, Susan?”

“Aye. My father showed me when I was small.”

“Then you know how the red pieces stand at one end of the board and the white at the other. How they come around the Hillocks and creep toward each other, setting screens for cover. What’s going on here in Hambry is very like that. And, as in the game, it has now become a question of who will break cover first. Do you understand?”

She nodded at once. “In the game, the first one around his Hillock is vulnerable.”

“In life, too. Always. But sometimes even staying in cover is difficult. My friends and I have counted nearly everything we dare count. To count the rest—”

“The horses on the Drop, for instance.”

“Aye, just so. To count them would be to break cover. Or the oxen we know about—”

Her eyebrows shot up. “There are no oxen in Hambry. Ye must be mistaken about that.”

“No mistake.”

“Where?”

“The Rocking H.”

Now her eyebrows drew back down, and knitted in a thoughtful frown. “That’s Laslo Rimer’s place.”

“Aye—Kimba’s brother. Nor are those the only treasures hidden away in Hambry these days. There are extra wagons, extra tack hidden in barns belonging to members of the Horsemen’s Association, extra caches of feed—”

“Will, no!”