“We’ll be at our prettiest,” Roland said. “Nice boys from the Inners with good intentions but not many brains. Fine.” And he went inside, no longer grinning (which was a relief) but smiling gently.

Cuthbert and Alain looked at each other and let out their breath in a mutual rush. Cuthbert cocked his head toward the yard, and went down the steps. Alain followed, and the two boys stood in the center of the dirt rectangle with the bunkhouse at their backs. To the east, the rising full moon was hidden behind a scrim of clouds.

“She’s tranced him,” Cuthbert said. “Whether she means to or not, she’ll kill us all in the end. Wait and see if she don’t.”

“You shouldn’t say such, even in jest.”

“All right, she’ll crown us with the jewels of Eld and we’ll live forever.”

“You have to stop being angry at him, Bert. You have to.”

Cuthbert looked at him bleakly. “I can’t.”

4

The great storms of autumn were still a month or more distant, but the following morning dawned drizzly and gray. Roland and Cuthbert wrapped themselves in serapes and headed for town, leaving Alain to the few home place chores. Tucked in Roland’s belt was the schedule of farms and ranches—beginning with the three small spreads owned by the Barony—the three of them had worked out the previous evening. The pace this schedule suggested was almost ludicrously slow—it would keep them on the Drop and in the orchards almost until Year’s End Fair—but it conformed to the pace they had already set on the docks.

Now the two of them rode silently toward town, both lost in their own thoughts. Their way took them past the Delgado house. Roland looked up and saw Susan sitting in her window, a bright vision in the gray light of that fall morning. His heart leaped up and although he didn’t know it then, it was how he would remember her most clearly forever after—lovely Susan, the girl at the window. So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely if ever crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little.

Roland raised a hand to her. It went toward his mouth at first, wanting to send her a kiss, but that would be madness. He lifted the hand before it could touch his lips and ticked a finger off his forehead instead, offering a saucy little salute.