Except what duty was Roland shirking? And what made him so sure Roland was wrong? Logic? Intuition? Or just shitty old catbox jealousy? Cuthbert found himself thinking of the effortless way Jonas had ripped up Deputy Dave’s army when Deputy Dave had moved too soon. But life was not like Castles... was it? He didn’t know. But he thought he had at least one valid intuition: Roland was heading for disaster. And so they all were.

Wake up, Cuthbert thought. Please, Roland, wake up before it’s too late.

Chapter III

PLAYING CASTLES

1

There followed a week of the sort of weather that makes folk apt to crawl back into bed after lunch, take long naps, and wake feeling stupid and disoriented. It was far from flood-weather, but it made the final phase of the apple-picking dangerous (there were several broken legs, and in Seven-Mile Orchard a young woman fell from the top of her ladder, breaking her back), and the potato-fields became difficult to work; almost as much time was spent freeing wagons stuck in the gluey rows as was spent actually picking. In Green Heart, what decorations had been done for the Reaping Fair grew sodden and had to be pulled down. The work volunteers waited with increasing nervousness for the weather to break so they could begin again.

It was bad weather for young men whose job it was to take inventory, although they were at least able to begin visiting barns and counting stock. It was good weather for a young man and young woman who had discovered the joys of physical love, you would have said, but Roland and Susan met only twice during the run of gray weather. The danger of what they were doing was now almost palpable.

The first time was in an abandoned boathouse on the Seacoast Road. The second was in the far end of the crumbling building below and to the east of Citgo—they made love with furious intensity on one of Roland’s saddle-blankets, which was spread on the floor of what had once been the oil refinery’s cafeteria. As Susan climaxed, she shrieked his name over and over. Startled pigeons filled the old, shadowy rooms and crumbling hallways with their soft thunder.

2

Just as it seemed that the drizzle would never end and the grinding sound of the thinny in the still air would drive everyone in Hambry insane, a strong wind—almost a gale—blew in off the ocean and puffed the clouds away. The town awoke one day to a sky as bright as blue steel and a sun that turned the bay to gold in the morning and white fire in the afternoon. That sense of lethargy was gone. In the potato-fields the carts rolled with new vigor. In Green Heart an army of women began once more to bedeck with flowers the podium where Jamie McCann and Susan Delgado would be acclaimed this year’s Reaping Lad and Girl.