“Of course, molly.” He saw her blush more furiously than ever at this harmless endearment, and squeezed her hand. “Anything.”

“You mustn’t tell Hart. That disgusting spider of a Chancellor, either, but especially not the Mayor. If I’m right in what I suspect and he found out, he could send her west!” She almost moaned this, as if comprehending it as a real fact for the first time. “He could send us both west!”

Maintaining his sympathetic smile, he said: “Not a word to Mayor Thorin, not a word to Kimba Rimer. Promise.”

For a moment he thought that she wouldn’t take the plunge... or perhaps couldn’t. Then, in a low, gaspy voice that sounded like ripping cloth, she said a single word. “Dearborn.”

He felt his heart take a bump as the name that had been so much in his mind now passed her lips, and although he continued to smile, he could not forbear a single hard squeeze of her fingers that made her wince.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just that you startled me a little. Dearborn... a well-spoken enough lad, but I wonder if he’s entirely trustworthy.”

“I fear he’s been with my Susan.” Now it was her turn to squeeze, but Jonas didn’t mind. He hardly felt it, in fact. He continued to smile, hoping he did not look as flabbergasted as he felt. “I fear he’s been with her... as a man is with a woman. Oh, how horrible this is!”

She wept with a silent bitterness, taking little pecking peeks around as she did to make sure they were not being observed. Jonas had seen coyotes and wild dogs look around from their stinking dinners in just that fashion. He let her get as much of it out of her system as he could—he wanted her calm; incoherencies wouldn’t help him—and when he saw her tears slackening, he held out a cup of tea. “Drink this.”

“Yes. Thank you.” The tea was still hot enough to steam, but she drank it down greedily. Her old throat must be lined with slate, Jonas thought. She set the cup down, and while he poured out fresh, she used her frilly pañuelo to scrub the tears almost viciously from her face.

“I don’t like him,” she said. “Don’t like him, don’t trust him, none of those three with their fancy In-World bows and insolent eyes and strange ways of talking, but him in particular. Yet if anything’s gone on betwixt the two of em (and I’m so afraid it has), it comes back to her, doesn’t it? It’s the woman, after all, who must refuse the bestial impulses.”

He leaned over the table, looking at her with warm sympathy. “Tell me everything, Cordelia.”

She did.

4