For a moment they were frozen, and then they fled in a howling pack. One had left his trophy behind; the dog’s tail lay on the board sidewalk like a grisly fan. Jonas grimaced at the sight of it, holstered his gun, locked his hands behind him again, and walked on, looking like a parson meditating on the nature of the gods. And what in gods’ name was he doing, pulling iron on a bunch of young hellions like that?

Being upset, he thought. Being worried.

He was worried, all right. The titless old biddy’s suspicions had upset him greatly. Not on Thorin’s account—as far as Jonas was concerned, Dearborn could fuck the girl in the town square at high noon of Reaping Fair Day—but because it suggested that Dearborn might have fooled him about other things.

Crept up behind you once, he did, and you swore it’d never happen again. But if he’s been diddling that girl, it has happened again. Hasn’t it?

Aye, as they said in these parts. If the boy had had the impertinence to begin an affair with the Mayor’s gilly-in-waiting, and the incredible slyness to get away with it, what did that do to Jonas’s picture of three In-World brats who could barely find their own behinds with both hands and a candle?

We underestimated em once and they made us look like monkeys, Clay had said. I don’t want it to happen again.

Had it happened again? How much, really, did Dearborn and his friends know? How much had they found out? And who had they told? If Dearborn had been able to get away with pronging the Mayor’s chosen... to put something that large over on Eldred Jonas... on everyone...

“Good day, sai Jonas,” Brian Hookey said. He was grinning widely, all but kowtowing before Jonas with his sombrero crushed against his broad blacksmith’s chest. “Would ye care for fresh graf, sai? I’ve just gotten the new pressing, and—”

“All I want is my horse,” Jonas said curtly. “Bring it quick and stop your quacking.”

“Aye, so I will, happy to oblige, thankee-sai.” He hurried off on the errand, taking one nervous, grinning look back over his shoulder to make sure he wasn’t going to be shot out of hand.

Ten minutes later Jonas was headed west on the Great Road. He felt a ridiculous but nevertheless strong desire to simply kick his horse into a gallop and leave all this foolishness behind him: Thorin the graying goat-boy, Roland and Susan with their no-doubt mawkish teenage love, Roy and Clay with their fast hands and slow wits, Rimer with his ambitions, Cordelia Delgado with her ghastly visions of the two of them in some bosky dell, him likely reciting poetry while she wove a garland of flowers for his brow.