Coral hauled her the rest of the way down the corridor, through the kitchen (that great room, which would have been all steam and bustle on any other Reaping Day, now stood uncannily deserted), and to the iron-bound door on the far side. This she opened. A smell of potatoes and gourds and sharproot drifted out.

“Get in there. Go smart, before I decide to kick yer winsome ass square.”

Susan looked her in the eye, smiling.

“I’d damn ye for a murderer’s bed-bitch, sai Thorin, but ye’ve already damned yerself. Ye know it, too—’tis written in yer face, to be sure. So I’ll just drop ye a curtsey”—still smiling, she suited action to the words—“and wish ye a very good day.”

“Get in and shut up yer saucy mouth!” Coral cried, and pushed Susan into the cold pantry. She slammed the door, ran the bolt, and turned her blazing eyes upon the vaqs, who stood prudently away from her.

“Keep her well, muchachos. Mind ye do.”

She brushed between them, not listening to their assurances, and went up to her late brother’s suite to wait for Jonas, or word of Jonas. The whey-faced bitch sitting down there amongst the carrots and potatoes knew nothing, but her words

(ye’ll never see sai Jonas again)

were in Coral’s head now; they echoed and would not leave.

2

Twelve o’ the clock sounded from the squat bell-tower atop the Town Gathering Hall. And if the unaccustomed silence which hung over the rest of Hambry seemed strange as that Reap morning passed into afternoon, the silence in the Travellers’ Rest was downright eerie. Better than two hundred souls were packed together beneath the dead gaze of The Romp, all of them drinking hard, yet there was hardly a sound among them save for the shuffle of feet and the impatient rap of glasses on the bar, indicating that another drink was wanted.

Sheb had tried a hesitant tune on the piano—“Big Bottle Boogie,” everyone liked that one—and a cowboy with a mutie-mark on one cheek had put the tip of a knife in his ear and told him to shut up that noise if he wanted to keep what passed for his brains on the starboard side of his eardrum. Sheb, who would be happy to go on drawing breath for another thousand years if the gods so allowed, quit his piano-bench at once, and went to the bar to help Stanley and Pettie the Trotter serve up the booze.