"What I still like best is the bonfire," she said, looking toward the great pile of sticks and boards that was being constructed at the far end of the park, eater-corner from the stage. It looked like a large wooden tepee. "I love it when the townsfolk bring their stuffy-guys and throw them on. Barbaric, but it always gives me such a pleasant shiver."
"Aye," Jonas said, and wondered if it would give her a pleasant shiver to know that three of the stuffy-guys thrown onto the Reap Night bonfire this year were apt to smell like pork and scream like harpies as they burned. If his luck was in, the one that screamed the longest would be the one with the pale blue eyes.
The tea and cakes came, and Jonas didn't so much as glance at the girl's full bosom when she bent to serve. He had eyes only for the fascinating sai Delgado, with her nervous little shifting movements and odd, desperate look.
When the girl was gone, he poured out, put the teapot back on its trivet, then covered her hand with his. "Now, Cordelia," he said in his warmest tone. "I can see something troubles you. Out with it. Confide in your friend Eldred."
Her lips pressed so tightly together that they almost disappeared, but not even that effort could stop their trembling. Her eyes filled with tears; swam with them; overspilled. He took his napkin and, leaning across the table, wiped the tears away.
"Tell me," he said tenderly.
"I will. I must tell somebody or go mad. But you must make one promise, Eldred."
"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 1 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 panuelo 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
Rhea loved everything about the glass ball, but what she especially loved was the way it unfailingly showed her people at their vilest. Never in its pink reaches did she see one child comforting another after a fall at play, or a tired husband with his head in his wife's lap, or old people supping peacefully together at the end of the day; these things held no more interest for the glass, it seemed, than they did for her.