"What are ye doing in here?" Aunt Cord repeated.
Susan bent and picked up the book. "I came to remember my father," she said, and put the book back on the shelf. Who had torn those pages out? Lengyll? Rimer? She doubted it. She thought it more likely that the woman standing before her right now had done it. Perhaps for as little as a single piece of red gold. Nothing asked, nothing told, so all is well, she would have thought, popping the coin into her money-box, after first biting its edge to make sure it was true.
"Remember him? It's ask his forgiveness, ye should do. For ye've forgotten his face, so ye have. Most grievous have ye forgotten it, Sue."
Susan only looked at her.
"Have ye been with him today?" Cordelia asked in a brittle, laughing voice. Her hand went to the red pillow-mark on her cheek and began rubbing it. She had been getting bad by degrees, Susan realized, but had become ever so much worse since the gossip about Jonas and Coral Thorin had started. "Have ye been with sai Dearborn? Is yer crack still dewy from his spend? Here, let me see for myself!"
Her aunt glided forward - spectral in her black dress, her bodice open, her slippered feet peeping - and Susan pushed her back. In her fright and disgust, she pushed hard. Cordelia struck the wall beside the cobwebbed window.
"Ye should ask forgiveness yerself," Susan said. "To speak to his daughter so in this place. In this place." She let her eyes turn to the shelf of ledgers, then return to her aunt. The look of frightened calculation she saw on Cordelia Delgado's face told her all she wanted or needed to know. She hadn't been a party to her brother's murder, that Susan could not believe, but she had known something of it. Yes, something.
"Ye faithless bitch," Cordelia whispered.
"No," Susan said, "I have been true."
And so, she realized, she had been. A great weight seemed to slip off her shoulders at the thought. She walked to the door of the office and turned back to her aunt. "I've slept my last night here," she said. "I'll not listen to more such as this. Nor look at ye as ye are now. It hurts my heart and steals the love I've kept for ye since I was little, when ye did the best ye could to be my ma."
Cordelia clapped her hands over her face, as if looking at Susan hurt her.
"Get out, then!" she screamed. "Go back to Seafront or wherever it is thee rolls with that boy! If I never see thy trollop's face again, I'll count my life good!"
Susan led Pylon from the stable. When she got him into the yard, she was sobbing almost too hard to mount up. Yet mount she did, and she couldn't deny that there was relief in her heart as well as sorrow. When she turned onto the High Street and booted Pylon into a gallop, she didn't look back.
9
In a dark hour of the following morning, Olive Thorin crept from the room where she now slept to the one she had shared for almost forty years with her husband. The floor was cold under her bare feet and she was shivering by the time she reached the bed ... but the chilly floor wasn't the only reason she was shivering. She slid in beside the gaunt, snoring man in the nightcap, and when he turned away from her (his knees and back crackling loudly as he did), she pressed against him and hugged him tightly. There was no passion in this, but only a need to share a bit of his warmth. His chest - narrow but almost as well-known to her as her own plump one - rose and fell under her hands, and she began to quiet a little. He stirred, and she thought for a moment he would wake and find her sharing his bed for the first time in gods knew how long.
Yes, wake, she thought, do. She didn't dare wake him of her own - all her courage had been exhausted just getting here, creeping through the dark following one of the worst dreams she had ever had in her life - but if he woke, she would take it as a sign and tell him she had dreamed of a vast bird, a cruel golden-eyed roc that flew above the Barony on wings that dripped blood.
Wherever its shadow fell, there was blood, she would tell him, and its shadow fell everywhere. The Barony ran with it, from Hambry all the way out to Eyebolt. And I swelled big fire in the wind. I ran to tell you and you were dead in your study, sitting by the hearth with your eyes gouged out and a skull in your lap.