"Miss Delgado, then. Are you sure you won't ride?"
"Sure as can be. I'd not ride cross-saddle in a dress in any case, Mr. Dearborn - not even if you were my own brother. 'Twouldn't be proper."
He stood in the stirrup himself, reached over to the far side of his saddle (Rusher stood docilely enough at this, only flicking his ears, which Susan would have been happy to flick herself had she been Rusher - they were that beautiful), and stepped back down with a rolled garment in his hands. It was tied with a rawhide hank. She thought it was a poncho.
"You may spread this over your lap and legs like a duster," he said. "There's quite enough of it for decorum's sake - it was my father's, and he's taller than me." He looked off toward the western hills for a moment, and she saw he was handsome, in a hard sort of way that jagged against his youth. She felt a little shiver inside her, and wished for the thousandth time that the foul old woman had kept her hands strictly on her business, as unpleasant as that business had been. Susan didn't want to look at this handsome stranger and remember Rhea's touch.
"Nay," she said gently. "Thankee again, I recognize yer kindness, but I must refuse."
"Then I'll walk along beside, and Rusher'll be our chaperone," he said cheerfully. "As far as the edge of town, at least, there'll be no eyes to see and think ill of a perfectly proper young woman and a more-or-less proper young man. And once there, I'll tip my hat and wish you a very good night."
"I wish ye wouldn't. Really." She brushed a hand across her forehead. "Easy for you to say there are no eyes to see, but sometimes there are eyes even where there shouldn't be. And my position is ... a little delicate just now."
"I'll walk with you, however," he repeated, and now his face was somber. "These are not good times. Miss Delgado. Here in Mejis you are far from the worst of the troubles, but sometimes trouble reaches out."
She opened her mouth - to protest again, she supposed, perhaps to tell him that Pat Delgado's daughter could take care of herself - and then she thought of the Mayor's new men, and the cold way they had run their eyes over her when Thorin's attention had been elsewhere. She had seen those three this very night as she left on her way to the witch's hut. Them she had heard approaching, and in plenty of time for her to leave the road and rest behind a handy pinon tree (she refused to think of it as hiding, exactly). Back toward town they had gone, and she supposed they were drinking at the Travellers' Rest right now - and would continue to until Stanley Ruiz closed the bar - but she had no way of knowing that for sure. They could come back.
"If I can't dissuade ye, very well," she said, sighing with a vexed resignation she didn't really feel. "But only to the first mailbox - Mrs. Beech's. That marks the edge of town."
He tapped his throat again, and made another of those absurd, enchanting bows - foot stuck out as if he would trip someone, heel planted in the dirt. "Thankee, Miss Delgado!"
At least he didn't 't call me sai, she thought. That's a start.
2
She thought he'd chatter away like a magpie in spite of his promise to be silent, because that was what boys did around her - she was not vain of her looks, but she thought she was good-looking, if only because the boys could not shut up or stop shuffling their feet when they were around her. And this one would be full of questions the town boys didn't need to ask - how old was she, had she always lived in Hambry, were her parents alive, half a hundred others just as boring - but they would all circle in on the same one: did she have a steady fellow?
But Will Dearborn of the Inner Baronies didn't ask her about her schooling or family or friends (the most common way of approaching any romantic rivals, she had found). Will Dearborn simply walked along beside her, one hand wrapped around Rusher's bridle, looking off east toward the Clean Sea. They were close enough to it now so that the teary smell of salt mingled with the tarry stench of oil, even though the wind was from the south.
They were passing Citgo now, and she was glad for Will Dearborn's presence, even if his silence was a little irritating. She had always found the oil patch, with its skeletal forest of gantries, a little spooky. Most of those steel towers had stopped pumping long since, and there was neither the parts, the need, nor the understanding to repair them. And those which did still labor along - nineteen out of about two hundred - could not be stopped. They just pumped and pumped, the supplies of oil beneath them seemingly inexhaustible. A little was still used, but a very little - most simply ran back down into the wells beneath the dead pumping stations. The world had moved on, and this place reminded her of a strange mechanical graveyard where some of the corpses hadn't quite -