Not at all. Will; boys have been stubbing their toes around me ever since I grew my br**sts.
"Not at all," she said, and returned to the previous topic. It interested her greatly. "So ye and yer friends come at the behest of the Affiliation to count our goods, do you?"
"Yes. The reason I took particular note of yon oil patch is because one of us will have to come back and count the working derricks - "
"I can spare ye that, Will. There are nineteen."
He nodded. "I'm in your debt. But we'll also need to make out - if we can - how much oil those nineteen pumps are bringing up."
"Are there so many oil-fired machines still working in New Canaan that such news matters? And do ye have the alchemy to change the oil into the stuff yer machines can use?"
"It's called refinery rather than alchemy in this case - at least I think so - and I believe there is one that still works. But no, we haven't that many machines, although there are still a few working filament-lights in the Great Hall at Gilead."
"Fancy it!" she said, delighted. She had seen pictures of filament-lights and electric flambeaux, but never the lights themselves. The last ones in Hambry (they had been called "spark-lights" in this part of the world, but she felt sure they were the same) had burned out two generations ago.
"You said your father managed the Mayor's horses until his death," Will Dearborn said. "Was his name Patrick Delgado? It was, wasn't it?"
She looked down at him, badly startled and brought back to reality in an instant. "How do ye know that?"
"His name was in our lessons of calling. We're to count cattle, sheep, pigs, oxen . . . and horses. Of all your livestock, horses are the most important. Patrick Delgado was the man we were to see in that regard. I'm sorry to hear he's come to the clearing at the end of the path, Susan. Will you accept my condolence?"
"Aye, and with thanks."
"Was it an accident?"
"Aye." Hoping her voice said what she wanted it to say, which was leave this subject, ask no more.
"Let me be honest with you," he said, and for the first time she thought she heard a false note there. Perhaps it was only her imagination. Certainly she had little experience of the world (Aunt Cord reminded her of this almost daily), but she had an idea that people who set on by saying Let me be honest with you were apt to go on by telling you straight-faced that rain fell up, money grew on trees, and babies were brought by the Grand Featherex.
"Aye, Will Dearborn," she said, her tone just the tiniest bit dry. "They say honesty's the best policy, so they do."
He looked at her a bit doubtfully, and then his smile shone out again. That smile was dangerous, she thought - a quicksand smile if ever there was one. Easy to wander in; perhaps more difficult to wander back out.
"There's not much Affiliation in the Affiliation these days. That's part of the reason Parson's gone on as long as he has; that's what has allowed his ambitions to grow. He's come a far way from the harrier who began as a stage-robber in Garlan and Desoy, and he'll come farther yet if the Affiliation isn't revitalized. Maybe all the way to Mejis."
She couldn't imagine what the Good Man could possibly want with her own sleepy little town in the Barony which lay closest to the Clean Sea, but she kept silent.
"In any case, it wasn't really the Affiliation that sent us," he said. "Not all this way to count cows and oil derricks and hectares of land under cultivation."
He paused a moment, looking down at the road (as if for more rocks in the way of his boots) and stroking Rusher's nose with absentminded gentleness. She thought he was embarrassed, perhaps even 'shamed. "We were sent by our fathers."
"Yer - " Then she understood. Bad boys, they were, sent out on a make-work quest that wasn't quite exile. She guessed their real job in Hambry might be to rehabilitate their reputations. Well, she thought, it certainly explains the quicksand smile, doesn't it? 'Ware this one, Susan; he's the sort to burn bridges and upset mail-carts, then go on his merryway without a single look back. Not in meanness but in plain old boy-carelessness.
That made her think of the old song again, the one she'd been singing, the one he'd been whistling.
"Our fathers, yes."
Susan Delgado had cut a caper or two (or perhaps it was two dozen) other own in her time, and she felt sympathy for Will Dearborn as well as caution. And interest. Bad boys could be amusing ... up to a point. The question was, how bad had Will and his cronies been?
"Helling?" she asked.
"Helling," he agreed, still sounding glum but perhaps brightening just a bit about the eyes and mouth. "We were warned; yes, warned very well. There was ... a certain amount of drinking."