Wizard and glass - Stephen King [138]
“I’m not sure I want thy trust any more than I want thy love,” she said.
He nodded. “And yet, to do the job I was sent to do, I have to trust someone. Can you understand that?”
She looked into his eyes, then nodded.
He stepped next to her, so close she fancied she could feel the warmth of his skin. “Look down there. Tell me what you see.”
She looked, then shrugged. “The Drop. Same as always.” She smiled a little. “And as beautiful. This has always been my favorite place in all the world.”
“Aye, it’s beautiful, all right. What else do you see?”
“Horses, of courses.” She smiled to show this was a joke (an old one of her da’s, in fact), but he didn’t smile back. Fair to look at, and courageous, if the stories they were already telling about town were true—quick in both thought and movement, too. Really not much sense of humor, though. Well, there were worse failings. Grabbing a girl’s bosom when she wasn’t expecting it might be one of them.
“Horses. Yes. But does it look like the right number of them? You’ve been seeing horses on the Drop all your life, and surely no one who’s not in the Horsemen’s Association is better qualified to say.”
“And ye don’t trust them?”
“They’ve given us everything we’ve asked for, and they’re as friendly as dogs under the dinner-table, but no—I don’t think I do.”
“Yet ye’d trust me.”
He looked at her steadily with his beautiful and frightening eyes—a darker blue than they would later be, not yet faded out by the suns of ten thousand drifting days. “I have to trust someone,” he repeated.
She looked down, almost as though he had rebuked her. He reached out, put gentle fingers beneath her chin, and tipped her face up again. “Does it seem the right number? Think carefully!”
But now that he’d brought it to her attention, she hardly needed to think about it at all. She had been aware of the change for some time, she supposed, but it had been gradual, easy to overlook.
“No,” she said at last. “It’s not right.”
“Too few or too many? Which?”
She paused for a moment. Drew in breath. Let it out in a long sigh. “Too many. Far too many.”
Will Dearborn raised his clenched fists to shoulder-height and gave them a single hard shake. His blue eyes blazed like the spark-lights of which her grand-da had told her. “I knew it,” he said. “I knew it.”
8
“How many horses are down there?” he asked.
“Below us? Or on the whole Drop?”
“Just below us.”
She looked carefully, making no attempt to actually count. That didn’t work; it only confused you. She saw four good-sized groups of about twenty horses each, moving about on the green almost exactly as birds moved about in the blue above them. There were perhaps nine smaller groups, ranging from octets to quartets . . . several pairs (they reminded her of lovers, but everything did today, it seemed) . . . a few galloping loners—young stallions, mostly . . .
“A hundred and sixty?” he asked in a low, almost hesitant voice.
She looked at him, surprised. “Aye. A hundred sixty’s the number I had in mind. To a pin.”
“And how much of the Drop are we looking at? A quarter? A third?”
“Much less.” She tilted him a small smile. “As I think thee knows. A sixth of the total open graze, perhaps.”
“If there are a hundred and sixty horses free-grazing on each sixth, that comes to . . .”
She waited for him to come up with nine hundred and sixty. When he did, she nodded. He looked down a moment longer, and grunted with surprise when Rusher nosed him in the small of the back. Susan put a curled hand to her mouth to stifle a laugh. From the impatient way he pushed the horse’s muzzle away, she guessed he still saw little that was funny.
“How many more are stabled or training or working, do you reckon?” he asked.
“One for every three down there. At a guess.”
“So we’d be talking twelve hundred head of horses. All threaded stock, no muties.”
She looked at him with faint surprise. “Aye. There’s almost no mutie stock here in Mejis . . . in any of the Outer Baronies, for that matter.”
“You true-breed more than three out of every five?”
“We breed