Wizard and glass - Stephen King [200]
Being upset, he thought. Being worried.
He was worried, all right. The titless old biddy’s suspicions had upset him greatly. Not on Thorin’s account—as far as Jonas was concerned, Dearborn could fuck the girl in the town square at high noon of Reaping Fair Day—but because it suggested that Dearborn might have fooled him about other things.
Crept up behind you once, he did, and you swore it’d never happen again. But if he’s been diddling that girl, it has happened again. Hasn’t it?
Aye, as they said in these parts. If the boy had had the impertinence to begin an affair with the Mayor’s gilly-in-waiting, and the incredible slyness to get away with it, what did that do to Jonas’s picture of three In-World brats who could barely find their own behinds with both hands and a candle?
We underestimated em once and they made us look like monkeys, Clay had said. I don’t want it to happen again.
Had it happened again? How much, really, did Dearborn and his friends know? How much had they found out? And who had they told? If Dearborn had been able to get away with pronging the Mayor’s chosen . . . to put something that large over on Eldred Jonas . . . on everyone . . .
“Good day, sai Jonas,” Brian Hookey said. He was grinning widely, all but kowtowing before Jonas with his sombrero crushed against his broad blacksmith’s chest. “Would ye care for fresh graf, sai? I’ve just gotten the new pressing, and—”
“All I want is my horse,” Jonas said curtly. “Bring it quick and stop your quacking.”
“Aye, so I will, happy to oblige, thankee-sai.” He hurried off on the errand, taking one nervous, grinning look back over his shoulder to make sure he wasn’t going to be shot out of hand.
Ten minutes later Jonas was headed west on the Great Road. He felt a ridiculous but nevertheless strong desire to simply kick his horse into a gallop and leave all this foolishness behind him: Thorin the graying goat-boy, Roland and Susan with their no-doubt mawkish teenage love, Roy and Clay with their fast hands and slow wits, Rimer with his ambitions, Cordelia Delgado with her ghastly visions of the two of them in some bosky dell, him likely reciting poetry while she wove a garland of flowers for his brow.
He had ridden away from things before, when intuition whispered; plenty of things. But there would be no riding away this time. He had vowed vengeance on the brats, and while he had broken a bushel of promises made to others, he’d never broken one made to himself.
And there was John Farson to consider. Jonas had never spoken to the Good Man himself (and never wanted to; Farson was reputed to be whimsically, dangerously insane), but he had had dealings with George Latigo, who would probably be leading the troop of Farson’s men that would arrive any day now. It was Latigo who had hired the Big Coffin Hunters in the first place, paying a huge cash advance (which Jonas hadn’t yet shared with Reynolds and Depape) and promising an even larger piece of war-spoil if the Affiliation’s major forces were wiped out in or around the Shavéd Mountains.
Latigo was a good-sized bug, all right, but nothing to the size of the bug trundling along behind him. And besides, no large reward was ever achieved without risk. If they delivered the horses, oxen, wagons of fresh vegetables, the tack, the oil, the glass—most of all the wizard’s glass—all would be well. If they failed, it was very likely that their heads would end up being whacked about by Farson and his aides in their nightly polo games. It could happen, and Jonas knew it. No doubt someday it would happen. But when his head finally parted company from his shoulders, the divorce wouldn’t be caused by any such smarms as Dearborn and his friends, no matter whose bloodline they had descended from.
But