Wizard and glass - Stephen King [296]
Coral was looking at her in a chilly this-is-all-business-to-me fashion, but Susan believed she saw something different in the woman’s eyes. Fear, mayhap.
“Don’t talk to me about Eldred, missy. He’s sent to catch the boys who killed my brother. The boys you set loose.”
“Get off it.” Susan wiped her nose, grimaced at the blood pooled in her palm, and wiped it on the leg of her pants. “I know who killed Hart as well as ye do yerself, so don’t pull mine and I won’t yank yer own.” She watched Coral’s hand rise, ready to slap, and managed a dry laugh. “Go on. Cut my face open on the other side, if ye like. Will that change how ye sleep tonight with no man to warm the other side of the bed?”
Coral’s hand came down fast and hard, but instead of slapping, it seized Susan’s arm again. Hard enough to hurt, this time, but Susan barely felt it. She had been hurt by experts this day, and would suffer more hurt gladly, if that would hasten the moment when she and Roland could be together again.
Coral hauled her the rest of the way down the corridor, through the kitchen (that great room, which would have been all steam and bustle on any other Reaping Day, now stood uncannily deserted), and to the iron-bound door on the far side. This she opened. A smell of potatoes and gourds and sharproot drifted out.
“Get in there. Go smart, before I decide to kick yer winsome ass square.”
Susan looked her in the eye, smiling.
“I’d damn ye for a murderer’s bed-bitch, sai Thorin, but ye’ve already damned yerself. Ye know it, too—’tis written in yer face, to be sure. So I’ll just drop ye a curtsey”—still smiling, she suited action to the words—“and wish ye a very good day.”
“Get in and shut up yer saucy mouth!” Coral cried, and pushed Susan into the cold pantry. She slammed the door, ran the bolt, and turned her blazing eyes upon the vaqs, who stood prudently away from her.
“Keep her well, muchachos. Mind ye do.”
She brushed between them, not listening to their assurances, and went up to her late brother’s suite to wait for Jonas, or word of Jonas. The whey-faced bitch sitting down there amongst the carrots and potatoes knew nothing, but her words
(ye’ll never see sai Jonas again)
were in Coral’s head now; they echoed and would not leave.
2
Twelve o’ the clock sounded from the squat bell-tower atop the Town Gathering Hall. And if the unaccustomed silence which hung over the rest of Hambry seemed strange as that Reap morning passed into afternoon, the silence in the Travellers’ Rest was downright eerie. Better than two hundred souls were packed together beneath the dead gaze of The Romp, all of them drinking hard, yet there was hardly a sound among them save for the shuffle of feet and the impatient rap of glasses on the bar, indicating that another drink was wanted.
Sheb had tried a hesitant tune on the piano—“Big Bottle Boogie,” everyone liked that one—and a cowboy with a mutie-mark on one cheek had put the tip of a knife in his ear and told him to shut up that noise if he wanted to keep what passed for his brains on the starboard side of his eardrum. Sheb, who would be happy to go on drawing breath for another thousand years if the gods so allowed, quit his piano-bench at once, and went to the bar to help Stanley and Pettie the Trotter serve up the booze.
The mood of the drinkers was confused and sullen. Reaping Fair had been stolen from them, and they didn’t know what to do about it. There would still be a bonfire, and plenty of stuffy-guys to burn on it, but there were no Reap-kisses today and would be no dancing tonight; no riddles, no races, no pig-wrestle, no jokes . . . no good cheer, dammit! No hearty farewell to the end of the year! Instead of joviality there had been murder in the dark, and the escape of the guilty, and now only the hope of retribution instead of the certainty of it. These folk, sullen-drunk and as potentially dangerous as stormclouds filled with lightning,