1

The most important day of Susan Delgado's life - the day upon which her life turned like a stone upon a pivot - came about two weeks after her moonlit tour of the oilpatch with Roland. Since then she had seen him only half a dozen times, always at a distance, and they had raised their hands as passing acquaintances do when their errands bring them briefly into sight of one another. Each time this happened, she felt a pain as sharp as a knife twisting in her ... and though it was no doubt cruel, she hoped he felt the same twist of the knife. If there was anything good about those two miserable weeks, it was only that her great fear - that gossip might begin about herself and the young man who called himself Will Dearborn - subsided, and she found herself actually sorry to feel it ebb. Gossip? There was nothing to gossip about.

Then, on a day between the passing of the Peddler's Moon and the rise of the Huntress, ka finally came and blew her away - house and barn and all. It began with someone at the door.

2

She had been finishing the washing - a light enough chore with only two women to do it for - when the knock came.

"If it's the ragman, send him away, ye mind!" Aunt Cord called from the other room, where she was turning bed linen.

But it wasn't the ragman. It was Maria, her maid from Seafront, looking woeful. The second dress Susan was to wear on Reaping Day - the silk meant for luncheon at Mayor's House and the Conversational after-ward - was ruined, Maria said, and she was in hack because of it. Would be sent back to Onnie's Ford if she wasn't lucky, and she the only support of her mother and father -  oh, it was hard, much too hard, so it was. Could Susan come? Please?

Susan was happy to come - was always happy to get out of the house these days, and away from her aunt's shrewish, nagging voice. The closer Reaping came, the less she and Aunt Cord could abide each other, it seemed.

They took Pylon, who was happy enough to carry two girls riding double through the morning cool, and Maria's story was quickly told. Susan understood almost at once that Maria's position at Seafront wasn't really in much jeopardy; the little dark-haired maid had simply been using her innate (and rather charming) penchant for creating drama out of what was really not very dramatic at all.

The second Reaping dress (which Susan thought of as Blue Dress With Beads; the first, her breakfast dress, was White Dress With High Waist and Puffed Sleeves) had been kept apart from the others - it needed a bit of work yet - and something had gotten into the first-floor sewing room and gnawed it pretty much to rags. If this had been the costume she was to wear to the bonfire lighting, or the one she was to wear to the ballroom dance after the bonfire had been lit, the matter would indeed have been serious. But Blue Dress With Beads was essentially just a fancified day receiving dress, and could easily be replaced in the two months between now and the Reap. Only two! Once - on the night the old witch had granted her her reprieve - it had seemed like eons before she would have to begin her bed-service to Mayor Thorin. And now it was only two months! She twisted in a kind of involuntary protest at the thought.

"Mum?" Maria asked. Susan wouldn't allow the girl to call her sai, and Maria, who seemed incapable of calling her mistress by her given name, had settled on this compromise. Susan found the term amusing, given the fact that she was only sixteen, and Maria herself probably just two or three years older. "Mum, are you all right?"

"Just a crick in my back, Maria, that's all."

"Aye, I get those. Fair bad, they are. I've had three aunts who've died of the wasting disease, and when I get those twinges, I'm always afeard that - "

"What kind of animal chewed up Blue Dress? Do ye know?"

Maria leaned forward so she could speak confidentially into her mistress's ear, as if they were in a crowded marketplace alley instead of on the road to Seafront. "It's put about that a raccoon got in through a window that 'us opened during the heat of the dayand was then forgot at day's end, but i had a good sniff of that room, and Kimba Rimer did, too, when he came down to inspect. Just before he sent me after you, that was."

"What did you smell?"

Maria leaned close again, and this time she actually whispered, although there was no one on the road to overhear: "Dog farts."

There was a moment of thunderstruck silence, and then Susan began to laugh. She laughed until her stomach hurt and tears went streaming down her cheeks.

"Are ye saying that W-W-Wolf... the Mayor's own d-d-dog ... got into the downstairs seamstress's closet and chewed up my Conversational d-d - " But she couldn't finish. She was simply laughing too hard.

"Aye," Maria said stoutly. She seemed to find nothing unusual about Susan's laughter . . . which was one of the things Susan loved about her. "But he's not to be blamed, so I say, for a dog will follow his natural instincts, if the way is open for him to do so. The downstairs maids - " She broke off. "You'd not tell the Mayor or Kimba Rimer this, I suppose, Mum?"

"Maria, I'm shocked at you - ye play me cheap."

"No, Mum, I play ye dear, so I do, but it's always best to be safe. All I meant to say was that, on hot days, the downstairs maids sometimes go into that sewing closet for their fives. It lies directly in the shadow of the watchtower, ye know, and is the coolest room in the house - even cooler than the main receiving rooms."

"I'll remember that," Susan said. She thought of holding the Luncheon and Conversational in the seamstress's beck beyond the kitchen when the great day came, and began to giggle again. "Go on."

"No more to say, Mum," Maria told her, as if all else were too obvious for conversation. "The maids eat their cakes and leave the crumbs. I reckon Wolf smelled em and this time the door was left open. When the crumbs was gone, he tried the dress. For a second course, like."

This time they laughed together.

3

But she wasn't laughing when she came home.

Cordelia Delgado, who thought the happiest day of her life would be the one when she finally saw her troublesome niece out the door and the annoying business other defloration finally over, bolted out other chair and hurried to the kitchen window when she heard the gallop of approaching hoofs about two hours after Susan had left with that little scrap of a maid to have one of her dresses refitted. She never doubted that it was Susan returning, and she never doubted it was trouble. In ordinary circumstances, the silly twist would never gallop one of her beloved horses on a hot day.

She watched, nervously dry-washing her hands, as Susan pulled Pylon up in a very unDelgado-like scrunch, then dismounted in an unladylike leap. Her braid had come half undone, spraying that damned blonde hair that was her vanity (and her curse) in all directions. Her skin was pale, except for twin patches of color flaring high on her cheekbones. Cordelia didn't like the look of those at all. Pat had always flared in that same place when he was scared or angry.

She stood at the sink, now biting her lips as well as working her hands. Oh, 'twould be so good to see the back of that troublesome she. "Ye haven't made trouble, have ye?" she whispered as Susan pulled the saddle from Pylon's back and then led him toward the barn. "You better not have, Miss Oh So Young and Pretty. Not at this late date. You better not have."

4

When Susan came in twenty minutes later, there was no sign of her aunt's strain and rage; Cordelia had put them away as one might store a dangerous weapon - a gun, say - on a high closet shelf. She was back in her rocker, knitting, and the face she turned to Susan's entry had a surface serenity. She watched the girl go to the sink, pump cold water into the basin, and then splash it on her face. Instead of reaching for a towel to pat herself dry, Susan only looked out the window with an expression that frightened Cordelia badly. The girl no doubt fancied that look haunted and desperate; to Cordelia, it looked only childishly willful.

"All right, Susan," she said in a calm, modulated voice. The girl would never know what a strain it was to achieve that tone, let alone maintain it. Unless she was faced with a willful teenager of her own one day, that was. "What's fashed thee so?"

Susan turned to her - Cordelia Delgado, just sitting there in her rocker, calm as a stone. In that moment Susan felt she could fly at her aunt and claw her thin, self-righteous face to strings, screaming This is your fault! Yours! All yours! She felt soiled - no, that wasn't strong enough; she felt filthy, and nothing had really happened. In a way, that was the horror of it. Nothing had really happened yet.

"It shows?" was all she said.

"Of course it does," Cordelia replied. "Now tell me, girl. Has he been on thee?"

"Yes ... no ... no."

Aunt Cord sat in her chair, knitting in her lap, eyebrows raised, waiting for more.

At last Susan told her what had happened, speaking in a tone that was mostly flat - a little tremble intruded toward the end, but that was all. Aunt Cord began to feel a cautious sort of relief. Perhaps more goose-girl nerves was all it came down to, after all!

The substitute gown, like all the substitutes, hadn't been finished off; there was too much else to do. Maria had therefore turned Susan over to blade-faced Conchetta Morgenstem, the chief seamstress, who had led Susan into the downstairs sewing room without saying anything - if saved words were gold, Susan had sometimes reflected, Conchetta would be as rich as the Mayor's sister was reputed to be.

Blue Dress With Beads was draped over a headless dressmaker's dummy crouched beneath one low eave, and although Susan could see ragged places on the hem and one small hole around to the back, it was by no means the tattered ruin she had been expecting.

"Can it not be saved?" she asked, rather timidly.

"No," Conchetta said curtly. "Get out of those trousers, girl. Shirt, too."

Susan did as she was bid, standing barefoot in the cool little room with her arms crossed over her bosom .. . not that Conchetta had ever shown the slightest interest in what she had, back or front, above or below.

Blue Dress With Beads was to be replaced by Pink Dress With Applique, it seemed. Susan stepped into it, raised the straps, and stood patiently while Conchetta bent and measured and muttered, sometimes using a bit of chalk to write numbers on a wall-stone, sometimes grabbing a swag of material and pulling it tighter against Susan's hip or waist, checking the look in the full-length mirror on the far wall. As always during this process, Susan slipped away mentally, allowing her mind to go where it wanted. Where it wanted to go most frequently these days was into a daydream of riding along the Drop with Roland, the two of them side by side, finally stopping in a willow grove she knew that overlooked Hambry Creek.

"Stand there still as you can," Conchetta said curtly. "I be back."

Susan was hardly aware she was gone; was hardly aware she was in Mayor's House at all. The part of her that really mattered wasn't there. That part was in the willow grove with Roland. She could smell the faint half-sweet, half-acrid perfume of the trees and hear the quiet gossip of the stream as they lay down together forehead to forehead. He traced the shape of her face with the palm of his hand before taking her in his arms .. .

This daydream was so strong that at first Susan responded to the arms which curled around her waist from behind, arching her back as they first caressed her stomach and then rose to cup her breasts. Then she heard a kind of plowing, snorting breath in her ear, smelled tobacco, and understood what was happening. Not Roland touching her breasts, but Hart Thorin's long and skinny fingers. She looked in the mirror and saw him looming over her left shoulder like an incubus. His eyes were bulging, there were big drops of sweat on his forehead in spite of the room's coolness, and his tongue was actually hanging out, like a dog's on a hot day. Revulsion rose in her throat like the taste of rotten food. She tried to pull away and his hands tightened their hold, pulling her against him. His knuckles cracked obscenely, and now she could feel the hard lump at the center of him.

At times over the last few weeks, Susan had allowed herself to hope that, when the time came, Thorin would be incapable - that he would be able to make no iron at the forge. She had heard this often happened to men when they got older. The hard, throbbing column which lay against her bottom disabused her of that wistful notion in a hurry.

She had managed at least a degree of diplomacy by simply putting her hands over his and attempting to draw them off her breasts instead of pulling away from him again (Cordelia, impassive, not showing the great relief she felt at this).

"Mayor Thorin - Hart - you mustn't - this is hardly the place and not yet the time - Rhea said - "

"Balls to her and all witches!" His cultured politician's tones had been replaced by an accent as thick as that in the voice of any back-country farmhand from Onnie's Ford. "I must have something, a bonbon, aye, so I must. Balls to the witch, I say! Owlshit to 'er!" The smell of tobacco a thick reek around her head. She thought that she would vomit if she had to smell it much longer. "Just stand still, girl. Stand still, my temptation. Mind me well!"

Somehow she did. There was even some distant part of her mind, a part totally dedicated to self-preservation, that hoped he would mistake her shudders of revulsion for maidenly excitement. He had drawn her tight against him, hands working energetically on her breasts, his respiration a stinky steam-engine in her ear. She stood back to him, her eyes closed, tears squeezing out from beneath the lids and through the fringes of her lashes.

It didn't take him long. He rocked back and forth against her, moaning like a man with stomach cramps. At one point he licked the lobe of her ear, and Susan thought her skin would crawl right off her body in its revulsion. Finally, thankfully, she felt him begin to spasm against her.

"Oh, aye, get out, ye damned poison!" he said in a voice that was almost a squeal. He pushed so hard she had to brace her hands against the wall to keep from being driven face-first into it. Then he at last stepped back.

For a moment Susan only stood as she was, with her palms against the rough cold stone of the sewing room wall. She could see Thorin in the mirror, and in his image she saw the ordinary doom that was rushing at her, the ordinary doom of which this was but a foretaste: the end of girlhood, the end of romance, the end of dreams where she and Roland lay together in the willow grove with their foreheads touching. The man in the mirror looked oddly like a boy himself, one who's been up to something he wouldn't tell his mother about. Just a tall and gangly lad with strange gray hair and narrow twitching shoulders and a wet spot on the front of his trousers. Hart Thorin looked as if he didn't quite know where he was. In that moment the lust was flushed out of his face, but what replaced it was no better - that vacant confusion. It was as if he were a bucket with a hole in the bottom: no matter what you put in it, or how much, it always ran out before long.

He 'II do it again, she thought, and felt an immense tiredness creep over her. Now that he's done it once, he 'II do it every chance he gets, likely. From now on coming up here is going to be like . . . well . . .

Like Castles. Like playing at Castles.

Thorin looked at her a moment longer. Slowly, like a man in a dream, he pulled the tail of his billowy white shirt out of his pants and let it drop around him like a skirt, covering the wet spot. His chin gleamed; he had drooled in his excitement. He seemed to feel this and wiped the wetness away with the heel of one hand, looking at her with those empty eyes all the while. Then some expression at last came into them, and without another word he turned and left the room.

There was a little scuffling thud in the hall as he collided with someone out there. Susan heard him mutter "Sorry! Sorry!" under his breath (it was more apology than he'd given her, muttered or not), and then Conchetta stepped back into the room. The swatch of cloth she'd gone after was draped around her shoulders like a stole. She took in Susan's pale face and tearstained cheeks at once. She'll say nothing, Susan thought. None of them will, just as none of them will lift a finger to help me off this stick I've run myself on. "Ye sharpened it yourself, gilly," they'd say if I called for help, and that'll be their excuse for leaving me to wriggle.

But Conchetta had surprised her. "Life's hard, missy, so it is. Best get used to it."

5

Susan's voice - dry, by now pretty much stripped of emotion - at last ceased. Aunt Cord put her knitting aside, got up, and put the kettle on for tea.

"Ye dramatize, Susan." She spoke in a voice that strove to be both kind and wise, and succeeded at neither. "It's a trait ye get from your Manchester side - half of them fancied themselves poets, t'other half fancied themselves painters, and almost all of them spent their nights too drunk to tapdance. He grabbed yer titties and gave yer a dry-hump, that's all. Nothing to be so upset over. Certainly nothing to lose sleep over."

"How would you know?" Susan asked. It was disrespectful, but she was beyond caring. She thought she'd reached a point where she could bear anything from her aunt except that patronizing worldly-wise tone of voice. It stung like a fresh scrape.

Cordelia raised an eyebrow and spoke without rancor. "How ye do love to throw that up to me! Aunt Cord, the dry old stick. Aunt Cord the spinster. Aunt Cord the graying virgin. Aye? Well, Miss Oh So Young and Pretty, virgin I might be, but I had a lover or two back when I was young . . . before the world moved on, ye might say. Mayhap one was the great Fran Lengyll."

And mayhap not, Susan thought; Fran Lengyll was her aunt's senior by at least fifteen years, perhaps as many as twenty-five.

"I've felt old Tom's goat on my backside a time or two, Susan. Aye, and on my frontside as well."

"And were any of these lovers sixty, with bad breath and knuckles that cracked when they squeezed your titties, Aunt? Did any of them try to push you through the nearest wall when old Tom began to wag his beard and say baa-baa-baa?"

The rage she expected did not come. What did was worse - an expression close to the look of emptiness she had seen on Thorin's face in the mirror. "Deed's done, Susan." A smile, short-lived and awful, nickered like an eyelid on her aunt's narrow face. "Deed's done, aye."

In a kind of terror Susan cried: "My father would have hated this! Hated it! And hated you for allowing it to happen! For encouraging it to happen!"

"Mayhap," Aunt Cord said, and the awful smile winked at her again. "Mayhap so. And the only thing he'd hate more? The dishonor of a broken promise, the shame of a faithless child. He would want thee to go on with it, Susan. If thee would remember his face, thee must go on with it."

Susan looked at her, mouth drawn down in a trembling arc, eyes filling with tears again. I've met someone I love! That was what she would have told her if she could. Don't you understand how that changes things? I've met someone I love! But if Aunt Cord had been the sort of person to whom she could have said such a thing, Susan would likely never have been impaled on this stick to begin with. So she turned and stumbled from the house without saying anything, her streaming eyes blurring her vision and filling the late summer world with rueful color.

6

She rode with no conscious idea of where she was going, yet some part of her must have had a very specific destination in mind, because forty minutes after leaving her house, she found herself approaching the very grove of willows she had been daydreaming about when Thorin had crept up behind her like some bad elf out of a gammer's story.

It was blessedly cool in the willows. Susan tied Felicia (whom she had ridden out bareback) to a branch, then walked slowly across the little clearing which lay at the heart of the grove. Here the stream passed, and here she sat on the springy moss which carpeted the clearing. Of course she had come here; it was where she had brought all her secret griefs and joys since she had discovered the clearing at the age of eight or nine. It was here she had come, time and time again, in the nearly endless days after her father's death, when it had seemed to her that the very world - her version of it, at least - had ended with Pat Delgado. It was only this clearing that had heard the full and painful measure of her grief; to the stream she had spoken it, and the stream had carried it away.

Now a fresh spate of tears took her. She put her head on her knees and sobbed - loud, unladylike sounds like the caw of squabbling crows. In that moment she thought she would have given anything - everything -  to have her father back for one minute, to ask him if she must go on with this.

She wept above the brook, and when she heard the sound of a snapping branch, she started and looked back over her shoulder in terror and chagrin. This was her secret place and she didn't want to be found here, especially not when she was bawling like a kiddie who has fallen and bumped her head. Another branch snapped. Someone was here, all right, invading her secret place at the worst possible time.

"Go away!" she screamed in a tear-clotted voice she barely recognized. "Go away, whoever ye are, be decent and leave me alone!"

But the figure - she could now see it - kept coming. When she saw who it was, she at first thought that Will Dearborn (Roland, she thought, his real name is Roland) must be a figment of her overstrained imagination. She wasn't entirely sure he was real until he knelt and put his arms around her. Then she hugged him with panicky tightness. "How did you know I was - "

"Saw you riding across the Drop. I was at a place where I go to think sometimes, and I saw you. I wouldn't have followed, except I saw that you were riding bareback. I thought something might be wrong."

"Everything's wrong."

Deliberately, with his eyes wide open and serious, he began kissing her cheeks. He had done it several times on both sides of her face before she realized he was kissing her tears away. Then he took her by the shoulders and held her back from him so he could look into her eyes.

"Say it again and I will, Susan. I don't know if that's a promise or a warning or both at the same time, but... say it again and I will."

There was no need to ask him what he meant. She seemed to feel the ground move beneath her, and later she would think that for the first and only time in her life she had actually felt ka, a wind that came not from the sky but from the earth. It has come to me, after all, she thought. My ka, for good or ill.

"Roland!"

"Yes, Susan."

She dropped her hand below his belt-buckle and grasped what was there, her eyes never leaving his.

"If you love me, then love me."

"Aye, lady. I will."

He unbuttoned his shirt, made in a part of Mid-World she would never see, and took her in his arms.

7

Ka:

They helped each other with their clothes; they lay naked in each other's arms on summer moss as soft as the finest goosedown. They lay with their foreheads touching, as in her daydream, and when he found his way into her, she felt pain melt into sweetness like some wild and exotic herb that may only be tasted once in each lifetime. She held that taste as long as she could, until at last the sweetness overcame it and she gave in to that, moaning deep in her throat and rubbing her forearms against the sides of his neck. They made love in the willow grove, questions of honor put aside, promises broken without so much as a look back, and at the end of it Susan discovered there was more than sweetness; there was a kind of delirious clinching of the nerves that began in the part of her that had opened before him like a flower; it began there and then filled her entire body. She cried out again and again, thinking there could not be so much pleasure in the mortal world; she would die of it. Roland added his voice to hers, and the sound of water rushing over stones wrapped around both. As she pulled him closer to her, locking her ankles together behind his knees and covering his face with fierce kisses, his going out rushed after hers as if trying to catch up. So were lovers joined in the Barony of Mejis, near the end of the last great age, and the green moss beneath the place where her thighs joined turned a pretty red as her virginity passed; so were they joined and so were they doomed.

Ka.

8

They lay together in each other's arms, sharing afterglow kisses beneath Felicia's mild gaze, and Roland felt himself drowsing. This was understandable - the strain on him that summer had been enormous, and he had been sleeping badly. Although he didn't know it then, he would sleep badly for the rest of his life.

"Roland?" Her voice, distant. Sweet, as well.

"Yes?"

"Will thee take care of me?"

"Yes."

"I can't go to him when the time comes. I can bear his touching, and his little thefts - if I have you, I can - but I can't go to him on Reap Night. I don't know if I've forgotten the face of my father or not, but I cannot go lo Hart Thorin's bed. There are ways the loss of a girl's virginity can be concealed, I think, but I won't use them. I simply cannot go to his bed."

"All right," he said, "good." And then, as her eyes widened in startlement, he looked around. No one was there. He looked back at Susan, fully awake now. "What? What is it?"

"I might already be carrying your child," she said. "Has thee thought of that?"

He hadn't. Now he did. A child. Another link in the chain stretching hack into the dimness where Arthur Eld had led his gunslingers into battle with the great sword Excalibur raised above his head and the crown of All-World on his brow. But never mind that; what would his father think? Ur Gabrielle, to know she had become a grandmother?

A little smile had formed at the comers of his mouth, but the thought of his mother drove it away. He thought of the mark on her neck. When his mother came to his mind these days, he always thought of the mark he'd seen on her neck when he came unexpected into her apartment. And the small, rueful smile on her face.

"If you carry my child, such is my good fortune," he said.

"And mine." It was her turn to smile, but it had a sad look to it all the same, that smile. "We're too young, I suppose. Little more than kiddies ourselves."

He rolled onto his back and looked up at the blue sky. What she said might be true, but it didn't matter. Truth was sometimes not the same as reality - this was one of the certainties that lived in the hollow, cavey place at the center of his divided nature. That he could rise above both and willingly embrace the insanity of romance was a gift from his mother. All else in his nature was humorless . . . and, perhaps more important, without metaphor. That they were too young to be parents? What of that? If he had planted a seed, it would grow.

"Whatever comes, we'll do as we must. And I'll always love you, no matter what comes."

She smiled. He said it as a man would state any dry fact: sky is up, earth is down, water flows south.

"Roland, how old are you?" She was sometimes troubled by the idea that, young as she herself was, Roland was even younger. When he was concentrating on something, he could look so hard he frightened her. When he smiled, he looked not like a lover but a kid brother.

"Older than I was when I came here," he said. "Older by far. And if I have to stay in sight of Jonas and his men another six months, I'll be hobbling and needing a boost in the arse to get aboard my horse."

She grinned at that, and he kissed her nose.

"And thee'll take care of me?"

"Aye," he said, and grinned back at her. Susan nodded, then also turned on her back. They lay that way, hip to hip, looking up at the sky. She took his hand and placed it on her breast. As he stroked the nipple with his thumb, it raised its head, grew hard, and began to tingle. This sensation slipped quickly down her body to the place that was still throbbing between her legs. She squeezed her thighs together and was both delighted and dismayed to find that doing so only made matters worse.

"Ye must take care of me," she said in a low voice. "I've pinned everything on you. All else is cast aside."

"I'll do my best," he said. "Never doubt it. But for now, Susan, you must go on as you have been. There's more time yet to pass; I know that because Depape is back and will have told his tale, but they still haven't moved in any way against us. Whatever he found out, Jonas still thinks it's in his interest to wait. That's apt to make him more dangerous when he does move, but for now it's still Castles."

"But after the Reaping Bonfire - Thorin - "

"You'll never go to his bed. That you can count on. I set my warrant on it."

A little shocked at her own boldness, she reached below his waist. "Here's a warrant ye can set on me, if ye would," she said.

He would. Could. And did.

When it was over (for Roland it had been even sweeter than the first time, if that was possible), he asked her: "That feeling you had out at Citgo, Susan - of being watched. Did you have it this time?"

She looked at him long and thoughtfully. "I don't know. My mind was in other places, ye ken." She touched him gently, then laughed as he jumped - the nerves in the half-hard, half-soft place where her palm stroked were still very lively, it seemed.

She took her hand away and looked up at the circle of sky above the grove. "So beautiful here," she murmured, and her eyes drifted closed.

Roland also felt himself drifting. It was ironic, he thought. This time she hadn't had that sensation of being watched ... but the second time, he had. Yet he would have sworn there was no one near this grove.

No matter. The feeling, megrim or reality, was gone now. He took Susan's hand, and felt her fingers slip naturally through his, entwining.

He closed his eyes.

9

All of this Rhea saw in the glass, and wery interesting viewing it made, aye, wery interesting, indeed. But she'd seen shagging before - sometimes with three or four or even more doing it all at the same time (sometimes with partners who were not precisely alive) - and the hokey-pokey wasn't very interesting to her at her advanced age. What she was interested in was what would come after the hokey-pokey.

Is our business done? the girl had asked.

Mayhap there's one more little thing, Rhea had responded, and then she told the impudent trull what to do.

Aye, she'd given the girl very clear instructions as the two of them stood in the hut doorway, the Kissing Moon shining down on them as Susan Delgado slept the strange sleep and Rhea stroked her braid and whispered instructions in her ear. Now would come the fulfillment of that interlude . . . and that was what she wanted to see, not two babbies shagging each other like they were the first two on earth to discover how 'twas done.

Twice they did it with hardly a pause to natter in between (she would have given a good deal to hear that natter, too). Rhea wasn't surprised; at his young age, she supposed the brat had enough spunkum in his sack to give her a week's worth of doubles, and from the way the little slut acted, that might be to her taste. Some of them discovered it and never wanted aught else; this was one, Rhea thought.

But let's see how sexy you feel in a few minutes, you snippy bitch, she thought, and leaned deeper into the pulsing pink light thrown from the glass. She could sometimes feel that light aching in the very bones of her face . . . but it was a good ache. Aye, wery good indeed.

They were at last done ... for the time being, at least. They clasped hands and drifted off to sleep.

"Now," Rhea murmured. "Now, my little one. Be a good girl and do as ye were told."

As if hearing her, Susan's eyes opened - but there was nothing in them. They woke and slept at the same time. Rhea saw her gently pull her hand free of the boy's. She sat up, bare breasts against bare thighs, and looked around. She got to her feet -

That was when Musty, the six-legged cat, jumped into Rhea's lap, waowing for either food or affection. The old woman shrieked with surprise, and the wizard's glass at once went dark - puffed out like a candle-flame in a gust of wind.

Rhea shrieked again, this time with rage, and seized the cat before it could flee. She hurled it across the room, into the fireplace. That was as dead a hole as only a summer fireplace can be, but when Rhea cast a bony, misshapen hand at it, a yellow gust of flame rose from the single half-charred log lying in there. Musty screamed and fled from the hearth with his eyes wide and his split tail smoking like an indifferently butted cigar.

"Run, aye!" Rhea spat after him. "Begone, ye vile cusk!"

She turned back to the glass and spread her hands over it, thumb to thumb. But although she concentrated with all her might, willed until her heart was beating with a sick fury in her chest, she could do no more than bring back the ball's natural pink glow. No images appeared. This was bitterly disappointing, but there was nothing to be done. And in time she would be able to see the results with her own two natural eyes, if she cared to go to town and do so.

Everybody would be able to see.

Her good humor restored, Rhea returned the ball to its hiding place.

10

Only moments before he would have sunk too deep in sleep to have heard it, a warning bell went off in Roland's mind. Perhaps it was the faint realization that her hand was no longer entwined with his; perhaps it was raw intuition. He could have ignored that faint bell, and almost did, but in the end his training was too strong. He came up from the threshold of real sleep, fighting his way back to clarity as a diver kicks for the surface of a quarry. It was hard at first, but became easier; as he neared wakefulness, his alarm grew.

He opened his eyes and looked to his left. Susan was no longer there. He sat up, looked to his right, and saw nothing above the cut of the stream ... yet he felt that she was in that direction, all the same.

"Susan?"

No response. He got up, looked at his pants, and Cort - a visitor he never would have expected in such a romantic bower as this - spoke up gruffly in his mind. No time, maggot.

He walked naked to the bank and looked down. Susan was there, all right, also naked, her back to him. She had unbraided her hair. It hung, loose gold, almost all the way to the lyre other hips. The chill air rising from the surface of the stream shivered the tips of it like mist.

She was down on one knee at the edge of the running water. One arm was plunged into it almost to the elbow; she searched for something, it seemed.

"Susan!"

No answer. And now a cold thought came to him: She's been infested by a demon. While I slept, heedless, beside her, she's been infested by a demon. Yet he did not think he really believed that. If there had been a demon near this clearing, he would have felt it. Likely both of them would have felt it; the horses, too. But something was wrong with her.

She brought an object up from the streambed and held it before her eyes in her dripping hand. A stone. She examined it, then tossed it back -  plunk. She reached in again, head bent, two sheafs of her hair now actually floating on the water, the stream prankishly tugging them in the direction it flowed. "Susan!"

No response. She plucked another stone out of the stream. This one was a triangular white quartz, shattered into a shape that was almost like the head of a spear. Susan tilted her head to the left and took a sheaf of her hair in her hand, like a woman who means to comb out a nest of tangles. But there was no comb, only the rock with its sharp edge, and for a moment longer Roland remained on the bank, frozen with horror, sure that she meant to cut her own throat out of shame and guilt over what they'd done. In the weeks to come, he was haunted by a clear knowledge: if it had been her throat she'd intended, he wouldn't have been in time to stop her.

Then the paralysis broke and he hurled himself down the bank, unmindful of the sharp stones that gouged the soles of his feet. Before he reached her, she had already used the edge of the quartz to cut off part of the golden tress she held.

Roland seized her wrist and pulled it back. He could see her face clearly now. What could have been mistaken for serenity from the top of the bank now looked like what it really was: vacuity, emptiness.

When he took hold of her, the smoothness of her face was replaced by a dim and fretful smile; her mouth quivered as if she felt distant pain, and an almost formless sound of negation came from her mouth:

"Nnnnnnnnn - "

Some of the hair she had cut off lay on her thigh like gold wire; most had fallen into the stream and been carried away. Susan pulled against Roland's hand, trying to get the sharp edge back to her hair, wanting to continue her mad barbering. The two of them strove together like arm-wrestlers in a barroom contest. And Susan was winning. He was physically the stronger, but not stronger than the enchantment which held her. Little by little the white triangle of quartz moved back toward her hanging hair. That frightening sound - Nnnnnnnnnn -  kept drifting from her mouth.

"Susan! Stop it! Wake up!"

"Nnnnnnnn -  "

Her bare arm quivering visibly in the air, the muscles bunched like hard little rocks. And the quartz moving closer and closer to her hair, her cheek, the socket of her eye.

Without thinking about it - it was the way he always acted most successfully - Roland moved his face close to the side others, giving up another four inches to the fist holding the stone in order to do it. He put his lips against the cup of her ear and then clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. Clucked sidemouth, in fact.

Susan jerked back from that sound, which must have gone through her head like a spear. Her eyelids fluttered rapidly, and the pressure she was exerting against Roland's grip eased a little. He took the chance and twisted her wrist.

"Ow!Owwww!"

The stone flew out of her opening hand and splashed into the water. Susan gazed at him, now fully awake, her eyes filled with tears and bewilderment. She was rubbing her wrist. . . which, Roland thought, was likely to swell.

"Ye hurt me, Roland! Why did ye hurt m ..."

She trailed off, looking around. Now not just her face but the whole set other body expressed bewilderment. She moved to cover herself with her hands, then realized they were still alone and dropped them to her sides. She glanced over her shoulder at the footprints - all of them bare -  leading down the bank.

"How did I get down here?" she asked. "Did thee carry me, after I fell asleep? And why did thee hurt me? Oh, Roland, I love thee - why did ye hurt me?"

He picked up the strands of hair that still lay on her thigh and held them in front of her. "You had a stone with a sharp edge. You were trying to cut yourself with it, and you didn't want to stop. I hurt you because I was scared. I'm just glad I didn't break your wrist ... at least, I don't think I did."

Roland took it and rotated it gently in either direction, listening for the grate of small bones.

He heard nothing, and the wrist turned freely. As Susan watched, stunned and confused, he raised it to his lips and kissed the inner part, above the delicate tracery of veins.

11

Roland had tied Rusher just far enough into the willows so the big gelding could not be seen by anyone who happened to come riding along the Drop.

"Be easy," Roland said, approaching. "Be easy a little longer, good-heart."

Rusher stamped and whickered, as if to say he could be easy until the end of the age, if that was what were required.

Roland nipped open his saddlebag and took out the steel utensil that served as either a pot or a frypan, depending on his needs. He started away, then turned back. His bedroll was tied behind Pusher's saddle he had planned to spend the night camped out on the Drop, thinking. There had been a lot to think about, and now there was even more.

He pulled one of the rawhide ties, reached inside the blankets, and pulled out a small metal box. This he opened with a tiny key he drew from around his neck. Inside the box was a small square locket on a fine silver chain (inside the locket was a line-drawing of his mother), and a handful of extra shells - not quite a dozen. He took one, closed it in his fist, and went back to Susan. She looked at him with wide, frightened eyes.

"I don't remember anything after we made love the second time," she said. "Only looking up at the sky and thinking how good I felt and going to sleep. Oh, Roland, how bad does it look?"

"Not bad, I should think, but you'll know better than I. Here."

He dipped his cooker full of water and set it on the bank. Susan bent over it apprehensively, laying the hair on the left side of her head across her forearm, then moving the arm slowly outward, extending the tress in a band of bright gold. She saw the ragged cut at once. She examined it carefully, then let it drop with a sigh more relieved than rueful.

"I can hide it," she said. "When it's braided, no one will know. And after all, 'tis only hair - no more than woman's vanity. My aunt has told me so often enough, certainly. But Roland, why? Why did I do it?"

Roland had an idea. If hair was a woman's vanity, then hair-chopping would likely be a woman's bit of nastiness - a man would hardly think of it at all. The Mayor's wife, had it been her? He thought not. It seemed more likely that Rhea, up there on her height of land looking north toward the Bad Grass, Hanging Rock, and Eyebolt Canyon, had set this ugly trap. Mayor Thorin had been meant to wake up on the morning after the Reap with a hangover and a bald-headed gilly.

"Susan, can I try something?"

She gave him a smile. "Something ye didn't try already up yonder? Aye, what ye will."

"Nothing like that." He opened the hand he had held closed, showing the shell. "I want to try and find out who did this to you, and why." And other things, too. He just didn't know what they were yet.

She looked at the shell. Roland began to move it along the back of his hand, dancing it back and forth in a dexterous weaving. His knuckles rose and fell like the heddles of a loom. She watched this with a child's fascinated delight. "Where did ye learn that?"

"At home. It doesn't matter."

"Ye'd hypnotize me?"

"Aye ... and I don't think it would be for the first time." He made the shell dance a bit faster - now east along his rippling knuckles, now west. "May I?"

"Aye," she said. "If you can."

12

He could, all right; the speed with which she went under confirmed that this had happened to Susan before, and recently. Yet he couldn't get what lie wanted from her. She was perfectly cooperative (some sleep eager, fort would have said), but beyond a certain point she would not go. It wasn't decorum or modesty, either - as she slept open-eyed before the stream, she told him in a far-off but calm voice about the old woman's examination, and the way Rhea had tried to "fiddle her up." (At this Poland's fists clenched so tightly his nails bit into his palms.) But there came a point where she could no longer remember.

She and Rhea had gone to the door of the hut, Susan said, and there they had stood with the Kissing Moon shining down on their faces. The old woman had been touching her hair, Susan remembered that much. The touch revolted her, especially after the witch's previous touches, but Susan had been unable to do anything about it. Arms too heavy to raise; tongue too heavy to speak. She could only stand there while the witch whispered in her ear.

"What?" Roland asked. "What did she whisper?"

"I don't know," Susan said. "The rest is pink."

"Pink? What do you mean?"

"Pink," she repeated. She sounded almost amused, as if she believed Roland was being deliberately dense. "She says, 'Aye, lovely, just so, it's a good girl y'are,' then everything's pink. Pink and bright."

"Bright."

"Aye, like the moon. And then . . ." She paused. "Then I think it becomes the moon. The Kissing Moon, mayhap. A bright pink Kissing Moon, as round and full as a grapefruit."

He tried other ways into her memory with no success - every path he tried ended in that bright pinkness, first obscuring her recollection and then coalescing into a full moon. It meant nothing to Roland; he'd heard of blue moons, but never pink ones. The only thing of which he was sure was that the old woman had given Susan a powerful command to forget.

He considered taking her deeper - she would go - but didn't dare. Most of his experience came from hypnotizing his friends - classroom exercises that were larky and occasionally spooky. Always there had been Cort or Vannay present to make things right if they went off-track. Now there were no teachers to step in; for better or worse, the students had been left in charge of the school. What if he took her deep and couldn't get her back up again? And he had been told there were demons in the below-mind as well. If you went down to where they were, they sometimes swam out of their caves to meet you . . .

All other considerations aside, it was getting late. It wouldn't be prudent to stay here much longer.

"Susan, do you hear me?"

"Aye, Roland, I hear you very well."

"Good. I'm going to say a rhyme. You'll wake up as I say it. When I'm done, you'll be wide awake and remember everything we've said. Do you understand?"

"Aye."

"Listen: Bird and bear and hare and fish, Give my love her fondest wish."

Her smile as she rose to consciousness was one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen. She stretched, then put her arms around his neck and covered his face with kisses. "You, you, you, you," she said. "You're my fondest wish, Roland. You're my only wish. You and you, forever and ever."

They made love again there on the bank, beside the babbling stream, holding each other as tightly as they could, breathing into each other's mouths and living on each other's breath. You, you, you, you.

13

Twenty minutes later, he boosted her onto Felicia's back. Susan leaned down, took his face in her hands, and kissed him soundly.

"When will I see ye again?" she asked.

"Soon. But we must be careful."

"Aye. Careful as two lovers ever were, I think. Thank God thee's clever."

"We can use Sheemie, if we don't use him too often."

"Aye. And, Roland - do ye know the pavilion in Green Heart? Close to where they serve tea and cakes and things when the weather's fair?"

Roland did. Fifty yards or so up Hill Street from the jail and the Town Gathering Hall, Green Heart was one of the most pleasant places in town, with its quaint paths, umbrella-shaded tables, grassy dancing pavilion, and menagerie.

"There's a rock wall at the back," she said. "Between the pavilion and the menagerie. If you need me badly - "

"I'll always need you badly," he said.

She smiled at his gravity. "There's a stone on one of the lower courses - a reddish one. You'll see it. My friend Amy and I used to leave messages there for each other when we were little girls. I'll look there when I can. Ye do the same."

"Aye." Sheemie would work for awhile, if they were careful. The red rock might also work for awhile, if they were careful. But no matter how careful they were, they would slip eventually, because the Big Coffin Hunters now probably knew more about Roland and his friends than Roland ever would have wished. But he had to see her, no matter what the risks. If he didn't, he felt he might die. And he only had to look at her to know she felt the same.

"Watch special for Jonas and the other two," he said.

"I will. Another kiss, if ye favor?"

He kissed her gladly, and would just as gladly have pulled her off the mare's back for a fourth go-round . .. but it was time to stop being delirious and start being careful.

"Fare you well, Susan. I love y - " He paused, then smiled. "I love thee."

"And I thee, Roland. What heart I have is yours."

She had a great heart, he thought as she slipped through the willows, and already he felt its burden on his own. He waited until he felt sure she must be well away. Then he went to Rusher and rode off in the opposite direction, knowing that a new and dangerous phase of the game had begun.

14

Not too long after Susan and Roland had parted, Cordelia Delgado stepped out of the Hambry Mercantile with a box of groceries and a troubled mind. The troubled mind was caused by Susan, of course, always Susan, and Cordelia's fear that the girl would do something stupid before Reaping finally came around.

These thoughts were snatched out of her mind just as hands - strong ones - snatched the box of groceries from her arms. Cordelia cawed in surprise, shaded her eyes against the sun, and saw Eldred Jonas standing there between the Bear and Turtle totems, smiling at her. His hair, long and white (and beautiful, in her opinion), lay over his shoulders. Cordelia felt her heart beat a little faster. She had always been partial to men like Jonas, who could smile and banter their way to the edge of risqueness . . . but who carried their bodies like blades.

"I startled you. I cry your pardon, Cordelia."

"Nay," she said, sounding a little breathless to her own ears. "It's just the sun - so bright at this time of day - "

"I'd help you a bit on your way, if you give me leave. I'm only going up High as far as the comer, then I turn up the Hill, but may I help you that far?"

"With thanks," she said. They walked down the steps and up the board sidewalk, Cordelia looking around in little pecking glances to see who was observing them - she beside the handsome sai Jonas, who just happened to be carrying her goods. There was a satisfying number of onlookers. She saw Millicent Ortega, for one, looking out of Ann's Dresses with a satisfying 0 of surprise on her stupid cow's puss.

"I hope you don't mind me calling you Cordelia." Jonas shifted the box, which she'd needed two hands to carry, casually under one arm. "I feel, since the welcoming dinner at Mayor Thorin's house, that I know you."

"Cordelia's fine."

"And may I be Eldred to you?"

"I think 'Mr. Jonas' will do a bit longer," she said, then favored him with what she hoped was a coquettish smile. Her heart beat faster yet. (It did not occur to her that perhaps Susan was not the only silly goose in the Delgado family.)

"So be it," Jonas said, with a look of disappointment so comic that she laughed. "And your niece? Is she well?"

"Quite well, thank yefor asking. a bit of a trial, sometimes - "

"Was there ever a girl of sixteen who wasn't?"

"I suppose not."

"Yet you have additional burdens regarding her this fall. I doubt if \he realizes that, though."

Cordelia said nothing - 'twouldn't be discreet - but gave him a meaningful look that said much.

"Give her my best, please."

"I will." But she wouldn't. Susan had conceived a great (and irrational, in Cordelia's view) dislike for Mayor Thorin's regulators. Trying to talk her out of these feelings would likely do no good; young girls thought they knew everything. She glanced at the star peeking unobtrusively out from beneath the flap of Jonas's vest. "I understand ye've taken on an additional responsibility in our undeserving town, sai Jonas."

"Aye, I'm helping out Sheriff Avery," he agreed. His voice had a reedy little tremble which Cordelia found quite endearing, somehow. "One of his deputies - Claypool, his name is - "

"Frank Claypool, aye."

" - fell out of his boat and broke his leg. How do you fall out of a boat and break your leg, Cordelia?"

She laughed merrily (the idea that everyone in Hambry was watching them was surely wrong ... but it felt that way, and the feeling was not unpleasant) and said she didn't know.

He stopped on the comer of High and Camino Vega, looking regretful. "Here's where I turn." He handed the box back to her. "Are you sure you can carry that? I suppose I could go on with you to your house - "

"No need, no need. Thank you. Thank you, Eldred." The blush which crept up her neck and cheeks felt as hot as fire, but his smile was worth every degree of heat. He tipped her a little salute with two fingers and sauntered up the hill toward the Sheriff's office.

Cordelia walked on home. The box, which had seemed such a burden when she stepped out of the mercantile, now seemed to weigh next to nothing. This feeling lasted for half a mile or so, but by the time her house came into view, she was once again aware of the sweat trickling down her sides, and the ache in her arms. Thank the gods summer was almost over ... and wasn't that Susan, just leading her mare in through the gate?

"Susan!" she called, now enough returned to earth for her former irritation with the girl to sound clear in her voice. "Come and help me, 'fore I drop this and break the eggs!"

Susan came, leaving Felicia to crop grass in the front yard. Ten minutes earlier, Cordelia would have noticed nothing of how the girl looked -  her thoughts had been too wrapped up in Eldred Jonas to admit of much else. But the hot sun had taken some of the romance out of her head and returned her feet to earth. And as Susan took the box from her (handling it almost as easily as Jonas had done), Cordelia thought she didn't much care for the girl's appearance. Her temper had changed, for one thing -  from the half-hysterical confusion in which she'd left to a pleasant and happy-eyed calmness. That was the Susan of previous years to the sleeve and seam . . . but not this year's moaning, moody breast-beater. There was nothing else Cordelia could put her finger on, except -

But there was, actually. One thing. She reached out and grasped the girl's braid, which looked uncharacteristically sloppy this afternoon. Of course Susan had been riding; that could explain the mess. But it didn't explain how dark her hair was, as if that bright mass of gold had begun to tarnish. And she jumped, almost guiltily, when she felt Cordelia's touch. Why, pray tell, was that?

"Yer hair's damp, Susan," she said. "Have ye been swimming somewhere?"

"Nay! I stopped and ducked my head at the pump outside Hockey's barn. He doesn't mind - 'tis a deep well he has. It's so hot. Perhaps there'll be a shower later. I hope so. I gave Felicia to drink as well."

The girl's eyes were as direct and as candid as ever, but Cordelia thought there was something off in them, just the same. She couldn't say what. The idea that Susan might be hiding something large and serious did not immediately cross Cordelia's mind; she would have said her niece was incapable of keeping a secret any greater than a birthday present or a surprise party . . . and not even such secrets as those for more than a day or two. And yet something was off here. Cordelia dropped her fingers to the collar of the girl's riding shirt.

"Yet this is dry."

"I was careful," she said, looking at her aunt with a puzzled eye. "Dirt sticks worse to a wet shirt. You taught me that, Aunt."

"Ye flinched when I touched yer hair, Susan."

"Aye," Susan said, "so I did. The weird-woman touched it just that same way. I haven't liked it since. Now may I take these groceries in and get my horse out of the hot sun?"

"Don't be pert, Susan." Yet the edginess in her niece's voice actually eased her in some strange way. That feeling that Susan had changed, somehow - that feeling ofoffness -  began to subside.

"Then don't be tiresome."

"Susan! Apologize to me!"

Susan took a deep breath, held it, then let it out. "Yes, Aunt. I do. But it's hot."

"Aye. Put those in the pantry. And thankee."

Susan went on toward the house with the box in her arms. When the girl had enough of a lead so they wouldn't have to walk together, Cordelia followed. It was all foolishness on her part, no doubt - suspicions brought on by her flirtation with Eldred - but the girl was at a dangerous age, and much depended on her good behavior over the next seven weeks. After that she would be Thorin's problem, but until then she was Cordelia's. Cordelia thought that, in the end, Susan would be true to her promise, but until Reaping Fair she would bear close watching. About such matters as a girl's virginity, it was best to be vigilant.

INTERLUDE

KANSAS,

SOMEWHERE,

SOMEWHEN

Eddie stirred. Around them the thinny still whined like an unpleasant mother-in-law; above them the stars gleamed as bright as new hopes . . . or bad intentions. He looked at Susannah, sitting with the stumps of her legs curled beneath her; he looked at Jake, who was eating a burrito; he looked at Oy, whose snout rested on Jake's ankle and who was looking up at the boy with an expression of calm adoration.

The fire was low, but still it burned. The same was true of Demon Moon, far in the west.

"Roland." His voice sounded old and rusty to his own ears.

The gunslinger, who had paused for a sip of water, looked at him with his eyebrows raised.

"How can you know every comer of this story?"

Roland seemed amused. "I don't think that's what you really want to know, Eddie."

He was right about that - old long, tall, and ugly made a habit of being right. It was, as far as Eddie was concerned, one of his most irritating characteristics. "All right. How long have you been talking? That's what I really want to know."

"Are you uncomfortable? Want to go to bed?"

He's making fun of me, Eddie thought . . . but even as the idea occurred to him, he knew it wasn't true. And no, he wasn't uncomfortable. There was no stiffness in his joints, although he had been sitting cross-legged ever since Roland had begun by telling them about Rhea and the glass ball, and he didn't need to go to the toilet. Nor was he hungry. Jake was munching the single leftover burrito, but probably for the same reason folks climbed Mount Everest ... because it was there. And why should he be hungry or sleepyor stiff? why, when the fire still burned and the moon was not yet down?

He looked at Roland's amused eyes and saw the gunslinger was reading his thoughts.

"No, I don't want to go to bed. You know I don't. But, Roland . . . you've been talking a long time." He paused, looked down at his hands, then looked up again, smiling uneasily. "Days, I would have said."

"But time is different here. I've told you that; now you see for yourself. Not all nights are the same length just recently. Days, either . . . but we notice time more at night, don't we? Yes, I think we do."

"Is the thinny stretching time?" And now that he had mentioned it, Eddie could hear it in all its creepy glory - a sound like vibrating metal, or maybe the world's biggest mosquito.

"It might be helping, but mostly it's just how things are in my world."

Susannah stirred like a woman who rises partway from a dream that holds her like sweet quicksand. She gave Eddie a look that was both distant and impatient. "Let the man talk, Eddie."

"Yeah," Jake said. "Let the man talk."

And Oy, without raising his snout from Jake's ankle: "An. Awk."

"All right," Eddie said. "No problem."

Roland swept them with his eyes. "Are you sure? The rest is . . ." He didn't seem able to finish, and Eddie realized that Roland was scared.

"Go on," Eddie told him quietly. "Let the rest be what it is. What it was." He looked around. Kansas, they were in Kansas. Somewhere, somewhen. Except he felt that Mejis and those people he had never seen -  Cordelia and Jonas and Brian Hookey and Sheemie and Pettie the Trotter and Cuthbert Allgood - were very close now. That Roland's lost Susan was very close now. Because reality was thin here - as thin as the seat in an old pair of blue jeans - and the dark would hold for as long as Roland needed it to hold. Eddie doubted if Roland even noticed the dark, particularly. Why would he? Eddie thought it had been night inside of Roland's mind for a long, long time . . . and dawn was still nowhere near.

He reached out and touched one of those callused killer's hands. Gently he touched it, and with love.

"Go on, Roland. Tell your tale. All the way to the end."

"All the way to the end," Susannah said dreamily. "Cut the vein." Her eyes were full of moonlight.

"All the way to the end," Jake said.

"End," Oy whispered.

Roland held Eddie's hand for a moment, then let it go. He looked into the guttering fire without immediately speaking, and Eddie sensed him trying to find the way. Trying doors, one after another, until he found one that opened. What he saw behind it made him smile and look up at Eddie.

"True love is boring," he said.

"Say what?"

"True love is boring," Roland repeated. "As boring as any other strong and addicting drug. And, as with any other strong drug . . ."

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