“Not unless we have to, I reckon.” Later he would regret this decision—if it was a decision—bitterly, but there never came a time when he did not understand it. He had been a boy not much older than Jake Chambers during that Mejis fall, and the decision to kill does not come easily or naturally to most boys. “Not unless she makes us.”
“Perhaps it would be best if she did,” Cuthbert said. It was hard gunslinger talk, but he looked troubled as he said it.
“Yes. Perhaps it would. It’s not likely, though, not in one as sly as her. Be ready to get up early.”
“All right. Do you want your hand back?”
“When you’re on the verge of knocking him out? Not at all.”
Roland went past them to his bunk. There he sat, looking at his folded hands in his lap. He might have been praying; he might only have been thinking hard. Cuthbert looked at him for a moment, then turned back to his cards.
16
The sun was just over the horizon when Roland and Cuthbert left the next morning. The Drop, still drenched with morning dew, seemed to bum with orange
fire in the early light. Their breath and that of their horses puffed frosty in the air.
It was a morning neither of them ever forgot. For the first time in their lives they went forth wearing bolstered revolvers; for the first time in their lives they went into the world as gunslingers.
Cuthbert said not a word—he knew that if he started, he’d do nothing but babble great streams of his usual nonsense—and Roland was quiet by nature. There was only one exchange between them, and it was brief.
“I said I made at least one very bad mistake,” Roland told him. “One that this note”—he touched his breast pocket—”brought home to me. Do you know what that mistake was?”
“Not loving her—not that,” Cuthbert said. “You called that ka, and I call it the same.” It was a relief to be able to say this, and a greater one to believe it. Cuthbert thought he could even accept Susan herself now, not us his best friend’s lover, a girl he had wanted himself the first time he saw her, but as a part of their entwined fate.
“No,” Roland said. “Not loving her, but thinking that love could somehow be apart from everything else. That I could live two lives—one with you and Al and our job here, one with her. I thought that love could lilt me above ka, the way a bird’s wings can take it above all the things that would kill it and eat it, otherwise. Do you understand?”
“It made you blind.” Cuthbert spoke with a gentleness quite foreign to the young man who had suffered through the last two months.
“Yes,” Roland said sadly. “It made me blind . . . but now I see. Come on, a little faster, if you please. I want to get this over.”
17
They rode up the rutty cart-track along which Susan (a Susan who had known a good deal less about the ways of the world) had come singing “Careless Love”
beneath the light of the Kissing Moon. Where the track opened into Rhea’s yard, they stopped.
“Wonderful view,” Roland murmured. “You can see the whole sweep of the desert from here.”
“Not much to say about the view right here in front of us, though.”
That was true. The garden was full of unpicked mutie vegetables, the stuffy-guy presiding over them either a bad joke or a bad omen. The yard supported just one tree, now moulting sickly-looking fall leaves like an old vulture shedding its feathers. Beyond the tree was the hut itself, made of rough stone and topped by a single sooty pot of a chimney with a hex-sign painted on it in sneering yellow. At the rear comer, beyond one overgrown window, was a woodpile.
Roland had seen plenty of huts like it—the three of them had passed any number on their way here from Gilead—but never one that felt as powerfully wrong as this. He saw nothing untoward, yet there was a feeling, too strong to be denied, of a presence. One that watched and waited.
Cuthbert felt it, too. “Do we have to go closer?” lie swallowed. “Do we have to go in? Because . . . Roland, the door is open. Do you see?”
He saw. As if she expected them. As if she was inviting them in, wanting them to sit down with her to some unspeakable breakfast.
“Stay here.” Roland gigged Rusher forward.
“No! I’m coming!”
“No, cover my back. If I need to go inside, I’ll call you to join me … but if I need to go inside, the old woman who lives here will breathe no more. As you said, that might be for the best.”
At every slow step Rusher took, the feeling of wrongness grew in Roland’s heart and mind. There was a stench to the place, a smell like rotten meat and hot putrefied tomatoes. It came from the hut, he supposed, but it also seemed to come wafting out of the very ground. And at every step, the whine of the thinny seemed louder, as if the atmosphere of this place somehow magnified it.
Susan came up here alone, and in the dark, he thought. Gods, I’m not sure I could have come up here in the dark with my friends for company.
He stopped beneath the tree, looking through the open door twenty paces away.
He saw what could have been a kitchen; the legs of a table, the back of a chair, a filthy hearthstone. No sign of the lady of the house. But she was there. Roland could feel her eyes crawling on him like loathsome bugs.
I can’t see her because she’s used her art to make herself dim… but she’s there.
And just perhaps he did see her. The air had a strange shimmer just inside the door to the right, as if it had been heated. Roland had been told that you could see someone who was dim by turning your head and looking from the comer of your
eye. He did that now.
“Roland?” Cuthbert called from behind him.
“Fine so far, Bert.” Barely paying attention to the words he was saying, because
… yes! That shimmer was clearer now, and it had almost the shape of a woman. It could be his imagination, of course, but…
But at that moment, as if understanding he’d seen her, the shimmer moved farther back into the shadows. Roland glimpsed the swinging hem of an old black dress, there and then gone.
No matter. He had not come to see her but only to give her her single warning . . .
which was one more than any of their fathers would have given her, no doubt.
“Rhea!” His voice rolled in the harsh tones of old, stem and commanding. Two yellow leaves fell from the tree, as if shivered loose by that voice, and one fell in his black hair. From the hut came only a waiting, listening silence . . . and then the discordant, jeering yowl of a cat.
“Rhea, daughter of none! I’ve brought something back to you, woman! Something you must have lost!” From his shirt he took the folded letter and tossed it to the stony ground. “Today I’ve been your friend, Rhea—if this had gone where you had intended it to go, you would have paid with your life.”
He paused. Another leaf drifted down from the tree. This one landed in Pusher’s mane.
“Hear me well, Rhea, daughter of none, and understand me well. I have come here under the name of Will Dearborn, but Dearborn is not my name and it is the Affiliation I serve. More, ’tis all which lies behind the Affiliation—’tis the power of the White. You have crossed the way of our ka, and I warn you only this once: do not cross it again. Do you understand?”
Only that waiting silence.
“Do not touch a single hair on the head of the boy who carried your had-natured mischief hence, or you’ll die. Speak not another word of those things you know or think you know to anyone—not to Cordelia Delgado, nor to Jonas, nor to Rimer, nor to Thorin—or you’ll die. Keep your peace and we will keep ours. Break it, and we’ll still you. Do you understand?”
More silence. Dirty windows peering at him like eyes. A puff of breeze sent more leaves showering down around him, and caused the stuffy-guy to creak nastily on his pole. Roland thought briefly of the cook, Hax, twisting at the end of his rope.
“Do you understand?”
No reply. Not even a shimmer could he see through the open door now.
“Very well,” Roland said. “Silence gives consent.” He gigged his horse around. As he did, his head came up a little, and he saw something green shift above him among the yellow leaves. There was a low hissing sound.