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.