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?”