Jamie shook his head.
“Not I,” said Peavy, “for it might be haunted. Go on, Roland. If I may call ye so.”
“And welcome,” I said. I struck the sulphur and dropped it. We stood watching until the remains of Debaria’s skin-man were nothing but black bones. The wrist-clock was a charred lump in the ash.
The following morning, Jamie and I rounded up a crew of men-more than willing, they were-to go out to the rail line. Once they were there, it was a matter of two hours to put Sma’ Toot back on the double-steel. Travis, the enjie, directed the operation, and I made many friends by telling them I’d arranged for everyone in the crew to eat free at Racey’s at top o’ day and drink free at the Busted Luck that afternoon.
There was to be a town celebration that night, at which Jamie and I would be guests of honor. It was the sort of thing I could happily do without-I was anxious to get home, and as a rule, company doesn’t suit me-but such events are often part of the job. One good thing: there would be women, some of them no doubt pretty. That part I wouldn’t mind, and suspected Jamie wouldn’t, either. He had much to learn about women, and Debaria was as good a place to begin his studies as any.
He and I watched Sma’ Toot puff slowly up to the roundway and then make its way toward us again, pointed in the right direction: toward Gilead.
“Will we stop at Serenity on the way back to town?” Jamie asked. “To ask if they’ll take the boy in?”
“Aye. And the prioress said she had something for me.”
“Do you know what?”
I shook my head.
Everlynne, that mountain of a woman, swept toward us across the courtyard of Serenity, her arms spread wide. I was almost tempted to run; it was like standing in the path of one of the vast trucks that used to run at the oil-fields near Kuna.
Instead of running us down, she swept us into a vast and bosomy double hug. Her aroma was sweet: a mixture of cinnamon and thyme and baked goods. She kissed Jamie on the cheek-he blushed. Then she kissed me full on the lips. For a moment we were enveloped by her complicated and billowing garments and shaded by her winged silk hood. Then she drew back, her face shining.
“What a service you have done this town! And how we say thankya!”
I smiled. “Sai Everlynne, you are too kind.”
“Not kind enough! You’ll have noonies with us, yes? And meadow wine, although only a little. Ye’ll have more to drink tonight, I have no doubt.” She gave Jamie a roguish side-glance. “But ye’ll want to be careful when the toasts go around; too much drink can make a man less a man later on, and blur memories he might otherwise want to keep.” She paused, then broke into a knowing grin that went oddly with her robes. “Or… p’raps not.”
Jamie blushed harder than ever, but said nothing.
“We saw you coming,” Everlynne said, “and there’s someone else who’d like to give you her thanks.”
She moved aside and there stood the tiny Sister of Serenity named Fortuna. She was still swathed in bandagement, but she looked less wraithlike today, and the side of the face we could see was shining with happiness and relief. She stepped forward shyly.
“I can sleep again. And in time, I may even be able to sleep wi’out nightmares.”
She twitched up the skirt of her gray robe, and-to my deep discomfort-fell on her knees before us. “Sister Fortuna, Annie Clay that was, says thank you. So do we all, but this comes from my own heart.”
I took her gently by the shoulders. “Rise, bondswoman. Kneel not before such as us.”
She looked at me with shining eyes, and kissed me on the cheek with the side of her mouth that could still kiss. Then she fled back across the courtyard toward what I assumed was their kitchen. Wonderful smells were already arising from that part of the haci.
Everlynne watched her go with a fond smile, then turned back to me.
“There’s a boy-” I began.
She nodded. “Bill Streeter. I know his name and his story. We don’t go to town, but sometimes the town comes to us. Friendly birds twitter news in our ears, if you take my meaning.”
“I take it well,” I said.
“Bring him tomorrow, after your heads have shrunk back to their normal size,” said she. “We’re a company of women, but we’re happy to take an orphan boy… at least until he grows enough hair on his upper lip to shave. After that, women trouble a boy, and it might not be so well for him to stay here. In the meantime, we can set him about his letters and numbers… if he’s trig enough to learn, that is. Would you say he’s trig enough, Roland, son of Gabrielle?”
It was odd to be called from my mother’s side rather than my father’s, but strangely pleasant. “I’d say he’s very trig.”
“That’s well, then. And we’ll find a place for him when it’s time for him to go.”
“A plot and a place,” I said.
Everlynne laughed. “Aye, just so, like in the story of Tim Stoutheart. And now we’ll break bread together, shall we? And with meadow wine we’ll toast the prowess of young men.”
We ate, we drank, and all in all, it was a very merry meeting. When the sisters began to clear the trestle tables, Prioress Everlynne took me to her private quarters, which consisted of a bedroom and a much larger office where a cat slept in a bar of sun on a huge oaken desk heaped high with papers.
“Few men have been here, Roland,” she said. “One was a fellow you might know. He had a white face and black clothes. Do you know the man of whom I speak?”
“Marten Broadcloak,” I said. The good food in my stomach was suddenly sour with hate. And jealousy, I suppose-nor just on behalf of my father, whom Gabrielle of Arten had decorated with cuckold’s horns. “Did he see her?”
“He demanded to, but I refused and sent him hence. At first he declined to go, but I showed him my knife and told him there were other weapons in Serenity, aye, and women who knew how to use them. One, I said, was a gun. I reminded him he was deep inside the haci, and suggested that, unless he could fly, he had better take heed. He did, but before he went he cursed me, and he cursed this place.” She hesitated, stroked the cat, then looked up at me. “There was a time when I thought perhaps the skin-man was his work.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Nor I, but neither of us will ever be entirely sure, will we?” The cat tried to climb into the vast playground of her lap, and Everlynne shooed it away. “Of one thing I am sure: he spoke to her anyway, although whether through the window of her cell late at night or only in her troubled dreams, no one will ever know. That secret she took with her into the clearing, poor woman.”
To this I did not reply. When one is amazed and heartsick, it’s usually best to say nothing, for in that state, any word will be the wrong word.
“Your lady-mother quit her retirement with us shortly after we turned this Broadcloak fellow around. She said she had a duty to perform, and much to atone for. She said her son would come here. I asked her how she knew and she said, ‘Because ka is a wheel and it always turns.’ She left this for you.”
Everlynne opened one of the many drawers of her desk and removed an envelope. Written on the front was my name, in a hand I knew well. Only my father would have known it better. That hand had once turned the pages of a fine old book as she read me “The Wind Through the Keyhole.” Aye, and many others. I loved all the stories held in the pages that hand turned, but never so much as I loved the hand itself. Even more, I loved the sound of the voice that told them as the wind blew outside. Those were the days before she was mazed and fell into the sad bitchery that brought her under a gun in another hand. My gun, my hand.
Everlynne rose, smoothing her large apron. “I must go and see how things are advancing in other parts of my little kingdom. I’ll bid you goodbye now, Roland, son of Gabrielle, only asking that you pull the door shut when you go. It will lock itself.”
“You trust me with your things?” I asked.