“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 of offness-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 sleepy or 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…”
Part three
COME, REAP
Chapter 1
BENEATH THE HUNTRESS MOON
1
True love, like any other strong and addicting drug, is boring-once the tale of encounter and discovery is told, kisses quickly grow stale and caresses tiresome… except, of course, to those who share the kisses, who give and take the caresses while every sound and color of the world seems to deepen and brighten around them. As with any other strong drug, true first love is really only interesting to those who have become its prisoners.
And, as is true of any other strong and addicting drug, true first love is dangerous.
2
Some called Huntress the last moon of summer; some called it the first of fall. Whichever it was, it signaled a change in the life of the Barony. Men put out into the bay wearing sweaters beneath their oilskins as the winds began to turn more and more firmly into autumn’s east-west alley, and to sharpen as they turned. In the great Barony orchards north of Hambry (and in smaller orchards owned by John Croydon, Henry Wertner, Jake White, and the morose but wealthy Coral Thorin), the pickers began to appear in the rows, carrying their odd, off-kilter ladders; they were followed by horse-drawn carts full of empty barrels. Downwind of the cider-houses-especially downwind of the great Barony cider-mansion a mile north of Seafront-the breezy air was filled with the sweet tang of blems being pressed by the basketload. Away from the shore of the Clean Sea, the days remained warm as the Huntress waxed, skies were clear day and night, but summer’s real heat had departed with the Peddler. The last cutting of hay began and was finished in the run of a week-that last one was always scant, and ranchers and freeholders alike would curse it, scratching their heads and asking themselves why they even bothered… but come rainy, blowsy old March, with the bam lofts and bins rapidly emptying, they always knew. In the Barony’s gardens-the great ones of the ranchers, the smaller ones of the freeholders, and the tiny backyard plots of the townsfolk-men and women and children appeared in their old clothes and boots, their sombreros and sombreros. They came with the legs of their pants tied down firmly at the ankles, for in the time of the Huntress, snakes and scorpions in plentiful numbers wandered east from the desert. By the time old Demon Moon began to fatten, a line of rattlers would hang from the hitching posts of both the Travellers’ Rest and the mercantile across the street. Other businesses would similarly decorate their hitching posts, but when the prize for the most skins was given on Reaping Day, it was always the inn or the market that won it. In the fields and gardens, baskets to pick into were cast along the rows by women with their hair tied up in kerchiefs and reap-charms hidden in their bosoms. The last of the tomatoes were picked, the last of the cucumbers, the last of the corn, the last of the parey and mingo. Waiting behind them, as the days sharpened and the autumn storms began to near, would come squash, sharproot, pumpkins, and potatoes. In Mejis the time of reaping had begun, while overhead, clearer and clearer on each starry night, the Huntress pulled her bow and looked east over those strange, watery leagues no man or woman of Mid-World had ever seen.