“I love that sound,” she said. “It always makes me wish I could be part of the wind… go where it goes, see what it sees.”

“This year, if ka allows, you will.”

“Aye. And with thee.” She turned to him, up on one elbow. Light fell through the ruined roof and dappled her face. “Roland, I love thee.” She kissed him… and then began to cry.

He held her, concerned. “What is it? Sue, what troubles thee?”

“I don’t know,” she said, crying harder. “All I know is that there’s a shadow on my heart.” She looked at him with tears still flowing from her eyes. “Thee’d not leave me, would ye, dear? Thee’d not go without Sue, would ye?”

“No.”

“For I’ve given all I have to ye, so I have. And my virginity’s the very least of it, thee knows.”

“I’d never leave you.” But he felt cold in spite of the bearskin, and the wind outside-so comforting a moment ago-sounded like beast’s breath. “Never, I swear.”

“I’m frightened, though. Indeed I am.”

“You needn’t be,” he said, speaking slowly and carefully… for suddenly all the wrong words wanted to come tumbling out of his mouth. We’ll leave this, Susan-not day after tomorrow, on Reaping, but now, this minute. Dress and we’ll go crosswise to the wind; it’s south we’ll ride and never look back. We’ll be-

–haunted.

That’s what they would be. Haunted by the faces of Alain and Cuthbert; haunted by the faces of all the men who might die in the Shaved Mountains, massacred by weapons torn from the armory-crypts where they should have been left. Haunted most of all by the faces of their fathers, for all the rest of their lives. Not even the South Pole would be far enough to escape those faces.

“All you need do day after tomorrow is claim indisposition at lunch.” They had gone over all this before, but now, in his sudden, pointless fright, it was all he could think of to say. “Go to your room, then leave as you did on the night we met in the graveyard. Hide up a little. Then, when it’s three o’ the clock, ride here, and look under the skins in yon comer. If my guns are gone-and they will be, I swear they will-then everything’s all right. You’ll ride to meet us. Come to the place above the canyon, the one we told you of. We’ll-”

“Aye, I know all that, but something’s wrong.” She looked at him, touched the side of his face. “I fear for thee and me, Roland, and know not why.”

“All will work out,” he said. “Ka-”

“Speak not to me of ka!” she cried. “Oh please don’t! Ka like a wind, my father said, it takes what it will and minds the plea of no man or woman. Greedy old ka, how I hate it!”

“Susan-”

“No, say no more.” She lay back and pushed the bearskin down to her knees, exposing a body that far greater men than Hart Thorin might have given away kingdoms for. Beads of sunlight ran over her bare skin like rain. She held her arms out to him. Never had she looked more beautiful to Roland than she did then, with her hair spread about her and that haunted look on her face. He would think later: She knew. Some part of her knew.

“No more talking,” she said. “Talking’s done. If you love me, then love me.”

And for the last time, Roland did. They rocked together, skin to skin and breath to breath, and outside the wind roared into the west like a tidal wave.

12

That evening, as the grinning Demon rose in the sky, Cordelia left her house and walked slowly across the lawn to her garden, detouring around the pile of leaves she had raked that afternoon. In her arms was a bundle of clothes. She dropped them in front of the pole to which her stuffy-guy was bound, then looked raptly up at the rising moon: the knowing wink of the eye, the ghoul’s grin; silver as bone was that moon, a white button against violet silk.

It grinned at Cordelia; Cordelia grinned back. Finally, with the air of a woman awakening from a trance, she stepped forward and pulled the stuffy-guy off its pole. His head lolled limply against her shoulder, like the head of a man who has found himself too drunk to dance. His red hands dangled.

She stripped off the guy’s clothes, uncovering a bulging, vaguely humanoid shape in a pair of her dead brother’s longhandles. She took one of the things she had brought from the house and held it up to the moonlight. A red silk riding shirt, one of Mayor Thorin’s presents to Miss Oh So Young and Pretty. One of those she wouldn’t wear. Whore’s clothes, she had called them. And what did that make Cordelia Delgado, who had taken care of her even after her bullheaded da had decided he must stand against the likes of Fran Lengyll and John Croydon? It made her a whorehouse madam, she supposed.

This thought led to an image of Eldred Jonas and Coral Thorin, naked and striving while a honky-tonk piano planked out “Red Dirt Boogie” below them, and Cordelia moaned like a dog.

She yanked the silk shirt over the stuffy’s head. Next came one of Susan’s split riding skirts. After the skirt, a pair of her slippers. And last, replacing the sombrero, one of Susan’s spring bonnets.

Presto! The stuffy-guy was now a stuffy-gal.

“And caught red-handed ye are,” she whispered. “I know. Oh yes, I know. I wasn’t born yesterday.”

She carried the stuffy from the garden to the pile of leaves on the lawn. She laid it close by the leaves, then scooped some up and pushed them into the bodice of the riding shirt, making rudimentary breasts. That done, she took a match from her pocket and struck it alight.

The wind, as if eager to cooperate, dropped. Cordelia touched the match to the dry leaves. Soon the whole pile was blazing. She picked the stuffy-gal up in her arms and stood with it in front of the fire. She didn’t hear the rattling firecrackers from town, or the wheeze of the steam-organ in Green Heart, or the mariachi band playing in the Low Market; when a burning leaf rose and swirled past her hair, threatening to set it alight, she didn’t seem to notice. Her eyes were wide and blank.

When the fire was at its height, she stepped to its edge and threw the stuffy on. Flame whumped up around it in bright orange gusts; sparks and burning leaves swirled skyward in a funnel.

“So let it be done!” Cordelia cried. The firelight on her face turned her tears to blood. “Charyou tree! Aye, just so!”

The thing in the riding clothes caught fire, its face charring, its red hands blazing, its white-cross eyes turning black. Its bonnet flared; the face began to bum.

Cordelia stood and watched, fists clenching and unclenching, heedless of the sparks that lit on her skin, heedless of the blazing leaves that swirled toward the house. Had the house caught tire, she would likely have ignored that as well.

She watched until the stuffy dressed in her niece’s clothes was nothing but ashes lying atop more ashes. Then, as slowly as a robot with rust in its works, she walked back to the house, lay down on the sofa, and slept like the dead.