Jonas seemed to take no notice. His eyes were wide; the comers of his seamed mouth were trembling. “Watch your words, Will Dearborn,” he said in a low, hoarse voice. “You want to watch em ever so close. I got two pounds of pressure on a three-pound trigger right this second.”

“Fine, shoot me,” Roland said. He lifted his head and looked down at Jonas. “Shoot, exile. Shoot, worm. Shoot, you failure. You’ll still live in exile and die as you lived.”

For a moment he was sure Jonas would shoot, and in that moment Roland felt death would be enough, an acceptable end after the shame of being caught so easily. In that moment Susan was absent from his mind. Nothing breathed in that moment, nothing called, nothing moved. The shadows of the men watching this confrontation, both on foot and on horseback, were printed depthless on the dirt.

Then Jonas dropped the hammer of his gun and slipped it back into its holster.

“Take em to town and jug em,” he said to Lengyll. “And when I show up, I don’t want to see one hair harmed on one head. If I could keep from killing this one, you can keep from hurting the rest. Now go on.”

“Move,” Lengyll said. His voice had lost some of its bluff authority. It was now the voice of a man who realizes (too late) that he has bought chips in a game where the stakes are likely much too high.

They rode. As they did, Roland turned one last time. The contempt Jonas saw in those cool young eyes stung him worse than the whips that had scarred his back in Garlan years ago.

6

When they were out of sight, Jonas went into the bunkhouse, pulled up the board which concealed their little armory, and found only two guns. The matched set of six-shooters with the dark handles-Dearborn’s guns, surely-were gone.

You ’re in the west. The soul of a man such as you can never leave the west. You’ll live in exile and die as you lived.

Jonas’s hands went to work, disassembling the revolvers Cuthbert and Alain had brought west. Alain’s had never even been worn, save on the practice-range. Outside, Jonas threw the pieces, scattering them every which way. He threw as hard as he could, trying to rid himself of that cool blue gaze and the shock of hearing what he’d believed no man had known. Roy and Clay suspected, but even they hadn’t known for sure.

Before the sun went down, everyone in Mejis would know that Eldred Jonas, the white-haired regulator with the tattooed coffin on his hand, was nothing but a failed gunslinger.

You’ll live in exile and die as you lived.

“P'raps,” he said, looking at the burned-out ranch house without really seeing it. “But I’ll live longer than you, young Dearborn, and die long after your bones are rusting in the ground.”

He mounted up and swung his horse around, sawing viciously at the reins. He rode for Citgo, where Roy and Clay would be waiting, and he rode hard, but Roland’s eyes rode with him.

7

“Wake up! Wake up, sai! Wake up! Wake up!”

At first the words seemed to be coming from far away, drifting down by some magical means to the dark place where she lay. Even when the voice was joined by a rudely shaking hand and Susan knew she must wake up, it was a long, hard struggle.

It had been weeks since she’d gotten a decent night’s sleep, and she had expected more of the same last night… especially last night. She had lain awake in her luxurious bedchamber at Seafront, tossing from side to side, possibilities-none good-crowding her mind. The nightgown she wore crept up to her hips and bunched at the small of her back. When she got up to use the commode, she took the hateful thing off, hurled it into a comer, and crawled back into bed naked.

Being out of the heavy silk nightgown had done the trick. She dropped off almost at once… and in this case, dropped off was, exactly right: it was less like falling asleep than falling into some thoughtless, dreamless crack in the earth.

Now this intruding voice. This intruding arm, shaking her so hard that her head rolled from side to side on the pillow. Susan tried to slide away from it, pulling her knees up to her chest and mouthing fuzzy protests, but the arm followed. The shaking recommenced; the nagging, calling voice never stopped.

“Wake up, sai! Wake up! In the name of the Turtle and the Bear, wake up!”

Maria’s voice. Susan hadn’t recognized it at first because Maria was so upset. Susan had never heard her so, or expected to. Yet it was so; the maid sounded on the verge of hysteria.

Susan sat up. For a moment so much input-all of it wrong-crashed in on her that she was incapable of moving. The duvet beneath which she had slept tumbled into her lap, exposing her breasts, and she could do no more than pluck weakly at it with the tips of her fingers.

The first wrong thing was the light. It flooded through the windows more strongly than it ever had before… because, she realized, she had never been in this room so late before. Gods, it had to be ten o’ the clock, perhaps later.

The second wrong thing was the sounds from below. Mayor’s House was ordinarily a peaceful place in the morning; until noon one heard little but casa vaqueros leading the horses out for their morning exercise, the whicker-whicker-whick of Miguel sweeping the courtyard, and the constant boom and shush of the waves. This morning there were shouts, curses, galloping horses, the occasional burst of strange, jagged laughter. Somewhere outside her room-perhaps not in this wing, but close- Susan heard the running thud of booted feet.

The wrongest thing of all was Maria herself, cheeks ashy beneath her olive skin-tone, and her usually neat hair tangled and unbound. Susan would have guessed only an earthquake could make her look so, if that.

“Maria, what is it?”

“You have to go, sai. Seafront maybe not safe for you just now. Your own house maybe better. When I don’t see you earlier, I think you gone there already. You chose a bad day to sleep late.”

“Go?” Susan asked. Slowly, she pulled the duvet all the way up to her nose and stared at Maria over it with wide, puffy eyes. “What do you mean, go?”

“Out the back.” Maria plucked the duvet from Susan’s sleep-numbed hands again and this time stripped it all the way down to her ankles. “Like you did before. Now, missy, now! Dress and go! Those boys put away, aye, but what if they have friends? What if they come back, kill you, too?”

Susan had been getting up. Now all the strength ran out of her legs and she sat back down on the bed again. “Boys?” she whispered. “Boys kill who? Boys kill who?”

This was a good distance from grammatical, but Maria took her meaning.

“Dearborn and his pinboys,” she said.

“Who are they supposed to have killed?”

“The Mayor and the Chancellor.” She looked at Susan with a kind of distracted sympathy. “Now get up, I tell you. And get gone. This place gone loco.”

“They didn’t do any such thing,” Susan said, and only just restrained herself from adding, It wasn’t in the plan.

“Sai Thorin and sai Rimer jus’ as dead, whoever did it.” There were more shouts below, and a sharp little explosion that didn’t sound like a firecracker. Maria looked in that direction, then began to throw Susan her clothes. “The Mayor’s eyes, they gouged right out of his head.”

“They couldn’t have! Maria, I know them-”

“Me, I don’t know nothing about them and care less-but I care about you. Get dressed and get out, I tell you. Quick as you can.”

“What’s happened to them?” A terrible thought came to Susan and she leaped to her feet, clothes falling all around her. She seized Maria by the shoulders. “They haven’t been killed?” Susan shook her. “Say they haven’t been killed!”

“I don’t think so. There’s been a t'ousan' shouts and ten t'ousan' rumors go the rounds, but I think jus’ jailed. Only…”