3

In their packs there was food none of them had put there-cookies with Keebler elves on the packages, Saran Wrapped sandwiches that looked like the kind you could get (if you were desperate, that was) from turnpike vending machines, and a brand of cola neither Eddie, Susannah, nor Jake knew. It tasted like Coke and came in a red and white can, but the brand was Nozz-A-La.

They ate a meal with their backs to the grove and their faces to the distant glam-gleam of the Green Palace, and called it lunch. If we start to lose the light in an hour or so, we can make it supper by voice vote, Eddie thought, but he didn’t believe they’d need to. His interior clock was running again now, and that mysterious but usually accurate device suggested that it was early afternoon.

At one point he stood up and raised his soda, smiling into an invisible camera. “When I’m travelling through the Land of Oz in my new Takuro Spirit, I drink Nozz-A-La!” he proclaimed. “It fills me up but never fills me out! It makes me happy to be a man! It makes me know God! It gives me the outlook of an angel and the balls of a tiger! When I drink Nozz-A-La, I say 'Gosh! Ain’t I glad to be alive!' I say-”

“Sit down, you bumhug,” Jake said, laughing.

“Ug,” Oy agreed. His snout was on Jake’s ankle, and he was watching the boy’s sandwich with great interest.

Eddie started to sit, and then that strange albino leaf caught his eye again. That’s no leaf, he thought, and walked over to it. No, not a leaf but a scrap of paper. He turned it over and saw columns of “blah blah” and “yak yak” and “all the stuff’s the same.” Usually newspapers weren’t blank on one side, but Eddie wasn’t surprised to find this one was-the Oz Daily Buzz had only been a prop, after all.

Nor was the blank side blank. Printed on it in neat, careful letters, was this message:

Below that, a little drawing:

Eddie brought the note back to where the others were eating. Each of them looked at it. Roland held it last, ran his thumb over it thoughtfully, feeling the texture of the paper, then gave it back to Eddie.

“R.F.,” Eddie said. “The man who was running Tick-Tock. This is from him, isn’t it?”

“Yes. He must have brought the Tick-Tock Man out of Lud.”

“Sure,” Jake said darkly. “That guy Flagg looked like someone who’d know a first-class bumhug when he found one. But how did they get here before us? What could be faster than Blaine the Mono, for cripe’s sake?”

“A door,” Eddie said. “Maybe they came through one of those special doors.”

“Bingo,” Susannah said. She held her hand out, palm up, and Eddie slapped it.

“In any case, what he suggests is not bad advice,” Roland said. “I urge you to consider it most seriously. And if you want to go back to your world, I will allow you to go.”

“Roland, I can’t believe you,” Eddie said. “This, after you dragged me and Suze over here, kicking and screaming? You know what my brother would say about you? That you’re as contrary as a hog on ice-skates.”

“I did what I did before I learned to know you as friends,” Roland said. “Before I learned to love you as I loved Alain and Cuthbert. And before I was forced to… to revisit certain scenes. Doing that has…” He paused, looking down at his feet (he had put his old boots back on again) and thinking hard. At last he looked up again. “There was a part of me that hadn’t moved or spoken in a good many years. 1 thought it was dead. It isn’t. I have learned to love again, and I’m aware that this is probably my last chance to love. I’m slow-Vannay and Cort knew that; so did my father-but I’m not stupid.”

“Then don’t act that way,” Eddie said. “Or treat us as if we were.”

“What you call 'the bottom line,' Eddie, is this: I get my friends killed. And I’m not sure I can even risk doing that again. Jake especially… I… never mind. I don’t have the words. For the first time since I turned around in a dark room and killed my mother, I may have found something more important than the Tower. Leave it at that.”

“All right, I guess I can respect that.”

“So can I,” Susannah said, “but Eddie’s right about ka.” She took the note and ran a finger over it thoughtfully. “Roland, you can’t talk about that-ka, I mean-then turn around and take it back again, just because you get a little low on willpower and dedication.”

“Willpower and dedication are good words,” Roland remarked. “There’s a bad one, though, that means the same thing. That one is obsession.”

She shrugged it away with an impatient twitch of her shoulders. “Sugarpie, either this whole business is ka, or none of it is. And scary as ka might be-the idea of fate with eagle eyes and a bloodhound’s nose- I find the idea of no ka even scarier.” She tossed the R.F. note aside on the matted grass.

“Whatever you call it, you’re just as dead if it runs you over,” Roland said. “Rimer… Thorin… Jonas… my mother… Cuthbert… Susan. Just ask them. Any of them. If you only could.”

“You’re missing the biggest part of this,” Eddie said. “You can’t send us back. Don’t you realize that, you big galoot? Even if there was a door, we wouldn’t go through it. Am I wrong about that?”

He looked at Jake and Susannah. They shook their heads. Even Oy shook his head. No, he wasn’t wrong.

“We’ve changed,” Eddie said. “We…” Now he was the one who didn’t know how to go on. How to express his need to see the Tower… and his other need, just as strong, to go on carrying the gun with the sandal-wood insets. The big iron was how he’d come to think of it. Like in that old Marty Robbins song about the man with the big iron on his hip. “It’s ka,” he said. It was all he could think of that was big enough to cover it.

“Kaka,” Roland replied, after a moment’s consideration. The three of them stared at him, mouths open. Roland of Gilead had made a joke.

4

“There’s one thing I don’t understand about what we saw,” Susannah said hesitantly. “Why did your mother hide behind that drape when you came in, Roland? Did she mean to…” She bit her lip, then brought it out. “Did she mean to kill you?”

“If she’d meant to kill me, she wouldn’t have chosen a belt as her weapon. The very fact that she had made me a present-and that’s what it was, it had my initials woven into it-suggests that she meant to ask my forgiveness. That she had had a change of heart.”

Is that what you know, or only what you want to believe? Eddie thought. It was a question he would never ask. Roland had been tested enough, had won their way back to the Path of the Beam by reliving that terrible final visit to his mother’s apartment, and that was enough.

“I think she hid because she was ashamed,” the gunslinger said. “Or because she needed a moment to think of what to say to me. Of how to explain.”

“And the ball?” Susannah asked him gently. “Was it on the vanity table, where we saw it? And did she steal it from your father?”

“Yes to both,” Roland said. “Although… did she steal it?” He seemed to ask this question of himself. “My father knew a great many things, but he sometimes kept what he knew to himself.”

“Like him knowing that your mother and Marten were seeing each other,” Susannah said.

“Yes.”

“But, Roland… you surely don’t believe that your father would knowingly have allowed you to… to…”

Roland looked at her with large, haunted eyes. His tears had gone, but when he tried to smile at her question, he was unable. “Have knowingly allowed his son to kill his wife?” he asked. “No, I can’t say that. Much as I’d like to, I can’t. That he should have caused such a thing to have happened, to have deliberately set it in motion, like a man playing Castles… that I cannot believe. But would he allow ka to run its course? Aye, most certainly.”

“What happened to the ball?” Jake asked.