“I thought you were in the west,” Roland said. “In Cressia. After Far-son and his-”

Roland’s father slapped him hard enough to send the boy tumbling across the room and into a corner with blood pouring from one comer of his mouth. Roland’s first, appalling instinct was to raise the gun he still held.

Steven Deschain looked at him, hands on hips, reading this thought even before it was fully formed. His lips pulled back in a singularly mirthless grin, one that showed all of his teeth and most of his gums.

“Shoot me if you will. Why not? Make this abortion complete. Ah, gods, I’d welcome it!”

Roland laid the gun on the floor and pushed it away, using the back of his hand to do it. All at once he wanted his fingers nowhere near the trigger of a gun. They were no longer fully under his control, those fingers. He had discovered that yesterday, right around the time he had broken Cort’s nose.

“Father, I was tested yesterday. I took Cort’s stick. I won. I’m a man.”

“You’re a fool,” his father said. His grin was gone now; he looked haggard and old. He sat down heavily on the whore’s bed, looked at the gunbelts he still held, and dropped them between his feet. “You’re a fourteen-year-old fool, and that’s the worst, most desperate kind.” He looked up, angry all over again, but Roland didn’t mind; anger was better than that look of weariness. That look of age. “I’ve known since you toddled that you were no genius, but I never believed until yestereve that you were an idiot. To let him drive you like a cow in a chute! Gods! You have forgotten the face of your father! Say it!”

And that sparked the boy’s own anger. Everything he had done the day before he had done with his father’s face firmly fixed in his mind.

“That’s not true!” he shouted from where he now sat with his bare butt on the splintery boards of the whore’s crib and his back against the wall, the sun shining through the window and touching the fuzz on his fair, unscarred cheek.

“It is true, you whelp! Foolish whelp! Say your atonement or I’ll strip the hide from your very-”

“They were together!” he burst out. “Your wife and your minister- your magician! I saw the mark of his mouth on her neck! On my mother’s neck!” He reached for the gun and picked it up, but even in his shame and fury was still careful not to let his fingers stray near the trigger; he held the apprentice’s revolver only by the plain, undecorated metal of its barrel. “Today I end his treacherous, seducer’s life with this, and if you aren’t man enough to help me, at least you can stand aside and let m-”

One of the revolvers on Steven’s hip was out of its holster and in his hand before Roland’s eyes saw any move. There was a single shot, deafening as thunder in the little room; it was a full minute before Roland was able to hear the babble of questions and commotion from below. The 'prentice-gun, meanwhile, was long gone, blown out of his hand and leaving nothing behind but a kind of buzzing tingle. It flew out the window, down and gone, its grip a smashed ruin of metal and its short turn in the gunslinger’s long tale at an end.

Roland looked at his father, shocked and amazed. Steven looked back, saying nothing for a long time. But now he wore the face Roland remembered from earliest childhood: calm and sure. The weariness and the look of half-distracted fury had passed away like last night’s thunderstorms.

At last his father spoke. “I was wrong in what I said, and I apologize. You did not forget my face, Roland. But still you were foolish-you allowed yourself to be driven by one far slyer than you will ever be in your life. It’s only by the grace of the gods and the working of ka that you have not been sent west, one more true gunslinger out of Marten’s road… out of John Farson’s road… and out of the road which leads to the creature that rules them.” He stood and held out his arms. “If I had lost you, Roland, I should have died.”

Roland got to his feet and went naked to his father, who embraced him fiercely. When Steven Deschain kissed him first on one cheek and then the other, Roland began to weep. Then, in Roland’s ear, Steven Deschain whispered six words.

16

“What?” Susannah asked. “What six words?”

“I have known for two years,'” Roland said. “That was what he whispered.”

“Holy Christ,” Eddie said.

“He told me I couldn’t go back to the palace. If I did, I’d be dead by nightfall. He said, ‘You have been born to your destiny in spite of all Marten could do; yet he has sworn to kill you before you can grow to be a problem to him. It seems that, winner in the test or no, you must leave Gilead anyway. For only awhile, though, and you’ll go east instead of west. I’d not send you alone, either, or without a purpose.’ Then, almost as an afterthought, he added: ‘Or with a pair of sorry “prentice revolvers.”’”

“What purpose?” Jake asked. He had clearly been captivated by the story; his eyes shone nearly as bright as Oy’s. “And which friends?”

“These things you must now hear,” Roland said, “and how you judge me will come in time.”

He fetched a sigh-the deep sigh of a man who contemplates some arduous piece of work-and then tossed fresh wood on the fire. As the flames flared up, driving the shadows back a little way, he began to talk. All that queerly long night he talked, not finishing the story of Susan Delgado until the sun was rising in the east and painting the glass castle yonder with all the bright hues of a fresh day, and a strange green cast of light which was its own true color.

Part two

SUSAN

Chapter I

BENEATH THE KISSING MOON

1

A perfect disc of silver-the Kissing Moon, as it was called in Full Earth-hung above the ragged hill five miles east of Hambry and ten miles south of Eyebolt Canyon. Below the hill the late summer heat still held, suffocating even two hours after sundown, but atop the Coos, it was as if Reap had already come, with its strong breezes and frost-pinched air. For the woman who lived here with no company but a snake and one old mutie cat, it was to be a long night.

Never mind, though; never mind, my dear. Busy hands are happy hands. So they are.

She waited until the hoofbeats of her visitors’ horses had faded, sitting quietly by the window in the hut’s large room (there was only one other, a bedroom little bigger than a closet). Musty, the six-legged cat, was on her shoulder. Her lap was full of moonlight.

Three horses, bearing away three men. The Big Coffin Hunters, they called themselves.

She snorted. Men were funny, aye, so they were, and the most amusing thing about them was how little they knew it. Men, with their swaggering, belt-hitching names for themselves. Men, so proud of their muscles, their drinking capacities, their eating capacities; so everlastingly proud of their pricks. Yes, even in these times, when a good many of them could shoot nothing but strange, bent seed that produced children fit only to be drowned in the nearest well. Ah, but it was never their fault, was it, dear? No, always it was the woman-her womb, her fault. Men were such cowards. Such grinning cowards. These three had been no different from the general run. The old one with the limp might bear watching-aye, so he might, a clear and overly curious pair of eyes had looked out at her from his head-but she saw nothing in them she could not deal with, came it to that.

Men! She could not understand why so many women feared them. Hadn’t the gods made them with the most vulnerable part of their guts hanging right out of their bodies, like a misplaced bit of bowel? Kick them there and they curled up like snails. Caress them there and their brains melted. Anyone who doubted that second bit of wisdom need only look at her night’s second bit of business, the one which still lay ahead. Thorin! Mayor of Hambry! Chief Guard o’ Barony! No fool like an old fool!