“Aye,” he said, clapping Dave on the shoulder. “Mayhap he’ll have to change his way of thinking.” He smiled-one very different from any of those he had shown the Affiliation counters. “Mayhap they all will.”

4

The three boys rode in single file until they were past the Travellers’ Rest (a young and obviously retarded man with kinky black hair looked up from scrubbing the brick stoop and waved to them; they waved back). Then they moved up abreast, Roland in the middle.

“What did you think of our new friend, the High Sheriff?” Roland asked.

“I have no opinion,” Cuthbert said brightly. “No, none at all. Opinion is politics, and politics is an evil which has caused many a fellow to be hung while he’s still young and pretty.” He leaned forward and tapped the rook’s skull with his knuckles. “The lookout didn’t care for him, though. I’m sorry to say that our faithful lookout thought Sheriff Avery a fat bag of guts without a trustworthy bone in his body.”

Roland turned to Alain. “And you, young Master Stockworth?”

Alain considered it for some time, as was his way, chewing a piece of grass he’d bent oversaddle to pluck from his side of the road. At last he said: “If he came upon us burning in the street, I don’t think he’d piss on us to put us out.”

Cuthbert laughed heartily at that. “And you, Will? How do you say, dear captain?”

“He doesn’t interest me much… but one thing he said does. Given that the horse-meadow they call the Drop has to be at least thirty wheels long and runs five or more to the dusty desert, how do you suppose Sheriff Avery knew we were on the part of it that belongs to Croydon’s Piano Ranch?”

They looked at him, first with surprise, then speculation. After a moment Cuthbert leaned forward and rapped once more on the rook’s skull. “We’re being watched, and you never reported it? No supper for you, sir, and it’ll be the stockade the next time it happens!”

But before they had gone much farther, Roland’s thoughts of Sheriff Avery gave way to more pleasant ones of Susan Delgado. He would see her the following night, of that he was sure. He wondered if her hair would be down.

He couldn’t wait to find out.

5

Now here they were, at Mayor’s House. Let the game begin, Roland thought, not clear on what that meant even as the phrase went through his mind, surely not thinking of Castles… not then.

The hostlers led their mounts away, and for a moment the three of them stood at the foot of the steps-huddled, almost, as horses do in unfriendly weather-their beardless faces washed by the light of the torches. From inside, the guitars played and voices were raised in a fresh eddy of laughter.

“Do we knock?” Cuthbert asked. “Or just open and march in?”

Roland was spared answering. The main door of the had was thrown open and two women stepped out, both wearing long white-collared dresses that reminded all three boys of the dresses stockmen’s wives wore in their own part of the world. Their hair was caught back in snoods that sparkled with some bright diamondy stuff in the light of the torches.

The plumper of the two stepped forward, smiling, and dropped them a deep curtsey. Her earrings, which looked like square-cut firedims, flashed and bobbed. “You are the young men from the Affiliation, so you are, and welcome you are, as well. Goodeven, sirs, and may your days be long upon the earth!”

They bowed in unison, boots forward, and thanked her in an unintended chorus that made her laugh and clap her hands. The tall woman beside her offered them a smile as spare as her frame.

“I am Olive Thorin,” the plump woman said, “the Mayor’s wife. This is my sister-in-law, Coral.”

Coral Thorin, still with that narrow smile (it barely creased her lips and touched her eyes not at all), dipped them a token curtsey. Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain bowed again over their outstretched legs.

“I welcome you to Seafront,” Olive Thorin said, her dignity leavened and made pleasant by her artless smile, her obvious dazzlement at the appearance of her young visitors from In-World. “Come to our house with joy. I say so with all my heart, so I do.”

“And so we will, madam,” Roland said, “for your greeting has made us joyful.” He took her hand, and, with no calculation whatever, raised it to his lips and kissed it. Her delighted laughter made him smile. He liked Olive Thorin on sight, and it was perhaps well he met someone of that sort early on, for, with the problematic exception of Susan Delgado, he met no one else he liked, no one else he trusted, all that night.

6

It was warm enough even with the seabreeze, and the cloak- and coat-collector in the foyer looked as though he’d had little or no custom. Roland wasn’t entirely surprised to see that it was Deputy Dave, his remaining bits of hair slicked back with some sort of gleaming grease and his monocle now lying on the snow-white breast of a houseman’s jacket. Roland gave him a nod. Dave, his hands clasped behind his back, returned it.

Two men-Sheriff Avery and an elderly gent as gaunt as Old Doctor Death in a cartoon-came toward them. Beyond, through a pair of double doors now open wide, a whole roomful of people stood about with crystal punch-cups in their hands, talking and taking little bits of food from the trays which were circulating.

Roland had time for just one narrow-eyed glance toward Cuthbert:

Everything. Every name, every face… every nuance. Especially those.

Cuthbert raised an eyebrow-his discreet version of a nod-and then Roland was pulled, willy-nilly, into the evening, his first real evening of service as a working gunslinger. And he had rarely worked harder.

Old Doctor Death turned out to be Kimba Rimer, Thorin’s Chancellor and Minister of Inventory (Roland suspected the title had been made up special for their visit). He was easily five inches taller than Roland, who was considered tall in Gilead, and his skin was pale as candlewax. Not unhealthy-looking; just pale. Wings of iron-gray hair floated away from either side of his head, gossamer as cobwebs. The top of his skull was completely bald. Balanced on his whelk of a nose was a pince-nez.

“My boys!” he said, when the introductions had been made. He had the smooth, sadly sincere voice of a politician or an undertaker. “Welcome to Mejis! To Hambry! And to Seafront, our humble Mayor’s House!”

“If this is humble, I should wonder at the palace your folk might build,” Roland said. It was a mild enough remark, more pleasantry than witticism (he ordinarily left the wit to Bert), but Chancellor Rimer laughed hard. So did Sheriff Avery.

“Come, boys!” Rimer said, when he apparently felt he had expressed enough amusement. “The Mayor awaits you with impatience, I’m sure.”

“Aye,” said a timid voice from behind them. The skinny sister-in-law, Coral, had disappeared, but Olive Thorin was still there, looking up at the newcomers with her hands decorously clasped before that area of her body which might once have been her waist. She was still smiling her hopeful, pleasant smile. “Very eager to meet you, Hart is, very eager, indeed. Shall I conduct them, Kimba, or-”

“Nay, nay, you mustn’t trouble yourself with so many other guests to attend,” Rimer said.

“I suppose you’re right.” She curtseyed to Roland and his companions a final time, and although she still smiled and although the smile looked completely genuine to Roland, he thought: She’s unhappy about something, all the same. Desperately so, I think.

“Gentlemen?” Rimer asked. The teeth in his smile were almost disconcertingly huge. “Will ye come?”

He led them past the grinning Sheriff and into the reception hall.