9

All of this Rhea saw in the glass, and wery interesting viewing it made, aye, wery interesting, indeed. But she’d seen shagging before-sometimes with three or four or even more doing it all at the same time (sometimes with partners who were not precisely alive)-and the hokey-pokey wasn’t very interesting to her at her advanced age. What she was interested in was what would come after the hokey-pokey.

Is our business done? the girl had asked.

Mayhap there’s one more little thing, Rhea had responded, and then she told the impudent trull what to do.

Aye, she’d given the girl very clear instructions as the two of them stood in the hut doorway, the Kissing Moon shining down on them as Susan Delgado slept the strange sleep and Rhea stroked her braid and whispered instructions in her ear. Now would come the fulfillment of that interlude… and that was what she wanted to see, not two babbies shagging each other like they were the first two on earth to discover how ’twas done.

Twice they did it with hardly a pause to natter in between (she would have given a good deal to hear that natter, too). Rhea wasn’t surprised; at his young age, she supposed the brat had enough spunkum in his sack to give her a week’s worth of doubles, and from the way the little slut acted, that might be to her taste. Some of them discovered it and never wanted aught else; this was one, Rhea thought.

But let’s see how sexy you feel in a few minutes, you snippy bitch, she thought, and leaned deeper into the pulsing pink light thrown from the glass. She could sometimes feel that light aching in the very bones of her face… but it was a good ache. Aye, wery good indeed.

They were at last done… for the time being, at least. They clasped hands and drifted off to sleep.

“Now,” Rhea murmured. “Now, my little one. Be a good girl and do as ye were told.”

As if hearing her, Susan’s eyes opened-but there was nothing in them. They woke and slept at the same time. Rhea saw her gently pull her hand free of the boy’s. She sat up, bare breasts against bare thighs, and looked around. She got to her feet-

That was when Musty, the six-legged cat, jumped into Rhea’s lap, waowing for either food or affection. The old woman shrieked with surprise, and the wizard’s glass at once went dark-puffed out like a candle-flame in a gust of wind.

Rhea shrieked again, this time with rage, and seized the cat before it could flee. She hurled it across the room, into the fireplace. That was as dead a hole as only a summer fireplace can be, but when Rhea cast a bony, misshapen hand at it, a yellow gust of flame rose from the single half-charred log lying in there. Musty screamed and fled from the hearth with his eyes wide and his split tail smoking like an indifferently butted cigar.

“Run, aye!” Rhea spat after him. “Begone, ye vile cusk!”

She turned back to the glass and spread her hands over it, thumb to thumb. But although she concentrated with all her might, willed until her heart was beating with a sick fury in her chest, she could do no more than bring back the ball’s natural pink glow. No images appeared. This was bitterly disappointing, but there was nothing to be done. And in time she would be able to see the results with her own two natural eyes, if she cared to go to town and do so.

Everybody would be able to see.

Her good humor restored, Rhea returned the ball to its hiding place.

10

Only moments before he would have sunk too deep in sleep to have heard it, a warning bell went off in Roland’s mind. Perhaps it was the faint realization that her hand was no longer entwined with his; perhaps it was raw intuition. He could have ignored that faint bell, and almost did, but in the end his training was too strong. He came up from the threshold of real sleep, fighting his way back to clarity as a diver kicks for the surface of a quarry. It was hard at first, but became easier; as he neared wakefulness, his alarm grew.

He opened his eyes and looked to his left. Susan was no longer there. He sat up, looked to his right, and saw nothing above the cut of the stream… yet he felt that she was in that direction, all the same.

“Susan?”

No response. He got up, looked at his pants, and Cort-a visitor he never would have expected in such a romantic bower as this-spoke up gruffly in his mind. No time, maggot.

He walked naked to the bank and looked down. Susan was there, all right, also naked, her back to him. She had unbraided her hair. It hung, loose gold, almost all the way to the lyre other hips. The chill air rising from the surface of the stream shivered the tips of it like mist.

She was down on one knee at the edge of the running water. One arm was plunged into it almost to the elbow; she searched for something, it seemed.

“Susan!”

No answer. And now a cold thought came to him: She’s been infested by a demon. While I slept, heedless, beside her, she’s been infested by a demon. Yet he did not think he really believed that. If there had been a demon near this clearing, he would have felt it. Likely both of them would have felt it; the horses, too. But something was wrong with her.

She brought an object up from the streambed and held it before her eyes in her dripping hand. A stone. She examined it, then tossed it back- plunk. She reached in again, head bent, two sheafs of her hair now actually floating on the water, the stream prankishly tugging them in the direction it flowed. “Susan!”

No response. She plucked another stone out of the stream. This one was a triangular white quartz, shattered into a shape that was almost like the head of a spear. Susan tilted her head to the left and took a sheaf of her hair in her hand, like a woman who means to comb out a nest of tangles. But there was no comb, only the rock with its sharp edge, and for a moment longer Roland remained on the bank, frozen with horror, sure that she meant to cut her own throat out of shame and guilt over what they’d done. In the weeks to come, he was haunted by a clear knowledge: if it had been her throat she’d intended, he wouldn’t have been in time to stop her.

Then the paralysis broke and he hurled himself down the bank, unmindful of the sharp stones that gouged the soles of his feet. Before he reached her, she had already used the edge of the quartz to cut off part of the golden tress she held.

Roland seized her wrist and pulled it back. He could see her face clearly now. What could have been mistaken for serenity from the top of the bank now looked like what it really was: vacuity, emptiness.

When he took hold of her, the smoothness of her face was replaced by a dim and fretful smile; her mouth quivered as if she felt distant pain, and an almost formless sound of negation came from her mouth:

“Nnnnnnnnn-”

Some of the hair she had cut off lay on her thigh like gold wire; most had fallen into the stream and been carried away. Susan pulled against Roland’s hand, trying to get the sharp edge back to her hair, wanting to continue her mad barbering. The two of them strove together like arm-wrestlers in a barroom contest. And Susan was winning. He was physically the stronger, but not stronger than the enchantment which held her. Little by little the white triangle of quartz moved back toward her hanging hair. That frightening sound-Nnnnnnnnnn-kept drifting from her mouth.

“Susan! Stop it! Wake up!”

“Nnnnnnnn-”

Her bare arm quivering visibly in the air, the muscles bunched like hard little rocks. And the quartz moving closer and closer to her hair, her cheek, the socket of her eye.

Without thinking about it-it was the way he always acted most successfully-Roland moved his face close to the side others, giving up another four inches to the fist holding the stone in order to do it. He put his lips against the cup of her ear and then clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. Clucked sidemouth, in fact.