There was a question which the other two, constrained by politeness, couldn't ask. Roland could, and did. "You are serious about this. Dad? It's not just a leg-pull, is it?"
"I'm sending you away at an age when many boys still don't sleep well if their mothers don't kiss them goodnight," Steven said. "I expect to see all three of you again, alive and well - Mejis is a lovely, quiet place, or was when I was a boy - but I can't be sure of it. As things are these days, no one can be sure of anything. I wouldn't send you away with a joke and a laugh. I'm surprised you think it."
"Cry your pardon," Roland said. An uneasy peace had descended between him and his father, and he would not rupture it. Still, he was wild to be off. Pusher jigged beneath him, as if seconding that.
"I don't expect you boys to see Maerlyn's glass . . . but I didn't expect to be seeing you off at fourteen with revolvers tucked in your bedrolls, either. Ka's at work here, and where ka works, anything is possible."
Slowly, slowly, Steven took off his hat, stepped back, and swept them a bow. "Go in peace, boys. And return in health."
"Long days and pleasant nights, sai," Alain said.
"Good fortune," Cuthbert said.
"I love you," Roland said.
Steven nodded. "Thankee-sai - I love you, too. My blessings, boys." He said this last in a loud voice, and the other two men - Robert Allgood and Christopher Johns, who had been known in the days of his savage youth as Burning Chris - added their own blessings.
So the three of them rode toward their end of the Great Road, while summer lay all about them, breathless as a gasp. Roland looked up and saw something that made him forget all about the Wizard's Rainbow. It was his mother, leaning out of her apartment's bedroom window: the oval of her face surrounded by the timeless gray stone of the castle's west wing. There were tears coursing down her cheeks, but she smiled and lifted one hand in a wide wave. Of the three of them, only Roland saw her.
He didn't wave back.
8
"Roland!" An elbow struck him in the ribs, hard enough to dispel these memories, brilliant as they were, and return him to the present. It was Cuthbert. "Do something, if you mean to! Get us out of this deadhouse before I shiver the skin right off my bones!"
Roland put his mouth close by Alain's ear. "Be ready to help me."
Alain nodded.
Roland turned to Susan. "After the first time we were together an-tet, you went to the stream in the grove."
"Aye."
"You cut some of your hair."
"Aye." That same dreaming voice. "So I did."
"Would you have cut it all?"
"Aye, every lick and lock."
"Do you know who told you to cut it?"
A long pause. Roland was about to turn to Alain when she said, "Rhea." Another pause. "She wanted to fiddle me up."
"Yes, but what happened later? What happened while you stood in the doorway?"
"Oh, and something else happened before."
"What?"
"I fetched her wood," said she, and said no more.
Roland looked at Cuthbert, who shrugged. Alain spread his hands. Roland thought of asking the latter boy to step forward, and judged it still wasn't quite time.
"Never mind the wood for now," he said, "or all that came before. We'll talk of that later, mayhap, but not just yet. What happened as you were leaving? What did she say to you about your hair?"
"Whispered in my ear. And she had a Jesus-man."
"Whispered what?"
"I don't know. That part is pink."
Here it was. He nodded to Alain. Alain bit his lip and stepped forward. He looked frightened, but as he took Susan's hands in his own and spoke to her, his voice was calm and soothing.
"Susan? It's Alain Johns. Do you know me?"
"Aye - Richard Stockworth that was."
"What did Rhea whisper in your ear?"
A frown, faint as a shadow on an overcast day, creased her brow. "I can't see. It's pink."
"You don't need to see," Alain said. "Seeing's not what we want right now. Close your eyes so you can't do it at all."
"They are closed," she said, a trifle pettishly. She's frightened, Roland thought. He felt an urge to tell Alain to stop, to wake her up, and restrained it.
"The ones inside," Alain said. "The ones that look out from memory. Close those, Susan. Close them for your father's sake, and tell me not what you see but what you hear. Tell me what she said."
Chillingly, unexpectedly, the eyes in her face opened as she closed those in her mind. She stared at Roland, and through him, with the eyes of an ancient statue. Roland bit back a scream.
"You were in the doorway, Susan?" Alain asked.
"Aye. So we both were."
"Be there again."
"Aye." A dreaming voice. Faint but clear. "Even with my eyes closed I can see-the moon's light. 'Tis as big as a grapefruit."
It's the grapefruit, Roland thought. By which I mean, it's the pink one.
"And what do you hear? What does she say?"
"No, I say." The faintly petulant voice of a little girl. "First I say, Alain. I say 'And is our business done?' and she says 'Mayhap there's one more little thing,' and then ... then..."