"I... I promise, Roland. I do."
"Tell me aloud what you promise."
"I'll come here. Get yer guns. Take them to yer da. Tell him what happened."
He nodded and let go of her face. The shapes of his hands were printed faintly on her cheeks.
"Ye frightened me," Susan said, and then shook her head. That wasn't right. "Ye do frighten me."
"I can't help what I am."
"And I wouldn't change it." She kissed his left cheek, his right cheek, his mouth. She put her hand inside his shirt and caressed his nipple. It grew instantly hard beneath the tip of her finger. "Bird and bear and hare and fish," she said, now making soft butterfly kisses all over his face. "Give your love her fondest wish."
After, they lay beneath a bearskin Roland had brought along and listened to the wind sough through the grass.
"I love that sound," she said. "It always makes me wish I could be part of the wind ... go where it goes, see what it sees."
"This year, if ka allows, you will."
"Aye. And with thee." She turned to him, up on one elbow. Light fell through the ruined roof and dappled her face. "Roland, I love thee." She kissed him . . . and then began to cry.
He held her, concerned. "What is it? Sue, what troubles thee?"
"I don't know," she said, crying harder. "All I know is that there's a shadow on my heart." She looked at him with tears still flowing from her eyes. "Thee'd not leave me, would ye, dear? Thee'd not go without Sue, would ye?"
"No."
"For I've given all I have to ye, so I have. And my virginity's the very least of it, thee knows."
"I'd never leave you." But he felt cold in spite of the bearskin, and the wind outside - so comforting a moment ago - sounded like beast's breath. "Never, I swear."
"I'm frightened, though. Indeed I am."
"You needn't be," he said, speaking slowly and carefully ... for suddenly all the wrong words wanted to come tumbling out of his mouth. We 'II leave this, Susan - not day after tomorrow, on Reaping, but now, this minute. Dress and we'll go crosswise to the wind; it's south we'll ride and never look back. We'll be -
- haunted.
That's what they would be. Haunted by the faces of Alain and Cuthbert; haunted by the faces of all the men who might die in the Shaved Mountains, massacred by weapons torn from the armory-crypts where they should have been left. Haunted most of all by the faces of their fathers, for all the rest of their lives. Not even the South Pole would be far enough to escape those faces.
"All you need do day after tomorrow is claim indisposition at lunch." They had gone over all this before, but now, in his sudden, pointless fright, it was all he could think of to say. "Go to your room, then leave as you did on the night we met in the graveyard. Hide up a little. Then, when it's three o' the clock, ride here, and look under the skins in yon comer. If my guns are gone - and they will be, I swear they will - then everything's all right. You'll ride to meet us. Come to the place above the canyon, the one we told you of. We'll - "
"Aye, I know all that, but something's wrong." She looked at him, touched the side of his face. "I fear for thee and me, Roland, and know not why."
"All will work out," he said. "Ka - "
"Speak not to me of ka !" she cried. "Oh please don't! Ka like a wind, my father said, it takes what it will and minds the plea of no man or woman. Greedy old ka, how I hate it!"
"Susan - "
"No, say no more." She lay back and pushed the bearskin down to her knees, exposing a body that far greater men than Hart Thorin might have given away kingdoms for. Beads of sunlight ran over her bare skin like rain. She held her arms out to him. Never had she looked more beautiful to Roland than she did then, with her hair spread about her and that haunted look on her face. He would think later: She knew. Some part of her knew.
"No more talking," she said. "Talking's done. If you love me, then love me."
And for the last time, Roland did. They rocked together, skin to skin and breath to breath, and outside the wind roared into the west like a tidal wave.
12
That evening, as the grinning Demon rose in the sky, Cordelia left her house and walked slowly across the lawn to her garden, detouring around the pile of leaves she had raked that afternoon. In her arms was a bundle of clothes. She dropped them in front of the pole to which her stuffy-guy was bound, then looked raptly up at the rising moon: the knowing wink of the eye, the ghoul's grin; silver as bone was that moon, a white button against violet silk.