"Hit him!" he told Alain. "Hit him again, you have to!"
But Alain might as well have been hitting a post. Roland didn't even rock back on his heels. He continued to cry out that single negative - "No! No! No! No " - and the ball flashed faster and faster, eating its way into him through the wound it had opened, sucking up his grief like blood.
25
"Charyou tree!" Cordelia Delgado cried, darting forward from where she had been waiting. The crowd cheered her, and beyond her left shoulder Demon Moon winked, as if in complicity. "Charyou tree, ye faithless bitch! Charyou tree!"
She flung the pail of paint at her niece, splattering her pants and dressing her tied hands in a pair of wet scarlet gloves. She grinned up at Susan as the cart rolled past. The smear of ash stood out on her cheek; in the center of her pale forehead, a single vein pulsed like a worm.
"Bitch!" Cordelia screamed. Her fists were clenched; she danced a kind of hilarious jig, feet jumping, bony knees pumping beneath her skirt. "Life for the crops! Death for the bitch! Charyou tree! Come, Reap!"
The cart rolled past her; Cordelia faded from Susan's sight, just one more cruel phantasm in a dream that would soon end. Bird and bear and hare and fish, she thought. Be safe, Roland; go with my love. That's my fondest wish.
"Take her!" Rhea screamed. "Take this murdering bitch and cook her red-handed! Charyou tree!"
"Charyou tree!" the crowd responded. A forest of willing hands grew in the moonlit air; somewhere firecrackers rattled and children laughed excitedly.
Susan was lifted from the cart and handed toward the waiting woodpile above the heads of the crowd, passed by uplifted hands like a heroine returned triumphantly home from the wars. Her hands dripped red tears upon their straining, eager faces. The moon overlooked it all, dwarfing the glow of the paper lanterns.
"Bird and bear and hare and fish," she murmured as she was first lowered and then slammed against the pyramid of dry wood, put in the place which had been left for her - the whole crowd chanting in unison now, "Charyou TREE! Charyou TREE! Charyou TREE!"
"Bird and bear and hare and fish."
Trying to remember how he had danced with her that night. Trying to remember how he had loved with her in the willow grove. Trying to remember that first meeting on the dark road: Thankee-sai, we 're well met, he had said, and yes, in spite of everything, in spite of this miserable ending with the folk who had been her neighbors turned into prancing goblins by moonlight, in spite of pain and betrayal and what was coming, he had spoken the truth: they had been well met, they had been very well met, indeed.
"Charyou TREE! Charyou TREE! Charyou TREE!"
Women came and piled dry cornshucks around her feet. Several of them slapped her (it didn't matter; her bruised and puffy face seemed to have gone numb), and one - it was Misha Alvarez, whose daughter Susan had taught to ride - spat into her eyes and then leaped prankishly away, shaking her hands at the sky and laughing. For a moment she saw Coral Thorin, festooned with reap-charms, her arms filled with dead leaves which she threw at Susan; they fluttered down around her in a crackling, aromatic shower.
And now came her aunt again, and Rhea beside her. Each held a torch. They stood before her, and Susan could smell sizzling pitch.
Rhea raised her torch to the moon. "CHARYOU TREE!" she screamed in her rusty old voice, and the crowd responded, "CHARYOU TREE!"
Cordelia raised her own torch. "COME, REAP!"
"COME, REAP!" they cried back to her.
"Now, ye bitch," Rhea crooned. "Now comes warmer kisses than any yer love ever gave ye."
"Die, ye faithless," Cordelia whispered. "Life for the crops, death for you."
It was she who first flung her torch into the cornshucks which were piled as high as Susan's knees; Rhea flung hers a bare second later. The cornshucks blazed up at once, dazzling Susan with yellow light.
She drew in a final breath of cool air, warmed it with her heart, and loosed it in a defiant shout: "ROLAND, I LOVE THEE!"
The crowd fell back, murmuring, as if uneasy at what they had done, now that it was too late to take it back; here was not a stuffy-guy but a cheerful girl they all knew, one of their own, for some mad reason backed up against the Reap-Night bonfire with her hands painted red. They might have saved her, given another moment - some might have, anyway - but it was too late. The dry wood caught; her pants caught; her shirt caught; her long blonde hair blazed on her head like a crown.