Be careful, Roland - don't let your feeling for this girl tip anything over. She's not free, anyway - she said as much. Not married, but spoken for in some other way.
Roland was far from the relentless creature he would eventually become, but the seeds of that relentlessness were there - small, stony things that would, in their time, grow into trees with deep roots . . . and bitter fruit. Now one of these seeds cracked open and sent up its first sharp blade.
What's been spoken for may be unspoken, and what's done may be undone. Nothing's sure, but . . . I want her.
Yes. That was the one thing he did know, and he knew it as well as he knew the face of his father: he wanted her. Not as he had wanted the whore when she lay naked on her bed with her legs spread and her half-lidded eyes looking up at him, but in the way he wanted food when he was hungry or water when he was thirsty. In the way, he supposed, that he wanted to drag Marten's dusty body behind his horse down Gilead's High Road in payment for what the wizard had done to his mother.
He wanted her; he wanted the girl Susan.
Roland turned over on his other side, closed his eyes, and fell asleep. His rest was thin and lit by the crudely poetic dreams only adolescent boys have, dreams where sexual attraction and romantic love come together and resonate more powerfully than they ever will again. In these thirsty visions Susan Delgado put her hands on Roland's shoulders over and over, kissed his mouth over and over, told him over and over to come to her for the first time, to be with her for the first time, to see her for the first time, to see her very well.
2
Five miles or so from where Roland slept and dreamed his dreams, Susan Delgado lay in her bed and looked out her window and watched Old Star begin to grow pale with the approaching dawn. Sleep was no closer now than it had been when she lay down, and there was a throb between her legs where the old woman had touched her. It was distracting but no longer unpleasant, because she now associated it with the boy she'd met on the road and impulsively kissed by starlight. Every time she shifted her legs, that throb flared into a brief sweet ache.
When she'd got home, Aunt Cord (who would have been in her own bed an hour before on any ordinary night) had been sitting in her rocking chair by the fireplace - dead and cold and swept clean of ashes at this time of year - with a lapful of lace that looked like wave-froth against her dowdy black dress. She was edging it with a speed that seemed almost supernatural to Susan, and she hadn't looked up when the door opened and her niece came in on a swirl of breeze.
"I expected ye an hour ago," Aunt Cord said. And then, although she didn't sound it: "I was worried."
"Aye?" Susan said, and said no more. She thought that on any other night she would have offered one of her fumbling excuses which always sounded like a lie to her own ears - it was the effect Aunt Cord had had on her all her life - but this hadn't been an ordinary night. Never in her life had there been a night like this. She found she could not get Will Dearborn out of her mind.
Aunt Cord had looked up then, her close-set, rather beady eyes sharp and inquisitive above her narrow blade of a nose. Some things hadn't changed since Susan had set out for the Coos; she had still been able to feel her aunt's eyes brushing across her face and down her body, like little whisk-brooms with sharp bristles.
"What took ye so long?" Aunt Cord had asked. "Was there trouble?"
"No trouble," Susan had replied, but for a moment she thought of how the witch had stood beside her in the doorway, pulling her braid through the gnarled tube of one loosely clenched fist. She remembered wanting to go, and she remembered asking Rhea if their business was done.
Mayhap there's one more little thing, the old woman had said ... or so Susan thought. But what had that one more little thing been? She couldn't remember. And, really, what did it matter? She was shut of Rhea until her belly began to rise with Thorin's child . . . and if there could be no baby-making until Reap-Night, she'd not be returning to the Coos until late winter at the soonest. An age! And it would be longer than that, were she slow to kindle . . .
"I walked slowly coming home, Aunt. That's all."
"Then why look ye so?" Aunt Cord had asked, scant brows knitting toward the vertical line which creased her brow.
"How so?" Susan had asked, taking off her apron and knotting the strings and hanging it on the hook just inside the kitchen door.
"Flushy. Frothy. Like milk fresh out of the cow."
She'd almost laughed. Aunt Cord, who knew as little about men as Susan did about the stars and planets, had struck it directly. Flushy and frothy was exactly how she felt. "Only the night air, I suppose," she had said. "I saw a meteor, Aunt. And heard the thinny. The sound's strong tonight."
"Aye?" her aunt asked without interest, then returned to the subject which did interest her. "Did it hurt?"
"A little."
"Did ye cry?"
Susan shook her head.