I have no idea.

I think … It was hard, but Mia forced herself. I think I owe you a word of thanks.

Susannah’s response was cold and immediate. Thank me with the truth.

First tell me why you’d help me at all, after I …

This time Mia couldn’t finish. She liked to think of herself as brave—as brave as she had to be in the service of her chap, at least—but this time she couldn’t finish.

After you betrayed the man I love to men who are, when you get right down to it, footsoldiers of the Crimson King? After you decided it would be all right for them to kill mine so long as you could keep yours? Is that what you want to know?

Mia hated to hear it spoken of that way, but bore it. Had to bear it.

Yes, lady, if you like.

It was the other one who replied this time, in that voice—harsh, cawing, laughing, triumphant, and hateful—that was even worse than the shrill laughter of the birdy-women. Worse by far.

Because mah boys got away, dass why! Fucked those honkies mos’ righteous! The ones dey didn’t shoot all blowed to smithereens!

Mia felt a deep stirring of unease. Whether it was true or not, the bad laughing woman clearly believed it was true. And if Roland and Eddie Dean were still out there, wasn’t it possible the Crimson King wasn’t as strong, as all-powerful, as she had been told? Wasn’t it even possible that she had been misled about—

Stop it, stop it, you can’t think that way!

There’s another reason I helped. The harsh one was gone and the other was back. At least for now.

What?

It’s my baby, too, Susannah said. I don’t want it killed.

I don’t believe you.

But she did. Because the woman inside was right: Mordred Deschain of Gilead and Discordia belonged to both of them. The bad one might not care, but the other, Susannah, clearly felt the chap’s tidal pull. And if she was right about Sayre and whoever waited for her at the Dixie Pig … if they were liars and cozeners …

Stop it. Stop. I have nowhere else to go but to them.

You do, Susannah said quickly. With Black Thirteen you can go anywhere.

You don’t understand. He’d follow me. Follow it.

You’re right, I don’t understand. She actually did, or thought she did, but … Burn up the day, he’d said.

All right, I’ll try to explain. I don’t understand everything myself—there are things I don’t know—but I’ll tell you what I can.

Thank y—

Before she could finish, Susannah was falling again, like Alice down the rabbit-hole. Through the toilet, through the floor, through the pipes beneath the floor, and into another world.

NINE

No castle at the end of her drop, not this time. Roland had told them a few stories of his wandering years—the vampire nurses and little doctors of Eluria, the walking waters of East Downe, and, of course, the story of his doomed first love—and this was a little like falling into one of those tales. Or, perhaps, into one of the oat-operas (“adult Westerns,” as they were called) on the still relatively new ABC-TV network: Sugarfoot, with Ty Hardin, Maverick, with James Garner, or—Odetta Holmes’s personal favorite—Cheyenne, starring Clint Walker. (Odetta had once written a letter to ABC programming, suggesting they could simultaneously break new ground and open up a whole new audience if they did a series about a wandering Negro cowboy in the years after the Civil War. She never got an answer. She supposed writing the letter in the first place had been ridiculous, a waste of time.)