Susannah could have responded that it hadn’t been her idea to catch preg with a demon’s baby in the first place, but this would be a terrible time to get into one of those yes-you-did, no-I-didn’t squabbles.

“I wasn’t scolding,” Susannah said, “only asking.”

Mia made an impatient shooing gesture with her hand as if to say Don’t split hairs, and half-turned away. Under her breath she said, “I didn’t go to Morehouse or no house. And in any case I’ll bear my chap, do you hear? Whichever way the cards fall. Bear him and feed him!”

All at once Susannah understood a great deal. Mia mocked because she was afraid. In spite of all she knew, so much of her was Susannah.

I didn’t go to Morehouse or no house, for instance; that was from Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison. When Mia had bought into Susannah, she had purchased at least two personalities for the price of one. It was Mia, after all, who’d brought Detta out of retirement (or perhaps deep hibernation), and it was Detta who was particularly fond of that line, which expressed so much of the Negro’s deep-held disdain for and suspicion of what was sometimes called “the finer post-war Negro education.” Not to Morehouse or no house; I know what I know, in other words, I heard it through the grapevine, I got it on the earie, dearie, I picked it up on the jungle telegraph.

“Mia,” she said now. “Whose chap is it besides yours? What demon was his father, do you know?”

Mia grinned. It wasn’t a grin Susannah liked. There was too much Detta in it; too much laughing, bitter knowledge. “Aye, lady, I know. And you’re right. It was a demon got him on you, a very great demon indeed, say true! A human one! It had to have been so, for know you that true demons, those left on the shore of these worlds which spin around the Tower when the Prim receded, are sterile. And for a very good reason.”

“Then how—”

“Your dinh is the father of my chap,” Mia said. “Roland of Gilead, aye, he. Steven Deschain finally has his grandson, although he lies rotten in his grave and knows it not.”

Susannah was goggling at her, unmindful of the cold wind rushing out of the Discordia wilderness. “Roland …? It can’t be! He was beside me when the demon was in me, he was pulling Jake through from the house on Dutch Hill and fucking was the last thing on his mind …” She trailed off, thinking of the baby she’d seen in the Dogan. Thinking of those eyes. Those blue bombardier’s eyes. No. No, I refuse to believe it.

“All the same, Roland is his father,” Mia insisted. “And when the chap comes, I shall name him from your own mind, Susannah of New York; from what you learned at the same time you learned of merlons and courtyards and tre-bouchets and barbicans. Why not? ’Tis a good name, and fair.”