She looked at the shell. Roland began to move it along the back of his hand, dancing it back and forth in a dexterous weaving. His knuckles rose and fell like the heddles of a loom. She watched this with a child’s fascinated delight. “Where did ye learn that?”

“At home. It doesn’t matter.”

“Ye’d hypnotize me?”

“Aye... and I don’t think it would be for the first time.” He made the shell dance a bit faster—now east along his rippling knuckles, now west. “May I?”

“Aye,” she said. “If you can.”

12

He could, all right; the speed with which she went under confirmed that this had happened to Susan before, and recently. Yet he couldn’t get what he wanted from her. She was perfectly cooperative (some sleep eager, Cort would have said), but beyond a certain point she would not go. It wasn’t decorum or modesty, either—as she slept open-eyed before the stream, she told him in a far-off but calm voice about the old woman’s examination, and the way Rhea had tried to “fiddle her up.” (At this Roland’s fists clenched so tightly his nails bit into his palms.) But there came a point where she could no longer remember.

She and Rhea had gone to the door of the hut, Susan said, and there they had stood with the Kissing Moon shining down on their faces. The old woman had been touching her hair, Susan remembered that much. The touch revolted her, especially after the witch’s previous touches, but Susan had been unable to do anything about it. Arms too heavy to raise; tongue too heavy to speak. She could only stand there while the witch whispered in her ear.

“What?” Roland asked. “What did she whisper?”

“I don’t know,” Susan said. “The rest is pink.”

“Pink? What do you mean?”

“Pink,” she repeated. She sounded almost amused, as if she believed Roland was being deliberately dense. “She says, ‘Aye, lovely, just so, it’s a good girl y’are,’ then everything’s pink. Pink and bright.”

“Bright.”

“Aye, like the moon. And then...” She paused. “Then I think it becomes the moon. The Kissing Moon, mayhap. A bright pink Kissing Moon, as round and full as a grapefruit.”

He tried other ways into her memory with no success—every path he tried ended in that bright pinkness, first obscuring her recollection and then coalescing into a full moon. It meant nothing to Roland; he’d heard of blue moons, but never pink ones. The only thing of which he was sure was that the old woman had given Susan a powerful command to forget.