“We have a spot of business tomorrow, you and I. Up on the Cöos.”

“Are we going to kill her?”

Roland thought, and thought hard. At last he looked up, biting his lip. “We should.”

“Aye. We should. But are we going to?”

“Not unless we have to, I reckon.” Later he would regret this decision—if it was a decision—bitterly, but there never came a time when he did not understand it. He had been a boy not much older than Jake Chambers during that Mejis fall, and the decision to kill does not come easily or naturally to most boys. “Not unless she makes us.”

“Perhaps it would be best if she did,” Cuthbert said. It was hard gunslinger talk, but he looked troubled as he said it.

“Yes. Perhaps it would. It’s not likely, though, not in one as sly as her. Be ready to get up early.”

“All right. Do you want your hand back?”

“When you’re on the verge of knocking him out? Not at all.”

Roland went past them to his bunk. There he sat, looking at his folded hands in his lap. He might have been praying; he might only have been thinking hard. Cuthbert looked at him for a moment, then turned back to his cards.

16

The sun was just over the horizon when Roland and Cuthbert left the next morning. The Drop, still drenched with morning dew, seemed to burn with orange fire in the early light. Their breath and that of their horses puffed frosty in the air. It was a morning neither of them ever forgot. For the first time in their lives they went forth wearing holstered revolvers; for the first time in their lives they went into the world as gunslingers.

Cuthbert said not a word—he knew that if he started, he’d do nothing but babble great streams of his usual nonsense—and Roland was quiet by nature. There was only one exchange between them, and it was brief.

“I said I made at least one very bad mistake,” Roland told him. “One that this note”—he touched his breast pocket—“brought home to me. Do you know what that mistake was?”

“Not loving her—not that,” Cuthbert said. “You called that ka, and I call it the same.” It was a relief to be able to say this, and a greater one to believe it. Cuthbert thought he could even accept Susan herself now, not as his best friend’s lover, a girl he had wanted himself the first time he saw her, but as a part of their entwined fate.