“No,” Roland said. “Not loving her, but thinking that love could somehow be apart from everything else. That I could live two lives—one with you and Al and our job here, one with her. I thought that love could lift me above ka, the way a bird’s wings can take it above all the things that would kill it and eat it, otherwise. Do you understand?”

“It made you blind.” Cuthbert spoke with a gentleness quite foreign to the young man who had suffered through the last two months.

“Yes,” Roland said sadly. “It made me blind... but now I see. Come on, a little faster, if you please. I want to get this over.”

17

They rode up the rutty cart-track along which Susan (a Susan who had known a good deal less about the ways of the world) had come singing “Careless Love” beneath the light of the Kissing Moon. Where the track opened into Rhea’s yard, they stopped.

“Wonderful view,” Roland murmured. “You can see the whole sweep of the desert from here.”

“Not much to say about the view right here in front of us, though.”

That was true. The garden was full of unpicked mutie vegetables, the stuffy-guy presiding over them either a bad joke or a bad omen. The yard supported just one tree, now moulting sickly-looking fall leaves like an old vulture shedding its feathers. Beyond the tree was the hut itself, made of rough stone and topped by a single sooty pot of a chimney with a hex-sign painted on it in sneering yellow. At the rear corner, beyond one overgrown window, was a woodpile.

Roland had seen plenty of huts like it—the three of them had passed any number on their way here from Gilead—but never one that felt as powerfully wrong as this. He saw nothing untoward, yet there was a feeling, too strong to be denied, of a presence. One that watched and waited.

Cuthbert felt it, too. “Do we have to go closer?” He swallowed. “Do we have to go in? Because... Roland, the door is open. Do you see?”

He saw. As if she expected them. As if she was inviting them in, wanting them to sit down with her to some unspeakable breakfast.

“Stay here.” Roland gigged Rusher forward.

“No! I’m coming!”

“No, cover my back. If I need to go inside, I’ll call you to join me... but if I need to go inside, the old woman who lives here will breathe no more. As you said, that might be for the best.”