At every slow step Rusher took, the feeling of wrongness grew in Roland’s heart and mind. There was a stench to the place, a smell like rotten meat and hot putrefied tomatoes. It came from the hut, he supposed, but it also seemed to come wafting out of the very ground. And at every step, the whine of the thinny seemed louder, as if the atmosphere of this place somehow magnified it.

Susan came up here alone, and in the dark, he thought. Gods, I’m not sure I could have come up here in the dark with my friends for company.

He stopped beneath the tree, looking through the open door twenty paces away. He saw what could have been a kitchen: the legs of a table, the back of a chair, a filthy hearthstone. No sign of the lady of the house. But she was there. Roland could feel her eyes crawling on him like loathsome bugs.

I can’t see her because she’s used her art to make herself dim ... but she’s there.

And just perhaps he did see her. The air had a strange shimmer just inside the door to the right, as if it had been heated. Roland had been told that you could see someone who was dim by turning your head and looking from the corner of your eye. He did that now.

“Roland?” Cuthbert called from behind him.

“Fine so far, Bert.” Barely paying attention to the words he was saying, because... yes! That shimmer was clearer now, and it had almost the shape of a woman. It could be his imagination, of course, but...

But at that moment, as if understanding he’d seen her, the shimmer moved farther back into the shadows. Roland glimpsed the swinging hem of an old black dress, there and then gone.

No matter. He had not come to see her but only to give her her single warning... which was one more than any of their fathers would have given her, no doubt.

“Rhea!” His voice rolled in the harsh tones of old, stern and commanding. Two yellow leaves fell from the tree, as if shivered loose by that voice, and one fell in his black hair. From the hut came only a waiting, listening silence... and then the discordant, jeering yowl of a cat.

“Rhea, daughter of none! I’ve brought something back to you, woman! Something you must have lost!” From his shirt he took the folded letter and tossed it to the stony ground. “Today I’ve been your friend, Rhea—if this had gone where you had intended it to go, you would have paid with your life.”

He paused. Another leaf drifted down from the tree. This one landed in Rusher’s mane.