But this year there’s something else, as well: a sense of wrongness that no one can quite voice. Folks who never had a nightmare in their lives will awake screaming with them during the week of fin de año; men who consider themselves peaceful will find themselves not only in fistfights but instigating them; discontented boys who would only have dreamed of running away in other years will this year actually do it, and most will not come back after the first night spent sleeping raw.

There is a sense—inarticulate but very much there—that things have gone amiss this season. It is the closing of the year; it is also the closing of the peace. For it is here, in the sleepy Out-World Barony of Mejis, that Mid-World’s last great conflict will shortly begin; it is from here that the blood will begin to flow. In two years, no more, the world as it has been will be swept away. It starts here. From its field of roses, the Dark Tower cries out in its beast’s voice. Time is a face on the water.

2

Coral Thorin was coming down the High Street from the Bayview Hotel when she spied Sheemie, leading Caprichoso and heading in the opposite direction. The boy was singing “Careless Love” in a voice both high and sweet. His progress was slow; the barrels slung over Capi’s back were half again as large as the ones he had carried up to the Cöos not long before.

Coral hailed her boy-of-all-work cheerily enough. She had reason to be cheery; Eldred Jonas had no use for fin de año abstinence. And for a man with a bad leg, he could be very inventive.

“Sheemie!” she called. “Where go ye? Seafront?”

“Aye,” Sheemie said. “I’ve got the graf them asked for. All parties come Reaping Fair, aye, tons of em. Dance a lot, get hot a lot, drink graf to cool off a lot! How pretty you look, sai Thorin, cheeks all pinky-pink, so they are.”

“Oh, law! How kind of you to say, Sheemie!” She favored him with a dazzling smile. “Go on, now, you flatterer—don’t linger.”

“Noey-no, off I go.”

Coral stood watching after him and smiling. Dance a lot, get hot a lot, Sheemie had said. About the dancing Coral didn’t know, but she was sure this year’s Reaping would be hot, all right. Very hot indeed.

3

Miguel met Sheemie at Seafront’s archway, gave him the look of lofty contempt he reserved for the lower orders, then pulled the cork from first one barrel and then the other. With the first, he only sniffed from the bung; at the second, he stuck his thumb in and then sucked it thoughtfully. With his wrinkled cheeks hollowed inward and his toothless old mouth working, he looked like an ancient bearded baby.