Roland squeezed Rusher’s sides; the horse trotted toward Jonas. And suddenly Roland knew something. As with all his best and truest intuitions, it came from nowhere and everywhere—absent at one second, all there and fully dressed at the next.

“Who sent you west, maggot?” he asked as he passed Jonas. “Couldn’t have been Cort—you’re too old. Was it his father?”

The look of slightly bored amusement left Jonas’s face—flew from his face, as if slapped away. For one amazing moment the man with the white hair was a child again: shocked, shamed, and hurt.

“Yes, Cort’s da—I see it in your eyes. And now you’re here, on the Clean Sea... except you’re really in the west. The soul of a man such as you can never leave the west.”

Jonas’s gun was out and cocked in his hand with such speed that only Roland’s extraordinary eyes were capable of marking the movement. There was a murmur from the men behind them—partly shock, mostly awe.

“Jonas, don’t be a fool!” Lengyll snarled. “You ain’t killin em after we took the time and risk to hood em and tie their hooks, are ye?”

Jonas seemed to take no notice. His eyes were wide; the corners of his seamed mouth were trembling. “Watch your words, Will Dearborn,” he said in a low, hoarse voice. “You want to watch em ever so close. I got two pounds of pressure on a three-pound trigger right this second.”

“Fine, shoot me,” Roland said. He lifted his head and looked down at Jonas. “Shoot, exile. Shoot, worm. Shoot, you failure. You’ll still live in exile and die as you lived.”

For a moment he was sure Jonas would shoot, and in that moment Roland felt death would be enough, an acceptable end after the shame of being caught so easily. In that moment Susan was absent from his mind. Nothing breathed in that moment, nothing called, nothing moved. The shadows of the men watching this confrontation, both on foot and on horseback, were printed depthless on the dirt.

Then Jonas dropped the hammer of his gun and slipped it back into its holster.

“Take em to town and jug em,” he said to Lengyll. “And when I show up, I don’t want to see one hair harmed on one head. If I could keep from killing this one, you can keep from hurting the rest. Now go on.”

“Move,” Lengyll said. His voice had lost some of its bluff authority. It was now the voice of a man who realizes (too late) that he has bought chips in a game where the stakes are likely much too high.

They rode. As they did, Roland turned one last time. The contempt Jonas saw in those cool young eyes stung him worse than the whips that had scarred his back in Garlan years ago.

6