Roland picked it up—how well it fit his hand, how natural it felt against his palm, even after all these years—and looked into its cloudy, troubled depths. “You always did have a charmed life,” he whispered to it. He thought of Rhea as he had seen her in this ball—her ancient, laughing eyes. He thought of the flames from the Reap-Night bonfire rising around Susan, making her beauty shimmer in the heat. Making it shiver like a mirage.

Wretched glam! he thought. If I dashed you to the floor, surely we would drown in the sea of tears that would pour out of your split belly... the tears of all those you’ve put to ruin.

And why not do it? Left whole, the nasty thing might be able to help them back to the Path of the Beam, but Roland didn’t believe they actually needed it. He thought that Tick-Tock and the creature which had called itself Flagg had been their last challenge in that regard. The Green Palace was their door back to Mid-World... and it was theirs, now. They had conquered it by force of arms.

But you can’t go yet, gunslinger. Not until you’ve finished your story, told the last scene.

Whose voice was that? Vannay’s? No. Cort’s? No. Nor was it the voice of his father, who had once turned him naked out of a whore’s bed. That was the hardest voice, the one he often heard in his troubled dreams, the one he wanted so to please and so seldom could. No, not that voice, not this time.

This time what he heard was the voice of ka—ka like a wind. He had told so much of that awful fourteenth year... but he hadn’t finished the tale. As with Detta Walker and the Blue Lady’s forspecial plate, there was one more thing. A hidden thing. The question wasn’t, he saw, whether or not the five of them could find their way out of the Green Palace and recover the Path of the Beam; the question was whether or not they could go on as ka-tet. If they were to do that, there could be nothing hidden; he would have to tell them of the final time he had looked into the wizard’s glass in that long-ago year. Three nights past the welcoming banquet, it had been. He would have to tell them—

No, Roland, the voice whispered. Not just tell. Not this time. You know better.

Yes. He knew better.

“Come,” he said, turning to them.

They drew slowly around him, their eyes wide and filling with the ball’s flashing pink light. Already they were half-hypnotized by it, even Oy.

“We are ka-tet,” Roland said, holding the ball toward them. “We are one from many. I lost my one true love at the beginning of my quest for the Dark Tower. Now look into this wretched thing, if you would, and see what I lost not long after. See it once and for all; see it very well.”