“All right, I guess I can respect that.”

“So can I,” Susannah said, “but Eddie’s right about ka.” She took the note and ran a finger over it thoughtfully. “Roland, you can’t talk about that—ka, I mean—then turn around and take it back again, just because you get a little low on willpower and dedication.”

“Willpower and dedication are good words,” Roland remarked. “There’s a bad one, though, that means the same thing. That one is obsession.”

She shrugged it away with an impatient twitch of her shoulders. “Sugarpie, either this whole business is ka, or none of it is. And scary as ka might be—the idea of fate with eagle eyes and a bloodhound’s nose—I find the idea of no ka even scarier.” She tossed the R.F. note aside on the matted grass.

“Whatever you call it, you’re just as dead if it runs you over,” Roland said. “Rimer... Thorin... Jonas... my mother... Cuthbert... Susan. Just ask them. Any of them. If you only could.”

“You’re missing the biggest part of this,” Eddie said. “You can’t send us back. Don’t you realize that, you big galoot? Even if there was a door, we wouldn’t go through it. Am I wrong about that?”

He looked at Jake and Susannah. They shook their heads. Even Oy shook his head. No, he wasn’t wrong.

“We’ve changed,” Eddie said. “We...” Now he was the one who didn’t know how to go on. How to express his need to see the Tower... and his other need, just as strong, to go on carrying the gun with the sandalwood insets. The big iron was how he’d come to think of it. Like in that old Marty Robbins song about the man with the big iron on his hip. “It’s ka,” he said. It was all he could think of that was big enough to cover it.

“Kaka,” Roland replied, after a moment’s consideration. The three of them stared at him, mouths open.

Roland of Gilead had made a joke.

4

“There’s one thing I don’t understand about what we saw,” Susannah said hesitantly. “Why did your mother hide behind that drape when you came in, Roland? Did she mean to...” She bit her lip, then brought it out. “Did she mean to kill you?”

“If she’d meant to kill me, she wouldn’t have chosen a belt as her weapon. The very fact that she had made me a present—and that’s what it was, it had my initials woven into it—suggests that she meant to ask my forgiveness. That she had had a change of heart.”

Is that what you know, or only what you want to believe? Eddie thought. It was a question he would never ask. Roland had been tested enough, had won their way back to the Path of the Beam by reliving that terrible final visit to his mother’s apartment, and that was enough.