“I think she hid because she was ashamed,” the gunslinger said. “Or because she needed a moment to think of what to say to me. Of how to explain.”

“And the ball?” Susannah asked him gently. “Was it on the vanity table, where we saw it? And did she steal it from your father?”

“Yes to both,” Roland said. “Although... did she steal it?” He seemed to ask this question of himself. “My father knew a great many things, but he sometimes kept what he knew to himself.”

“Like him knowing that your mother and Marten were seeing each other,” Susannah said.

“Yes.”

“But, Roland... you surely don’t believe that your father would knowingly have allowed you to... to...”

Roland looked at her with large, haunted eyes. His tears had gone, but when he tried to smile at her question, he was unable. “Have knowingly allowed his son to kill his wife?” he asked. “No, I can’t say that. Much as I’d like to, I can’t. That he should have caused such a thing to have happened, to have deliberately set it in motion, like a man playing Castles... that I cannot believe. But would he allow ka to run its course? Aye, most certainly.”

“What happened to the ball?” Jake asked.

“I don’t know. I fainted. When I awoke, my mother and I were still alone, one dead and one alive. No one had come to the sound of the shots—the walls of that place were thick stone, and that wing mostly empty as well. Her blood had dried. The belt she’d made me was covered with it, but I took it, and I put it on. I wore that bloodstained gift for many years, and how I lost it is a tale for another day—I’ll tell it to you before we have done, for it bears on my quest for the Tower.

“But although no one had come to investigate the gunshots, someone had come for another reason. While I lay fainted away by my mother’s corpse, that someone came in and took the wizard’s glass away.”

“Rhea?” Eddie asked.

“I doubt she was so close in her body... but she had a way of making friends, that one. Aye, a way of making friends. I saw her again, you know.” Roland explained no further, but a stony gleam arose in his eyes. Eddie had seen it before, and knew it meant killing.

Jake had retrieved the note from R.F. and now gestured at the little drawing beneath the message. “Do you know what this means?”

“I have an idea it’s the sigul of a place I saw when I first travelled in the wizard’s glass. The land called Thunderclap.” He looked around at them, one by one. “I think it’s there that we’ll meet this man—this thing—named Flagg again.”

Roland looked back the way they had come, sleepwalking in their fine red shoes. “The Kansas we came through was his Kansas, and the plague that emptied out that land was his plague. At least, that’s what I believe.”