“But between the time your friends talked to you about it and the time you gave it up, you looked into it,” Jake said. “Went into it. Travelled in it. What did it show you that time?”

“First the Tower again,” Roland said, “and the beginning of the way there. I saw the fall of Gilead, and the triumph of the Good Man. We’d put those things back a mere twenty months or so by destroying the tankers and the oilpatch. I could do nothing about that, but it showed me something I could do. There was a certain knife. The blade had been treated with an especially potent poison, something from a distant Mid-World Kingdom called Garlan. Stuff so strong even the tiniest cut would cause almost instant death. A wandering singer—in truth, John Farson’s eldest nephew—had brought this knife to court. The man he gave it to was the castle’s chief of domestic staff. This man was to pass the knife on to the actual assassin. My father was not meant to see the sun come up on the morning after the banquet.” He smiled at them grimly. “Because of what I saw in the Wizard’s Glass, the knife never reached the hand that would have used it, and there was a new chief of domestics by the end of that week. These are pretty tales I tell you, are they not? Aye, very pretty, indeed.”

“Did you see the person the knife was meant for?” Susannah asked. “The actual killer?”

“Yes.”

“Anything else? Did you see anything else?” Jake asked. The plan to murder Roland’s father didn’t seem to hold much interest for him.

“Yes.” Roland looked puzzled. “Shoes. Just for a minute. Shoes tumbling through the air. At first I thought they were autumn leaves. And when I saw what they really were, they were gone and I was lying on my bed with the ball hugged in my arms... pretty much the way I carried it back from Mejis. My father... as I’ve said, his surprise when he looked inside the bag was very great, indeed.”

You told him who had the knife with the special poison on it, Susannah thought, Jeeves the Butler, or whoever, but you didn’t tell him who was supposed to actually use it, did you, sugar? Why not? Because you wanted to take care of dat little spot o’ work yo ownself? But before she could ask, Eddie was asking a question of his own.

“Shoes? Flying through the air? Does that mean anything to you now?”

Roland shook his head.

“Tell us about the rest of what you saw in it,” Susannah said.

He gave her a look of such terrible pain that what Susannah had only suspected immediately solidified to fact in her mind. She looked away from him and groped for Eddie’s hand.