“Yeah, no reap-charms, either,” Eddie said. “Would have been a nice touch, though. I tell you, Jake, when I was a kid, I used to have nightmares about the way she laughed.”

“It was the monkeys that gave me the creeps,” Susannah said. “The flying monkeys. I’d get thinkin about em, and then have to crawl into bed with my mom and dad. They’d still be arguin ’bout whose bright idea it was to take me to that show in the foist place when I fell asleep between em.”

“I wasn’t worried about clapping the heels together,” Jake said. “Not a bit.” It was Susannah and Eddie he was speaking to; for the time being, it was as if Roland wasn’t even there. “I wasn’t wearing them, after all.”

“True,” Susannah said, sounding severe, “but you know what my daddy always used to say?”

“No, but I have a feeling we’re going to find out,” Eddie said.

She gave Eddie a brief, severe look, then turned her attention back to Jake. “‘Never whistle for the wind unless you want it to blow,’” she said. “And it’s good advice, no matter what Young Mister Foolish here may think.”

“Spanked again,” Eddie said, grinning.

“Panked!” Oy said, eyeing Eddie severely.

“Explain this to me,” Roland said in his softest voice. “I would hear. I would share your khef. And I would share it now.”

2

They told him a story almost every American child of the twentieth century knew, about a Kansas farmgirl named Dorothy Gale who had been carried away by a cyclone and deposited, along with her dog, in the Land of Oz. There was no I-70 in Oz, but there was a yellow brick road which served much the same purpose, and there were witches, both good and bad. There was a ka-tet comprised of Dorothy, Toto, and three friends she met along the way: the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Woodman, and the Scarecrow. They each had

(bird and bear and hare and fish)

a fondest wish, and it was with Dorothy’s that Roland’s new friends (and Roland himself, for that matter) identified the most strongly: she wanted to find her way home again.

“The Munchkins told her that she had to follow the yellow brick road to Oz,” Jake said, “and so she went. She met the others along the way, sort of like you met us, Roland—”

“Although you don’t look much like Judy Garland,” Eddie put in.

“—and eventually they got there. To Oz, the Emerald Palace, and the guy who lived in the Emerald Palace.” He looked toward the glass palace ahead of them, greener and greener in the strengthening light, and then back to Roland.

“Yes, I understand. And was this fellow, Oz, a powerful dinh? A Baron? Perhaps a King?”

Again, the three of them exchanged a glance from which Roland was excluded. “That’s complicated,” Jake said. “He was sort of a humbug—”