The flush on her cheek and the love-bite on the side of her neck told him everything else.

Thus had he been goaded by Marten into an early trial of manhood, and by employing a weapon his teacher had not expected—his hawk, David—Roland had defeated Cort, taken his stick... and made the enemy of his life in Marten Broadcloak.

Beaten badly, face swelling into something that looked like a child’s goblin mask, slipping toward a coma, Cort had fought back unconsciousness long enough to offer his newest apprentice gunslinger counsel: stay away from Marten yet awhile, Cort had said.

“He told me to let the story of our battle grow into a legend,” the gunslinger told Eddie, Susannah, and Jake. “To wait until my shadow had grown hair on its face and haunted Marten in his dreams.”

“Did you take his advice?” Susannah asked.

“I never got a chance,” Roland said. His face cracked in a rueful, painful smile. “I meant to think about it, and seriously, but before I even got started on my thinking, things... changed.”

“They have a way of doing that, don’t they?” Eddie said. “My goodness, yes.”

“I buried my hawk, the first weapon I ever wielded, and perhaps the finest. Then—and this part I’m sure I didn’t tell you before, Jake—I went into the lower town. That summer’s heat broke in storms full of thunder and hail, and in a room above one of the brothels where Cort had been wont to roister, I lay with a woman for the first time.”

He poked a stick thoughtfully into the fire, seemed to become aware of the unconscious symbolism in what he was doing, and threw it away with a lopsided grin. It landed, smoldering, near the tire of an abandoned Dodge Aspen and went out.

“It was good. The sex was good. Not the great thing I and my friends had thought about and whispered about and wondered about, of course—”

“I think store-bought pussy tends to be overrated by the young, sugar,” Susannah said.

“I fell asleep listening to the sots downstairs singing along with the piano and to the sound of hail on the window. I awoke the next morning in... well... let’s just say I awoke in a way I never would have expected to awake in such a place.”

Jake fed fresh fuel to the fire. It flared up, painting highlights on Roland’s cheeks, brushing crescents of shadow beneath his brows and below his lower lip. And as he talked, Susannah found she could almost see what had happened on that long-ago morning that must have smelled of wet cobblestones and rain-sweetened summer air; what had happened in a whore’s crib above a drinking-dive in the lower town of Gilead, Barony seat of New Canaan, one small mote of land located in the western regions of Mid-World.