The silence and the empty board sidewalks began to give Eddie the creeps. He remembered Roland’s tale of Susan’s final ride into Mejis in the back of a cart, standing with her hands tied in front of her and a noose around her neck. Her road had been empty, too. At first. Then, not far from the intersection of the Great Road and the Silk Ranch Road, Susan and her captors had passed a single farmer, a man with what Roland had called lamb-slaughterer’s eyes. Later she would be pelted with vegetables and sticks, even with stones, but this lone farmer had been first, standing there with his handful of cornshucks, which he had tossed almost gently at her as she passed on her way to…well, on her way to charyou tree, the Reap Fair of the Old People.

As they rode into Calla Bryn Sturgis, Eddie kept expecting that man, those lamb-slaughterer’s eyes, and the handful of cornshucks. Because this town felt bad to him. Not evil—evil as Mejis had likely been on the night of Susan Delgado’s death—but bad in a simpler way. Bad as in bad luck, bad choices, bad omens. Bad ka, maybe.

He leaned toward Slightman the Elder. “Where in the heck is everyone, Ben?”

“Yonder,” Slightman said, and pointed to the flare of the torches.

“Why are they so quiet?” Jake asked.

“They don’t know what to expect,” Callahan said. “We’re cut off here. The outsiders we do see from time to time are the occasional peddler, harrier, gambler…oh, and the lake-boat marts sometimes stop in high summer.”

“What’s a lake-boat mart?” Susannah asked.

Callahan described a wide flatboat, paddlewheel-driven and gaily painted, covered with small shops. These made their slow way down the Devar-Tete Whye, stopping to trade at the Callas of the Middle Crescent until their goods were gone. Shoddy stuff for the most part, Callahan said, but Eddie wasn’t sure he trusted him entirely, at least on the subject of the lake-boat marts; he spoke with the almost unconscious distaste of the longtime religious.

“And the other outsiders come to steal their children,” Callahan concluded. He pointed to the left, where a long wooden building seemed to take up almost half the high street. Eddie counted not two hitching rails or four, but eight. Long ones. “Took’s General Store, may it do ya fine,” Callahan said, with what might have been sarcasm.

They reached the Pavilion. Eddie later put the number present at seven or eight hundred, but when he first saw them—a mass of hats and bonnets and boots and work-roughened hands beneath the long red light of that day’s evening sun—the crowd seemed enormous, untellable.

Theywill throw shit at us, he thought. Throw shit at us and yell “Charyou tree.” The idea was ridiculous but also strong.