If the Wolves got wind of the lie and believed it?

That would be good, wouldn’t it? Good if they lunged and snapped in the right direction, but at the wrong thing?

Yes, but I’ll need to trust someone with the whole truth eventually. Who?

Not Susannah, because Susannah was now two again, and he didn’t trust the other one.

Not Eddie, because Eddie might let something crucial slip to Susannah, and then Mia would know.

Not Jake, because Jake had become fast friends with Benny Slightman.

He was on his own again, and this condition had never felt more lonely to him.

“Look,” he said, tapping the arroyo. “Here’s a place you might think of, Slightman. Easy to get in, not so easy to get back out. Suppose we were to take all the children of a certain age and tuck them away safe in this little bit of a mine?”

He saw understanding begin to dawn in Slightman’s eyes. Something else, too. Hope, maybe.

“If we hide the children, they know where,” Eisenhart said. “It’s as if they smell em, like ogres in a kid’s cradle-story.”

“So I’m told,” Roland said. “What I suggest is that we could use that.”

“Make em bait, you mean. Gunslinger, that’s hard.”

Roland, who had no intention of putting the Calla’s children in the abandoned garnet mine—or anywhere near it—nodded his head. “Hard world sometimes, Eisenhart.”

“Say thankya,” Eisenhart replied, but his face was grim. He touched the map. “Could work. Aye, could work… ifye could suck all the Wolves in.”

Wherever the children wind up, I’ll need help putting them there,Roland thought. There’ll have to be people who know where to go and what to do. A plan. But not yet. For now I can play the game I’m playing. It’s like Castles. Because someone’s hiding.

Did he know that? He did not.

Did he smell it? Aye, he did.

Now it’s twenty-three,Roland thought. Twenty-three days until the Wolves.

It would have to be enough.

Chapter VI

Gran-Pere’s Tale

One

Eddie, a city boy to the core, was almost shocked by how much he liked the Jaffords place on the River Road. I could live in a place like this, he thought. That’d be okay. It’d do me fine.

It was a long log cabin, craftily built and chinked against the winter winds. Along one side there were large windows which gave a view down a long, gentle hill to the rice-fields and the river. On the other side was the barn and the dooryard, beaten dirt that had been prettied up with circular islands of grass and flowers and, to the left of the back porch, a rather exotic little vegetable garden. Half of it was filled with a yellow herb called madrigal, which Tian hoped to grow in quantity the following year.