Jake slipped back into the tent. Benny was still fast asleep. Jake looked at the other boy—older in years but younger in a lot of the ways that mattered—for several seconds, biting his lip. He didn’t want to get Benny’s father in trouble. Not unless he had to.

Jake lay down and pulled his blankets up to his chin. He had never in his life felt so undecided about so many things, and he wanted to cry. The day had begun to grow light before he was able to get back to sleep.

Chapter VIII

Took’s Store; The Unfound Door

One

For the first half hour after leaving the Rocking B, Roland and Jake rode east toward the smallholds in silence, their horses ambling side by side in perfect good fellowship. Roland knew Jake had something serious on his mind; that was clear from his troubled face. Yet the gunslinger was still astounded when Jake curled his fist, placed it against the left side of his chest, and said: “Roland, before Eddie and Susannah join up with us, may I speak to you dan-dinh?”

May I open my heart to your command. But the subtext was more complicated than that, and ancient—pre-dating Arthur Eld by centuries, or so Vannay had claimed. It meant to turn some insoluble emotional problem, usually having to do with a love affair, over to one’s dinh. When one did this, he or she agreed to do exactly as the dinh suggested, immediately and without question. But surely Jake Chambers didn’t have love problems—not unless he’d fallen for the gorgeous Francine Tavery, that was—and how had he known such a phrase in the first place?

Meanwhile Jake was looking at him with a wide-eyed, pale-cheeked solemnity that Roland didn’t much like.

“Dan-dinh—where did you hear that, Jake?”

“Never did. Picked it up from your mind, I think.” Jake added hastily: “I don’t go snooping in there, or anything like that, but sometimes stuff just comes. Most of it isn’t very important, I don’t think, but sometimes there are phrases.”

“You pick them up like a crow or a rustie picks up the bright things that catch its eye from the wing.”

“I guess so, yeah.”

“What others? Tell me a few.”

Jake looked embarrassed. “I can’t remember many. Dan-dinh, that means I open my heart to you and agree to do what you say.”

It was more complicated than that, but the boy had caught the essence. Roland nodded. The sun felt good on his face as they clopped along. Margaret Eisenhart’s exhibition with the plate had soothed him, he’d had a good meeting with the lady-sai’s father later on, and he had slept quite well for the first time in many nights. “Yes.”