Well…not quite last. Faintly, very faintly, Roland could hear a murmur of conversation from the folk on the other side of yonder south hill, the ones who were trailing them and watching them. Nerving themselves to step forward and make themselves known, very likely. Roland’s ears were sharp, but not quite sharp enough to pick out what they were saying. There were perhaps half a dozen murmured exchanges before someone uttered a loud shushing hiss. Then there was silence, except for the low, intermittent snuffling of the wind in the treetops. Roland lay still, looking up into the darkness where no stars shone, waiting for Susannah to rise. Eventually she did.

But before that, Jake, Eddie, and Oy went todash.

Five

Roland and his mates had learned about todash (what there was to learn) from Vannay, the tutor of court in the long-ago when they had been young. They had been a quintet to begin with: Roland, Alain, Cuthbert, Jamie, and Wallace, Vannay’s son. Wallace, fiercely intelligent but ever sickly, had died of the falling sickness, sometimes called king’s evil. Then they had been four, and under the umbrella of true ka-tet. Vannay had known it as well, and that knowing was surely part of his sorrow.

Cort taught them to navigate by the sun and stars; Vannay showed them compass and quadrant and sextant and taught them the mathematics necessary to use them. Cort taught them to fight. With history, logic problems, and tutorials on what he called “the universal truths,” Vannay taught them how they could sometimes avoid having to do so. Cort taught them to kill if they had to. Vannay, with his limp and his sweet but distracted smile, taught them that violence worsened problems far more often than it solved them. He called it the hollow chamber, where all true sounds became distorted by echoes.

He taught them physics—what physics there was. He taught them chemistry—what chemistry was left. He taught them to finish such sentences as “That tree is like a” and “When I’m running I feel as happy as a” and “We couldn’t help laughing because.” Roland hated these exercises, but Vannay wouldn’t let him slip away from them. “Your imagination is a poor thing, Roland,” the tutor told him once—Roland might have been eleven at the time. “I will not let you feed it short rations and make it poorer still.”

He had taught them the Seven Dials of Magic, refusing to say if he believed in any of them, and Roland thought it was tangential to one of these lessons that Vannay had mentioned todash. Or perhaps you capitalized it, perhaps it was Todash. Roland didn’t know for sure. He knew that Vannay had spoken of the Manni sect, people who were far travelers. And hadn’t he also mentioned the Wizard’s Rainbow?