"Aye, just what I said, 'Why not, indeed?' I said. The home place burned to a cinder, but the bunkhouse still stands; so does the stable and the cook-shack next door to it. On Mayor Thorin's orders, I've taken the liberty of stocking the larder and having the bunkhouse swept out and spruced up a little. Ye may see the occasional bug, but nothing that'll bite or sting . . . and no snakes, unless there's a few under the floor, and if there are, let em stay there's what I say. Hey, boys? Let em stay there!"

  "Let em stay there, right under the floor where they're happy," Cuth­bert agreed, still gazing down at the harbor with his arms folded over his chest.

  Avery gave him a brief, uncertain glance, his smile flickering a bit at the comers. Then he turned back to Roland, and the smile shone out strongly once more. "There's no holes in the roof, lad, and if it rains, ye'll be dry. What think ye of that? Does it sound well to ye?"

  "Better than we deserve. I think that you've been very efficient and Mayor Thorin's been far too kind." And he did think that. The question was why. "But we appreciate his thoughtfulness. Don't we, boys?"

  Cuthbert and Alain made vigorous assent.

  "And we accept with thanks."

  Avery nodded. "I'll tell him. Go safely, boys."

  They had reached the hitching rail. Avery once more shook hands all around, this time saving his keenest looks for their horses.

  "Until tomorrow night, then, young gents?"

  "Tomorrow night," Roland agreed.

  "Will ye be able to find the Bar K on your own, do yer think?"

  Again Roland was struck by the man's unspoken contempt and un­conscious condescension. Yet perhaps it was to the good. If the High Sheriff thought they were stupid, who knew what might come of it?

  "We'll find it," Cuthbert said, mounting up. Avery was looking suspi­ciously at the rook's skull on the horn of Cuthbert's saddle. Cuthbert saw him looking, but for once managed to keep his mouth shut. Roland was both amazed and pleased by this unexpected reticence. "Fare you well, Sheriff."

  "And you, boy."

  He stood there by the hitching post, a large man in a khaki shirt with sweat-stains around the armpits and black boots that looked too shiny for a working sheriff's feet. And where's the horse that could support him through a day of range-riding? Roland thought. I'd like to see the cut of that Cayuse.

  Avery waved to them as they went. The other deputies came down the walk, Deputy Dave in the forefront. They waved, too.

  3

  The moment the Affiliation brats mounted on their fathers' expensive horse­flesh were around the comer and headed downhill to the High Street, the sheriff and the deputies stopped waving. Avery turned to Dave Hollis, whose expression of slightly stupid awe had been replaced by one mar­ginally more intelligent.

  "What think ye, Dave?"

  Dave lifted his monocle to his mouth and began to nibble nervously at its brass edging, a habit about which Sheriff Avery had long since ceased to nag him. Even Dave's wife, Judy, had given up on that score, and Judy Hollis—Judy Wertner that was—was a fair engine when it came to get­ting her own way.

  "Soft," Dave said. "Soft as eggs just dropped out of a chicken's ass."

  "Mayhap," Avery said, putting his thumbs in his belt and rocking enormously back and forth, "but the one did most of the talking, him in the flathead hat, he doesn't think he's soft."

  "Don't matter what he thinks," Dave said, still nibbling at his eye­glass. "He's in Hambry, now. He may have to change his way of thinking to our'n."

  Behind him, the other deputies laughed. Even Avery smiled. They would leave the rich boys alone if the rich boys left them alone—those were orders, straight from Mayor's House—but Avery had to admit that he wouldn't mind a little dust-up with them, so he wouldn't. He would enjoy putting his boot into the balls of the one with that idiotic bird's skull on his saddle-horn—standing there and mocking him, he'd been, thinking all the while that Herk Avery was too country-dumb to know what he was up to—but the thing he'd realty enjoy would be beating the cool look from the eyes of the boy in the flathead preacher's hat, seeing a hotter ex­pression of fear rise up in them as Mr. Will Dearborn of Hemphill real­ized that New Canaan was far away and his rich father couldn't help him.

  "Aye," he said, clapping Dave on the shoulder. "Mayhap he'll have to change his way of thinking." He smiled—one very different from any of those he had shown the Affiliation counters. "Mayhap they all will."

  4

  The three boys rode in single file until they were past the Travellers' Rest (a young and obviously retarded man with kinky black hair looked up from scrubbing the brick stoop and waved to them; they waved back). Then they moved up abreast, Roland in the middle.

  "What did you think of our new friend, the High Sheriff?" Roland asked.

  "I have no opinion," Cuthbert said brightly. "No, none at all. Opinion is politics, and politics is an evil which has caused many a fellow to be hung while he's still young and pretty." He leaned forward and tapped the rook's skull with his knuckles. "The lookout didn't care for him, though. I'm sorry to say that our faithful lookout thought Sheriff Avery a fat bag of guts without a trustworthy bone in his body."

  Roland turned to Alain. "And you, young Master Stockworth?"

  Alain considered it for some time, as was his way, chewing a piece of grass he'd bent oversaddle to pluck from his side of the road. At last he said: "If he came upon us burning in the street, I don't think he'd piss on us to put us out."

  Cuthbert laughed heartily at that. "And you, Will? How do you say, dear captain?"

  "He doesn't interest me much ... but one thing he said does. Given that the horse-meadow they call the Drop has to be at least thirty wheels long and runs five or more to the dusty desert, how do you suppose Sher­iff Avery knew we were on the part of it that belongs to Croydon's Piano Ranch?"

  They looked at him, first with surprise, then speculation. After a mo­ment Cuthbert leaned forward and rapped once more on the rook's skull. "We're being watched, and you never reported it? No supper for you, sir, and it'll be the stockade the next time it happens!"

  But before they had gone much farther, Roland's thoughts of Sheriff Avery gave way to more pleasant ones of Susan Delgado. He would see her the following night, of that he was sure. He wondered if her hair would be down.

  He couldn't wait to find out.

  5

  Now here they were, at Mayor's House. Let the game begin, Roland thought, not clear on what that meant even as the phrase went through his mind, surely not thinking of Castles . . . not then.

  The hostlers led their mounts away, and for a moment the three of them stood at the foot of the steps—huddled, almost, as horses do in un­friendly weather—their beardless faces washed by the light of the torches. From inside, the guitars played and voices were raised in a fresh eddy of laughter.

  "Do we knock?" Cuthbert asked. "Or just open and march in?"

  Roland was spared answering. The main door of the had was thrown open and two women stepped out, both wearing long white-collared dresses that reminded all three boys of the dresses stockmen's wives wore in their own part of the world. Their hair was caught back in snoods that sparkled with some bright diamondy stuff in the light of the torches.

  The plumper of the two stepped forward, smiling, and dropped them a deep curtsey. Her earrings, which looked like square-cut firedims, flashed and bobbed. "You are the young men from the Affiliation, so you are, and welcome you are, as well. Goodeven, sirs, and may your days be long upon the earth!"

  They bowed in unison, boots forward, and thanked her in an unin­tended chorus that made her laugh and clap her hands. The tall woman be­side her offered them a smile as spare as her frame.

  "I am Olive Thorin," the plump woman said, "the Mayor's wife. This is my sister-in-law, Coral."

  Coral Thorin, still with that narrow smile (it barely creased her lips and touched her eyes not at all), dipped them a token curtsey. Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain bowed again over their outstretched legs.

  "I welcome you to Seafront," Olive Thorin said, her dignity leavened and made pleasant by her artless smile, her obvious dazzlement at the ap­pearance of her young visitors from In-World. "Come to our house with joy. I say so with all my heart, so I do."

  "And so we will, madam," Roland said, "for your greeting has made us joyful." He took her hand, and, with no calculation whatever, raised it to his lips and kissed it. Her delighted laughter made him smile. He liked Olive Thorin on sight, and it was perhaps well he met someone of that sort early on, for, with the problematic exception of Susan Delgado, he met no one else he liked, no one else he trusted, all that night.

  6

  It was warm enough even with the seabreeze, and the cloak- and coat-collector in the foyer looked as though he'd had little or no custom. Roland wasn't entirely surprised to see that it was Deputy Dave, his re­maining bits of hair slicked back with some sort of gleaming grease and his monocle now lying on the snow-white breast of a houseman's jacket. Roland gave him a nod. Dave, his hands clasped behind his back, returned it.

  Two men—Sheriff Avery and an elderly gent as gaunt as Old Doctor Death in a cartoon—came toward them. Beyond, through a pair of double doors now open wide, a whole roomful of people stood about with crystal punch-cups in their hands, talking and taking little bits of food from the trays which were circulating.

  Roland had time for just one narrow-eyed glance toward Cuthbert:

  Everything. Every name, every face . . . every nuance. Especially those.

  Cuthbert raised an eyebrow—his discreet version of a nod—and then Roland was pulled, willy-nilly, into the evening, his first real evening of service as a working gunslinger. And he had rarely worked harder.

  Old Doctor Death turned out to be Kimba Rimer, Thorin's Chancellor and Minister of Inventory (Roland suspected the title had been made up special for their visit). He was easily five inches taller than Roland, who was considered tall in Gilead, and his skin was pale as candlewax. Not unhealthy-looking; just pale. Wings of iron-gray hair floated away from either side of his head, gossamer as cobwebs. The top of his skull was completely bald. Balanced on his whelk of a nose was a pince-nez.

  "My boys!" he said, when the introductions had been made. He had the smooth, sadly sincere voice of a politician or an undertaker. "Welcome to Mejis! To Hambry! And to Seafront, our humble Mayor's House!"

  "If this is humble, I should wonder at the palace your folk might build," Roland said. It was a mild enough remark, more pleasantry than witticism (he ordinarily left the wit to Bert), but Chancellor Rimer laughed hard. So did Sheriff Avery.

  "Come, boys!" Rimer said, when he apparently felt he had expressed enough amusement. "The Mayor awaits you with impatience, I'm sure."

  "Aye," said a timid voice from behind them. The skinny sister-in-law, Coral, had disappeared, but Olive Thorin was still there, looking up at the newcomers with her hands decorously clasped before that area of her body which might once have been her waist. She was still smiling her hopeful, pleasant smile. "Very eager to meet you, Hart is, very eager, in­deed. Shall I conduct them, Kimba, or—"

  "Nay, nay, you mustn't trouble yourself with so many other guests to attend," Rimer said.

  "I suppose you're right." She curtseyed to Roland and his compan­ions a final time, and although she still smiled and although the smile looked completely genuine to Roland, he thought: She's unhappy about something, all the same. Desperately so, I think.

  "Gentlemen?" Rimer asked. The teeth in his smile were almost dis­concertingly huge. "Will ye come?"

  He led them past the grinning Sheriff and into the reception hall.

  7

  Roland was hardly overwhelmed by it; he had, after all, been in the Great Hall of Gilead—the Hall of the Grandfathers, it was sometimes called—and had even peeped down on the great party which was held there each year, the so-called Dance of Easterling, which marked the end of Wide Earth and the advent of Sowing. There were five chandeliers in the Great Hall instead of just one, and lit with electric bulbs rather than oil lamps. The dress of the partygoers (many of them expensive young men and women who had never done a hand's turn of work in their lives, a fact of which John Farson spoke at every opportunity) had been richer, the music had been fuller, the company of older and nobler lines which grew closer and closer together as they stretched back toward Arthur Eld, he of the white horse and unifying sword.

  Yet there was life here, and plenty of it. There was a robustness that had been missing in Gilead, and not just at Easterling, either. The texture he felt as he stepped into the Mayor's House reception room was the sort of thing, Roland reflected, that you didn't entirely miss when it was gone, because it slipped away quietly and painlessly. Like blood from a vein cut in a tub filled with hot water.

  The room—almost but not quite grand enough to be a hall—was cir­cular, its panelled walls decorated by paintings (most quite bad) of previ­ous Mayors. On a raised stand to the right of the doors leading into the dining area, four grinning guitarists in tati jackets and sombreros were playing something that sounded like a waltz with pepper on it. In the cen­ter of the floor was a table supporting two cut-glass punchbowls, one vast and grand, the other smaller and plainer. The white-jacketed fellow in charge of the dipping-out operations was another of Avery's deputies.

  Contrary to what the High Sheriff had told them the day before, sev­eral of the men were wearing sashes of various colors, but Roland didn't feel too out of place in his white silk shirt, black string tie, and one pair of stovepipe dress trousers. For every man wearing a sash, he saw three wearing the sort of dowdy, box-tailed coats that he associated with stock­men at church, and he saw several others (younger men, for the most part) who weren't wearing coats at all. Some of the women wore jewelry (though nothing so expensive as sai Thorin's firedim earrings), and few looked as if they'd missed many meals, but they also wore clothes Roland recognized: the long, round-collared dresses, usually with the lace fringe of a colored underskirt showing below the hem, the dark shoes with low heels, the snoods (most sparkling with gem-dust, as those of Olive and Coral Thorin had been).

  And then he saw one who was very different.

  It was Susan Delgado, of course, shimmering and almost too beauti­ful to look at in a blue silk dress with a high waist and a square-cut bodice which showed the tops of her breasts. Around her neck was a sapphire pendant that made Olive Thorin's earrings look like paste. She stood next to a man wearing a sash the color of coals in a hot woodfire. That deep orange-red was the Barony's color, and Roland supposed that the man was their host, but for the moment Roland barely saw him. His eye was held by Susan Delgado: the blue dress, the tanned skin, the triangles of color, too pale and perfect to be makeup, which ran lightly up her cheeks; most of all her hair, which was unbound tonight and fell to her waist like a shimmer of palest silk. He wanted her, suddenly and completely, with a desperate depth of feeling that felt like sickness. Everything he was and everything he had come for, it seemed, was secondary to her.

  She turned a little, then, and spied him. Her eyes (they were gray, he saw) widened the tiniest bit. He thought that the color in her cheeks deep­ened a little. Her lips—lips that had touched his as they stood on a dark road, he thought with wonder—parted a little. Then the man standing next to Thorin (also tall, also skinny, with a mustache and long white hair ly­ing on the dark shoulders of his coat) said something, and she turned back to him. A moment later the group around Thorin was laughing, Susan in­cluded. The man with the white hair didn't join them, but smiled thinly.

  Roland, hoping his face did not give away the fact that his heart was pounding like a hammer, was led directly to this group, which stood close to the punchbowls. Distantly, he could feel Rimer's bony confederation of fingers clamped to his arm above the elbow. More clearly he could smell mingled perfumes, the oil from the lamps on the walls, the aroma of the ocean. And thought, for no reason at all, Oh, I am dying. I am dying.

  Take hold of yourself, Roland of Gilead. Stop this foolishness, for your father's sake. Take hold!

  He tried ... to some degree succeeded. . . and knew he would be lost the next time she looked at him. It was her eyes. The other night, in the dark, he hadn't been able to see those fog-colored eyes. I didn't know how lucky I was, he thought wryly.

  "Mayor Thorin?" Rimer asked. "May I present our guests from the Inner Baronies?"

  Thorin turned away from the man with the long white hair and the woman standing next to him, his face brightening. He was shorter than his Chancellor but just as thin, and his build was peculiar: a short and narrow-shouldered upper body over impossibly long and skinny legs, He looked, Roland thought, like the sort of bird you should glimpse in a marsh at dawn, bobbing for its breakfast.

  "Aye, you may!" he cried in a strong, high voice. "Indeed you may, we've been waiting with impatience, great impatience, for this moment! Well met we are, very well met! Welcome, sirs! May your evening in this house of which I am the fleeting proprietor be happy, and may your days be long upon the earth!"

  Roland took the bony outstretched hand, heard the knuckles crack be­neath his grip, looked for an expression of discomfort on the Mayor's face, and was relieved to see none. He bowed low over his outstretched leg.

  "William Dearborn, Mayor Thorin, at your service. Thank you for your welcome, and may your own days be long upon the earth."

  "Arthur Heath" made his manners next, then "Richard Stockworth." Thorin's smile widened at each deep bow. Rimer did his best to beam, but looked unused to it. The man with the long white hair took a glass of punch, passed it to his female companion, and continued to smile thinly. Roland was aware that everyone in the room—the guests numbered per­haps fifty in all—was looking at them, but what he felt most upon his skin, beating like a soft wing, was her regard. He could see the blue silk of her dress from the side of one eye, but did not dare look at her more directly.