Wizard and glass - By Stephen King Page 0,153

Oh, it was too good! Too wonderful!

She leaned closer still, the deep sockets of her eyes filling with pink fire. Ermot, sensing that she remained immune to his blandishments, crawled disconsolately away across the floor, in search of bugs. Musty pranced away from him, spitting feline curses, his six-legged shadow huge and misshapen on the firestruck wall.

11

Roland sensed the moment rushing at them. Somehow he managed to step away from her, and she stepped back from him, her eyes wide and her cheeks flushed—he could see that flush even in the light of the newly risen moon. His balls were throbbing. His groin felt full of liquid lead.

She half-turned away from him, and Roland saw that her sombrero had gone askew on her back. He reached out one trembling hand and straightened it. She clasped his fingers in a brief but strong grip, then bent to pick up her riding gloves, which she had stripped off in her need to touch him skin to skin. When she stood again, the wash of blood abruptly left her face, and she reeled. But for his hands on her shoulders, steadying her, she might have fallen. She turned toward him, eyes rueful.

“What are we to do? Oh, Will, what are we to do?”

“The best we can,” he said. “As we both always have. As our fathers taught us.”

“This is mad.”

Roland, who had never felt anything so sane in his life—even the deep ache in his groin felt sane and right—said nothing.

“Do ye know how dangerous ’tis?” she asked, and went on before he could reply. “Aye, ye do. I can see ye do. If we were seen together at all, ’twould be serious. To be seen as we just were—”

She shivered. He reached for her and she stepped back. “Best ye don’t, Will. If ye do, won’t be nothing done between us but spooning. Unless that was your intention?”

“You know it wasn’t.”

She nodded. “Have ye set your friends to watch?”

“Aye,” he said, and then his face opened in that unexpected smile she loved so well. “But not where they can watch us.”

“Thank the gods for that,” she said, and laughed rather distractedly. Then she stepped closer to him, so close that he was hard put not to take her in his arms again. She looked curiously up into his face. “Who are you, really, Will?”

“Almost who I say I am. That’s the joke of this, Susan. My friends and I weren’t sent here because we were drunk and helling, but we weren’t sent here to uncover any fell plot or secret conspiracy, either. We were just boys to be put out of the way in a time of danger. All that’s happened since—” He shook his head to show how helpless he felt, and Susan thought again of her father saying ka was like a wind—when it came it might take your chickens, your house, your barn. Even your life.

“And is Will Dearborn your real name?”

He shrugged. “One name’s as good as another, I wot, if the heart that answers to it is true. Susan, you were at Mayor’s House today, for my friend Richard saw you ride up—”

“Aye, fittings,” she said. “For I am to be this year’s Reaping Girl—it’s Hart’s choice, nothing I ever would have had on my own, mark I say it. A lot of foolishness, and hard on Olive as well, I warrant.”

“You will make the most beautiful Reap-Girl that ever was,” he said, and the clear sincerity in his voice made her tingle with pleasure; her cheeks grew warm again. There were five changes of costume for the Reaping Girl between the noon feast and the bonfire at dusk, each more elaborate than the last (in Gilead there would have been nine; in that way, Susan didn’t know how lucky she was), and she would have worn all five happily for Will, had he been the Reaping Lad. (This year’s Lad was Jamie McCann, a pallid and whey-faced stand-in for Hart Thorin, who was approximately forty years too old and gray for the job.) Even more happily would she have worn the sixth—a silvery shift with wisp-thin straps and a hem that stopped high on her thighs. This was a costume no one but Maria, her maid, Conchetta, her seamstress, and Hart Thorin would ever see. It was the one she would be wearing when she went to the old man’s couch as his gilly, after the feast was over.

“When you were up there, did you see