Wizard and glass - By Stephen King Page 0,315

there. He was in Cressia, with Farson.”

“The ball,” Eddie said. “Your father had it by then?”

“No-o,” Roland said. He looked down at his hands, and Eddie observed a faint flush rising into his cheeks. “I didn’t give it to him at first. I found it . . . hard to give up.”

“I bet,” Susannah said. “You and everyone else who ever looked into the goddam thing.”

“On the third afternoon, before we were to be banqueted to celebrate our safe return—”

“I bet you were really in a mood to party, too,” Eddie said.

Roland smiled without humor, still studying his hands. “At around four o’ the clock, Cuthbert and Alain came to my rooms. We were a trio for an artist to paint, I wot—windburned, hollow-eyed, hands covered with healing cuts and scrapes from our climb up the side of the canyon, scrawny as scarecrows. Even Alain, who tended toward stoutness, all but disappeared when he turned sideways. They confronted me, I suppose you’d say. They’d kept the secret of the ball to that point—out of respect for me and for the loss I’d suffered, they told me, and I believed them—but they would keep it no longer than that night’s meal. If I wouldn’t give it up voluntarily, it would be a question for our fathers to decide. They were horribly embarrassed, especially Cuthbert, but they were determined.

“I told them I’d give it over to my own father before the banquet—before my mother arrived by coach from Debaria, even. They should come early and see that I kept my promise. Cuthbert started to hem and haw and say that wouldn’t be necessary, but of course it was necessary—”

“Yeah,” Eddie said. He had the look of a man who understood this part of the story perfectly. “You can go into the crapper on your own, but it’s a lot easier to actually flush all the bad shit down the toilet if you have somebody with you.”

“Alain, at least, knew it would be better for me—easier—if I didn’t have to hand the ball over alone. He hushed Cuthbert up and said they’d be there. And they were. And I gave it over, little as I wanted to. My father went as pale as paper when he looked into the bag and saw what was there, then excused himself and took it away. When he came back, he picked up his glass of wine and went on talking to us of our adventures in Mejis as if nothing had happened.”

“But between the time your friends talked to you about it and the time you gave it up, you looked into it,” Jake said. “Went into it. Travelled in it. What did it show you that time?”

“First the Tower again,” Roland said, “and the beginning of the way there. I saw the fall of Gilead, and the triumph of the Good Man. We’d put those things back a mere twenty months or so by destroying the tankers and the oilpatch. I could do nothing about that, but it showed me something I could do. There was a certain knife. The blade had been treated with an especially potent poison, something from a distant Mid-World Kingdom called Garlan. Stuff so strong even the tiniest cut would cause almost instant death. A wandering singer—in truth, John Farson’s eldest nephew—had brought this knife to court. The man he gave it to was the castle’s chief of domestic staff. This man was to pass the knife on to the actual assassin. My father was not meant to see the sun come up on the morning after the banquet.” He smiled at them grimly. “Because of what I saw in the Wizard’s Glass, the knife never reached the hand that would have used it, and there was a new chief of domestics by the end of that week. These are pretty tales I tell you, are they not? Aye, very pretty, indeed.”

“Did you see the person the knife was meant for?” Susannah asked. “The actual killer?”

“Yes.”

“Anything else? Did you see anything else?” Jake asked. The plan to murder Roland’s father didn’t seem to hold much interest for him.

“Yes.” Roland looked puzzled. “Shoes. Just for a minute. Shoes tumbling through the air. At first I thought they were autumn leaves. And when I saw what they really were, they were gone and I was lying on my bed with the ball hugged in my arms . . . pretty much the way I carried it back from Mejis. My father .