Wizard and glass - Stephen King [171]
It was blessedly cool in the willows. Susan tied Felicia (whom she had ridden out bareback) to a branch, then walked slowly across the little clearing which lay at the heart of the grove. Here the stream passed, and here she sat on the springy moss which carpeted the clearing. Of course she had come here; it was where she had brought all her secret griefs and joys since she had discovered the clearing at the age of eight or nine. It was here she had come, time and time again, in the nearly endless days after her father’s death, when it had seemed to her that the very world—her version of it, at least—had ended with Pat Delgado. It was only this clearing that had heard the full and painful measure of her grief; to the stream she had spoken it, and the stream had carried it away.
Now a fresh spate of tears took her. She put her head on her knees and sobbed—loud, unladylike sounds like the caw of squabbling crows. In that moment she thought she would have given anything—everything—to have her father back for one minute, to ask him if she must go on with this.
She wept above the brook, and when she heard the sound of a snapping branch, she started and looked back over her shoulder in terror and chagrin. This was her secret place and she didn’t want to be found here, especially not when she was bawling like a kiddie who has fallen and bumped her head. Another branch snapped. Someone was here, all right, invading her secret place at the worst possible time.
“Go away!” she screamed in a tear-clotted voice she barely recognized. “Go away, whoever ye are, be decent and leave me alone!”
But the figure—she could now see it—kept coming. When she saw who it was, she at first thought that Will Dearborn (Roland, she thought, his real name is Roland) must be a figment of her overstrained imagination. She wasn’t entirely sure he was real until he knelt and put his arms around her. Then she hugged him with panicky tightness. “How did you know I was—”
“Saw you riding across the Drop. I was at a place where I go to think sometimes, and I saw you. I wouldn’t have followed, except I saw that you were riding bareback. I thought something might be wrong.”
“Everything’s wrong.”
Deliberately, with his eyes wide open and serious, he began kissing her cheeks. He had done it several times on both sides of her face before she realized he was kissing her tears away. Then he took her by the shoulders and held her back from him so he could look into her eyes.
“Say it again and I will, Susan. I don’t know if that’s a promise or a warning or both at the same time, but . . . say it again and I will.”
There was no need to ask him what he meant. She seemed to feel the ground move beneath her, and later she would think that for the first and only time in her life she had actually felt ka, a wind that came not from the sky but from the earth. It has come to me, after all, she thought. My ka, for good or ill.
“Roland!”
“Yes, Susan.”
She dropped her hand below his belt-buckle and grasped what was there, her eyes never leaving his.
“If you love me, then love me.”
“Aye, lady. I will.”
He unbuttoned his shirt, made in a part of Mid-World she would never see, and took her in his arms.
7
Ka:
They helped each other with their clothes; they lay naked in each other’s arms on summer moss as soft as the finest goosedown. They lay with their foreheads touching, as in her daydream, and when he found his way into her, she felt pain melt into sweetness like some wild and exotic herb that may only be tasted once in each lifetime. She held that taste as long as she could, until at last the sweetness overcame it and she gave in to that, moaning deep in her throat and rubbing her forearms against the sides of his neck. They made love in the willow grove, questions of honor put aside, promises broken