Roland was awake and sitting by the fire. Jake was with him. Between them, Oy was asleep with one paw over his snout. Susannah joined them. The fire had burned down a little, but this close it threw a comforting heat on her face and arms. She took a board, thought about snapping it in two, decided it might wake Eddie, and tossed it onto the fire as it was. Sparks gushed up the chimney, swirling as the draft caught them.

She could have spared the consideration, because while the sparks were still swirling, a hand caressed the back of her neck just below the hairline. She didn’t have to look; she would have known that touch anywhere. Without turning, she took the hand, brought it to her mouth, and kissed the cup of the palm. The white palm. Even after all this time together and all the lovemaking, she could sometimes hardly believe that. Yet there it was.

At least I won’t have to bring him home to meet my parents, she thought.

“Can’t sleep, sugar?”

“A little. Not much. I had funny dreams.”

“The wind brings them,” Roland said. “Anyone in Gilead would tell you the same. But I love the sound of the wind. I always have. It soothes my heart and makes me think of old times.”

He looked away, as if embarrassed to have said so much.

“None of us can sleep,” Jake said. “So tell us a story.”

Roland looked into the fire for a while, then at Jake. The gunslinger was once more smiling, but his eyes were distant. A knot popped in the fireplace. Outside the stone walls, the wind screamed as if furious at its inability to get in. Eddie put an arm around Susannah’s waist and she laid her head on his shoulder.

“What story would you hear, Jake, son of Elmer?”

“Any.” He paused. “About the old days.”

Roland looked at Eddie and Susannah. “And you? Would you hear?”

“Yes, please,” Susannah said.

Eddie nodded. “Yeah. If you want to, that is.”

Roland considered. “Mayhap I’ll tell you two, since it’s long until dawn and we can sleep tomorrow away, if we like. These tales nest inside each other. Yet the wind blows through both, which is a good thing. There’s nothing like stories on a windy night when folks have found a warm place in a cold world.”

He took a broken piece of wood paneling, poked the glowing embers with it, then fed it to the flames. “One I know is a true story, for I lived it along with my old ka-mate, Jamie DeCurry. The other, ‘The Wind Through the Keyhole,’ is one my mother read to me when I was still sma’. Old stories can be useful, you know, and I should have thought of this one as soon as I saw Oy scenting the air as he did, but that was long ago.” He sighed. “Gone days.”

In the dark beyond the firelight, the wind rose to a howl. Roland waited for it to die a little, then began. Eddie, Susannah, and Jake listened, rapt, all through that long and contentious night. Lud, the Tick-Tock Man, Blaine the Mono, the Green Palace—all were forgotten. Even the Dark Tower itself was forgotten for a bit. There was only Roland’s voice, rising and falling.

Rising and falling like the wind.

“Not long after the death of my mother, which as you know came by my own hand . . .”

THE SKIN-MAN

(Part 1)

Not long after the death of my mother, which as you know came by my own hand, my father—Steven, son of Henry the Tall—summoned me to his study in the north wing of the palace. It was a small, cold room. I remember the wind whining around the slit windows. I remember the high, frowning shelves of books—worth a fortune, they were, but never read. Not by him, anyway. And I remember the black collar of mourning he wore. It was the same as my own. Every man in Gilead wore the same collar, or a band around his shirtsleeve. The women wore black nets on their hair. This would go on until Gabrielle Deschain was six months in her tomb.

I saluted him, fist to forehead. He didn’t look up from the papers on his desk, but I knew he saw it. My father saw everything, and very well. I waited. He signed his name several times while the wind whistled and the rooks cawed in the courtyard. The fireplace was a dead socket. He rarely called for it to be lit, even on the coldest days.

At last he looked up.

“How is Cort, Roland? How goes it with your teacher that was? You must know, because I’ve been given to understand that you spend most of your time in his hut, feeding him and such.”

“He has days when he knows me,” I said. “Many days he doesn’t. He still sees a little from one eye. The other . . .” I didn’t need to finish. The other was gone. My hawk, David, had taken it from him in my test of manhood. Cort, in turn, had taken David’s life, but that was to be his last kill.

“I know what happened to his other peep. Do you truly feed him?”

“Aye, Father, I do.”

“Do you clean him when he messes?”

I stood there before his desk like a chastened schoolboy called before the master, and that is how I felt. Only how many chastened schoolboys have killed their own mothers?

“Answer me, Roland. I am your dinh as well as your father and I’d have you answer.”

“Sometimes.” Which was not really a lie. Sometimes I changed his dirty clouts three and four times a day, sometimes, on the good days, only once or not at all. He could get to the jakes if I helped him. And if he remembered he had to go.

“Does he not have the white ammies who come in?”

“I sent them away,” I said.

He looked at me with real curiosity. I searched for contempt in his face—part of me wanted to see it—but there was none that I could tell. “Did I raise you to the gun so you could become an ammie and nurse a broken old man?”

I felt my anger flash at that. Cort had raised a moit of boys to the tradition of the Eld and the way of the gun. Those who were unworthy he had bested in combat and sent west with no weapons other than what remained of their wits. There, in Cressia and places even deeper in those anarchic kingdoms, many of those broken boys had joined with Farson, the Good Man. Who would in time overthrow everything my father’s line had stood for. Farson had armed them, sure. He had guns, and he had plans.

“Would you throw him on the dungheap, Father? Is that to be his reward for all his years of service? Who next, then? Vannay?”

“Never in this life, as you know. But done is done, Roland, as thee also knows. And thee doesn’t nurse him out of love. Thee knows that, too.”