The Wind Through The Keyhole Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 . . .”

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.