“That’s right, brat,” Cort said. “You’ll consider what you did wrong, and sharpen your reflections with hunger. No supper. No breakfast.”
“Look!” Roland cried. He pointed up.
The hawk had climbed above the soaring dove. It glided for a moment, its stubby wings outstretched and without movement on the still, white spring air. Then it folded its wings and dropped like a stone. The two bodies came together, and for a moment Roland fancied he could see blood in the air. The hawk gave a brief scream of triumph. The dove fluttered, twisting, to the ground, and Roland ran toward the kill, leaving Cort and the chastened Cuthbert behind him.
The hawk had landed beside its prey and was complacently tearing into its plump white breast. A few feathers seesawed slowly downward.
“David!” the boy yelled, and tossed the hawk a piece of rabbit flesh from his poke. The hawk caught it on the fly, ingested it with an upward shaking of its back and throat, and Roland attempted to re-leash the bird.
The hawk whirled, almost absentmindedly, and ripped skin from Roland’s arm in a long, dangling gash. Then it went back to its meal.
With a grunt, Roland looped the leash again, this time catching David’s diving, slashing beak on the leather gauntlet he wore. He gave the hawk another piece of meat, then hooded it. Docilely, David climbed onto his wrist.
He stood up proudly, the hawk on his arm.
“What’s this, can ya tell me?” Cort asked, pointing to the dripping slash on Roland’s forearm. The boy stationed himself to receive the blow, locking his throat against any possible cry, but no blow fell.
“He struck me,” Roland said.
“You pissed him off,” Cort said. “The hawk does not fear you, boy, and the hawk never will. The hawk is God’s gunslinger.”
Roland merely looked at Cort. He was not an imaginative boy, and if Cort had intended to imply a moral, it was lost on him; he went so far as to believe that it might have been one of the few foolish statements he had ever heard Cort make.
Cuthbert came up behind them and stuck his tongue out at Cort, safely on his blind side. Roland did not smile, but nodded to him.
“Go in now,” Cort said, taking the hawk. He turned and pointed at Cuthbert. “But remember your reflection, maggot. And your fast. Tonight and tomorrow morning.”
“Yes,” Cuthbert said, stiltedly formal now. “Thank you for this instructive day.”
“You learn,” Cort said, “but your tongue has a bad habit of lolling from your stupid mouth when your instructor’s back is turned. Mayhap the day will come when it and you will learn their respective places.” He struck Cuthbert again, this time solidly between the eyes and hard enough so that Roland heard a dull thud—the sound a mallet makes when a scullion taps a keg of beer. Cuthbert fell backward onto the lawn, his eyes cloudy and dazed at first. Then they cleared and he stared burningly up at Cort, his usual easy grin nowhere to be seen, his hatred unveiled, a pinprick as bright as the dove’s blood in the center of each eye. He nodded and parted his lips in a scarifying smile that Roland had never seen.
“Then there’s hope for you,” Cort said. “When you think you can, you come for me, maggot.”
“How did you know?” Cuthbert said between his teeth.
Cort turned toward Roland so swiftly that Roland almost fell back a step—and then both of them would have been on the grass, decorating the new green with their blood. “I saw it reflected in this maggot’s eyes,” he said. “Remember it, Cuthbert Allgood. Last lesson for today.”
Cuthbert nodded again, the same frightening smile on his face. “I grieve,” he said. “I have forgotten the face—”
“Cut that shit,” Cort said, losing interest. He turned to Roland. “Go on, now. The both of you. If I have to look at your stupid maggot faces any longer I’ll puke my guts and lose a good dinner.”
“Come on,” Roland said.
Cuthbert shook his head to clear it and got to his feet. Cort was already walking down the hill in his squat, bowlegged stride, looking powerful and somehow prehistoric. The shaved and grizzled spot at the top of his head glimmered.
“I’ll kill the son of a bitch,” Cuthbert said, still smiling. A large goose egg, purple and knotted, was rising mystically on his forehead.
“Not you or me,” Roland said, suddenly bursting into a grin. “You can have supper in the west kitchen with me. Cook will give us some.”
“He’ll tell Cort.”
“He’s no friend of Cort’s,” Roland said, and then shrugged. “And what if he did?”
Cuthbert grinned back. “Sure. Right. I always wanted to know how the world looked when your head was on backwards and upside down.”
They started back together over the green lawns, casting shadows in the fine white springlight.
IX
