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They hit it off immediately -- young and rakish both, Eddie's hair only slightly less ridiculous, Ben's grin only slightly more roguish. They fall into an easy routine of trying to outdo each other with their stories, and after a while, even Roland can't suss out the fact from the fiction in Eddie's increasingly wild yarns.
He hasn't believed a word to leave Ben Finn's mouth yet.
At least he doesn't ask questions.
Roland still feels ill at ease despite the lambent afternoon sun, the kind of sun that triggers that little ache in the recesses of his heart, in the place where old Gilead still lives. It's better than Eddie's New York, Albion is, and there are worse places for a hidden highway to lead a man and his ka-tet to, but there are sores in the earth here, sores scabbed over but not healed, wounds that festered and birthed abominations.
Susannah had slapped Eddie's hands away and set to walking -- Roland could hardly call it crawling, not whilst observing the dignity and adroitness with which she pulled herself along. "This earth feels good," she sighed, content, her face turned up to the sun.
Maybe he was too cautious. But that was his lot.
A burst of raucous laughter from Eddie jars Roland back into the present. "You think that's bad? I once told a joke so bad it killed an entire monorail!"
Susannah catches the I-just-ate-a-whole-lemon face that Roland pulls, and chuckles.
"God knows that boy needs him a friend," she says reflectively. "We just ain't enough, you and me. Ain't nobody just enough for Eddie Dean."
Ben Finn leads them to town, an entirely different atmosphere from the pastoral plains that greeted them upon first stumbling into Albion. This is industrialisation at its finest and at its worst -- ambition and greed, dishonest labour and men behaving no better than slaves. Roland tugs his kerchief over his mouth and nose, the acrid air making tears prick at the corners of his eyes.
"You live here, sugar?" Susannah asks Ben disbelievingly, not even protesting when Eddie scoops her up before the dirt gives way to cobblestones.
"Yeah, I know what it looks like. It's not so bad, really. There are good people here, too, just like anywhere. Oh, and speaking of." He raises his hand to hail someone, a woman, clad in something that makes Roland think of newspapers and scrap fabric all glued together. "Hey! Page! Over here!"
Roland nods a silent greeting when she's introduced to them, then glances from her face to Susannah's, then from Eddie's to Ben's.
He doesn't know what Ben is to Page, but it's obvious what she is to him. Just like it had been for Eddie and Suze in the early days of their ka-tet, when the woman Eddie would come to love was just emerging.
"Adopting more strays, are you?" Page chides Ben, who flushes and shrugs. "Well, come on, you three. If Ben likes you, I probably won't, but I did make more soup than I intended..."
"We can't stay here, Eddie."
"Oh, you old bag o' bones. Yes, we can," and just like that, they were Albans, for a little while at least.