Everything's Eventual

   A sixth sister appeared, pushing rudely in between Mary and Tamra. This one perhaps was only one-and-twenty, with flushed cheeks, smooth skin, and dark eyes. Her white habit billowed like a dream. The red rose over her breast stood out like a curse.

   "Go! Leave him!"

   "Oooo, my dear!" cried Sister Louise in a voice both laughing and angry. "Here's Jenna, the baby, and has she fallen in love with him?"

   "She has!" Tamra said, laughing. "Baby's heart is his for the purchase!"

   "Oh, so it is!" agreed Sister Coquina.

   Mary turned to the newcomer, lips pursed into a tight line. "Ye have no business here, saucy girl."

   "I do if I say I do," Sister Jenna replied. She seemed more in charge of herself now. A curl of black hair had escaped her wimple and lay across her forehead in a comma. "Now go. He's not up to your jokes and laughter."

   "Order us not," Sister Mary said, "for we never joke. So you know, Sister Jenna."

   The girl's face softened a little, and Roland saw she was afraid. It made him afraid for her. For himself, as well. "Go," she repeated. "'Tis not the time. Are there not others to tend?"

   Sister Mary seemed to consider. The others watched her. At last she nodded, and smiled down at Roland. Again her face seemed to shimmer, like something seen through a heat-haze. What he saw (or thought he saw) beneath was horrible and watchful. "Bide well, pretty man," she said to Roland. "Bide with us a bit, and we'll heal ye."

   What choice have I? Roland thought.

   The others laughed, birdlike titters which rose into the dimness like ribbons. Sister Michela actually blew him a kiss.

   "Come, ladies!" Sister Mary cried. "We'll leave Jenna with him a bit in memory of her mother, whom we loved well!" And with that, she led the others away, five white birds flying off down the center aisle, their skirts nodding this way and that.

   "Thank you," Roland said, looking up at the owner of the cool hand . . . for he knew it was she who had soothed him.

   She took up his fingers as if to prove this, and caressed them. "They mean ye no harm," she said . . . yet Roland saw she believed not a word of it, nor did he. He was in trouble here, very bad trouble.

   "What is this place?"

   "Our place," she said simply. "The home of the Little Sisters of Eluria. Our convent, if'ee like."

   "This is no convent," Roland said, looking past her at the empty beds. "It's an infirmary. Isn't it?"

   "A hospital," she said, still stroking his fingers. "We serve the doctors . . . and they serve us." He was fascinated by the black curl lying on the cream of her brow—would have stroked it, if he had dared reach up. Just to tell its texture. He found it beautiful because it was the only dark thing in all this white. The white had lost its charm for him. "We are hospitalers . . . or were, before the world moved on."

   "Are you for the Jesus Man?"

   She looked surprised for a moment, almost shocked, and then laughed merrily. "No, not us!"

   "If you are hospitalers . . . nurses . . . where are the doctors?"

   She looked at him, biting at her lip, as if trying to decide something. Roland found her doubt utterly charming, and he realized that, sick or not, he was looking at a woman as a woman for the first time since Susan Delgado had died, and that had been long ago. The whole world had changed since then, and not for the better.

   "Would you really know?"

   "Yes, of course," he said, a little surprised. A little disquieted, too. He kept waiting for her face to shimmer and change, as the faces of the others had done. It didn't. There was none of that unpleasant dead-earth smell about her, either.

   Wait, he cautioned himself. Believe nothing here, least of all your senses. Not yet.

   "I suppose you must," she said with a sigh. It tinkled the bells at her forehead, which were darker in color than those the others wore—not black like her hair but charry, somehow, as if they had been hung in the smoke of a campfire. Their sound, however, was brightest silver. "Promise me you'll not scream and wake the pube in yonder bed."

"Pube?"

"The boy. Do ye promise?"

   "Aye," he said, falling into the half-forgotten patois of the Outer Arc without even being aware of it. Susan's dialect. "It's been long since I screamed, pretty."

   She colored more definitely at that, roses more natural and lively than the one on her breast mounting in her cheeks.

   "Don't call pretty what ye can't properly see," she said.

   "Then push back the wimple you wear."

   Her face he could see perfectly well, but he badly wanted to see her hair—hungered for it, almost. A full flood of black in all this dreaming white. Of course it might be cropped, those of her order might wear it that way, but he somehow didn't think so.

   "No, 'tis not allowed."

   "By whom?"

   "Big Sister."

   "She who calls herself Mary?"

   "Aye, her." She started away, then paused and looked back over her shoulder. In another girl her age, one as pretty as this, that look back would have been flirtatious. This girl's was only grave.