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, who we loved well!” And with that, she led the others away, five white birds flying off down the centre 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 hospitallers… 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 hospitallers… 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.