“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 colour 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 coloured 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 who?”

“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. “Remember your promise.”

“Aye, no screams.”

She went to the bearded man, skirt swinging. In the dimness, she cast only a blur of shadow on the empty beds she passed. When she reached the man (this one was unconscious, Roland thought, not just sleeping), she looked back at Roland once more. He nodded.