cheeks like shadows.
'Am I pretty? Am I? Tell me the truth, Roland of Gilead - no
flattery. For flattery's kind only a candle's length.'
'Pretty as a summer night.'
What she saw in his face seemed to please her more than his
words, because she smiled radiantly. She pulled the wimple up
again, tucking her hair back in with quick little finger-pokes. 'Am I
decent?'
'Decent as fair,' he said, then cautiously lifted an arm and pointed
at her brow. 'One curl's out ... just there.'
'Aye, always that one to devil me.' With a comical little grimace,
she tucked it back. Roland thought how much he would like to kiss
her rosy cheeks ... and perhaps her rosy mouth, for good measure.
'All's well,' he said.
'Jenna!' The cry was more impatient than ever. 'Meditations!'
`I'm coming just now!' she called, and gathered her voluminous
skirts to go. Yet she turned back once more, her face now very
grave and very serious. 'One more thing,' she said in a voice only a
step above a whisper. She snatched a quick look around. 'The gold
medallion ye wear - ye wear it because it's yours. Do'ee understand
... James?'
'Yes.' He turned his head a bit to look at the sleeping boy. 'This is
my brother.'
`If they ask, yes. To say different would be to get Jenna in serious
trouble.'
How serious he did not ask, and she was gone in any case, seeming
to flow along the aisle between all the empty beds, her skirt caught
up in one hand. The roses had fled from her face, leaving her
cheeks and brow ashy. He remembered the greedy look on the
faces of the others, how they had gathered around him in a
tightening knot ... and the way their faces had shimmered.
Six women, five old and one young.
Doctors that sang and then crawled away across the floor when
dismissed by jingling bells.
And an improbable hospital ward of perhaps a hundred beds, a
ward with a silk roof and silk walls ...
... and all the beds empty save three.
Roland didn't understand why Jenna had taken the dead boy's
medallion from his pants pocket and put it around his neck, but he
had an idea that if they found out she had done so, the Little Sisters
of Eluria might kill her.
Roland closed his eyes, and the soft singing of the doctor-insects
once again floated him off into sleep.
IV. A Bowl of Soup. The Boy
in the Next Bed. The Night-Nurses.
Roland dreamed that a very large bug (a doctor-bug, mayhap) was
flying around his head and banging repeatedly into his nose -
collisions which were annoying rather than painful. He swiped at
the bug repeatedly, and although his hands were eerily fast under
ordinary circumstances, he kept missing it. And each time he
