Читать книгу Red Sister онлайн | страница 10

Despite Partnis’s haste, he beat the abbess to the girl by only a fraction. ‘Where’s the other one?’ He looked around as if the guardsman might be hiding another prisoner behind him.

‘Other what?’ John Fallon’s gaze flickered past Partnis to the advancing nun, her habit swirling as she marched.

‘Girl! There were two. I gave orders to— I sent a request that they be held back.’

‘Over with the dropped.’ Fallon tilted his head towards a mound beside the main gates, several feet high. Stones pinned a stained, grey sheet across the heap. The graveman’s cart came into view as they watched.

‘Damnation!’ The word burst from Partnis loud enough to turn heads all across the yard. He raised both hands, fingers spread, then trembling with effort, lowered them to his sides. ‘I wanted them both.’

‘Have to argue with the graveman over the big one,’ Fallon observed. ‘This’un.’ He reached for the girl at his side. ‘You’ll have to argue with me over. Then those two.’ He nodded at Dava and Argus. ‘Then the warden.’

‘There’ll be no arguing.’ The abbess stepped between Fallon and Partnis, dwarfed by both, her crozier reaching up to break their eye contact. ‘I shall be taking the child.’

‘No you won’t!’ Partnis looked down at her, brow furrowed. ‘All due respect to the Ancestor and all that, but she’s mine, bought and paid for.’ He glanced back at the gates where Herber had now halted his cart beside the covered mound. ‘Besides … how do you know she’s the one you want?’

The abbess snorted and favoured Partnis with a motherly smile. ‘Of course she is. You can tell by looking at her, Partnis Reeve. This child has the fire in her eyes.’ She frowned. ‘I saw the other. Scared. Lost. She should never have been here.’

‘Saida’s back in the cells …’ the girl said. ‘They told me I would go first.’

Argus peered at the child. A small thing in shapeless linen – not street rags, covered in rusty stains, but a serf’s wear none the less. She might be nine. Argus had lost the knack for telling. His older two were long grown, and little Sali would always be five. This girl was a fierce creature, a scowl on her thin, dirty face. Eyes black below a short shock of ebony hair.