Читать книгу Red Sister онлайн | страница 59

Jula nodded, looking grim. She picked up her fork and got it halfway to her mouth before remembering the bells. ‘Bitel is the third bell. The steel bell.’ She returned the fork to her plate, perhaps still thinking of poisons. ‘That’s almost always bad news, and you won’t confuse it for the others – it’s sharp and very loud. The abbess will ring Bitel if there’s a fire, or an intruder, or something like that. Hope you never hear it. But if you do and if nobody tells you different, go to the abbess’s front door and wait.’

‘I heard …’ The girl across the table spoke up, loud enough for everyone to hear. ‘I heard the abbess herself brought you up from Verity.’ The rest of the class had been focused on Arabella who had been telling them some story about the emperor’s court. Nona had only caught the odd word and had imagined it a fairy tale of the sort told about princesses around the hearth in her village … but then she had remembered Clera calling Arabella royalty and it struck her that the fairy story might actually be true.

‘I heard Abbess Glass brought you up the Seren Way in the middle of the night.’ The speaker was the one Clera had called Ghena and had said was the youngest in the class, a girl with a tightly curled cap of short, black hair. In the village Grey Stephen had a staff that had been his father’s and his father’s: where so many hands had polished the dark wood for so long it was the colour of Ghena’s skin. ‘I heard you’re a peasant. Where are you from? How did your people even pay the confirmation fee?’

‘I—’ Nona found she had the whole table’s attention. Even Arabella broke off her tale to stare.

‘You hear too much, Ghena.’ Clera cupped both hands behind her ears and laughed. ‘You were at the window all night looking to see “the Chosen One” arrive.’ She tilted her head just a fraction in Arabella’s direction. ‘Did you see the abbess going by with dust on her skirts and know she’d come up by Seren Way?’

Ghena scowled and looked away.

After lunch, and before Bray spoke for the sixth time that day to let them know they must hurry to class, there was time to wander or to sit. Arabella left the refectory with most of the class at her heels.