Читать книгу Red Sister онлайн | страница 61

They both looked at Nona, waiting.

Clera raised her eyebrows, inviting Nona to speak. When they could rise no further, she herself spoke. ‘On the first day you tell why your parents didn’t want you any more. It’s supposed to stop it hurting. Sharing does that. Later you hear everyone else’s stories and you know you’re not the only one. If you’d ever been to prison you’d know that’s the first thing people do there – they tell what they did.’

Nona didn’t like to say that she had been to prison and that she hadn’t needed to tell because the guards had shouted it out as they led her to her cell. Murderer. It was on her lips to ask what a merchant’s daughter knew about such places – but as she opened her mouth to speak she remembered the cruel things Arabella had said about Clera’s father. He put himself in prison. And instead she began to answer the question that she had been trying to avoid. Nona’s story should have begun, ‘A juggler once came to my village. He was my first friend.’ She didn’t start there though. She started with a question of her own.

‘Did you ever have a dream that they were coming for you, in the night?’ she said, staring at her feet and the black water far below them.

‘Who?’ asked Clera.

‘Yes.’ Ruli lifted her head, shedding long pale hair to either side to reveal her long pale face.

‘They?’ Jula frowned.

‘They. Them. Bad people who want to hurt you,’ Nona said, and she told the girls a story. And though at first her words stumbled and she spoke as a peasant girl from the wild Grey lands of the west, out where the emperor’s name is rarely spoken and his enemies are closer than his palaces, she found her tongue and painted in the girls’ minds a picture that took hold of them all and wrapped them in a life they had never tasted or imagined.

‘I dreamed I was asleep in my mother’s house in the village where I had always lived. We weren’t like them, Mother and me. The villages along the Blue River are like clans, each one a family, one blood, the same looks, held by the same thinking. My father brought us there, me in my mother’s belly, but he left and we didn’t.