Читать книгу Red Sister онлайн | страница 76

By the time it was Arabella’s turn to shave Jula’s head she did so with a steady grip on the blade, her eyes red-rimmed and full of cold accusation aimed in Nona’s direction.

Nona opened her eyes with a start. Sleep had nearly taken her. She rolled her head to the left. Clera sat on the edge of the bed in her long white nightgown, the copper penny she so often played with in her hand. The other girls were settling into their beds. ‘We’re friends then?’ she asked without preamble, watching Nona’s eyes.

‘“Friend” can be a dangerous word,’ Nona said.

Clera laughed. ‘Friend? Really?’

‘It is if you mean it.’ Nona didn’t smile. She thought of Amondo and of Saida. ‘Friend’ was a bond. Much of what people did, how they acted, confused Nona. But ‘friend’ she understood. A friend you would die for. Or kill for.

‘Well I mean it.’ Clera let her own smile slip.

‘Then we are.’

It seemed enough for Clera. She rose from Nona’s bed and went to her own, flipping the penny once and humming some tune, low and sweet.

Nona let exhaustion close her eyes. The dormitories were heated by the same pipes that ran in the bathhouse and cells. She hadn’t imagined that commoners ever wholly escaped the cold, perhaps the emperor before his ever-blazing fires, but not girls like her, not like this. One of the high windows was even a quarter open to stop it being too muggy, as if heat were something that could be given to the wind rather than something precious to be hoarded.

In the village mothers cut their children’s hair to a fuzz whenever the weather turned. When the ice-wind surrendered to the Corridor wind and the cold grew less bitter the knives came out. They did it to reduce lice, fleas, and nits to a manageable level, but Nona had always felt it marked the start of something new: new growth, new possibilities. Her last thoughts before dreams stole her were that if a shaved head were the worst thing to have happened to Arabella Jotsis so far then she had lived a charmed life. Also, Nona thought, annoyingly the loss of that golden mane had done nothing to mar the girl’s beauty. If anything she looked somehow more perfect.