King's Blood Read Free Page B

obedience.”
    â€œThat is my weakest virtue,” Edith said.
    Sister Cecilia looked as if she would have laughed, but even she did not dare do that here. “It’s a virtue to know oneself so well,” she said. She held out her hand. “Come.”
    Edith decided to be obedient. She was still angry, but it was hard to keep a grip on her temper with the lady smiling at her.
    She had one question left to ask, even while she let herself be led out of the dormitory. “Who are you really? Besides whatever you told me?”
    â€œIn time you’ll learn,” Sister Cecilia said. And that was all she would say. She was like the folk of air: mysterious and rather wicked.
    Â 
It was that wickedness which kept Edith from running away: that and the folk of air who followed her everywhere, even to chapel. It was not an unfamiliar life, in the end, with its daily round of offices and its constant duties and the long hours in the schoolroom learning to read Latin and write in a fair hand.
    What was least familiar—and least bearable—was that the gates never opened for the novices. The walls were always there, the gates shut, the bonds of obedience compelling them all to live imprisoned.
    Most of them did not seem to mind. They were quiet, milk-faced girls with a clear calling to this life, or else they knew no better. The few who did mind had learned to keep quiet about it. Edith could see it in their eyes, how they were trapped. But none of them had found a way to escape.
    A few could see the folk of air. Some of the nuns could, too; and there was Sister Cecilia, who Edith was convinced did not belong there at all. She walked and talked like the others, prayed as they did, and her Latin was beautifully learned—and yet she made Edith think of a falcon shut in with a flock of ringdoves.
    This was a Saxon abbey. Edith was half Saxon. In Scotland it was nothing terribly remarkable; people cared more that her ancestors had been kings.
    In England it mattered a great deal. England meant Anglaland—Angle-land, land of the Angles and the Saxons. But years ago, before Edith was born, the Saxons had been defeated in a great battle. Foreigners ruled England now, invaders from Normandy, and the king was a Norman.
    Edith had known all that before she left Scotland. She had known how much hate there was, and how much the Saxons yearned to be kings again. What she had not known was that the Normans let their worst enemies live together, shut in an abbey, too firmly locked in duty and sanctity to mount a rebellion.
    There was Abbess Christina. There was Sister Gunnhild, whose father had been the last Saxon king; he had died in the battle at Santlache, and lost the kingdom for all of them. There had been another Edith, Edith the queen, who was the last king’s sister; but she lay in a tomb in the cloister.
    Edith was not entirely sure that her namesake was dead. A few days after she came to the abbey, when she was ready to fling herself over the walls and into the river, Sister Cecilia sent her on an errand to the infirmary. She was to fetch a jar of salve for Aldith’s eyes.
    Aldith was one of the younger novices, even younger than Edith, and she could almost see through the world. Maybe, once her eyes were better, she would be able to do it.
    Edith had not been to the infirmary before, but she knew where it was. She had been studying as the lady advised her, and watching and listening. She found her way out of the schoolroom and through the whispering stillness of the chapel.
    Beyond the chapel were the cloister and the tomb. There were others buried there, holy nuns sleeping under unmarked stones. Only the queen had the flat grey bulk of a tomb.
    There was no effigy on it. That was somewhere else, the folk of air sang in Edith’s ear. Mortals thought her body lay in another place far away from here.
    It was here. This was not Edith’s blood kin, not one of Alfred’s line, but she had