Anna turned her back to Julia and lifted two fingers to seal her lips. The healer nodded. Blessing, still sitting cross-legged, pulled her shift up to her hips to show the blood streaking her thighs.
Berda nodded. “A drink calms the belly,” she said in her odd voice. Her broad hands smoothed the shift back over the girl’s legs. She touched the girl’s forehead, throat, and her collarbone on each side.
“Some sickness in the food,” she said. “Have you piss this morning?”
Blessing shook her head.
“Come, small queen.”
They went to the corner, where the chamber pot was tucked away behind a bench, and Blessing did her business. Julia came over to look, but after Blessing rose, Berda squatted quickly with her heavy felt skirt concealing this complicated maneuver, since the steppe women, Anna had seen, wore both skirts and trousers. She then peed in her turn, and rose with a grimace.
“Moon turns,” she said. “I am bleeding. Must move my bed to upstairs.”
It was a habit of the Kerayit healer to sleep downstairs with the men most of the month, and upstairs with the women during her bleeding, although it seemed to Anna that it had not been more than two weeks since her last sojourn upstairs. Never mind it. They would burn that bridge after they had crossed it. She looked at Berda, and the healer nodded, covered the pan, and offered it to Julia to dispose of, as was her duty.
“I fetch drink of herbs for the small queen. She rest this day.”
Rest she did. Berda found clean rags for her, to catch the blood, and pretended they were her own. It was not so difficult, once the ruse was begun; Julia, like the other Aostans, found the healer so peculiar that she didn’t like to get close to her.
Afterward, they went about their usual routine. Water must be brought up for washing, and the buckets taken downstairs and emptied and rinsed out. The morning chores broke up the monotony of the day, so Anna eked out each least errand, dawdling where she could. She didn’t even mind it when, after the upstairs was tidied and washed, she was sent down to empty the dungeon bucket. The old man didn’t scare her, although the stink was bad. After the first few weeks, the soldiers simply stopped going down with her because they hated the pit, and she was free to make quick conversation with the Eagle, mostly a detailed account from her of yesterday’s doings, and perhaps a few oblique sentences passed back and forth between him and Lady Elene.
This morning, though, the soldiers loitered nervously by the outer door, as if keeping an eye out for someone they expected to come along at any moment. Anna had a clean bucket in one hand as she reached the head of the steps that cut down into the gloom. The sergeant on duty glanced back into the chamber and saw her.