Ai, Lady! Surely she was safe from Hugh now.
The door to the novitiary opened and a double line of brown-robed novices, heads bowed humbly, emerged from the novitiary and walked in strict columns by paved paths, then dirt ones, out to the gardens. Liath jumped up to follow them. Certain of the noble lords and ladies lounged at their leisure on the withering autumn grass or admired the late flowers in the herb garden; unlike Liath, they ignored the novices—all, that is, except the wheat-haired girl Liath recognized as Lady Tallia.
As the column of novices passed Tallia, she knelt on ragged grass and bowed her head in prayer. Liath found the girl’s piety grating and excessive, but others praised her for it. Liath had been on the road for too long to find it admirable that Tallia ruined her gowns by using them to wash the Hearths of churches, scraping her pale fine hands raw in the process. That was all very well for a noblewoman who could replace such fine stuffs, but something else again for those who had little to spare. Tallia might fast at every opportunity and turn away fine meats and soft breads and rich savories, but at least she had such food to turn away. Liath had traveled the roads with Da for eight years. She had seen faces gaunt with starvation because the last harvest had run scant; she had seen children scrabbling in the dirt for precious grains of wheat and rye and oats.
Some among the novices did not ignore the nobles. Some looked up, curious—as she would have been curious, in their place. The watching schoolmaster scurried down the line and applied his willow switch to shoulders. They plodded out to the gardens where a ridge of soil lay dry and crumbling on one side from a summer under the sun and fresh and moist on the other where the novices had turned it up the previous day. With hoes, pointed sticks, and shovels, they commenced digging the unturned earth.
Liath picked her way down the steep stone stairs and took a circuitous route across the grounds. Lady Tallia had ventured to the edge of the garden and Liath saw her pleading with the schoolmistress—for both male and female novices worked in the gardens this day, though at separate ends as was proper. After a bit, the schoolmistress relented and handed the girl a stick. With this in hand, she promptly climbed over the little stone fence that served to keep vermin out of the vegetables and with more enthusiasm than skill commenced digging beside the other female novices, oblivious to the stains that now accumulated on the hem and knees of her gold linen gown.