By the next day, she was so disenchanted with everything in the first band that it took her a moment to register that Mistress Meva came in the afternoon not to lecture but to announce a gardening day. Beside Nell, Wista let out a happy squeal, Minna grinned, and even Zirri smiled. They gathered their tools and stood in line waiting for the Shepherdess as she disappeared briefly and returned with a sack for Nell. Nell checked inside and found a spade, a small rake, and several packets of seeds. Annoyance flared. Max wasn’t working with a spade.
“To each her own plot of food and of flowers,” Mistress Meva said too cheerfully as Nell examined the bundles, wrapped in dried grass that had been woven into small pockets. “You’ll have a chance to raise both, because sustenance is nothing without beauty. That’s a quote from Tur Lanto, of the second age.”
Nell resisted the urge to say something sarcastic. She only rubbed her fingers over the grass parcels. They crackled at her touch; the faint aroma of earth clung to them. She followed the others out across the library floor and into the first garden, ducking beneath the weeping willow on the way to the second ring. They emerged among the metalworkers, and Nell looked to see if she could spot Iana and Neetri in the weavers’ booths along the wall. But she was too far away. They crossed the flower beds, full of open-palms and other blossoms she couldn’t yet name, and reached the edge of the second garden, where the vegetable patches spread out below the windows on the outer wall of the third band.
There was a plot waiting for her, and despite her mood, it did look inviting, a green square full of promise. She couldn’t help wondering if some of the seeds in her packets were open-palms, and what the Shepherdess would say if she told her she had no use for seeds. The thought gave her a brief flush of satisfaction, but she glanced up at the third band and thought of Max and the old man on the other side. The thought dampened her interest in sparring with the Shepherdess, who seemed a little pitiful suddenly.
Besides, the woman had begun the chant of seeds, and the girls were joining in. Its rhythm quieted Nell, and she bent to the earth to begin.
To the soundless voice the seed . . .
The heat rose as they worked, planting, watering, and weeding. Even Wista, who for a time talked happily about the progress of her flowers, soon grew too tired to say anything. Nell thought of the cool shadows of the third garden as the sun burned through her thin dress and drew lines of sweat down the side of her face. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the Shepherdess, red faced, standing in the limited shade of a dogwood, wringing out a small cloth she kept running across her forehead.
“Do you stay here all afternoon while we work?” Nell asked the woman.
“Certainly. Why?”
Nell wiped a mud-stained hand across the back of her neck. “No reason. You just look so hot. I think you ought to drink something.”
Mistress Meva smiled. “I would enjoy some more shade.”
Nell tugged at a dandelion root she’d just noticed at the edge of her square of land. “Well, we’re big enough to come back on our own. Why don’t you go in?”
Mistress Meva hesitated, looking from the row of girls up to the wall of the third band and back.
“I shouldn’t,” she began.
Nell said nothing. She waited, and sure enough, a moment later, the Shepherdess exhaled loudly, waved a tired hand in front of her face, and called, “Minna? You’ll lead everyone back when they’re done, won’t you?”
Minna looked up from the small bush she was pruning. “Certainly, Mistress. Thank you!”
The Shepherdess had not been gone ten minutes when the girls began to rise and dust off. “It’s awful hot today,” Wista said. “I don’t think Mistress Meva would mind if we stopped early. Do you, Minna?”
“Oh, no! She wouldn’t want us to keep at it in this heat, I don’t think.”
One by one they drifted away, until only Nell remained. When they’d gone, she stood and made her way through the passage to the other side of the third band, thinking with some satisfaction that there was more than one way to use your mind to get things done.
The heat had emptied the scholars’ garden.
Across the width of it, Nell caught sight of the iron gate that led into the center, what the Master Watcher had called the heart of the sanctuary. A thick lock hung from it. She turned and peered down the length of the third wall. Here, on its inner face, a series of doors stretched away from her into the distance. She wondered in which thicket she’d find Max’s tree. Moving silently along the path, she peered beneath willows and into mossy patches rimmed with bushes, keeping an eye all the while on the closed doors along the third band wall. She had half a mind to sneak in and peek through one of the classroom doors. The scholars in the old days could heal people, Max had said. Even now they could make trees grow from nothing and cloud the valley with mist. They knew about lots of things, none of them hinted at by the mistresses. But the thought of Max and the old man elbowed even that out, and she looked searchingly into the trees, wondering if they were there or in the airy room at the top of the stairs, full of old books and cool sunlight.
She came abreast of the door she’d gone through with the Master Watcher. To her left, a clump of hawthorn and dogwood made
