Free The Bell at Sealey Head by Patricia McKillip Page B

to know about life in the city.”

    “I look forward to it.” He met Gwyneth’s eyes again. “I hope to explore your thoughts about the bell much further, Miss Blair.”

    “Yes,” she said a trifle dazedly. “Though in the light of—ah—your own reflections, mine seem strangely insubstantial.

    Good night, Judd. Please come again soon. We forgot to talk about books.”

    “Fish oil intruded,” he murmured. He hesitated, wanting to say more, she sensed, and she smiled encouragingly. But Raven spoke first, and suddenly she was watching Judd’s back, accompanying the astonishing Mr. Dow out the door.

    Well, she thought, during a little moment of silence while Raven and Daria bit into tea cakes simultaneously. Well, then. I shall just have to borrow a book.

Seven

    Ysabo brought the scrap bowl down from the tower.

    No one else was allowed up there, not even the kitchen maid who carried the bowl up the kitchen stairs to the hall every morning and met the princess to give it to her. She waited there while the princess fed the crows, then took the bowl from her with a curtsy and vanished back down into the depths. She kept her eyes and chin lowered, never presumed to speak, and never expected the princess to acknowledge her existence by a word or a glance.

    But Ysabo was in a mood to examine everything that had to do with the ritual. Since the moment when she saw herself as part of a pattern, as vital as the ringing of the bell or the daily gathering of the crows, she had been consumed with a strange, desperate need to understand. What exactly was the pattern? And exactly whose pattern was it? Before, filling cups and tossing scraps, she had felt useful but replaceable. Anyone could do what she did every day. Now, seeing her fate in the ritual, she wondered suddenly, intensely: How far back in time did that line of children go who had inherited this piece of the pattern? How far forward into the future would the unborn children go?

    What would happen if everything stopped?

    So, that morning, she started to scrutinize the details of her days. Beginning with the scrap bowl. It changed daily, she had thought, according to the amount that filled it. For the first time, she realized that the bowl itself never changed; only its size varied. The bowl was silver and copper, always gleaming; it must have been polished daily. Still, it seemed very old, with its odd lumps of uncut jewels decorating the sides, the ribbons of copper wandering randomly over it, the shadow, here and there, of age that no care could remove.

    What were these crows that must be fed each day from that magic bowl?

    Who had made the magic?

    She studied the averted face of the kitchen maid as well, wondering if they changed randomly, or if it had been the same one all Ysabo’s life. She had pretty eyelashes, the princess noticed, long, thick, and black as crows’ feathers; her pale, thin, milky face looked quite young. But who knew? Maybe she was as ancient as the bowl.

    “Do you bring the bowl to me every day?” Ysabo asked. “Or are there others?”

    The maid’s eyes flew open. The princess’s words seemed to bounce off the stones around them, transform into words spoken underwater, words shouted from a distant hill, fraying as they flew. Ysabo glimpsed eyes as green as newborn leaves. Then the maid screwed them up in terror, clapped the scrap bowl over her head as though to hide herself from the princess, and fled.

    Ysabo sighed.

    Don’t ask.

    She had no other task until noon. She spent the morning with Aveline and Maeve in Maeve’s chambers overlooking the sea. Ysabo, docilely embroidering, kept feeling their eyes on her, swift, wide-eyed glances, as though her silence disturbed them more than if she had raged again, or wept, or dared again to ask a question. She sent her needle in and out of the linen, making yet another length of colorful flowers and vines to hang over the cold stones around them. Through the open casement she