The Matron sniffed out that she was of a lower quality compared to the other novice girls and set her up in a hammock with two other no-names right at the top where the stairs met the attic. There was noise anytime someone entered or left. The others had beds, but when she saw the lumpy state of some of the sleeping mats and her fellow novices itching their tender flesh because of bedbugs, she was grateful for the easy-to-wash hammock.
“Always crowded after a call-up,” the Matron said, pointing Ileth to some hooks where she could tie up her hammock. “It’ll thin out by midwinter.”
The attic was fireless, warmed only by the heat rising from below and the four chimneys of the house. It was stuffy but warm enough in the summer weather. Ileth wondered what the winters were like, and if cold had anything to do with novices giving up. She had an advantage on the others there; she was inured to cold thanks to her years at the Lodge. The roof was sound; if a fault appeared they’d know about it, as their noses were practically pressed up against its beams.
Below on the second floor the female apprentices and a few of the well-bred novices like Santeel Dun Troot slept anywhere from two to six to a room. Santeel was in a crowded room and often appeared at the morning meal sleepy with tufts of rag stuck in her ears. One of her roommates snored. Ileth found herself admiring Santeel despite herself; she seemed to know a great deal and did everything well, whether it was washing spoons or reading aloud. But there wasn’t much to report to Falth yet, except that Santeel had lost or someone had stolen a tiny pair of scissors Santeel used to trim her toenails. Santeel believed it the latter. She complained to the Matron, who refused to turn the entire Manor upside down to find scissors.
A part of her wanted to dislike Santeel, a girl her age given seconds and dessert when they handed out beauty and voice and everything else not just on a platter, but on individual doilies resting on the platter, each item polished, arranged, and engraved with her renowned initials. But the circumstances of Santeel’s birth were no more under her control than Ileth’s, and Ileth was thoroughly sick about hearing how her mother’s conduct brought her no shining platter, but a stutter that made everyone think she was slow. Ileth resolved that she’d like or dislike Santeel Dun Troot only if her words and actions merited it.
Santeel didn’t seem to mind Ileth hanging about her. She liked, and expected, to be the center of attention.
There was only one female of wingman rank living in the Manor, and she had a room to herself, even more spacious than the Matron’s. She was hardly ever in the Manor, though. Every time she had more than a few hours of rest she’d go down to rooms she rented in Vyenn where there were servants to cook for her. All Ileth knew about her in those early days was that she was small and flew many errands for the Charge of the Serpentine.
The Matron slept on the first floor just off the kitchen, where her bedroom also served as the pantry. Much of the first floor was taken up by a dining temple. Everyone ate their breakfast on narrow benches, all facing the same way, from a small shelf that folded down from the bench in front, forming a ready-made audience for one of the Matron’s lectures or an inspirational reading. Those seated in the front row ate with their plates in their laps. The women and girls were expected to prepare and eat breakfast together, then join the men and boys in the dining hall for the evening meal.
Everyone wore basically the same attire, a men’s work shirt and a knee-length overdress of that durable, channeled weave Ileth admired when it was first handed to her. The overdress brushed clean easily. You weren’t to decorate or enhance either garment in any way, though if it became hopelessly stained you were allowed to dye it.
Novices wore a small brooch of white dragon scale. Her group didn’t have theirs yet; it would be issued once they were oathed in, and their oathing ceremony had been delayed for some days because of a lack of a sufficient number of dragoneers present to attend the oath.
Apprentices wore a plain white sash tied about the waist but out of practicality took it off for work. You had to buy or make your own sash, and the sammarind[2] fabric preferred as fitting for future dragoneers was as dear as it was delicate. Two of last year’s novices had only just recently been promoted and had bought the last ones at a ruinous price for a used length of white silk.
The Matron’s discourse rarely wandered from her obsessions: the cleanliness of Academy linens and furniture, and that the Academy’s novices and apprentices must eat moderately so that a healthy bowel could be maintained. She treated their outsides with bristle brushes and hard, gritty soap that scoured their skin and had them fill up on practically raw oats, bran mashes, and summer vegetables that did the same to their insides. Such was the Matron’s belief in the power of substantial and regular evacuations that she grew nonplussed at the continuance of Ileth’s stutter after a week on the goat’s feed. Ileth wondered if she’d cured a stutter with the feed or her victims were too busy chewing and squatting to talk. In any case, the subjects of hygiene, mealtime denial, and a purpose-filled bowel mentally combined, like three cow paths joining together to become a road, when it came to their chastity. They could look at boys, talk about them in a respectable manner, but you could no more think of kissing one than you would a barnyard animal. Her standards of purity were such that had she found out about the boy who had barged in while Ileth stood undressed in Joai’s kitchen, Ileth would be considered tainted.
The hour before bed was devoted to sewing and polishing. Groups of novices and apprentices worked while a few others took turns reading from the short list of works the Matron considered appropriate for young female ears. They had regular servings of the Old Rite’s Temple Maxims, or On Virtue by Tonerone, or short “plays” that were just catechisms of manners on the perils of dancing with the wrong sort of suitor.
Ileth often amused herself by imagining the Matron presenting her series of moral and uplifting entertainments at the Lodge to the Captain’s friends.
As the evening hour wound down, the Matron would post everyone’s assignments by their room number on the first stair landing where you couldn’t help but see it as you went to bed. Old engraved and painted wooden signs were hung up on little hooks next to each of the thirty lettered or numbered rooms—Ileth’s stairway hammock-eyrie with the other two was D and they had a private joke that it stood for the desperate, or the despaired of, or (in whispers) the damned.
Behind all the discipline was a threat to the novices, rarely spoken, that if they indulged their youthful follies their names would be put down in the Blue Book in the chamber of the Master of Novices. You went into the book and shortly afterward, you went out the gate and into the gutter.
But the routine of chores, roughage, lectures, and duty finally had a most welcome break when the newest novices were invited to join their male counterparts and finally take their oath the next day.
The news caused an excited rush to the washtubs and basins and there was great borrowing and sharing of brushes, pins, and ribbons and oh, I know I shall break down reciting.