So, pausing at the thresholds of the mauntery’s kitchens, the Superior Maunt felt a faint queasiness.

Given where the mauntery was situated—on the back route from Quadling Country—the establishment took in its share of Quadling girls deemed too plain or unruly for marriage, or too dull for the mild professions—teacher, governess, nurse. Sometimes their families reclaimed them. More often, the girls ran away, but at least they were older and better fed when they struck out on their own.

Still, while in residence, they were as a population docile enough, and they made good kitchen assistants. Looking for Sister Cook, it occurred to the Superior Maunt that a Quadling girl might sit with the convalescent upstairs.

“Sister Cook?” called the Superior Maunt, but her voice was rusty. “Sister Cook?” There was no reply. Into the kitchens ventured the Superior Maunt. A few quiet girls worked in a sunny corner, kneading vast tough pillows of bread dough with their bare knees. The peasant practice was generally frowned upon, but the Superior Maunt passed by the novices, pretending not to notice, as she didn’t feel up to delivering a chastisement.

Sister Liquor was high on a ladder, giving each purple glass bottle of savorsuckle brandy a quarter turn. She was singing to herself and swaying on her rung.

“Mercy,” murmured the Superior Maunt, and kept going.

The pantry offended with the promise of lunch: bread, moldiflower root, rounds of aged skark cheese, and soft blue olives, the kind even donkeys refused to eat. It’s notthat hard to keep your mind on higher things when this is the daily fare, observed the Superior Maunt.

The outside door was open. Beyond the pantry, in the walled orchard, wands of pearlfruit trees twitched and shuddered in the wind. The Superior Maunt went through, as much to catch a breath of fresh air as to see the severe autumn colors of pearlfruit leaves, which shaded from granite pink to a hesitant periwinkle.

In the emerald grass near the well several novices sat on their aprons. They’d taken for a little outing one of the palsied biddies in a wheeled chair and kindly thrown a tartan over her lap. The ancient maunt—older even than the Superior Maunt, by the look of it, or more infirm, anyway—had pulled her shawl over her forehead, to keep the morning sun out of her eyes. Two of the novices were husking pearlfruit pods. A third was fingering some sort of instrument, a kind of zither or dulcimer with lengths of catgut strung along two axes, one set perpendicularly above the other. The effect of her plucking and slithering was more tympanic than melodic. Perhaps the thing was out of tune. Or the player untalented. Or even that it was a foreign way of making music. Still, the other novices seemed not to mind, indeed, even to take pleasure from the droning sounds.

They leaped to their feet at her approach, scattering their work in the grass. They were Quadlings, the younger three of them. “Girls, please,” said the Superior Maunt. “To your tasks.” Then, deferentially, “Your health, Mother.”