A week. And then another week, my body used to rising and falling with the bells as though I had never left them behind at all. And another week, my hands chapped from the cold that the sullen kitchen fires couldn’t quite banish, the even more bitter cold in my cell. Four stone walls, a pallet and a prie-dieu of my own, a peg for my cloak and habit. I’d gotten used to the habit again too. Strange how much my hands remembered; how to adjust the veil and wimple over my poor cropped head. I didn’t struggle with it, not the way novices were supposed to, and I suppose that drew comments, but the nuns were far more interested in the new gossip about the Pope’s daughter.

“She’s to marry Alfonso of Aragon, they say! A handsome prince from Naples—”

“Do you really suppose she broke her arm and that was all the screaming we heard on her last day? I saw that Perotto going in and out for months, he was so handsome. Do you suppose they . . .”

“Ssshh! Mother Prioress will have your head for talk like that!”

They asked me what I knew of the Pope’s daughter and her secrets. “You served her, after all. She and that good-looking envoy, did they . . .” But I had nothing to say. Suora Serafina had no opinions. She faded into the crowd of black and white, just as anonymous as the others. Nothing to set her apart except maybe the small bulge in her sleeve.

And maybe on the nights Suora Serafina wasn’t feeling so very fortunate, she opened the pouch in her sleeve and shook something out onto her bed. Something a little withered, a little dark and dried, but still boasting a filigreed gold ring on one small curled-in finger.

“Move!” she’d cry out in the dark. “Give me a sign! Give me something!”

But the dried-up old relic had no magic in it, not away from a kitchen. A proper kitchen, that is, not a convent kitchen with no spices to speak of and an oven that barely spat out any heat. It was a kitchen to make Suora Serafina weep, and that was where she did most of her weeping: tears sliding silently down her cheeks to land in the watery stews along with the turnips past their prime and the stringy cuts of meat. She didn’t bother to wipe her face. Those stews couldn’t be spoiled by a little salt water.

Weeping was for the kitchen. Screaming was for the cell, hunched into a ball with a pillow crammed over the face, screaming into it over and over because the walls were not moving in around her, they were not. Suora Serafina was used to stone walls; she belonged inside them, after all, and once her throat was hoarse and burning she could usually remember that.