The priory tower above the library, rather the roof of it, is the highest point you can climb to on the monastery grounds.

When I first set foot there and my eyes fell on the magnificent, diverse, and strange landscape unfolding in front of them, I knew that the location of the priory had not been chosen by chance.

Enclosed in the walls of the monastery was green and luxuriant vegetation from all the parts of the continent, but outside of its walls everything was barren. To the east was The White Desert, to the west was the red one, and to the north was a steep mountain wall. The priory was a human and probably magic-made oasis in a sea of stone and dust.

There was also something else visible from the roof of the tower, something that till that moment I had only read about. The Rift.

The Rift had formed more than one thousand five hundred star circles ago, or so I was told, and all people had a different legend regarding its formation, but nobody had certainty.

The cues, the native desert people, say that the deserts were once fertile plains inhabited by two tribes that fought for supremacy, but the blood they shed angered the gods so much that they opened the ground to swallow them all and dried their lands to punish them.

That something Maleficent lays down in the rift is pretty believable because, from the priory tower, I could see the dark shadows that emerged from it and rose to the sky inexhaustibly, like an ominous curtain.

The bones of the last dragons supposedly lay at the bottom of that deep canyon too, together with death, ghosts, disease, and every other bad thing one can come up with. This knowledge wasn't really a fact, but rather legends and speculations, but most legends guard at least a kernel of truth in them. After all, The Rift was frightening, fascinating, and intimidating.

To me, the most interesting and ominous fact of all was that it looked like it was pointing directly at the priory and stopping only at its walls as if they would block and swallow its dark force. The image was breathtaking: an immense dark canyon, long and straight that just stopped at the brink of the white walls.

"It will be dawn soon; we have to go down," whispered Mairi.

"Just one more instant," I begged and returned to observe how the bright star that brings daylight, Shams Soleilis, swept its first rays over the landscape evaporating the dew from the monastery grounds and heating up the desert sands.

The image reminded me of my father's palace, of home, where I also used to sneak into The Tower or Daylight, watch the star raise over Miayatma and the first rays reflect in the water of the hundred lakes. Those moments seemed a lifetime ago. Even if barely one star-circle had passed since I arrived there, it felt as if I was a different person back then. If I think about it, I likely was, because, in the moons since my family's death, my perspective of the world was enriched and had changed from more than one point of view.

"Come on!" urged Mairi, that wasn't used to me being the one that didn't want to leave after one of our nightly lessons. The, at first tedious, reading exercises turned out to be something she quite enjoyed in the end. Not the writing though; she still hated that part.

That night when we concluded the reading lessons, which we did only once in a while, out of caution after the incident with Sita and the caravan, Mairi thought it was a good idea to climb on the roof as one of my lessons.

I didn't like the process, as I still had to fight slight fear of heights, but the image at the end was a brilliant reward.

"Don't you find it beautiful?" I asked her. "It humbles one to watch like this the creation of the gods. It feels like the thread that cradles the universe goes right through this point."

"You know what I find more beautiful? Not being made into holed cheese by The White Grace. Move," she said in her characteristic, not-so-delightful tone, but then a tiny smile bloomed on her lips and she whispered in my ear, "Yeah, it is, and you have a nice way with words, you know? Now move!"

Still a bit displeased, I made my way inside through the roof window and then let myself fall on the library ladder following Mairi. The red moon showed there was still enough time till the wake-up call, enough to sneak in and act as if we were never anywhere else than we should have been.

The whole height of the tower walls is occupied by bookshelves. Once in a while, a gallery is inserted between them to truncate the height and make the volumes reachable.

While we climb down the long library ladders, the muffled sound of the door catches our attention making our blood freeze. It was too soon for us to not fret and startle, just that this time it wasn't even a sister, as we would have expected. Chioma entered followed by Yara, crossing the room and hiding between the heavy shelves.

After the incident on Gray Day, Chioma was friendlier towards me and sometimes came to sit with me and Mairi. I liked her. She was mostly quiet, smart, and as pragmatic as Mairi. I couldn't forget how distressed she had been that day. The things she had said stayed in my mind and nagged at my fragile inner peace. I didn't tell anyone else. Somehow it felt like I didn't have the right to, but I kept thinking about what she said and what could be worse than a beating.

Yara was also midrib, but till that moment I had never seen them interact. It looked like they were actively avoiding each other. That was somehow odd but not entirely unusual. The ghazal were sticking together in a group but the rest of the girls didn't care so much about race when it came to their alliances. There were other southern girls too in the priory, one older and two younger besides Itotia but none of them cared about interacting with me.

Fera's theory was that people of the same race were more likely to stick together but Itotia was also manab and the two of them didn't like each other at all.

Fera had said that Chioma's parents were in the service of the Yara's at their estate in the northeast.

"So, what do you want?" asked Chioma visibly displeased.

"I saw what you did with Nadaria in the back of the pantry."

Chioma's red eyes lit up showing ambiguous emotions, but she took a deep breath and tried to conceal them.

"I don't know what you saw but it was likely not me. I and Nadaria don't talk."

"There wasn't much talking involved," said Yara, smirking.

"I don't know what you are talking about," answered Chioma trying to seem nonchalant but it was obvious that the words affected her.

"I am sure you do. I could tell The White Grace," she said, coming closer to Chioma and pressing her shoulders against the bookshelf.

"What do you want?"

"For you to kiss me, and let me touch you like you let Nadaria," she whispered that time, and her voice became smokey and deep. "Give me something to think about," she said pressing a vile kiss on Chioma's lips. Kissing! I had never seen anybody kiss before that night when the caravan soldier had kissed Sita. Sita seemed to enjoy the act, while Chioma's body was stiff and her eyes wide open and confused. She hesitated at first but then pushed the girl away.

"This is against the will of the gods."

"Wasn't it against the will of the gods when you did it with Nadaria? I think this has nothing to do with any god, only that your lewd self desires Nadaria more because she is more comely. Chioma, you are anyway soiled. I know what happened with Sahib Aldan. You are anyway worthless and your family is sworn to mine. You, by blood bounds, bow to me."

Yara started caressing Chioma's face and hair and kissing her again.

To my left, Mairi was looking at the scene astonished, then the astonishment transformed into a frown and then into wild rage. Her knuckles became white, clutching a book.

"Don't," I whispered, hoping that she would contain herself. Of course, it was futile and I knew it. Mairi jumped from the ladder on the bookshelf, and down on the floor beside them, slamming the book so hard into Yara's side that it made her scream in pain.

"Touch her again and I will stab you in your sleep. You will never see it coming just wake up to the smell of your spilled guts," she hissed at Yara. "And what is wrong with you? Just slap her prissy ass. It's not like you to swallow such behavior. She is no match for you," she asked genuinely confused, in a milder voice, looking at Chioma.

Then we heard the door again and all of us turned pale.

"Go hide!" I told Mairi and Chioma but grabbed Yara's arm before she could leave too. "Not you!" I told her frowning.

Lora, the sister in charge of the library, walked towards us frowning. Out of all sisters I liked her most. She was older than most but gentle in nature and kind for a change.

"Girls, what are you doing here? You know you ought to get a beating now," she said in a mellow voice.

Mairi and Chioma were tiptoeing behind her back toward the exit. If she saw them at that point it would mean trouble. The two of them, unlike me and Yara, were low-born and had absolutely no right or reason to be in the library.

"We are here because I asked Yara to help with studying the midrib customs for etiquette," I lied. It was not a good excuse but the only one that occurred to me at that moment, that made even a bit of sense.

"And the scream?"

"She saw a mouse," I answered before Yara could say anything.

Mairi and Chioma were almost at the door but not out.

"I think you should beat us," I said in the end not having a better idea to buy them time.

Yara frowned at me and I knew I made an enemy.

"I uh..." Sister Lora was clearly uncomfortable with the situation.

"At least a slap, to appease the gods," I insisted.

Sister Lora pressed the strangest and likely lightest slap I ever felt on my cheek and after that, she urged us to leave.

"This will not stay as it is," said Yara but I ignore her blatantly and hurried after Chioma and Mairi towards our bedroom.

I found them fighting in front of the door, rather Mairi whispering annoyed.

"What was that shit show? And what did you do with Nadaria in the pantry and got caught?"

"None of your business."

"None of my freaking business? I thought we swore an oath."

Chioma hesitated.

"Well kissing. Happy now?"

"Why?" asked Mairi genuinely confused.

"Because I wanted to see if it can feel good and I heard she liked it and because she will be gone in a few weeks so no loose ends."

"Are you stupid?! You know what would have happened if the sisters had caught you and now Yara knows too. Why would you do that?"

"You wouldn't understand!" Despite the whisper, her tone was angry and she was almost crying.

"I most certainly don't."

I was witnessing their quarrel not knowing what to say when I noticed Fera coming towards us. She happened to also have been out before the wake-up call. How bizarre.

"Get inside. All of you," she urged us.

Chioma just entered, averting her gaze from Mairi, annoyed. Beginning with that day she didn't sit by Mairi's side in the dining hall anymore, as she usually did.

The situation was obviously nagging at Mairi and everyone was noticing.

While the two were a permanent source of tension, my time with Fera was calm and relaxing. I found out she knew a lot about herbs. Apparently, the mountain people are good healers, magic and non-magic healing alike.

"My mother was a magical healer," she confessed. It was the first piece of information about her past that she shared.

"Mine too. And your father?" I asked also to show her I cared.

"Besides a rapist, I don't know."

I looked at her confused.

"Ah, you don't know what that means," she said smiling sarcastically. "Life really isn't fair, is it?"

"I... suppose not..." I answered somehow intimidated and unsure.

"Do you know how it feels to be powerless, in pain, exposed and humiliated, most of all humiliated and degraded? I bet you don't."

Fera's envy of my privileged upbringing was understandable. She never forgot to seep it into our conversations once in a while. I knew that most children didn't have honey cakes, toys, or even food and a bed growing up and that it was just luck that set me off in the universe with those premises. Mairi also told me she used to sleep in barns and on fields most of the time, and that her parents couldn't even afford a cottage while I lived in a palace.

What she was describing sounded worse than a beating.

"Does that have something to do with kissing?" I asked again naively.

"Kissing? I doubt most of them kiss. There surely are some, but most only shove their thing wherever they see fit and you have to stay and endure it. Then again I am being dramatic, it's much like a marriage in this aspect, just that in a marriage you also have to pretend you like it. But yes, to answer your question, kissing is mostly associated with shagging in normal circumstances. But gosh, you are really so unknowing it's almost funny."

That being said, a new veil was lifted from my innocence and I could picture what was worse than a beating and that Chioma wanted to somehow come to terms with that.

I really had to talk to Mairi!

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Ok. More action in the next chapter!