Zenn Scarlett Read Online Free PDF Page A

She leaned with one hand on the stool, attempting a jaunty pose, while taking the weight off her leg. “I need to get back on the horse that threw me, don’t I?” she said, repeating one of her uncle’s favorite sayings. Of course, she’d never seen a horse in the flesh, let alone been thrown off one.
    “You are your mother’s daughter, no doubt about it,” he said as they set off, Zenn walking gingerly, hanging back just slightly behind her uncle. They crossed into the refectory dining hall, past the long rows of empty tables and benches, their footsteps echoing. “You know, there was a time,” Otha said, “when your mother was at the same point you’re at now. I can see her plain as day, bright-eyed, all business, just starting her novitiate.”
    This was promising, Zenn decided. Family talk. Casual talk. Anything to distract Otha from what had happened with the hound.
    “Of course, Mai was older than you,” Otha said. This was a long-running issue between her and Otha. And between her and her father as well. They’d both insisted she was too young to begin her novitiate, and they’d both engaged her in several rounds of arguing over it. But Zenn knew she was ready. In the end, she wore them both down.
    “Mai was nineteen during her first year, if I recall correctly,” Otha continued, giving her a quick glance but not bringing up Zenn’s own age again. That battle had been won, she told herself with some measure of satisfaction. For reasons Zenn never really understood, the colonists on Mars clung to a number of outdated Earther traditions – like how they measured the passage of time. With Mars’ orbit lasting roughly twice as long as Earth’s, a Martian year equaled about two Earth years. By that computation, in Mars years Zenn wasn’t seventeen, she was eight-and-a-half. It sounded comical.
    “I remember this particular incident – one of Mai’s first patients was a Grosvenor’s thorn-throw,” her uncle said as they stepped out of the refectory and headed for the calefactory meeting hall.
    The calefactory’s large, main hall was where Otha or other instructors would have given presentations meant for the entire student body, back when there was a student body. Now, it served mainly for storage, with dwindling heaps of supplies stacked against the walls.
    “One of the thornies got all ripped up in transit, fighting with its pen-mate. Now, as it turns out, Mai had identified them both as males…”
    Otha’s thorn-throw story wasn’t a new one, and Zenn’s mind wandered as they walked on, passing through the calefactory and exiting into the cloister walk, the covered, columned walkway that ran around the open square at the center of the compound.
    Built two centuries ago according to Earther architectural plans that Otha said dated back almost two thousand years, the entire cloister compound was arranged around this open square. To the south was the huge, stone block building that housed the infirmary, its immense, double sliding doors big enough to accommodate even the largest patients. Except the vacuum-dwelling Indra, of course. Those could only be treated in orbit on board the ships they powered.
    Attached to the western side of the cloister walk were the kitchen and the refectory. Just outside the kitchen’s back door was the physic garden, the aromatic scent of its medicinal herbs and kitchen savories perfuming the air this time of year. Opposite the garden stood the small Chapter House, where Otha had his office and bedroom.
    Above the calefactory meeting hall on the north side of the cloister walk was the dormitory, where Zenn, Sister Hild, and Brother Hamish had their rooms. Beyond that to the south were the remains of the old chapel, looming like some derelict shipwreck, its roof long ago fallen in, the tiles salvaged to maintain other roofs. The chapel’s few intact Gothic window frames pointed naked at the sky like broken teeth. Deep-felt religious fervor had brought the Ciscan