I ran my hand down my leg, fingering the gauze that bound my ankle. Someone had brought me to that bed and listened, guessing where I had come from and why. Someone had bandaged my right ankle, packed it in ice. I kicked off the covers and saw that my legs were a solid mass of bruises and gashes and scrapes. My head ached, and when I moved, pain shot down my side. She just leaned closer to me, brought her free hand to my face, and said, “You’re okay.”īut I didn’t feel okay. “It’s my home.” Her voice cracked, but she didn’t try to fight. I was too weak to fight, far too unsteady to run, but when the girl reached for me, I managed to grab her hand and twist her arm into a terrible angle.

“Who are you?” I asked, scooting backward on the thin mattress, retreating into the cold corner made of stone. Worry seemed appropriate under the circumstances. A candle flickered in the corner, pale light washing partway across a sparsely furnished room, leaving it mostly in shadow. There were soft sheets beneath my hands, a cold stone wall beside my right shoulder. A lot of languages no one here even speaks.” She walked to the small wooden stool beside my bed and whispered, “You’ll have to forgive us, but it was either bet…or worry.” French and German, Russian and Japanese, I think. “Well, you should have heard yourself, talking in all kinds of tongues-like the devil himself was after you. I wanted to scream, but instead I gritted my teeth and said, “You were betting on me?” I shook my head, and it felt like a bomb went off. She wagered a week’s worth of kitchen duty you were Australian. Oh, Sister Isabella is going to be very upset about this. Maybe it was the terrible throbbing in my head-the piercing pain behind my eyes-but I could have sworn I saw a halo.

Soft curls framed a slightly freckled face with blue eyes and a wide smile. She had an Irish accent and strawberry blond hair in a shade that could never be anything but natural.

It was as if there were a stranger in my skin, lying in the dark, saying, “Who’s there?”Īs soon as the young woman moved to stand at the end of the bed, I could see that she was beautiful. The voice was too rough, too coarse to be mine. I heard the words, but I wasn’t sure I’d said them.

Out of sight out of time book