Total pages in book: 210
Estimated words: 200837 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1004(@200wpm)___ 803(@250wpm)___ 669(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 200837 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1004(@200wpm)___ 803(@250wpm)___ 669(@300wpm)
All Little Sisters and Maidens alike start their journey into the god’s service in the same way, cloistered together with your competitors. No one, absolutely no one but Matrons and Little Sisters is allowed inside. And even though every decade there are sixty-five girls who leave the tower behind, Unchosen, none of them ever broke the vow of secrecy about what it all looks like or how it’s laid out.
It feels unnecessarily… clandestine. I mean, who cares? It’s a dorm. I don’t get it. But rules are rules. My Little Sister class got the same sermon this morning as every other entering Little Sister class. “If you say anything about the dorm in public, you will immediately forfeit your right to be here and be escorted out.”
We’re only midway through the tour of the Maiden Tower at present, but from what I’ve seen so far, it’s been way undersold. The common rooms are open and airy, the roof above us so far away details must be left to the imagination, but I hear there’s a dining room up there at the very tippy top. Closed now, because with only three Maidens left, it was pointless to throw parties anymore.
But now that the Little Sisters are moving in, I bet they will open that dining room back up. We live in the dorm, but we can go into any of the common areas without invitation. Back when nine women used to call this tower home it might be seen as rude to venture upstairs where they live. But now? Who cares? I’m sure all of us have the same plans—stay away from Haryet’s, Clara’s, and Gemna’s floors, but explore every other nook and cranny of the place.
After all, some of us will only be here a few short weeks. Everyone wants to make the most of it.
Just as these words are forming in my head, we come around a corner and the whole group—all seventy-five of us—gasp in unison. There is a silence immediately after this gasp, and then… excitement. Squealing, and chatter, and giggling, and dancing, and jumping, and wide eyes with open mouths.
Because we have finally gotten our first look at the Little Sister dorm and it is spectacular.
I pictured a large room with many beds. Perhaps a little nightstand to put things on and a dresser of drawers. All those things are here in this real-life version of the dorm, but to say my imagination came up lacking is an understatement.
I don’t know what to look at first. The curved, rounded walls that make the entire massive room look like the inside of a sandstone cave? The mature trees growing out of cracks in the plaster? Or the thick, woody roots spanning the walls—which are four stories tall and dotted with more balconies than I can count?
All that is amazing, but my gaze floats down to the floor where a canal made out of polished blue stone cuts the long, colossal room in half. Just like the real one outside cuts the city down the middle like a bright, blue line.
I’m smiling, and stunned, and shivers erupt, causing my body to have a slight spark display that presents as a tingle across my face where my freckles are. I’m here. And it feels like a dream, something meant for princesses in storybooks from long ago, not a down-city girl who grew up with no spark at all in her humble childhood home.
But the canal is just the start of this most magnificent space. On either side of the teal-colored canal ‘water’ there is a plush, buff-colored carpet made to look like sand.
While I do not see bedrooms, per se, there are a hundred nooks with beds in them, each one with a special feature to make it unique. Like a terrace, for nooks on the upper floors, or a comfy and semi-private sitting area for those here on the ground. Some beds are on the ‘beachy’ carpet and others sit directly on the polished turquoise ‘canal.’ Looking past those first nooks, through round, cut-out windows in the plaster walls, I can see more spaces. More nooks. Like it goes on forever.
The walls are covered in artwork and shelves, which are lined with plants and small decorative items like stained-glass bowls, or books, or vases.
Staircases line the walls every twenty feet or so and dozens of girls are already climbing them, hoping to find their perfect spot to call home on a higher level. And the sewing rooms—my god. The sight of them actually causes me to sigh. They have machines here in up-city. Not foot-petal ones, like I’ve been using my whole life, but machines powered by the god with the magic of spark. Machines that can sew all kinds of different stitches and handle all kinds of delicate fabrics.