Book Two of Book of the Ancestor

HarperVoyager an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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London SE1 9GF

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright © Mark Lawrence 2018

Cover © Tomasz Jedruszek

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Mark Lawrence asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008152345

Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008152369

Version: 2018-09-24

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

The Story So Far

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Also by Mark Lawrence

About the Publisher

For my grandmother, Beatrice ‘BG’ Georgina, who knew with absolute certainty that I would be a ship’s captain.

The Story So Far

For those of you who have had to wait a while for this book I provide brief catch-up notes to Book One, so that your memories may be refreshed and I can avoid the awkwardness of having to have characters tell each other things they already know for your benefit.

Here I carry forward only what is of importance to the tale that follows.

You may find yourself wondering about Keot when he is mentioned. You’re supposed to wonder. You will find out. He’s not mentioned in Book One.

Abeth is a planet orbiting a dying red sun. It is sheathed in ice and the vast majority of its people live in a fifty-mile-wide ice-walled corridor around the equator.

An artificial moon, a great orbiting mirror, keeps the Corridor free of ice by focusing the sun’s rays into it each night.

When, thousands of years ago, the four original tribes of men came to Abeth from the stars they found the ruins of a vanished people they call the Missing.

The empire is bounded by the lands of the Scithrowl to the east and by the Sea of Marn to the west. Across the sea the Durns rule. At the end of Book One Durnish invaders were raiding inland from the coast.

As the sun weakens, the ice continues a slow advance despite the warmth of the moon’s nightly focus. As the Corridor is squeezed nations look to their neighbours for new territory.

The empire’s nobility are the Sis. The suffix is attached to the names of ennobled families such as the Tacsis, Jotsis etc.

The four original tribes that came to Abeth were the gerant, hunska, marjal, and quantal. Their blood sometimes shows in the current population, conferring unique powers. The gerant grow very large, the hunska are fantastically swift, the marjal can manifest all manner of minor to medium magics, including shadow weaving, sigil writing, and mastery of elements. The quantal can access the raw power of the Path and manipulate the threads that are woven to create reality.

The ships that brought the tribes from the stars were said to have been powered by shiphearts. A small number of these orbs exist within the empire and are highly valued as they enhance the magical abilities of quantals and marjals.

The Missing left behind structures called Arks. Three exist within the Corridor. The emperor’s palace is built around one. There are no reliable records of anyone being able to open the Ark, but a faked prophecy predicts the coming of a Chosen One who will be able to.

Nona Grey is a peasant child from a nameless village. She was given to the child-taker Giljohn who sold her to the Caltess where ring-fighters are trained and pitted against each other.

Nona ended up at the Convent of Sweet Mercy where novices are trained in service to the Ancestor. Novices take orders as one of four classes of nun: Holy Sister (entirely religious duties), Grey Sister/Sister of Discretion (trained in assassination and stealth), Red Sister/Martial Sister (trained in combat), Holy Witch/Mystic Sister (trained to walk the Path).

Nona has proven to be a triple-blood, an incredibly rare occurrence, she has hunska, marjal, and quantal skills. Nona has wholly black eyes, a side-effect from taking a dangerous antidote. She has no shadow, having cut it free whilst fighting Yisht.

Yisht is a woman of the ice-tribes and is in the employ of the emperor’s sister Sherzal. Yisht stole the Sweet Mercy shipheart and killed Nona’s friend Hessa.

Nona is hated by Lord Thuran Tacsis as she first wounded and later killed his son Raymel, a gerant ring-fighter. She is also hated by Thuran’s surviving son, Lano. The Tacsis sent assassins, known as Noi-Guin, after Nona. Once hired, the Noi-Guin rarely cease their efforts until the target is dead, even if it requires years of patience.

During the theft of the shipheart Nona was betrayed by her friend and fellow novice Clera Ghomal. Among Nona’s remaining friends are novices Ara, Darla, Ruli, and Jula. Arabella Jotsis is from a powerful family and a rare two-blood, having both hunska and quantal skills. Darla is the daughter of an important officer in the emperor’s armies and has gerant blood. Ruli has minor marjal skills. Jula is very studious and hopes to become a Holy Sister.

Zole is a significant novice. She is from the ice-tribes and came to the convent at Sherzal’s insistence, used as an unwitting distraction to help in the theft of the shipheart. She is the only known four-blood with access to all the skills of the original tribes. Many consider her to be the Chosen One from prophecy. Under the prophecy Zole is the Argatha, and Nona is her Shield.

The Convent of Sweet Mercy is led by Abbess Glass, a woman whose connections in the Church and beyond reach further than expected.

Most senior among the nuns are the sister superiors, Wheel and Rose. Sister Wheel teaches Spirit classes. Sister Rose runs the sanatorium. Other important figures are Sister Tallow, who teaches Blade, Sister Pan, who teaches Path, and Sister Apple who teaches Shade. Sister Kettle is a Grey Sister based at the convent. She and Apple are lovers.

There are four classes/stages that novices move through as they train to take holy orders as nuns. Red Class, Grey Class, Mystic Class, and Holy Class. Book One ended with Nona in Grey Class, aged around eleven or twelve.

Novices take new names when they become nuns. Nona will become Sister Cage. Ara will be Sister Thorn.

Book One ended with Nona having just killed Raymel Tacsis in the wilds. Sisters Kettle and Apple were secretly watching over the novices but Kettle was poisoned by a Noi-Guin assassin tracking Nona, and Apple has gone to her aid.

Prologue

The dissolution of any monastery or convent is not something to be lightly undertaken. Even the might of House Tacsis, whose line was born of emperors, may not suffice.

Lano Tacsis came to the Rock of Faith garbed for war, his armour Ark-steel made bloody by the light of a thousand crimson stars. Before him the serried ranks of his personal guard, the iron core of the Tacsis army, forged by his father. Soldiers tempered in battles upon the empire’s eastern borders and in the west upon the beaches of the Marn.

But Lano’s confidence rested on more than the spears of his army. Noi-Guin walked with him, brought from the shadowed halls of the Tetragode.

When a child is given to the Noi-Guin it is sacrificed to the dark. Some few may survive the training but the adult who then descends the fortress walls on a moonless stretch of night a decade and more later will be a different person. They will have been cut free of any allegiance to parent or sibling, pruned from the Ancestor’s tree. They will be Noi-Guin – instruments of death, beyond morality, beneath religion, dedicated only to the task they have been given. The richest among the Sis may purchase their services but few missions require more than one child of the Tetragode. None living remember more than three acting together. Even the oldest stories never speak of more than five. Eight walked with Lano Tacsis the day he came to the convent that stood upon the Rock of Faith.

‘Nona Grey? You’re sure?’ Lano raised his visor to squint at the dark figure standing alone in the path of his army, tiny before the great band of pillars. ‘Sister Cage … returned to Sweet Mercy.’ Fist smacked palm, gauntlets clashing. ‘Oh, this is perfect! I feared she had gone despite my instructions.’ A glance to his left. ‘It’s her, you’re sure?’

Clera Ghomal lifted her dark eyes to him. ‘Of course. Which other would let me go?’

Sister Cage waited, shadowless among the shadows of the pillars. The old nuns and young novices watched from within the stone forest behind her. When the Tacsis came and the blood began to flow Sister Rose would still be fighting her own battle somewhere back there, striving to save Sister Thorn from her injuries. Clera had left Thorn bleeding. She could have killed her in a moment. But she didn’t. At least there was that.

The sword Cage held offered its sharpness to the world and the Corridor wind, divided by its edge, hissed in pain. Cage’s sister had waited for her battle, hunting her centre, seeking silence and stillness while the Pelarthi advanced. Few Red Sisters had ever left the convent of Sweet Mercy better able than Sister Thorn to practise what the mistresses of Blade and Path had taught them.

Sister Cage walked to a different beat.

The holy disdain anger, for what faith is not, at its core, about acceptance of things you cannot change? The wise call wrath unwise for few truths are to be found there. Those who rule us stamp upon rage for they see it clearly, knowing it for the fire that it is, and who invites such hungry flames among that which they possess?

To Sister Cage, though, fury was a weapon. She opened herself to the anger she had held at bay. Her friend lay dying. Her friend. There is a purity in rage. It will burn out sorrow. For a time. It will burn out fear. Even cruelty and hatred will seek shelter, rage wants none of them, only to destroy. Rage is the gift our nature gives to us, shaped by untold years. Why discard it?

Every law of church or state seeks to separate you from your anger. Every rule is there to tame you – to take from your hands that which you should own. Every stricture aims to place the vengeance that is yours in the grasp of courts, juries, justice and judges. Books of law look to replace what you know to be right with lines of ink. Prisons and executioners stand only to keep your hands from the blood of those who have wronged you. Every part of it exists to put time and distance between deed and consequence. To lift us from our animal nature, to cage and tame the beast.

Sister Cage watched her enemy, bright in steel upon the Rock.

Hers the anger of an ocean wave rolling over deep waters to spend its white fury against the shore, one and then the next, relentless, tearing down high cliffs, pounding rocks to pebbles, grinding pebbles to sand, and thus are mountains laid low. Hers the storm’s wrath, thunder-shaken, sharp with lightning, blown on a wind that rips the oldest trees from the hardness of the ground. Hers the defiance of stone, raised in outrage against cold skies. Hers the anger that sits like broken glass within a chest, the anger that will allow no sleep, no retreat, no compromise.

Nona Grey raises her head and regards her foe through midnight eyes. Perhaps it is just the reflection of the torchlight but somewhere in their darkness a red flame seems to burn.

‘I am my own cage.’ She lifts her sword. ‘And I have opened the door.’

1

There are many poisons that will induce madness but none perhaps quite so effective as love. Sister Apple carried a hundred antidotes but she had drunk that particular draught of her own free will, knowing there was no cure.

Thorn and briar tore at her, the ice-wind howled, even the land opposed her with its steepness, with the long miles, the ground iron-hard. The Poisoner pressed on, worn, feeling each of her thirty years, her range-coat shredded in places, the tatters dancing to please the wind.

When the deer-track broke from cover to cross a broad and rutted track Apple followed without hesitation, eyes on the ranks of trees resuming their march on the far side.

‘Stop!’ A harsh cry close at hand.

Apple ignored it. Kettle had summoned her. She knew the direction, the distance, and the pain. Kettle had called her. Kettle would never call her from her watch, not even if her life were in danger. But she had called.

‘Stop!’ More voices raised, the dialect sharp-angled and hard to attach meaning to.

The treeline stood ten yards away across a ditch. Once she reached the shadows beneath the branches she would be safe. An arrow zipped past her. Apple glanced along the road.

Five Durnishmen spanned the width, their quilted armour salt-stained and mud-spattered, the iron plates sewn on shoulders and forearms, brown with rust. Apple could reach the trees before the men caught her – but not before the next arrow or spear did.

Cursing, she reached both hands into her coat pockets. Some of the obscenities she uttered had probably never been spoken by a nun before. Even the Durnishmen seemed surprised.

‘Don’t kill me. I’m worth more to you alive.’ Apple tried not to sound as if she were lecturing a class. She drew her hands out, a wax capsule of boneless in one, a wrap of grey mustard in the other, and a small white pill between finger and thumb. She popped the pill into her mouth, hoping it was bitterwill. She had all the antidotes ordered inside the many inner pockets of her habit, but reaching in to recover one would be asking to get shot, so she chanced to memory, feel, and luck, fishing in the outer pocket of her range-coat.

‘You … are nun?’ The tallest of them took a pace forward, spear levelled. He was older than the other four. Weathered.

‘Yes. A Holy Sister.’ She swallowed the pill, grimacing. It tasted like bitterwill. The four younger raiders, all with the same dark and shaggy hair, tightened their grip on their weapons, muttering to pagan gods. Perhaps one nun in a hundred was anything other than a Holy Sister but with the stories told in Durn they couldn’t be blamed for thinking every woman in a habit was a Red Sister, or a Holy Witch just itching to blast them to smoking ruin. ‘A nun. From the convent.’

‘Convent.’ The leader rolled the word around his mouth. ‘Convent.’ He spat it past frost-cracked lips.

Apple nodded. She bit back on her desire to say, ‘With the big golden statue.’ The men had to walk into the trap themselves. If they sensed her leading them she would be dead in moments.

The leader glanced back at his men, gabbling out words that so nearly made sense. Durnish was like empire tongue put through a mincer and sprinkled with spice. She had the feeling that if they would just speak a little more slowly and change the emphasis it would all become comprehensible. Apple caught the two words that might keep her alive though. ‘Convent’ and ‘gold’. She broke the capsule of boneless in her fist and rubbed her fingers over her palm to spread the syrupy contents before wiping the hand over the back of her other and her wrist.

‘You. Take us to convent.’ The man advanced another two paces, gesturing with his spear for her to move.

‘I won’t!’ Apple tried to sound scared rather than impatient. She thought of Kettle in danger, injured maybe, and fear entered her voice. ‘I can’t. It’s forbidden.’ She had to get them close. She couldn’t do much if they prodded her ahead of them at the point of a spear. She let her gaze flit between the faces of the men, offering a wavering defiance. A defiance that they might enjoy breaking.

The leader motioned and two of his men advanced to grab Apple’s arms. A third kept his bow ready, half-drawn, arrow pointing her way, daring her to run. The last leaned on his spear, grinning vacantly.

Apple feigned panic, raising her hands to intercept those that reached for her, but offering too little resistance to invite blows. One of the pair seemed to need no excuse and slapped her anyway, a hard, calloused hand across the face. She spat blood and cried out for mercy. Both men were smeared with the clear boneless syrup now, sticky on their fingers.

The slapper twisted one arm behind her while the other made to open her coat, perhaps forgetting that the Ancestor’s brides take a vow of poverty. Knowing he would find her array of poisons and cures rather than any gold or silver Apple wailed piteously, raising her clenched fist to remind them she had something more obviously hidden.

Slapper grunted incomprehensible syllables to Robber and the man abandoned the coat-ties to prise Apple’s hand open. In taking hold of it he got a second dose of boneless wiped across the palm of his hand. With the bitterwill to counter the poison Apple felt only a numbness where the syrup coated her, the strength in her arms untouched.

Apple began crying out, keeping her fist clenched against Robber’s weakening efforts. Slapper tried to twist her into submission and it hurt like fire but she managed enough resistance to stop him breaking the arm behind her. At the same time Apple threw herself left then right, her progress always towards the leader and the archer though she never once glanced their way. The Durns’ hobnails slid on the mud. The remaining subordinates laughed uproariously at their comrades’ efforts, making no move to help. The leader, snorting in disgust, motioned the archer forward then jammed his spear-butt into the mud and followed to intercept the group as they made a weaving approach.

Neither Slapper nor Robber yet seemed to understand that they had been poisoned, presumably believing instead that Apple was an abnormally strong woman, perhaps drawing some animal strength from the depths of her terror. Apple wrenched her fist to her face as the officer reached them. She blew through her closed hand, a short sharp puff, and a cloud of powder from the crushed wrap bloomed around the man’s head. The edge of the cloud caught the archer just behind him.

True terror loaned Apple the strength to throw herself backwards, falling from the Durns’ clutches to the rutted mud. She had seen what grey mustard could do and nothing in her array of antidotes would reduce the pain and disfigurement of it to an acceptable level.

The officer’s screams shattered the air, the breath for his second cry sucking mustard spores into his lungs. The archer fell back, scratching at his eyes. Slapper and Robber staggered away, tripping and stumbling. Which left Apple empty-handed, on the ground, with one able-bodied foe just yards away, spear in hand.

Another person’s distress exerts a certain fascination; the man stood in slack-jawed horror watching the officer claw his face to ruin. Apple glanced at the shadows between the trees. So close: a quick scramble could see her safe in their embrace. The need to be speeding towards Kettle drew at her even more strongly than the desire to escape. But Sisters of Discretion swear more than just vows of piety and poverty. Suppressing an impatient snarl, Apple drew her knife. She rose slowly from the mud amid the officer’s bubbling screams, the archer’s curses, and the struggles of the other two Durnishmen trying and failing to get to their feet. Her headdress had come loose and red hair spilled around her shoulders. The last of her coat-ties gave and her range-coat opened about her like the dark wings of a raptor. She held her knife ready to throw, a pouch of ground deadruff in the other hand in case she got the chance to take the spearman alive.

The raider saw her at the last moment, dragging his gaze from the frothing officer, now fallen into the ditch. As he lowered his spear Apple’s hand rose in an underarm throw and an instant later the hilt of her knife jutted beneath his chin. He sat down, clutching his throat in confusion.

The archer stumbled close by, blinded with tears and blood. Apple took up a dropped spear and ran it through the man’s chest. Next she went to offer mercy to the officer, now a twisting thing of mud and grass in the icy ditch water. She left him in a crimson bath and considered the two fallen Durns, Slapper and Robber. One had his face towards her and tracked the bloody tip of her spear with his eyes. Apple frowned, her gaze wandering to the treeline again, eager to be off. She had no stomach for killing helpless foes. In truth she had no stomach for killing. She had always been a better teacher than a doer.

Apple crouched. ‘Sisters of Discretion are supposed to pass unseen and be impossible to take unawares.’ She took two purple pills from her habit, brilliant groundwort. She had cured and prepared the roots herself, pressed the pills and sealed them in wax. ‘It’s all very embarrassing. I won’t tell if you don’t.’ She peeled the pills quickly and popped one into the mouth of each man then rolled them so they wouldn’t choke. ‘If nobody finds and kills you before you can move again – and believe me you deserve to be found and killed, then my advice is to run all the way back to your boat.’

She wiped her hand on Slapper’s cloak. The groundwort would make them sick for a week. A month if they swallowed too much. She considered leaving her dagger in the spearman’s neck, but went to retrieve it, pulling the blade free with a shudder of revulsion. In the next moment she was moving, running for the trees, red blade in hand.

Apple had always been a teacher first, lacking the iron for the darkest shades of grey-work. Kettle though, she would never fail to do what was required, without relish or complaint. A perfect weapon. When duty called her she had the capacity to put her sweet nature in a box, ready for collection when the mission was complete. The thought of what it would take to get her to call for help made Apple shudder. Kettle would never willingly make Apple abandon the abbess’s orders. Arabella Jotsis stood alone in the wild now, unwatched.

Apple pressed on, using all her resolve to pace herself rather than to sprint. Miles lay ahead. She dodged around trees, following a deer track for a while then leaving it to pursue a stream, rotten with ice.

Kettle had been watching Nona. Had something happened to the child? She was fearless, fierce, and quicker than thinking, but there were more dangerous things out in the Corridor than Nona Grey. Perhaps it was Nona that needed help … Apple shook the thought away: the pain had been Kettle’s, and the fear.

A swirling fog came in, lifted somewhere by the moon’s focus and carried perhaps for days in the ice-wind. The forest clutched at her, sought to trip her at every step, tried to lure her from her path with easier tracks. In the blind whiteness Apple found her way, following the faint echo of Kettle’s cry through the shadow.

Many miles became few miles and, as the fog cleared, became a singular remaining mile. The land had opened up into heath where the soil stood too thin and too sour for crops. Farmsteads lay scattered, raising sheep and goats, few houses stood close enough to see one from the next. Apple picked up speed, running now as she crossed rough ground, divided here and there by grassed-over lanes and collapsed walls of dry stone. Ahead the land dipped. In the broad valley a stream threaded its path between stands of trees before losing itself in a thicker extent of woodland. Kettle waited among those woods, Apple could feel it; her nearness tugged at the scar her shadow-cry had left.

Apple slowed as she approached the first trees. She had been careless before: her haste had delivered her into the hands of men she could have stepped around unnoticed if she had kept her focus. She moved between two elms and the shadows flowed around her, raised with both hands. Shade-work had always come easy to her. Darkness pooled in her palms. When the shadows answered her will it felt as if she had remembered some name that had long escaped her, or recognized the solution to a puzzle, a sort of mental relief, joy almost. Other shadow-magic had been worked within the woods. The empty spaces shivered with the echoes of it. Kettle’s cry lay there, sharp and deep, but other traces too, the sour workings of Noi-Guin. Apple had tasted their like before, back at Sweet Mercy on the night Thuran Tacsis had sent two of them to kill Nona. Quite how they had failed in that task was beyond her.

Apple wrapped herself in darkness and sought the patience of the Grey Sister. Mistress Path had taught her the mantras twenty years ago and Apple had made them part of her own foundation, woven through her core. Today though, with Kettle’s distress throbbing through the shadow, patience came hard.

The undergrowth scratched and tore and rustled with each step Apple took. She felt as raw as any novice, her woodcraft rusty with disuse, certain that her advance would be heard by any foe within a thousand yards. Bait the trap. A tactic as old as killing. Leave a comrade, a friend, a lover wounded, then wait and watch. A Noi-Guin could be resting among the branches of any tree, crossbow ready, bolt envenomed.

Kettle wouldn’t have called me if that were true. Apple advanced, leaving patience behind her but bringing the shadows.

All that drew her eyes to Kettle was the bond between them. The nun lay at the base of a great frost-oak, the length of her body fitting around the rise and fall of roots. Leaves and mud covered her range-coat, her headdress gone, the spread of raven hair showing the paleness of her face only in thin slices. She lay sprawled like a dead thing, a part of the forest floor, a work of camouflage of which any Grey Sister would be proud.

‘Kettle!’ Apple came to her side, the fear of an assassin’s bow crushed beneath the certainty that Kettle lay dead and that no purpose remained to her in the world. She took Kettle’s muddy fingers in her own, shocked by the coldness of them. ‘Kettle … it’s me.’ She choked on the words, overwhelmed, while her other hand, still calm, sought the nun’s pulse with practised ease. Nothing. No … not nothing, a whisper.

Apple reached to pull Kettle to her, to lift her from the cold ground, but saw the hilt of the knife, jutting from her side just above the hip. She touched a finger to the pommel, an iron ball. Leather binding wound the grip. She recognized the dagger. Kettle had shown one like it to her after it was confiscated from Nona. Noi-Guin for certain then. The one that got away. Apple eased her lover onto her lap and sat for a moment, hugging her, eyes squeezed tight against the tears. Seconds later she drew a deep shuddering breath and strove for calm.

Think.

Apple set Kettle back upon the ground and stripped her own range-coat to lie her on. With Kettle arranged on the coat she examined her for other injuries, checking the colour of her skin, lifting an eyelid, listening to her breath, watching the speed with which circulation returned to her extremities when pinched. She took a thin leather tube from the collection within her habit and broke the seal. Already the cold was making her shiver. She tipped the liquid into Kettle’s mouth, sat back, and watched. The knife was the only wound. It must have been coated with blade-venom but there were no strong indications to narrow down the type.

For the longest minute in Apple’s life nothing happened. All about her the trees groaned against the wind, their leaves seething. Then Kettle twitched, spluttered and started to choke. Apple seized her head. ‘Easy! Just breathe.’

‘W-where?’ Any further question became lost in coughing and choking. One hand clutched at the range-coat just above the knife. ‘Hurts.’

‘I told you to breathe, idiot.’

‘A-Appy?’ Kettle rolled her head to see, eyes squinting as if the light were too bright. Her skin was bone-white, lips almost blue. ‘Sister.’ The faintest smile.

‘I’ve given you adrene, it won’t last long. Tell me what you’ve taken. Quick!’

‘Nona. She made me call.’ Kettle slurred the words, staring past Apple at the leaves, black against a white sky. ‘Gone now.’

Apple shook her. ‘What did you take? It’s important!’

‘B—’ Kettle blinked, trying to focus. ‘Black cure.’ Her breath came shallow and fast. ‘And … kalewort.’

‘Kalewort?’

‘I … was cold. Thought it … might be nightweed on—’

‘Who puts nightweed in blade-venom?’ Apple shook her head. ‘Where’s the assassin?’

‘Gone.’ Kettle’s eyes closed and her head flopped back.

Apple bit her lip. The black cure should have had more effect whatever the Noi-Guin had used. She tasted blood and frowned. Her mind lay blank. Nothing in her great store of lore suggested a cause or cure.

Despair closed about Apple. Her lips moved, reciting venoms, none of which fitted the symptoms. Tendrils of shadow caught around Kettle, moving across her in wisps. Apple stared, her brow furrowed, mind racing. On the white inch of wrist exposed before Kettle’s range-coat swallowed her arm, a line of shadow followed the path of the largest vein.

‘No?’ Apple motioned the shadows around her forward and like a dark sea they washed over Kettle. As they drew back traces of shadow remained, held by her veins as a lodestone will hold powdered iron, revealing the invisible lines of its influence. ‘Yes!’

She grabbed Kettle’s face in both hands. ‘Wake up! Kettle, wake up!’ Kettle lay, as boneless as the Durns in the road. Apple slapped her. ‘Wake up! It was dark-venom.’

‘I’m dead then.’ Kettle rolled her eyes open. ‘I’m so sorry.’ A glistening tear pooled in the corner of her eye. She lifted a hand, as if it were the heaviest thing in the world, to Apple’s cheek. ‘You’re bleeding.’

Apple took the fingers and kissed them. ‘You are my blood.’

The darkness began to thicken around them, shadows streaming towards Apple, clotting about her.

‘What are … you doing?’ The smoothness of Kettle’s brow furrowed and her hand dropped back to her side.

‘Saving you,’ Apple said. The effort of drawing so much shadow so fast tightened her voice. She felt a coldness in her bones, an ache behind her eyes.

‘H-how?’ Kettle sought her eyes. ‘There’s no way.’

‘There is a way.’ Apple saw Kettle only because the darkness ran so deep in her. Night enfolded them both now, a fist of darkness within the depths of a forest grown lighter as its shadows were stolen. ‘I have to push you into shadow.’

‘No.’ Kettle managed to shake her head. ‘The Ancestor—’

‘I have to. It’s the only way.’ Apple gathered the darkness around her hands until even to her night-born sight they were holes cut in the shape of her body, without depth or contrast. The Noi-Guin pushed the best of their killers into the shadow, as far as their minds could bear it. It broke some of them. Others were lost in the dark places behind the world. But the price Kettle feared to pay was her soul. The Church taught that those who walked too far into the shadow would never join the Ancestor in unity.

‘Don’t.’ Kettle lacked the strength to raise her hand again. ‘Sister Wheel … says the Ancestor—’

‘Fuck Wheel, and fuck the Ancestor.’ Apple set one hand to Kettle’s chest, kneeling above her, ready to push. She took the hilt of the knife in her other hand. ‘You’re mine and I won’t lose you.’ She bent her head and tears fell. ‘Let me do it.’ Her mouth twitched and the words came out broken. ‘Please.’

‘Poisoner.’ Kettle found the strength to raise a hand, running white fingers into the flame of Apple’s hair. She held her a moment. ‘Poison me.’

And with a cry Apple pressed down with one black palm, all her strength behind it, and with the other drew the assassin’s knife from the wound, pulling with the steel and blood an inky venom born of the darkness that dwells between stars.

2
Two Years Later

‘Have you come for the laundry?’ The tall girl, a willowy blonde with a narrow beauty to her, stood away from her bed and bent to pull the linens from it. A titter ran among the other novices getting undressed around the room. Mystic Class had the whole of the dormitory’s second floor and the beds were well spaced around the walls, with desks between them.

Nona had been warned about Joeli Namsis. Her family held lands to the west and kept a close alliance with Thuran Tacsis. ‘Yes,’ she said, and stepped forward quickly, taking the bundled sheets with hunska swiftness. She returned to the doorway and threw the bedding down the stairs. Across the skin of her back Keot trembled with laughter.

‘Now, which bed is mine? Or must I take one?’ Nona looked around at their faces, a dozen of them, variously astonished or horrified, a couple even amused. Of all the novices from Nona’s time in Red Class she was the first to join Mystic. Three of the girls from her time in Grey Class had reached Mystic ahead of her: Mally, a hunska prime who had been head girl, had a bed close to the door; Alata watched her, dark-eyed, from the far side of the room, the ritual patterning of her scars a black web across arms and cheeks; and Darla who had joined the week before, grinning beneath the brown mop of her hair, the hugeness of her contriving to make the larger Mystic beds look small.

‘Well that was a mistake, peasant.’ Joeli came to stand before Nona.

‘Mistakes are how we learn.’ Nona looked expectantly past Joeli’s shoulder towards an empty bed.

‘Perhaps I should teach you another lesson.’ Joeli raised a hand, fingers spread. A white haze of lines filled Nona’s Path-sight. Some said Joeli was the best thread-worker in the convent, and since Hessa’s death Nona supposed it could be true. Using any kind of Path-power outside a lesson, however, was a sure-fire way to get your back shredded with a wire-willow cane, no matter which family name you bore.

Nona looked up, meeting the green slits of Joeli’s stare, and spoke with all the sincerity she could muster. ‘I love you as a sister, and when we die we will be together in the Ancestor, our bloods mixed.’ A warmth spread across her back as Keot sank into her flesh. A moment later he had wrapped himself around her tongue. ‘But I must warn you, sister, that a sickness runs in me, and if you fashion yourself my enemy I will make a ruin of your life, for I am born of war.’

Joeli stared at Nona, eyes widening as if recognizing a promise rather than a threat. Then laughter burst from her in a clean, controlled peal, confidence pushing aside sensible fear. ‘What dramatics! “I am born of war”.’ Joeli mimicked Keot’s words accented heavily towards the peasants’ dialect. ‘You were born of a mud hut in the wilds.’ She glanced at her friends. ‘What a strange creature this novice is. I can see why Sister Hearth was keen to get her out of her class.’ She turned away.

Nona resisted the urge as Keot tried to make her arm rise to seize the girl’s neck. Instead she turned towards an empty bed with a snarl, angry at the lapse of concentration that had let Keot speak for her.

I will make a ruin of your life, Keot?

You should let me. That bitch means trouble for you.

Nona sat on the bed she had chosen, one of a pair too neat to belong to anyone. She pushed her small bag of possessions under the desk, spare clothes mainly. Joeli was already in animated conversation with three novices across the room, laughter and glances in her direction punctuating their conversation. A fourth girl returned from the stairwell with the sheets Nona had thrown.

If you kill one of them the others will respect you.

Shut up.

The door opened again and Zole walked in, arms folded across the bag she had brought from the Grey dormitory. When Nona had left the classroom where Sister Hearth had examined her merit certificates Zole had been waiting outside the door. They had both nodded acknowledgment but it wasn’t in the ice-triber’s nature to volunteer information.

‘Another one?’ Joeli raised her voice in complaint.

Zole’s face registered no expression as she scanned the room, eyes dark above broad cheekbones. She wore her face like a mask. Nona could count on one hand the times she had seen her smile or scowl.

‘I—’ Joeli seemed about to expand upon her displeasure but for once her supposedly forgotten aristocracy fell short, eclipsed by Zole’s celebrity. Novices rose on all sides along with an excited babble of voices as they moved to welcome the Argatha. Nona decided against shielding her, though she was sure Zole would rather see the novices knocked down than endure their attentions.

Zole made slow but sure progress towards the bed beside Nona, answering questions and flattery with curt nods. On the few occasions she did reply she offered only single words. Most of them ‘no’. Outside the convent it was far worse. Her secret had been uncovered just months after they had returned from the ranging. Some said Sherzal herself had spread the news, but whatever the truth all of Verity soon whispered that Zole was the four-blood spoken of in the Argatha prophecy, the Chosen One come to drive back the ice and bring salvation! And the rest of the empire knew within another month. Pilgrims came to sit in vigil beyond the pillars even on days when the abbess stationed a sister at the base of the Vinery Stair to tell them there was no chance of an audience with Novice Zole.

Zole reached the bed and drove the last couple of novices away with a glower. The Argatha prophecy had been a constant in Sister Wheel’s Spirit classes for almost three years now, and she had managed to infect a fair proportion of the convent with her zeal, including most of the novices. At least the ones who didn’t know Zole.

‘You’re making friends almost as quickly as I am.’ Nona stood and stripped off her habit.

Zole shrugged. ‘None of them are bleeding.’

Nona knelt to dig in her bag for her nightdress. Keot could sink from view for a few moments and knew enough not to be seen. Nona had explained to him that the nuns would seek to burn him out before throwing her from the convent – over a cliff if she were unlucky. Nobody tainted by a devil could stay in service to the Ancestor, even after the taint had been driven from them with hot irons. Sister Wheel’s lessons had left no room for doubt on that account.

‘Welcome to Mystic, shrimp.’ Darla came to the foot of Nona’s bed, somewhat comical in her tent of a nightdress, her arms, thick with muscle, straining out of short frilly sleeves. ‘Nice entrance.’

‘I do my best.’ Nona stepped out of her underskirts and pulled her own nightdress over her head as fast as possible. In Grey dorm they mocked her for being shy, but it was Keot who prompted the haste. Also she was shy.

‘She threatened to kill Joeli before she’d even reached her bed,’ Darla said to Zole. ‘And she didn’t even have a crowd trying to get in her way.’

Zole looked up from her bag, one hand wrapped around the carved tooth of some sea-monster. ‘Good. I do not like that Joeli.’

‘You don’t like anyone,’ Nona said.

Zole shrugged.

‘And besides, I didn’t threaten to kill her.’

‘“I will make a ruin of your life”,’ Darla quoted through a broad grin.

‘That’s maiming at best,’ Nona said. ‘And I seem to remember my welcome to Grey wasn’t too warm either.’

Darla kept her grin. ‘That was just a kicking. Joeli’s a whole lot more dangerous. A thread-worker can mess you up. And she doesn’t even need to do that. She has lots of friends. Too many novices in this class are thinking they might not take their vows, just go back to their families. And when you start to think like that you also start to think how helpful it is to have friends like the Namsis.’

‘A devil got my tongue,’ Nona said. ‘I should have held it more tightly.’

I spoke truth. The fortress of you is built of such moments, they are stones dropped into the well of your tomorrow.

Shut up.

Nona checked the bed for spiders and other welcome gifts then slipped under the blanket, yawning. Darla laughed. ‘Get your beauty sleep, Shield.’ She slapped the bed. ‘Long day tomorrow. You’re with the big girls now.’

All around the room novices were climbing beneath thick blankets, Alata sleeping alone until Leeni got her merit certificate in Spirit. Something Sister Wheel seemed to be taking particular pleasure in denying her. Joeli Namsis wore only her tawny skin to her bed, perhaps proud of her woman’s body. Nona looked away. She would miss Ara’s presence in the bed beside hers, close enough to reach out and touch. She yawned again and stared at the shadow-dance across the beams above her. At heart she was still a child of the Grey and no matter how warm a room might be she would never be at ease with nakedness, even in the bathhouse. Ruli had taught Nona the steam-weaving trick that she had first shown them at the sink-hole in the focus moon, and when possible Nona wore a robe of steam around the bath-pool. Keot hid across the sole of her left foot at such times.

Shadows are nothing. Talk to me instead.

Shut up.

You should thank me. Your enemies make you what you are. Your foes shape your life more than friends ever could. This Joeli is good practice.

Nona ignored Keot and watched the shadows. Most novices with marjal blood could make them dance to their own tune, but such tricks were put beyond her reach the day she cut her own shadow loose. The day she launched it at Yisht to try to save Hessa. She had failed. She had lost both her friend and her shadow, and Yisht had escaped with the shipheart. Sleep came slowly as it always did, fighting to overcome the anger. She finally fell asleep wondering where her shadow might be now, and dreamed of being lost in dark places.

3

‘In Mystic we use edged steel.’ Sister Tallow spoke to Zole and Nona above the clash of swordplay as the other novices sparred in widely spaced pairs across the sand of Blade Hall. She held two naked blades, forge-iron rather than the Ark-steel of a Red Sister’s weapon, but visibly sharp. Each had the same curve as a sister-blade and each was the same length, about as long as a man’s arm from shoulder to fingertips. ‘There are some lessons that must be written in scars.’

Sister Tallow offered the hilts. Nona took hers, clumsy in her new gauntlets. Like her new blade-habit the gloves were reinforced with strips of iron sewn into the padding. They wouldn’t stop every hit but they would lessen the chances of blood being spilled.

‘It’s a good sword.’ Zole swung hers then circled the point in front of her.

Nona lifted her own, finding it heavier than the blunted Grey Class blades. She felt awkward in her blade-habit, as if she were wading in the bath-pool. Red Sisters wore black-skin but that had been scavenged from the hulls of the ships that carried the four tribes to Abeth and was worth more than its weight in gold. Far more. An experienced Red Sister had to die or become a Holy Sister before a new one could get her armour.

‘You two spar. I’ll watch.’ Sister Tallow pointed to a clear patch of sand. ‘No showing off. We have serious and dangerous work ahead of us, and I would rather send you on to Holy Class with the same number of fingers and eyes you had when you arrived in Mystic.’

Nona squared up to Zole. The ice-triber stood as tall as Sister Tallow now, her gerant blood perhaps starting to show. Nona remained a head shorter. She supposed she was around fifteen but when she came from the village she had scarcely realized there were dates and certainly hadn’t known on which one she had been born.

‘What are the rules?’ Nona asked. Behind her thoughts Keot yammered for blood and made his opinions on rules quite clear.

‘No killing thrusts.’ Sister Tallow stepped back.

‘That’s it?’ Nona had no more time for inquiry. Zole pulled the mesh-mask over her face and moved to attack. Nona pulled her own down and lifted her sword.

Zole came in fast as she always did, offering no quarter. Sister Tallow never had to lecture the girl on controlling her temper. Nona wasn’t sure Zole had one. Ara said if they cut the Chosen One open they’d find ice at her core.

Nona’s world narrowed to the flickering of blades and the clash of iron. With her speed matched Nona had to rely on training, on the memory that Sister Tallow had imprinted on her muscles. Deeper than that even – on her bones. She mounted a desperate defence against the stronger girl, acutely aware that the edge she met with her own could open ruinous wounds, even slice a limb off, gone in the blink of an eye, beyond repair. Zole would hardly care if she took all four fingers from Nona’s sword hand at the knuckle.

‘Stop!’ Sister Tallow raised an arm.

Nona put up her blade, relieved.

‘Your fear is beating you.’ Sister Tallow pinned Nona with narrow eyes. ‘Zole doesn’t even have to try.’

‘I’m not afraid!’ A snarl. And a lie. Blade-work held a fear for Nona that was absent when she fought empty-handed. Perhaps it had started with Raymel Tacsis swinging his sword at her as exhaustion robbed her of her speed. Perhaps before. Against most novices blade-work was just a game, but facing hunska primes and full-bloods her control slipped away and slaughterhouse images crept in.

‘Find your centre, novice. Wear your serenity like a second skin.’ Tallow motioned for them to continue.

Nona scowled and raised her blade. Serenity had never helped her find the Path. It had been passion that led her there. Rage. On the blade-path, suspended high above the ground in the chamber behind the changing room, it had been the discovery that she needed to slide rather than stick that made her stop falling. Where the other novices stepped with ever greater caution Nona had raced in.

Zole came at her again, efficient, relentless, cold. Their blades clashed and clashed again. Serenity would wrap up the fear that hampered her, but it would also keep away the anger that she needed. Nona had to have her heart in the battle or it wasn’t a battle at all, just some game. What she required was the right balance.

Nona swung at Zole’s side. The ice-triber stepped inside the blow, trapping Nona’s wrist against her ribs and laying her own blade along the thick collar around Nona’s neck.

‘Break!’ Tallow raised her hand. ‘Work through the standard thrust and parry routines. And think on my instruction, novice. They don’t call me Mistress Blade for nothing …’

After the lesson there was time for half an hour at blade-path before hitting the bathhouse. Nona changed into the lightest of her combat habits and joined the other Mystic novices who had chosen to practise.

She found that most of the class were there, half on the platform high above the net, half below staring up at the show. Even Darla, who Nona almost never saw in the chamber, had turned up. Joeli too, at the doorway down below, watching with her three closest cronies. The blonde girl, Meesha, stood at her side, and before them the hunska half-bloods Elani and Crocey, solid and sly, so similar they might be twins. A novice from Holy Class joined them. One Nona often saw walking with Joeli.

Nona found a spot on the platform’s edge beside Zole and sat, dangling her legs over the drop. ‘Now you’re in Mystic you’ll get to go on the ice-ranging.’

Zole grunted.

‘You notice how they put us up a class on the same day?’ Nona watched Alata on the blade-path. She moved well and had covered half the distance.

‘That’s Wheel’s doing. She wants Argatha and Shield together. She has been sitting on my merit certificate until they were ready to let you up,’ Zole said.

Nona narrowed her gaze and, as if her stare had become a weapon, Alata faltered, slipped, and fell with an oath.

‘It is your temper that held you where you were,’ Zole continued, gazing into space.

‘I—’ Nona bit off a sharp reply. It was true. Mostly true. Keot had returned with her from the Corridor ranging. She had lost a shadow, lost two friends, and gained a devil. Nona supposed she had never been the mildest of novices but with a devil beneath her skin she had turned wild. It had taken the best part of two years to get the upper hand, to slowly regain control and concentration, and even more slowly to regain the trust and respect of the sisters who taught her. ‘I wasn’t holding you back, if that’s what you think.’

Zole shrugged. Everyone knew she’d been ready for Mystic Class for an age, but the abbess didn’t want her ice-ranging. Abbess Glass didn’t think Zole would come back. More importantly Sherzal didn’t want her to go. Her opinion counted in the matter. Despite very obviously being behind the theft of the convent’s shipheart the emperor’s sister remained free, unpunished, and a power in the land. If anything she had tightened her grip on the Inquisition since the theft.

Another novice fell from the blade-path. Nona didn’t register which. ‘So why did they let you move up?’

‘I do not know.’ Zole hardly seemed to care. If Nona hadn’t met Tarkax she would have imagined everyone from the tribes to be carved from ice.

Zole stood to take her turn on the blade-path. Several of the novices raised a cheer as if they were pilgrims crowding on the Rock, hoping to see a miracle. They at least looked embarrassed when Zole turned to stare at them.

Nona watched Zole’s progress without truly seeing. Zole was right that her temper had held her down. Keot might fan the flames but the fire had been there before the devil came to warm himself in its midst. Four devils had found Raymel Tacsis while he waited to cross the Path and enter death. They had made their home within his flesh. The focused will of Academics in Thuran Tacsis’s pay had kept Raymel from joining the Ancestor, and in time they had returned him to health, alive but changed. But not even the power of the Academy could drive a devil from a man’s flesh if it found enough sin to anchor it.

Before the Tacsis giant died Nona had thrust her knife into his back a score of times. Perhaps more: it had been a frenzy. Three of the four devils had returned to the hollow places from where devils watch eternity, but the fourth, spilling out with Raymel’s blood, had slipped through some crack into Nona. At first he had seemed only a scarlet stain on Nona’s knife-hand, one that refused to be washed away with the gore that had reached up past her elbows. But later, in the depths of the night, he had spoken to her. He called himself Keot and claimed it had been neither the blood nor the rage that had let him get under her skin. Rather it had been the pleasure Nona had taken in driving the knife home into her enemy. That had been the crack into which he had squeezed.

‘You’re up.’ A novice tapped Nona’s shoulder.

‘What?’ Nona shook away her thoughts and went to stand at the start of the blade-path. Another girl reset the pendulum.

‘Let’s see you do your trick then.’ Joeli’s voice from below, sounding for all the world as if she were in her father’s halls and Nona was the entertainment, an acrobat hired to amuse.

Nona ran onto the cold, swaying pipe. She never slid along it except late at night when she came to clear her mind. Greasing her feet left the blade-path slippery and brought howls of protest from everyone but the handful of novices who had taken up her approach. Even so, whenever she took the path she went quickly. On the twisting narrowness of the blade-path pipe she ran faster than a non-hunska could sprint. The quickness of it gave the path beneath her feet too little time to sway or shift. In eight counts she had run up the first twist of the spiral. When sliding Nona took the inner path, letting her speed hold her to the metal as she turned momentarily upside-down inside the spiral. Running, she took the outer path and jumped from the top of the first turn to the second, then to the third, breaking the rules. The leap from the last turn of the spiral to the next flattish section was a dangerous one, several yards, risking injury if she missed and struck the pipe in passing.

‘Cheat!’ Joeli’s cry as Nona took off.

Keot twisted beneath her skin, scalding hot. Both feet hit the bar, but neither met it perfectly and on the blade-path one tiny error is multiplied with every step. Over-correction built on over-correction and five paces later Nona fell. No sound escaped her. The bounce of the net brought her to her feet and a moment later she landed cat-footed among the watchers.

‘So, you cheated and then you fell.’ Joeli put herself between Nona and the doorway.

Kill her!

Nona ignored Keot, slipping between Joeli and the tall girl from Holy.

At least cut an ear off …

Nona had her hand on the door before Joeli spoke again. ‘Did you cheat when you murdered Raymel Tacsis?’

Nona turned around.

‘I can see it doesn’t take thread-work to pull your strings.’ Joeli’s smile was an ugly thing.

Better. Make sure you scar her face.

‘Raymel Tacsis sought to kill me out in the wilds. I killed him first.’

‘There were half a dozen of you, including Tarkax Ice-Spear. Raymel came alone.’ Joeli managed to sound disgusted at the injustice of it.

‘I heard she had some gerant helping her.’ The girl from Holy Class wrinkled her nose at the thought of it, somehow ignoring the fact that Raymel stood close on nine foot tall and had sent his soldiers in first. ‘That girl …’ She snapped her fingers, trying to recall a name. ‘You know the one … The fat—’

‘Sorry.’ Darla rubbed her elbow where it had struck the Holy Class novice in the face. She peered down at her, sprawled on the floor, moaning. ‘Didn’t see you there.’

Nona didn’t try to hide her grin. ‘I killed Raymel Tacsis. He was a murderer and I doubt many worse men have drawn breath. If that damaged your family connections at court or inconvenienced the Namsis in any way … I don’t care.’ She turned to go. ‘You’ll have to work harder than that to provoke me, Joeli.’

‘Of course the person who really pulled your strings was back here while you were murdering your betters out in the Corridor.’

Nona found herself facing Joeli again without remembering turning around.

‘A pity she was killed in the cave-in while her conspirator escaped with the shipheart,’ Joeli said. ‘I would have liked to have seen the peasant bitch drowned for her crimes against this convent. What did they call her? Hop-along! That was—’

‘Hessa.’ Nona found herself pinning Joeli to the floor. Her hand scarlet around the girl’s throat where Keot burned across her skin. ‘Her name was Hessa.’

Finish her! Tear her neck open! Keot fought Nona as she struggled to draw her hand back. Shouts of alarm rang out all around her, novices seized her shoulders, and still she couldn’t withdraw her hand though the trembling fingers, caught in a war between her and Keot, exerted no pressure.

As Darla lifted her clear Nona managed to force Keot into the shadows of her habit sleeve. Joeli’s throat slipped undamaged from her grip, just the faint white impression of fingers left to record the event. The girl’s eyes narrowed and she started to choke, clutching at her neck. Darla carried Nona out through the door, and the wave of Joeli’s concerned friends closed in around her. Their voices followed Nona, raised in such outrage that you might think Joeli lay disembowelled in a pool of her own gore. The last thing Nona saw through the ring of backs were Joeli’s eyes seeking hers, a small but triumphant smile on her lips.

4

‘I hear you’ve been making friends in your new class.’ Ara sat herself down beside Nona, golden hair frothing around her shoulders.

‘How—’

‘Ruli told me. You know there’s nothing happens at Sweet Mercy without Ruli knowing minutes later. I think it’s her secret marjal talent. You have your claws, Ruli has gossip-magic.’ Ara nodded at Ruli, crossing the novice cloister to join them.

‘I heard you put Joeli in the sanatorium!’ Ruli sat heavily on Nona’s other side, habit billowing around her, cheeks red with excitement.

‘I hardly touched her.’ Nona frowned. Joeli had come to the Academia Tower with a shawl around her neck. In the corridor outside the lesson she came up to Nona and held her gaze for a long moment, pale green eyes fixed upon Nona’s black orbs without a flicker of fear. ‘Hessa’s name is so important to you? And yet you’ve never even visited the spot where she died. If you really thought Yisht killed Hessa … wouldn’t you want to find her murderer?’ She turned away then with just a hint of a smile, her words echoing in Nona’s head.

A minute later Sister Rail had called the novices into the classroom. Inevitably she spotted Joeli’s neck scarf and asked about this departure from the novice uniform. Joeli had, in a croaking whisper wholly absent in the corridor, related a lurid tale of being throttled. Sister Rail had sent her to the sanatorium to be checked over and had fixed Nona with a steely eye. Sister Rule had been huge, straining every seam of her habit. Her replacement, Rail, was a short, painfully thin woman whose habit flapped around her. Both nuns controlled their class with a very firm hand, but Rule’s had at least been fair and she had welcomed questions, valuing cleverness of any kind. Although she’d endured just a handful of lessons so far it seemed clear to Nona that Sister Rail most valued the ability to recite what the mistress said. She appeared to consider questions to be a form of stupidity and contrary ideas tantamount to mutiny.

Nona looked around at her friends on the cloister bench. ‘Really. I had a hand on Joeli’s neck but I held back. I didn’t choke her.’

The pause, just a beat of silence, reminded Nona that even friends needed a moment to swallow unlikely statements, true or not.

‘Rosie won’t be taken in by a pretend croak,’ Ruli said. ‘She’ll send Joeli on her way soon enough.’

But Joeli hadn’t returned to class. She wasn’t in the cloister either, and Joeli loved to hold court beneath the centre oak during breaks. Nona glanced at her friends. They had seen her rages, back before she started to master Keot, and those hadn’t been pretty scenes. Fortunately Zole had suffered the worst of them, mostly out on the sands of Blade Hall, and had never complained … probably because she usually won the fight. And even when Keot had his hooks set deep into the meat of her emotions Nona had never used her flaw-blades or raised her hand against a novice not training for the Red.

‘So, senior novice!’ Jula hailed. She bent over Nona’s shoulder, lowering her voice. ‘Are you too grand to come “below” with us now?’ She cropped her mousey hair short these days. It tickled Nona’s ear.

‘Try to stop me.’ Nona grinned. Jula had always been the most bookish and law-abiding of novices but since her discovery, close by the Seren Way, of a hidden entrance into the caves there had been no end to her enthusiasm for clandestine exploration.

Darla came to join them, shouldering her way through the building crowd. ‘Oh Ancestor, that Sister Rail will kill me with those lessons. I don’t care which emperor annexed what territory.’

‘You should!’ Ruli said. ‘Your father’s promotion is any day now, and generals are always annexing something.’

Darla scowled, sitting heavily on the bench. ‘And I don’t care which tax caused what revolt. The only good thing to happen in that lesson was Joeli leaving.’

‘Seriously, though.’ Ruli pushed aside the long pale fall of her hair and turned back to Nona. ‘Keep a lid on that temper. Sister Wheel would happily push you off the cliff and have Ara as Shield. And what would you do out there in the world if the abbess had to throw you out?’

Ara nodded. ‘Joeli’s trouble. She’s got half the mistresses on her side and a lot more friends inside the convent than you do. Then you have to think about how many friends she has outside. Just because they like her family’s money rather than her doesn’t stop them being dangerous. The Namsis are as well placed as my family, plus if you’re discharged from the order they’d happily murder you just to earn favour with the Tacsis.’

‘Sometimes I think I’d like to go out there and let them try.’

‘Nona!’ Ruli looked shocked.

‘What? It’s the only way I’m ever going to find Yisht. She’s not going to come back here and let me kill her.’ Nona scowled up at the grey sky, darkening by the moment. The cloister roofs opposite lay white, plastered by the ice-wind. The centre oak’s branches tossed randomly as the wind sought its direction, the Corridor wind trying to reassert itself. The tree’s leaves were wrapped so tightly against the cold that the branches seemed bare. ‘Joeli said bad things about Hessa. That’s what got to me.’

‘That’s how she is. Pulling strings, even if it’s not thread-work,’ Ara said. ‘She’s even got on the Poisoner’s good side because she’s so good at brewing up nastiness in a pot. So watch what you touch around her! And she poisons minds just as easily. The girl’s got a tongue on her. It wasn’t bad luck you fell foul of her straight off. She made it happen. Perhaps she even had it hot for Raymel Tacsis. She wouldn’t be the first Namsis matched to a Tacsis.’

Nona stared at the novices out on the gravelled yard, jaw clenched. Ara was right and the truth of it burned her. She’d been manipulated, moulded to the Namsis girl’s desire. Her eyes found Zole, alone as usual, sitting with her back to the centre oak, knees drawn up. Joeli could never sway Zole. The ice-triber gave out nothing for anyone to take a hold of. Since the bloodshed at the Devil’s Spine all those years ago Zole had perhaps spoken a hundred words to Nona. Most of them singular and days apart.

‘So, are we cave hunting tonight?’ Ruli asked.

‘Don’t you ever sleep?’ Darla was distinctly less keen than the rest of them when it came to exploring the tunnels riddling the Rock of Faith.

Ruli stuck her tongue out. ‘So, are we?’

‘It’s dangerous.’ Ara closed her fingers, signing that Ruli should lower her voice.

Ara didn’t just mean the chance of getting lost or injured. After the theft of the shipheart Abbess Glass had made clear that any novices exploring the convent’s undercaves would find themselves stripped of the habit, too untrustworthy to marry the Ancestor. And it seemed that all the rules were being more strictly enforced these days. Sister Wheel’s determination to root out wrong-doing more zealous from one day to the next.

‘It’s the only exciting thing we do outside Blade class.’ Ruli pouted. Jula had discovered the fissure hidden just past one of the many turns of the Seren Way, but it had been Ruli who convinced the novices that the caves it led to were just caves, not directly under the convent and so not the convent’s undercaves. On that basis they had begun their explorations. Discovery would undoubtedly bring punishment, but wouldn’t see them turned out into the world. Besides … they weren’t going to be discovered!

‘I …’ An uneasiness ran through Nona. Having no world outside Sweet Mercy to return to she had always been the one of them with most to lose. ‘Perhaps we shouldn’t …’ Across the cloister she saw a face at a window, above the galleried walkway. Joeli? Watching her? Smiling with the mouth that had sullied Hessa’s name. Nona knew she wouldn’t find any clues to Yisht’s whereabouts on top of the Rock. And Joeli had been right. Nona had failed her friend. For three long years Nona’s struggles with mastering Keot and the enormity of the challenge in finding justice for Hessa had kept her from action. Perhaps there really was something in the caves that might help. Maybe they could find a passage to the convent undercaves. She owed it to her friend to visit the place where she had died. Maybe Hessa had left some clue for Nona that might lead to her killer. Even at twelve Hessa had had few equals when it came to thread-work and bathed in the power of the shipheart she might have accomplished miracles. ‘Oh hells, let’s do it!’

A raindrop hit the back of Nona’s hand. A fat raindrop, close to freezing. A heartbeat later a salvo scattered down around them. As one the novices joined the rush for the shelter of the galleries, and behind them the black sky opened, hurling down the rain as if each drop were intended to be fatal. By the time Nona looked again for the window where Joeli had been the rain had drawn a curtain across it.

Sister Pail found Nona with her friends as they huddled together watching the downpour. ‘You’re to appear before the convent table tonight at eighth bell, that’s Ferra, not Bray.’ She stood regarding Nona with mild distaste, her habit beaded with water.

‘Why? What’s she done?’ Ghena, small and dark, working her way out of a clump of Red Class novices.

Sister Pail kept her gaze on Nona. ‘The abbess doesn’t approve of novices trying to murder other novices.’

5
Abbess Glass

‘Any other business before we invite the judge to make his petition?’ Abbess Glass looked up from her notes. Along both sides of the long table nuns returned her gaze. All except Sister Kettle, still recording the minutes of the last item in the ledger of record. A chamber beneath the scriptorium held piles of such ledgers, filled with minutes, stacked to the ceiling in columns that marched off into the mildewed gloom. Enough minutes to constitute hours, weeks, decades. Never to be read. But authority must leave a trail or how else will it be held to account, and without checks, or at least the potential for them, authority, like any power, corrupts. ‘Other business?’

‘Nona Grey.’ Sister Rail laid a hand upon the table. It was, like the rest of her, little more than skin and bones, the long nails jagged at the ends.

‘Again?’ Abbess Glass sighed and flexed her own hand. The burn scar across her palm had remained stiff despite all of Sister Rose’s oils and unguents, allowing only limited movement. At times like these she let the echo of that old pain remind her that it had been Nona who saved her from the fire.

‘Again.’ Sister Rail inclined her head. On the table her nails dug at the wood.

‘Really?’ Abbess Glass had disliked Sister Rail within moments of her arrival from the Convent of Silent Devotion, but by that point Sister Rule had already departed on her sabbatical and nobody else could teach Academia to all four classes. Besides, Rail had other qualifications Glass required, and one did not have to like one’s pieces in order to play them. ‘Tell me.’

‘She attacked and very nearly maimed Novice Joeli within hours of joining Mystic Class.’ The bony hand on the table became a bony fist. The candle flames jumped as if Sister Rail had struck the wood and set the candlesticks shuddering.

‘I wonder that Sister Spire hasn’t brought this to my attention.’ Abbess Glass looked to the nun in question. Nona’s new class mistress was another recent addition to the convent, a young Holy Sister returned from three years’ ministering to the sick on the far borders of Archon Anasta’s see.

‘Sister Spire didn’t know anything about it.’ Sister Spire raised an eyebrow and turned her gaze on Sister Rail.

‘The girl came to me in confidence.’ Sister Rail made a sour pucker of her mouth. Rail’s family were a very minor branch of the Namsis tree and she had petitioned the abbess before on Novice Joeli’s behalf.

The abbess frowned, wondering what ‘almost maiming’ the novice had entailed. ‘And what do you propose we do?’ She could see her breath before her. White hands pulled her robes tighter. The cold never left the hall, the heating pipes lay freezing since the shipheart had been taken. ‘Do you have a punishment in mind, sister?’

‘Reduce the girl to convent helper,’ Sister Rail replied without hesitation. ‘That’s what she deserves. At the very least she must be returned to Grey Class and whipped before the Ancestor’s dome.’

‘I vote she be whipped and then reduced to helper.’ Sister Wheel leaned forward, elbows on the table. ‘Or banished.’

‘Perhaps we could hear some evidence first, sister? Before moving to sentencing.’ The abbess raised her hand to forestall Wheel’s reply. ‘Did someone think to summon the girls?’ She drank from the cup beside her, wishing the water were wine.

‘I saw them waiting in the corridor.’ Sister Apple had arrived late and sat at the far end of the table.

Abbess Glass gestured towards the door. The ice had been surging for three years straight, all the nations of the Corridor squeezed tight against their borders, bursting for war, and here she sat arbitrating the disputes of children.

Sister Apple’s footsteps echoed in the bare hall. She spoke a word to the junior nun outside and moments later Joeli Namsis limped in, one hand at her throat, blonde hair in disarray. Nona Grey stalked in behind her. She looked twice the size of the painfully thin stray the abbess had brought from Verity more than five years earlier. Her unnerving all-black eyes seemed to challenge each nun in turn. She stood as tall as several at the table now, still slim, but Abbess Glass knew the body beneath that habit was corded with muscle. The abbess frowned at the state of Nona’s hair, a short and spiky shock as consumingly black as her eyes. Efforts to tame it over the years had singularly failed.

Abbess Glass nodded to Sister Spire.

‘If you could outline your grievance, Novice Joeli?’

Joeli looked as if nothing but determination kept her upright, sagging around her unspecified injuries. She dragged her bad leg a step closer to the table and spoke in a cracked whisper, holding her neck. ‘I was watching the class at blade-path. The new girl fell and seemed to think it was my fault. She beat me to the ground and tried to kill me.’

‘Novice Nona?’ Sister Spire gave her an inquiring look.

‘I did knock her down. If I had tried to kill her she would be dead.’

Sister Spire frowned. She had blunt features, not unkindly arranged, marred by a burn that ran across her forehead and down the side of her face. ‘Novice Joeli, how did Novice Nona try to kill you?’

‘She …’ Joeli stifled a sob. ‘She strangled me. She said she would kill me. She said it before she even chose her bed! And … and then she wrapped her hands around my throat and …’ Another sob. ‘They had to pull her off me.’

‘Is this true, Novice Nona?’ Sister Spire asked.

‘It was one hand. And for a few seconds. But yes.’ Nona furrowed her brow, looking furiously at the ground.

‘And how long would you say you were throttled for, Novice Joeli?’

‘I … it could be minutes. I blacked out after a while.’

Sister Wheel banged her fist to the table and the shadows danced. ‘Any period of time one novice spends strangling another is too long. What are we even discussing? Take her habit. She’ll never be fit for her vows. Novice Arabella can take the Ordeal of the Shield and serve the Argatha in her place.’

High above them the shutters rattled as the ice-wind picked up strength. It always seemed to be an ice-wind these days.

Abbess Glass stared at the two novices. She knew Joeli to be manipulative and spiteful, unable to forget her family’s privilege. On the other hand she was a quantal prime with rare skill at thread-work and was an accomplished poisoner to boot. Nona of course was too precious to be lost to the Church, a three-blood, fast as a devil and with a temper to match. The abbess would not lose sight of the girl – but Nona might just have made keeping her in the order impossible. If she had deliberately injured another novice Nona had done about the only thing that could get Sister Rose to agree with Sister Wheel on something. Sister Rose spent too much time repairing bodies to forgive deliberate and unwarranted harm caused in anger. She wouldn’t let a training blade be put in any hand that might seek the life of another novice. Together both sister superiors could overrule the abbess.

Sister Spire frowned. ‘Have you anything to say in your defence, Novice Nona?’

‘I didn’t try to kill her. I barely squeezed her neck.’

Joeli straightened, lowering the hand from beneath her chin and pulling down the collar of her habit. Along both sides of her throat livid bruises told the story of fingers pressed deep, the black imprints surrounded by a halo of yellowing flesh. Sister Wheel drew in a sharp breath. Sister Rail thumped the table in outrage. ‘This! This is the work of someone who has no place within our order.’

Abbess Glass felt the tide turn. She presided over a convent where a score of novices could do the miraculous, some moving faster than thought, some weaving shadows, or fire, and some few walking the Ancestor’s Path, returning from it echoing with the power of the divine. And yet given a choice she would never once consider exchanging for any of that the gift the Ancestor had given to her. People were a magic and a mystery, no matter whether they were low-born or high, no matter whether it was soil or spells they turned their hands to, whether they were geniuses or fools. There were few who saw past faces, past status, past what people said to what they meant. Abbess Glass knew she didn’t see far into the puzzle, but she saw further than most, and it gave her an edge. An edge so sharp that most of those she cut didn’t even know it until it was far too late. Right now though, all her gift told her was that the room had shifted and Nona stood on the brink.

Across the table from Sister Wheel Sister Rose lowered her head, lips pressed tight, brow furrowed.

‘Are there no witnesses?’ Sister Kettle asked, looking up from her recording. Surprise registered on several faces. Sister Kettle never spoke up at convent table – it wasn’t her place to – less than ten years into her vows. She came to record, not to speak, but so soon returned from a long and arduous mission she might be forgiven her lapse.

‘There are many witnesses!’ Sister Rail brightened, showing narrow teeth in a narrow smile. ‘Let me—’

‘Joeli is a very popular novice.’ Abbess Glass spoke over Mistress Academia. ‘Many of the girls may be swayed by personal loyalties, turning suspicion into fact.’

‘Would you summon the accused’s friends instead?’ Sister Rail demanded.

‘We need a witness who would satisfy all of us as impartial and true.’ The abbess studied the grain of the table between her spread hands as if such a hope were impossible.

Sister Wheel took the bait. ‘The Chosen One was there!’ She looked up in triumph.

Sisters Tallow and Apple suppressed long-suffering sighs.

‘Let it be Novice Zole then.’ The abbess nodded to Kettle who hurried to the door. ‘At least nobody can accuse her of being friends with either party. Or anyone else. Nona and Joeli can wait outside.’

Kettle led the pair to the door and returned to the table having sent for Zole. The shadows clung to the nun as she walked, like cobwebs. They mottled her face as if they were stains running across her skin. When Apple had brought Kettle back, injured and changed, there hadn’t been one person at the table who had thought the convent still held a place for her, not now she walked in darkness as the Noi-Guin do. That had been a long debate. A long night and a longer morning. But at length Glass had steered the sisters to the decision she wanted.

‘You know there is no safe place for Nona if she were to leave this convent.’ Sister Apple spoke to the table in general, her gaze avoiding Sister Wheel and Sister Spire. We’ve waited more than a generation for a three-blood novice and now you want to send her out to our enemies because of a fight with a girl who’s never forgotten she was born Sis. Joeli’s two parts spite, one part privilege.’

‘She is a member of our sisterhood!’ Wheel glared across the table. ‘And she was nearly killed whilst under the protection of the Ancestor.’

‘Attempted murder is punishable by the oven. She would be of no danger to us then.’ Sister Rail spoke lightly as if the matter were of little consequence. ‘She would fall into nobody else’s hands.’

‘In Sweet Mercy we drown rather than cook,’ said the abbess, without humour. ‘And we have managed to avoid capital punishment for several decades. I do not intend to start again today.’

Raised voices in the corridor drew their eyes to the doorway. Abbess Glass prayed the novices weren’t fighting again. The argument drew closer and she relaxed, hearing a man’s complaint. A brief knocking and the heated debate outside continued.

‘Come!’

Sister Pail burst in. ‘He won’t listen! I told him to stay!’ She still looked like a child to Abbess Glass, just two years in the habit. It took an effort not to call her Novice Suleri. Behind her came Zole, ice-spattered and glowering at the world with impartial dislike. Behind Zole a tall white-haired man encompassed by the thickest of velvet robes.

‘Irvone!’ Abbess Glass rose to greet the judge. The other nuns followed suit, Sister Rose struggling to rise having sat too long and weighing three times what was healthy.

A young man, burdened under books of law, hastened around the judge to introduce him.

‘Judge Irvone Galamsis offers the Abbess of Sweet Mercy Convent his greetings and felicitations on this the ninety- seventh anniversary of Emperor Royan Anstsis’s victory over the Pelarthi insurrection.’

‘Ah, that. How could we forget?’ Abbess Glass broadened her smile into the most genuine imitation at her disposal. ‘Irvone! How nice to have the pleasure of your company again. It’s been what … three years?’

‘Forgive the intrusion, dear abbess.’ Irvone inclined his head towards a bow. ‘But on seeing the arrival of the young lady about whom I’ve come all this way to petition you I felt I must be heard.’

Abbess Glass considered having the judge escorted from the hall, perhaps even from the convent, but it would be an expensive pleasure. Better to hand over the small victory of a seat at the convent table in order to compensate the loss awaiting him. She gestured to a vacant chair and the judge’s assistant pulled it out for him.

‘Stand at the end of the table, Novice Zole.’ Abbess Glass indicated the spot before glancing towards Sister Pail. ‘Bring Nona and Joeli back, sister.’

Accused and accuser re-entered the hall a moment after the junior nun exited. Sister Apple craned her neck to watch Joeli with particular attention, her eyes narrow. Further along the table Sister Pan coughed and muttered about the cold.

‘Novice Zole, what can you tell us about this morning’s incident at blade-path?’ Abbess Glass favoured the girl with a warm smile, knowing that it would not be returned.

‘Novice Joeli accused Novice Hessa of helping Yisht to steal the shipheart,’ Zole said. ‘Nona knocked her down.’

‘I would have wanted to knock her down myself,’ Abbess Glass said.

‘I would have.’ Sister Tallow kept a flinty gaze on Joeli. ‘No “wanted” about it.’

‘And then Nona strangled her!’ Sister Rail said.

Zole shook her head. ‘She held Joeli’s neck. There was no strangling.’

Sister Wheel harrumphed in irritation but couldn’t bring herself to contradict the Chosen One. Beside her Sister Rail looked daggers at Nona then raised a hand towards Joeli. ‘Of course she was strangled! You can see it!’

‘No.’ Zole shook her head again. ‘It did not happen.’

‘But the bruises!’ Sister Rail banged the table. ‘You think we’re blind?’

‘The evidence does seem compelling.’ Irvone nodded, candlelight glinting on the gold circlet around his hair.

Zole shrugged.

‘This is nonsense.’ Rail looked around the table. ‘We should vote and then the abbess will decide.’

Abbess Glass puffed out her cheeks. There were only two votes that mattered, the rest she could overrule, but if the convent’s two sister superiors united against her the matter would have to go to the archons or the high priest. Such public dissent would weaken her position and Nona would likely be found guilty in any case. ‘Let us vote then.’

‘Guilty.’ Sister Rail folded her arms.

‘Innocent.’ Sister Apple frowned, still watching the novices.

‘I abstain.’ Sister Pan huddled within the range-coat she never removed these days.

‘Innocent,’ Sister Tallow said. ‘If Nona wanted the girl dead she would have cut her head off.’

As Mistress Spirit Sister Wheel could vote first with the other mistresses, but as a sister superior she could also vote last. She waved for the class nuns to vote.

‘Guilty.’ Sister Oak, Red Class mistress, looked down.

‘Guilty.’ Sister Hearth had replaced Sister Flint as Grey Class mistress and had witnessed the worst of Nona’s rages while she struggled to control Keot.

Sister Spire seemed unwilling to speak but at last spoke in a small voice. ‘Guilty.’

‘Innocent.’ Sister Fork of Holy Class smiled encouragingly at Nona.

‘Sister Wheel?’ Abbess Glass inquired.

‘I …’ The older nun goggled at her, jaw clenching and unclenching. ‘I am sure the Chosen One had told us what she saw … but …’ The words seemed to hurt her. ‘She may not have seen everything. And this novice is guilty of many crimes. So I say, guilty.’

‘Sister Rose?’

Sister Rose shifted her bulk unhappily in her chair. ‘I wish you had come to me, Joeli. I have salves that would have helped your poor throat.’ She looked at the abbess, brown eyes glistening. ‘I’m sorry … but I can’t sanction this level of violence against fellow novices, especially in one so talented in battle. What will come next? I—’

‘Joeli didn’t come to you?’ Abbess Glass asked. That didn’t sound like Joeli Namsis at all. The girl would go to the sanatorium with a splinter and try to stay for a week. Especially if she could lay the blame for the splinter at someone else’s feet.

‘No.’ Sister Rose shot the novice a sympathetic look. ‘That was unreasonable of me. She couldn’t be expected to brave an ice-wind in her condition. But if she had sent word I would have come. Sister Rail really should have told me.’

‘Why would you not seek Sister Rose’s attention?’ Sister Apple stood from her chair and advanced on Joeli.

‘I didn’t want to bother—’

‘You’re bothering all of us now, Joeli. You bothered Mistress Academia before lunch. And yet you didn’t present yourself to our own sweet Rosie to ease your suffering?’ She stalked around the novice, peering at her neck. ‘Show me your hands.’

Joeli instinctively hid them in the pockets of her habit. Apple reached out and took the closest one, pulling it towards her face, palm up. ‘Come.’ She led the novice to the table, holding the hand towards the candles. ‘See?’

‘I see four fingers and a thumb.’ Judge Irvone covered a yawn.

Sister Apple ignored him. ‘This yellow staining here. Do you see it?’

Abbess Glass leaned forward. The girl’s fingers were faintly yellow here and there, the colour of an old bruise almost faded from sight.

‘Wodewort and burn-cotton. Careful preparation with an alkali base gives you Ulhen’s ointment.’ Sister Apple released Joeli’s hand.

Sister Rose scraped her chair back and came to see. ‘It has a role in the treatment of some chronic skin conditions but you have to be pretty desperate to use it. The main side-effect is severe bruising.’ She stepped back and looked Joeli in the face. The novice bowed her head. ‘Oh, Joeli! You didn’t?’

‘She choked me.’ Joeli spoke softly and without conviction, staring down at her hands.

‘I’ve a pill that will get the truth out of you soon enough!’ Sister Apple turned to make for the door.

‘Stay.’ The abbess raised her hand. ‘Potions and pills have no role at convent table. We have no evidence of their accuracy nor Church sanction to rely on such.’ She ignored Apple’s raised eyebrows. Sometimes the nun’s enthusiasm for her own works overrode common sense. Such cards were not to be revealed or played over novices and before an audience like Irvone Galamsis. ‘I will say, however, that it seems impossible that we condemn Novice Nona to any harsh punishment on the basis of what we have seen and heard. Both of you girls are confined to convent this seven-day, and the next, and neither of you will eat lunch until the seven-day after that. If there is any more fighting between you I shall be asking Sister Tallow to break out the wire-willow. Now go. And count yourselves lucky! Run!’

The novices hastened to the door. ‘Not you, Zole.’

Zole turned as the other two vanished through the doorway. For a moment she seemed to be considering whether to obey. Then with a shrug she closed the door and returned to the table.

‘So, to your business, Irvone,’ Abbess Glass said. ‘You came with a petition concerning Novice Zole.’

‘Indeed. Once more I come seeking the return of a novice.’ He inclined his head, full of gravitas, consulting the notes his assistant had set before him. It had always amused Glass quite how closely the judge resembled the statues and images the heretic Scithrowl made of the Ancestor. The mane of his white hair and blade of his nose making him seem wisdom incarnate rather than the most corruptible of Verity’s three high court judges. Irvone cleared his throat. ‘Fortunately on this occasion the novice is to be returned to the bosom of her loving family rather than to her appointment with the gallows.’

‘And the loving family in question would be …’

‘Our own esteemed royal family!’ Irvone smiled. ‘Young Zole is to be returned to House Lansis itself, and the arms of her mother, the honourable Sherzal.’

A low mutter ran the length of the table. Sister Wheel struggled to contain her outrage, and failed. ‘The Argatha belongs to the Church! She’s not some royal toy!’

The judge kept his eyes on Abbess Glass, ignoring Wheel’s outburst.

‘The emperor’s sisters have standing invitations to visit the convent any time they like,’ Abbess Glass said. ‘I would be delighted to discuss this matter in person with Sherzal.’

Irvone forced a smile and spread his hands. ‘I fear the honourable Sherzal is uncertain about the nature of her welcome after the wild slanders spread at court at the time of the convent’s … unfortunate loss.’

‘Certainly she would be still more welcome if she came visiting with the shipheart that was stolen from us. But we’re hardly likely to take the emperor’s sister prisoner or raise our hands against her, are we, Irvone? We are brides of the Ancestor, pledged to peace.’ She gestured at the stern faces around the table. Sister Tallow in particular looked no more than a blink from killing someone.

Irvone glanced around the seated nuns with a nervous frown. ‘That’s as maybe, abbess. However, Sherzal is within her rights to demand the return of her child.’

‘Her ward,’ Abbess Glass corrected.

‘Adopted child.’

‘Adopted in absentia? She was her ward when she arrived.’

‘A recent development,’ the judge acknowledged. ‘But entirely legal. Zole is Sherzal’s heir. Trained in her palace for some years before being entrusted into your care until such time—’

‘Until such time as I see fit to discharge her from her pledge of service.’

‘Until such time as Sherzal, Zole’s parent and guardian, calls for her return.’ Irvone turned to his assistant who already had the uppermost of his books open at a ribbon-marked page.

‘Yes. Yes.’ Abbess Glass waved the matter aside. ‘Again, Irvone, you come to us with a matter properly covered by Church law. Sherzal should take any concerns she may have to High Priest Nevis and they will be dealt with through the correct ecclesiastical channels.’

‘It’s a bad time to be imposing Church law over secular law, abbess.’ The judge shrugged within his robe.

‘One is not imposed over the other, judge.’ Abbess Glass reached for her water again, mouth dry. Irvone Galamsis might be greedy and lacking morals, but he wasn’t stupid. After three years of narrowing, the Corridor ran with rumours of fresh wars. When the ice advanced something else had to give. Such times were poor ones to remind an emperor that some of the empire’s most deadly resources were not his to control but must be lent to his purpose through the goodwill of the Church. ‘Each law has its own domain where it applies without challenge from the other.’

‘Reaching for Church law can get your fingers burned …’ The judge let his eyes linger on Abbess Glass’s right hand. ‘In any event, I had the idea that under Church law the issue of family rights versus convent authority over novices was somewhat vexed. Is that territory you really wish to wander into?’

‘Was there anything else, judge?’

Judge Irvone sat back in his chair, impassive save for a hard gleam in his eyes. ‘The honourable Sherzal was most insistent that Zole not go on the ice in any of the exercises your novices may undertake. I’m sure we can all agree on that. After all, none of us wish to lose the child.’

The abbess glanced at Zole who had stood so impassive and immobile that it took an effort to remember she was there at all. ‘Sherzal told us that Zole was the only survivor from the town of Ytis on the empire’s border with Scithrowl. Why would she be in any particular danger on the ice?’

The judge narrowed his eyes. ‘She spent her early years on the ice and unfortunately spent considerable time in the company of the criminal, Yisht, who stole the Sweet Mercy shipheart. It is possible she might wish to return to her parents’ tribe on the ice or to seek Yisht’s tribe out of some misplaced affection for the fugitive.’ He turned in his chair to face Zole. ‘I’m sure you’d like to swap your habit for something a bit more fashionable and join Sherzal at her palace, wouldn’t you? There’s a grand party coming up. She has exciting plans and wants you to be part of them!’

Zole regarded the judge without expression. ‘There are many things here I have yet to learn.’

‘But Sherzal has teachers for you, child! Safira is waiting to resume your weapons training, and Sherzal can call upon instructors from the Academy itself!’

‘I will ask the abbess for guidance,’ Zole said.

‘And I will give it.’ Glass hid her surprise and placed both hands flat upon the table. ‘Now, have you any more business to discuss, Irvone?’

The judge shook his head in resignation. ‘This is a poor decision, abbess.’

‘Even so.’

And with that push Abbess Glass set a new game in play, one domino falling into the next. So many pieces to fall, so many chances to fail. No one but her understood the game yet, but that didn’t mean she would win it. A thrill of fear ran through her. But the ice pressed in on both sides and somewhere high above them the moon continued its fall. It was time to move.

6

Nona lay awake her second night in the Mystic dormitory thinking she would never sleep. Joeli had retired to her cluster of friends and then to bed with nothing but hard looks thrown in Nona’s direction. Even so, when the lamps were extinguished Nona curled beneath her blankets wondering if there and then in the darkness the girl was picking at the jumble of her thoughts, seeking loose threads on which to pull.

However long Nona tossed and turned before her dreams took her it was not long enough to see Zole return. In the morning the ice-triber rose early and was leaving the room as Nona threw back her covers.

Nona finally trapped her at breakfast, taking her seat next to Zole who sat, head lowered, eating with her usual dedication as if it were a chore to be accomplished as swiftly as possible. Nona picked up her fork, glancing at the heaped and steaming bowls lined along the middle of the table. ‘You didn’t see me.’ She kept her voice low, leaning towards Zole. ‘In blade-path you didn’t see what happened.’

‘No.’

‘But you told the convent table that you did …’

‘No.’

‘But you said—’

‘I told them you didn’t strangle the girl.’

‘But you didn’t see …’

‘Are you given to lying?’ Zole looked up from her porridge.

‘No …’

‘The abbess says words are steps along a path – the important thing is to get where you’re going.’ Zole shrugged and returned to her porridge.

Nona hesitated then spoke. ‘Is this because I saved your life when Raymel …’

Zole swallowed. ‘My life was only in danger because of your actions.’

‘What? I saved—’

‘If you had killed Raymel Tacsis at your first attempt I would not have been lying poisoned in a cave. You should have cut his head off.’

Nona sat back. Zole hadn’t spoken so many words in a row to her for years, perhaps ever. Over on the Grey table Ara and Ruli were laughing at Jula who seemed to be demonstrating knife moves with a spoon. Nona grinned. It would be good when they joined her in Mystic. She’d feel safer sleeping in the same room as Joeli Namsis with Ara in the next bed.

‘You should hide him better.’ Zole pushed her bowl back.

‘Sorry?’ Nona turned from watching her friends.

‘You are careless. You lack control. I have seen him at your wrists when we fight, and at your neck when you are screeching.’

‘I don’t screech!’

‘Like a haunt-owl.’

‘I—’ Nona suddenly realized that whether she screeched or not wasn’t the important thing here. She lowered her voice, staring at Zole’s dark eyes. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about! You’ve seen nothing!’

Zole shrugged. ‘On the ice we know the klaulathu. We do not run from them screaming “devils” like you people huddling in the Corridor.’

Nona restrained herself from pointing out that Zole had been huddling with them for at least the past five years. ‘Klaulathu? Do you know how to get rid of them?’

Keot rose along her spine. I can only leave when you die.

Zole stood. ‘It is possible but hard. Better to live with him. They are of the Missing, you understand this? Pieces of the Missing that they abandoned before they crossed the Path.’ She walked off, leaving Nona open-mouthed.

‘Looked as though you got more than three words out of the Argatha!’ Darla sat down heavily beside Nona and started to heap her plate.

‘Well, I am her Shield!’ Nona reached for the food too. She made it a point of honour to always eat more than Darla managed, and Darla had an appetite most bears would envy.

‘Path first today,’ Darla grumbled. She took three smoked kippers.

‘Not too bad.’ Nona took four.

‘For you maybe. For me it’s a choice between meditation until my brain runs out of my ears, or begging off to see if I can get past four steps on blade-path.’

Nona shovelled eggs and kept a diplomatic silence. Darla had the worst sense of balance of any novice at the convent. Path lessons for those with quantal blood at least consisted of more than hunting for serenity, clarity, and patience. Nona had a much more interesting time under Sister Pan’s close guidance, but every attempt to reach the Path was a reminder of the day Hessa died. With the shipheart gone reaching the Path, which had always been a trial, became a feat of near- impossible difficulty. On the day Nona had fought Raymel somehow the depth of her anger, or being thread-bound to Hessa who was so close to the shipheart, had let her run the Path. In the years since, Nona had touched the Path on just a dozen occasions. Only in recent months had Nona regained the same level of competence without the shipheart’s presence as she had had when it was kept at the convent.

‘Practise the patience trance,’ Nona advised. ‘It’ll make the lesson more bearable.’ She crammed an overfull fork into her mouth.

Darla grimaced. ‘I don’t have the patience to learn the patience trance. It’s a vicious circle.’ She filled her mouth too and they chomped at each other a while. Despite the gerant girl welcoming Nona to their first class together with a beating they’d become firm friends, not that an outside observer would know it from the number of insults Darla threw Nona’s way.

Zole, Joeli, and Nona entered Path Tower by three different doors. Nona had found the east held a sense of rightness about it that the others lacked. Joeli came through the west in opposition. Zole came through the north, perhaps remembering her origins out on the ice.

In the classroom at the top of the tower they found themselves seats amid the play of light from the stained-glass windows. The classroom was freezing as usual and the novices’ breath misted before them. The tower had been built without fireplaces, relying on the shipheart warming the oil pipes that ran the length of the structure. Sigils on the pipes closest to the shipheart had converted its power into heat. Many of the convent’s buildings had been adapted since the loss and the wind now stripped the smoke from a score of chimneys, but Sister Pan had resisted change.

‘Welcome, Mystic Class girls, welcome.’ The ancient woman sat on her treasure chest, wrapped in a fox-fur robe for which the abbess had sought special dispensation from the high priest on account of Sister Pan being close on a hundred with nobody left alive who could say whether each year was now taking her closer to that century mark or further past it. ‘Zole and Nona have joined us! It’s a rare class that boasts three quantals.’

Two days earlier Joeli had been the only quantal in the class and the sole recipient of Sister Pan’s attentions. Joeli scowled and wrapped the illegal shawl tighter around the faked bruising on her neck. She didn’t look well pleased at having to share.

‘Clarity today, girls.’ Sister Pan rubbed her hand over her stump and huddled deeper into her furs. ‘I’ve put the etching of the Holothian labyrinth against the wall.’ She nodded for Darla to uncover it. ‘There is a second path from door to tomb. First find your clarity, then find that route. Eyes only.’ She glanced at Darla as she sat down: the gerant had been known to leave her chair and try tracing paths with her finger. ‘Zole, Nona, and Joeli will accompany me.’

The three novices fell in behind Mistress Path. At least the practice rooms were warmer, lacking windows. And if they were lucky Sister Pan would let them use any Path-energy they managed to channel to heat the room first before trying anything more complex.

Nona allowed her vision to defocus and summoned the Path’s image out of the blurred confusion. She let the flickers of light from Pan’s lantern fuse into a single burning line and followed it, her feet somehow losing contact with the reality of stone steps.

‘Follow close.’ Sister Pan’s voice, disembodied in a space both vast beyond measure and small beyond imagining. ‘A different room today.’

Nona stumbled out of the void into a narrow curving chamber very similar to the one in which she had practised her Path-work for the years since her gift showed. It stood between the spiral of the central stair and the circle of the tower’s outer wall, occupying another third of the space. The only difference lay in the nature of the sigils inlaid in silver upon the ceiling, floor, and every wall. These ones were smaller, more complex, less tightly bound. In places loops and trails from one overwrote the next, and no two looked the same.

‘The thread-room.’ She hadn’t meant to speak. Hessa had told her about the chamber.

‘It’s time you and Zole got to grips with thread-work,’ Sister Pan said. ‘Walking the Path arms a Mystic Sister with forces that are very hard to use for anything but destruction. Here we focus on the more subtle Path-arts, but although they are gentle one must never underestimate them. I believe our own dear abbess has some hint of quantal blood and a rare unconscious talent for the most ephemeral thread-work. Done right a gentle pull here, a touch there, a breath just sufficient to set a thread vibrating … and kings may be toppled, wars turned, the weak raised up.’ She gave the lantern to Joeli who moved to light three others. ‘Thread-work is a delicate art, which is why you two have never been any good at it. It rewards patience, observation, and empathy. There is no violence to it, though that does not preclude its use for malice. Hate can be a cold thing.’ She pushed Nona aside and stood between her and Zole. Nona heard the creak of Pan’s bones as she moved. When the nun stood hunched at her side Nona realized with sudden surprise that she was taller than the old woman, and more solid. A single blow would shatter Sister Pan. A sense of unease came over Nona. It felt wrong somehow that so much knowledge and experience could be so fragile.

‘I will show you.’ Sister Pan raised her hand and stared into the space beyond it.

Nona waited, watching. When Nona had arrived at the convent Sister Pan had loomed over her as all the other nuns did. There were still more secrets locked in her head than Nona could ever learn, the keys to powers untold … and yet she looked so small, so frail, waiting to cross the Path, so close that the devils must be licking their lips.

She is old, but I would not dare her.

Nona looked again. Keot was never one to miss a chance to boast. It gave her comfort to know he feared Mistress Path.

‘Watch!’ The air before Sister Pan filled with the bright complexity of the Path, a moving, living thing, twisting through more dimensions than the eye could fathom. ‘When wool is spun on the wheel a single length of yarn is wound around the spindle. But all around that strand of yarn there is a halo of loose pieces, fibres of wool not quite twisted in, wandering out from the main body.’

As Sister Pan spoke the Path dimmed and in the air all around it threads appeared, like stars when the sun has fled the sky. ‘The threads are not the Path but they are of the Path. And because the Path goes everywhere and runs through all things, so do the threads.’

Nona wondered if Sister Pan had chosen to speak of yarn to explain the matter because she knew Nona was a peasant and might not understand a different analogy so well. She was still wondering about it when she became aware that her mouth was open. She closed her jaw with a snap and wiped her lips. The image Sister Pan had made was mesmerizing. With an effort she tore her gaze from it.

‘It’s fascinating, is it not?’ Sister Pan’s smile was a narrow white crescent in the darkness of her face. ‘I could watch it forever.’

The slow motion of the threads reflected in Zole’s and Joeli’s eyes.

‘There’s a danger there,’ Sister Pan said. ‘The Path will throw you, sooner or later, but the threads will hold you. If you lack the will to free yourself they will keep you until your years have run from you and all that remains is to cross the Path into darkness.’ She waved at the pattern and it faded, releasing the others.

Joeli blinked and focused on Nona. ‘Mistress Path, you said that these two novices have no talent for thread-work because they’re so predisposed to violence. But do you think they might just be violent because they know they lack the talent for deeper work?’ A small smile played on her lips, as if the humiliation at the convent table had never happened.

Sister Pan waggled her hand. ‘We shall see. Path-work is closer to the brute force approach of the Red Sister, and thread-work more subtle, like the arts of the Grey Sister, all stealth and guile. Mystic Sisters shade either towards the Red or Grey.’

‘I would rather be open. Straightforward. Honest.’ Nona wrinkled her nose. ‘Manipulating people, using them, feels wrong. It feels like … lies. People should be allowed free will …’

Sister Pan barked a laugh. ‘We’re all puppets. Other people pull our strings every moment of every day. The only difference between us and Sayan-Ra dancing in the street show is that we can also pull our own strings and those of others. Threads aren’t something external to the world that only a privileged few can touch. Every time you speak to someone threads are pulled. Every glance exchanged. Every punch thrown. Every kindness shown. In thread-work we are just more direct about it. More focused.’ She turned and fixed Nona with her dark eyes. ‘You need to know how to draw a thread or how will you prevent your own from being drawn?’ She reached forward, plucking at the air with finger and thumb. ‘At first it will help you to visualize the task, see it before you, use your hands. It’s nonsense of course. Not needed. But the mind loves the familiar. There!’ She pinched and pulled. ‘How do you feel, Nona?’

‘Hungry!’ Nona clapped both hands across her stomach. ‘Starved!’

‘Basic needs, simple emotions, are the easiest to influence.’ Sister Pan opened her fingers as if releasing what she held. ‘And now?’

‘Full of breakfast.’ Nona laughed despite herself, then frowned. ‘But you couldn’t do that with just words.’

‘I couldn’t?’ Sister Pan tilted her head. ‘If I described a roast chicken in exquisite detail, steaming on a plate of buttered potatoes, its skin golden and crisp, seasoned with salt and pepper … your mouth wouldn’t begin to water? Your stomach rumble?’

Nona’s mouth had already filled with saliva. When it came to food her strings were remarkably easy to pull. ‘Hessa worked with threads when she tried to stop Yisht stealing the shipheart.’ She shot an angry glance at Joeli then frowned at Zole, who still, years later, felt tainted by that association. ‘And I saw it because we were thread-bound.’

‘Young Hessa was a remarkable talent. I’ve not seen another so gifted at such an age in all the years I’ve taught. She was a great loss.’ Sister Pan settled her hand on Nona’s shoulder. ‘And perhaps you will have an aptitude for thread-binding, novice. It’s a rare skill and difficult to achieve but always greatly aided by strong and honest friendship between both parties. It only ever works between quantals though. You need to share the same blood.’

Sister Pan stepped back and addressed them all. ‘Two things you should always remember. Firstly: you can never pull the same thread twice. Every action you take changes the thing you act upon and changes its connections to the world. Secondly: you can never pull just a single thread. Every thread is bound to every other, sometimes through many links, though always fewer than you might imagine. Pull one thread and others are pulled: the effect spreads like a ripple on a pond. You can play at thread-work and think that you are alone, but if you pull on a strand of a web hard enough and often enough … a spider will come. It is the same with the threads that bind the universe. Sooner or later you will be noticed. The “spiders” will, like as not, be humans, older, more powerful quantal thread-workers, marjal sorcerers with particular talents, intuitives such as Abbess Glass. But there are bigger spiders out there too. This world is not ours: it is older than us, the Missing were gone before our ships beached here. When the Corridor was a thousand miles wide and there was no moon in the sky they were gone. Echoes of them live among the threads, vibrations that will not fade. And there are others; their servants and things more ancient still. So tread softly, work sparingly, and hope.’ She waved her stump at the walls. ‘In here, however, there is no need for hope. The sigils seal us from the world, and the few threads that penetrate even these walls are beyond your reach.’

The morning’s exercises began with Nona and Zole paired, each seeking to visualize the threads that bound the other to the world.

‘See the Path first,’ Sister Pan instructed. ‘Each of you must see it as it runs through the other. You know it from your dreams. You hunt it in the serenity trance. You follow it every moment of your life. And when the Ancestor grants you grace, you walk it.’

Nona stared at Zole, at the black hair laid flat against her blunt skull, the stone-dark eyes, the broad cheekbones, the reddish hue of her skin as if the burn of the ice-wind had never left it, and the short, hard line of her mouth. She tried to see through the ice-triber to the Path, past her wide shoulders, past the height and strength of her. Time seemed both to race and to crawl in exercises like this. It always felt as if she had been at it an age, and when she stopped, Nona often discovered that the hours between one bell and the next had been devoured and yet with hindsight her efforts felt like just the work of minutes.

At first the Path showed as a single line, half-imagined, dividing Zole’s imperfect symmetry. In the next instant Nona saw it as Sister Pan had shown it, flexing at right angles to the world. A single, bright Path. The only difference being that where Sister Pan’s had been haloed by the diffuse white infinity of threads straying from the Path, each following its own convolutions before ending or returning to join the whole, Nona saw just the Path and nothing else.

‘I see her threads,’ Zole said.

‘Good work, novice. Try to follow one back to where it left the Path.’ Sister Pan called from across the room where she was working with Joeli on some more advanced matter. ‘Keep at it, Nona: there is still a little while before it’s time to return.’

Nona felt the familiar sense of surprise – a nearly whole class spent and nothing to show for it. She gritted her teeth and stared harder. The Path twisted across her vision, threadless. A bead of sweat rolled down her neck, the muscles of her jaw twitched and bunched. Her vision blurred. Nothing.

Help me! Nona never called on Keot but she needed this.

Helping is not in my nature.

Nona stared at Zole, willing her threads to appear. Abbess Glass had had Sister Pan try thread-work to hunt down Yisht and the shipheart of course, and without success, but Nona had been there, in Hessa’s head, watched her as the shipheart’s power filled her and sharpened her talents into something keen enough to dissect reality. They had been thread-bound. There had been an unbreakable connection. Something of it could have survived. Must have survived. For more than two years Nona had waited to be taught these arts. Years spent waiting for a chance to use them to avenge Hessa. And now … nothing. She hadn’t the skill!

‘Well, novice?’ Sister Pan touched Nona’s shoulder. ‘Have you been successful?’

Nona tore her stare away from Zole, her eyes hot and dry, too wide open yet unwilling to close. She found herself sweat-soaked and aching in every limb.

‘She doesn’t have any!’ Behind Sister Pan Joeli’s laughter tinkled like silver coins.

Sister Pan shook her head. ‘Of course she does. Every living thing, every dead thing, and every thing that has never lived is bound by threads. Stone, bone, tree, and thee.’ She pushed Nona aside and took her place. ‘Allow me to …’ She paused, frowned, and squinted. Then blinked. ‘That is quite remarkable. More remarkable, to me, than the fact that four bloods run in your veins, Zole.’

Zole glowered at the old nun.

‘She really doesn’t have any threads?’ Nona asked, feeling vindicated.

‘Of course she has threads!’ Sister Pan snapped. ‘Were you not listening to me?’ She frowned again. ‘But only the deepest and most fundamental, those hardest to find. Where there should be a myriad blazing around her, there are just a few, and buried deep in the stuff of the world. I have never seen the like.’

As if it had been holding its tongue and waiting for Sister Pan to pause Bray tolled, the sound of the bell reaching them faintly through the stones.

‘Come.’ Sister Pan waved for them to follow. ‘I will consider this later.’ And she began to walk the path that would take a nun through walls.

7

‘Hurry up!’ Jula beckoned at them from down the rock passage, a black shape behind her lantern.

‘Breathe out. I’ll pull.’ Nona grabbed Darla’s wrist and heaved as the girl exhaled. Behind Darla the outside world intruded as a line of brightness, glimpsed through the cliff-face.

Darla lurched forward, gasping for air, free of the crevice. Further down the passage Ruli gave a brief round of sarcastic applause. ‘I still have that grease if we need it!’

‘I’ll give her grease,’ Darla growled, and followed as Nona hurried to catch the others. The Seren Way was not as well travelled as the Vinery Stair and the chances of discovery were small, but the longer it took Darla to squeeze through into the caverns the greater that chance grew.

Nobody had ever told the novices that they weren’t to explore the caves and passages that riddled the plateau but Nona always had the strong impression that this was because they hadn’t asked, and also because all the entrances known to the nuns were barred and gated, the locks inscribed with sigils to defeat any form of picking. When Jula had first discovered the caves a year earlier Nona had moved their weekly meeting underground where the chances of detection shrank to zero. Nominally the objective of the group was to recover the shipheart but for Nona it had always been about killing Yisht.

‘Hold up!’ Nona and Darla closed the last few yards on the others. Jula and Ara carried the only two lanterns and the footing was treacherous. ‘If we break our ankles back here it’s you lot who’ll have to carry us out!’

‘We’ll just leave you here and say you ran away with city boys.’ Ketti, the last of their number, grinned and made kiss-mouths. The hunska girl was just a few inches shorter than Darla now, though thin as a rail. She talked about city boys a lot and it was a wonder to Nona that she preferred to spend her seven-day exploring the darkness beneath the Rock of Faith rather than going into Verity to giggle at the opposite sex across Thaybur Square.

‘Come on!’ Ara led off, eager to reach new ground.

At the first fork, where a smaller passage led steeply down, Ketti took her block of chalk and reinforced the letter on the wall that indicated the path to take. The moisture tended to blur the marks. They moved on in single file, Darla at the rear, demonstrating her impressive range of oaths as she repeatedly grazed her head on the rock above.

Nona called a halt at Round Cave a hundred yards from the entrance. Darla had come up with the name, and whilst unimaginative it was at least accurate.

‘Who’s got something to report?’ Nona looked to Ruli first. Ruli was on gossip duty, gathering any snippet of information that leaked into the convent through its connections with the outside world. Ruli had a talent for both creating and gathering gossip.

‘I do! I really do!’ Jula stepped forward, half raising her hand before remembering that she wasn’t in class. ‘I was reading the appendices in Levinin’s older works. Everyone always quotes from the Seven Histories of Marn but—’

‘What did you find?’ Darla had even less patience for Jula’s booklore than the others.

‘More about shiphearts in one page than I’ve discovered in all the books I’ve searched through since we started looking!’ Jula grinned. ‘According to Levinin there were four shiphearts within the empire’s boundaries: the one at Sweet Mercy which is most closely tuned to quantals, another we knew about in the Noi-Guin’s keeping at the Tetragode, which is attuned to marjals, one he says is rumoured in the city of Tru, and one from a gerant ship in the keeping of the mage Atoan.’

Ara frowned. ‘I’ve never heard of a city called Tru or a mage called Atoan. And if a shipheart were in a city someone would own it or it would get taken.’

Jula nodded. ‘Levinin was writing two hundred years ago. Tru is under the ice now. The black ice! And it was ruins before the ice took it. Tru’s a city the Missing left. And Atoan died years ago but he had a son Jaltone who was also a mage and somehow is still alive!’

‘Him I’ve heard of,’ Darla said. ‘He lives on the coast and helped General Hillan when the Durnish tried to land at Port Treen two years ago. My father was the general’s second-in-command.’

‘It’s interesting and everything …’ Ruli said. ‘But I don’t see how it helps us. We’re not going to walk up to the Tetragode and—’

‘It helps us because we know where Sherzal will have to look next,’ said Ara.

‘And we are going to the ice …’ Everyone went on the ice-ranging in Mystic Class. Over the ice though, not under it. Nona remembered her father’s tales about hunting in the ice tunnels. The worst of them, the scariest stories, were from the time he ventured into the grey ice. The trip he never came back from was the one to the black.

‘The ice is a big place. And Tallow is never going to take us up to the black ice. Even if it wasn’t on the Scithrowl side of the mountains.’ Darla shivered. ‘Let’s go explore some caves!’

Nona looked around the circle of lantern-lit faces. ‘Any more contributions? No?’

Jula bit her lip. ‘Well I thought it was interesting.’ She shrugged and led off.

It took less than half an hour’s walk to reach the furthest limit of their explorations, but to expand their territory initially had taken the best part of a year, following dead ends or routes that grew too narrow or too dangerous. In several places they had fixed knotted ropes to aid in difficult climbs. It was Nona’s private hope that they would find an alternative route into the convent undercaves but there were no guarantees that the two systems connected.

‘I love it down here.’ Jula fell in beside Nona as they trekked the Gullet, a long water-smoothed passage wide enough to walk shoulder to shoulder. ‘It’s so quiet. Just the drip of water. And footsteps. And Darla swearing.’

They passed a stand of stalagmites, blunt and glistening in the lantern light. Ketti said nothing. Even she had grown tired of her innuendo after the tenth or twelfth time. A little further along a veil of dripping water crossed the passage. Nona hunched and pressed on through the icy deluge. Five tight, winding twists rising steeply took them past the niche where two skeletons lay, limed over with rock-scale. One grown and one a child, locked together. A rusty stain between them may once have been a knife. They always made Nona sad, huddled there in the dark, watching with empty sockets as the centuries scurried by.

After the rising turns came a scramble up a rock fall, with the cavern roof slanting just three feet above. Finally a cliff some twenty yards high, perhaps once a waterfall, the wet stone offering few handholds. Fortunately the old watercourse had allowed room to swing and throw a grapple. The locating and pilfering of both rope and hook had taken a week but the hours spent trying to catch some edge far above them had seemed much longer. On perhaps the seventieth throw Darla had snagged the hook and Ruli, the lightest of them, had scrambled up. The rope was now secure and knotted at intervals. Climbing it brought them to the limits of their exploration, a roundish chamber, mud-floored, from which three new passages led.

Nona stood with Ara, Jula, and Ruli, catching their breath, staring at the exits, Ketti and Darla still climbing behind them.

‘I want to get under the convent,’ Nona said. She blinked. She hadn’t been intending to speak, but now the words had left her mouth she realized it was better that the truth was out. For three years she had seen the only route to revenge on Yisht to be training. To make herself into a weapon suited to the task of finding then destroying the woman. Neither would be easy. The empire was large, and Yisht expert at hiding, deadly when found. Nona had been very lucky in their first encounter and had still only just survived. But Joeli’s taunting had put into Nona’s mind the idea that there might be some clue at the spot where Hessa died. Something the nuns overlooked. Something her friend left for her alone. It was a very faint hope. Too faint perhaps to justify exposing her companions to such dangers … but Joeli’s words were an itch that refused to be scratched. ‘Hessa’s name is so important to you? And yet you’ve never even visited the spot where she died.’ The accusation repeated in her mind, an echo that grew rather than died away.

‘I need to visit the shipheart vault.’ Nona spoke the words into the silence that had followed her first statement.

‘Because we won’t be in enough trouble just for being in the tunnels,’ Ruli said. ‘We should go where we’re more likely to be caught and will have broken more rules.’

Jula frowned. Despite her cleverness sarcasm always seemed to go over her head. ‘But—’

‘I’m banned from leaving the convent until next seven-day in any case,’ Nona said. ‘So if I’m right under it I’ll be breaking fewer rules.’

‘Go back to the vault?’ Ara asked, raising her lantern to inspect Nona’s face. ‘That’s madness. Abbess Glass will throw us out. You know what she said about the undercaves!’

‘I have to.’ Nona had to see it for herself. She had to set her hands to the spot where Hessa had died. Perhaps some clue remained that would help her find Yisht. ‘I have to. For Hessa. I felt her die. The rocks. Yisht’s knife. I felt all of it. If there’s justice to be had, or revenge, it starts there, where it happened.’

‘I don’t want to go near the convent. The sinkhole’s too close.’ Ketti got to her feet behind them after finishing the climb. ‘There could be tunnel-floods.’ She shuddered.

‘I still say they’ll have the undercaves blocked off.’ Darla followed Ketti into the chamber, brushing grit from her habit.

‘Maybe. But it’s as good a direction to explore as any other,’ Ara said. Nona thanked her silently.

‘I don’t know …’ Darla shook her head. ‘The abbess wasn’t joking when she put the undercaves off-limits. She wrote it in the book and everything …’

‘That was over two years ago.’ Ara came to Nona’s defence. ‘Plus, if they didn’t know Yisht was there for all those weeks and she was going to and fro from her room, they won’t know we’re there if we come from underneath for a quick look. Right, Nona?’

Nona nodded. She owed it to Hessa. She had let years slide by and done nothing to avenge her. Her friend had died and Nona had hidden in the convent, well fed, cared for, whilst Yisht walked the world with Hessa’s blood on her hands. But though the Corridor might be a narrow girdle to the globe it was still too wide for a lone child to find a woman like that who didn’t want to be found. And Yisht was an ice-triber. She might be anywhere in the vastness of the ice. ‘I can’t do this alone.’ The gate to Shade class had a sigil-scribed lock now: the thing would have to be blown off its hinges to gain access without the key. Coming at the Dome of the Ancestor and the shipheart chamber from below was the best option.

‘I’ll help.’ Jula spoke up, her voice thin in the cavern’s void.

Nona offered her a smile. Jula put an arm around her shoulders for the briefest hug.

‘So …’ Nona, even less at ease with physical affection than Jula, waved a hand at the tunnel mouths.

‘That one.’ Jula pointed to the leftmost tunnel, boulder- choked and leading down. She had an instinct for direction below ground that had proved uncanny. ‘Though it doesn’t look very safe.’

Ara led on and they followed, stepping over fallen rock, some of it still jagged. After a hundred yards or so the passage broadened and became a cavern so wide it swallowed their light and gave nothing back. For a moment Ara halted and they all held quiet listening to the silence and to the drip … drip … drip of water that was somehow part of the vastness of the silence. Nona glanced about at the novices around her, all illuminated on one side and dark on the other, and for an instant found herself outside her body, suddenly aware of herself as a tiny mote of life, warmth, and light in the black and endless convolutions of the cave system. Now more than ever she felt the irony that the Rock of Faith, named for the foundations of their religion, lay rotten with voids and secret ways, permeable and ever-changing.

‘We should go across,’ Jula said, her voice small in all that empty space. She didn’t sound as if she wanted to.

Ketti marked the wall with her chalk and drew an arrow on the floor.

‘We should follow the wall. We’re less likely to get lost,’ Darla said.

Ara took them to the left, staying close to the wall. Stalagmites rose in small delicate forests, stalactites descended in curtains where the cave curved down, glistening with an iridescent sheen like the carapace of a beetle.

‘Stop.’ Ruli turned and stared into the darkness beyond the lanterns’ reach. Nona stopped, the others too.

‘What?’ Jula raised her light.

‘Didn’t you hear it?’

‘No.’ Darla loomed beside her, her shadow swinging.

‘Something’s out there, coming for us,’ Ruli said, wide-eyed.

‘There’s nothing living in these caves,’ Darla said. ‘We would have seen bones or dung. What did it sound like?’

‘Dry.’ Ruli shivered.

‘Dry?’

‘I want to go back,’ Ruli said.

Ara advanced a few yards, lantern high. ‘There’s something here.’

Nona crowded forward with the others, leaving Ruli in deepening shadow.

‘What is it?’ Ketti frowned.

To Nona’s eye it seemed that a shadowy forest of misshapen stalagmites covered the cavern floor, some curving over in ways that such growths are not supposed to.

‘Bones.’ Jula saw it first.

From one instant to the next the scene switched from one of confusion to one of horror. Skeletons, calcified like those back in the niche, but more thickly: dozens of them.

‘Some of these have been here for an age.’ Ara pointed to a stony ribcage from which straw-thin stalactites dripped, and to a skull distorted by the weight of stalagmite growing upon it, like a candle from which half the wax had run.

Jula bent over to inspect something by the wall.

‘We really need to go!’ Ruli called at them, not having moved from where she stood. ‘Can’t you feel it?’

‘I don’t …’ But then Nona felt it and held her tongue. Something scraping at the edges of her senses, a dry touch from which her mind recoiled.

Holothour.

What?

Nona felt Keot moving beneath the skin of her back. Normally he was silent in the caves.

You should run.

You always tell me to fight.

Now I’m telling you to run.

‘We should go back. Now!’ Nona turned to follow Ruli who had already started to run back the way they came, into the blind darkness.

‘What’re you scared of?’ Darla called after them. ‘There’s nothing here.’ She laughed. ‘And neither of you have a lantern.’

Nona stopped at the margins of the lighted area, infected by a disembodied fear.

What’s out there, Keot?

Something Missing-bred. Something hungry. Run!

‘We need to go. Trust me.’ Nona’s voice sounded thin in the emptiness of the cavern. Behind her the sounds of Ruli’s stumbling panic.

Ara frowned then followed. ‘I don’t understand you, but I trust you.’ Jula fell in behind her. Darla, with the light now retreating from her, snarled in frustration and hurried after them.

The six novices picked up the pace, shadows swinging all around them. Nona could make out Ruli ahead, feeling her way. With each passing moment it seemed that something gathered itself behind them, as if the space now echoing with their footfalls was drawing in its breath. Nona felt the horror of it crawl along her spine. The darkness held something awful. Something ancient and waiting. The need to be gone made her heart pound and tightened her breathing into gasps.

‘Oh blood!’ Even Darla felt it now, her face white.

Nona knew with cold certainty that beyond the margins of their illumination the calcified bones stretched out yard upon yard, innumerable victims lying in meticulous order. How many centuries had they watched the darkness? And she knew that among them paced a horror. She felt it now, individual, condensing out of the night, taking form. Perhaps it wore a man’s shape. Perhaps even her own. And if it ever raised its face to her she would drown in nightmare.

By the time they reached the chamber where they had chosen between the three unexplored passages all of them were running. Ruli was already on the rope. Jula didn’t wait for her to get off. Ara stood with her back to the cliff, lantern high, staring at the tunnel mouth. Ketti and Darla crouched by the edge urging the others down. It was all Nona could do not to push between them and make her own grab for the rope.

‘Ancestor! Hurry it up!’ The cry broke from her.

Ruli and Jula reached the bottom together and went sprawling in a clatter of loose stones. Ketti began to climb. The darkness in the tunnel seemed to thicken, rejecting the light from Ara’s lantern.

‘It’s coming!’ Darla was sliding over the edge, hands white on the rope, her feet just a yard above Ketti’s head.

‘We can’t stay!’ It was all Nona could do not to scream. Fear filled her, trembling in every limb, fluttering the breath in her lungs. ‘Ara, come on!’

They descended the rope on top of one another, lanterns hooked to belts, burning their palms as they slipped from knot to knot.

A confusion of swinging lanterns, sharp rocks, and snatching shadows followed. Screaming, panting, glimpses of chalk symbols, running, scrambling, and finally a desperate squeeze and they lay in the improbable brightness of day, sprawled on the Seren Way, gasping for breath.

There in the light, with a cold wind blowing and the plains stretching out below them towards the distant smokes of Verity their flight seemed suddenly foolish.

‘I’m never going in there again. Ever.’ Darla rolled over onto her back, her habit torn and smeared with mud.

‘What were we running from?’ Ketti asked.

‘The first time when serenity would have really helped us …’ Ara sat up, shaking her head.

‘And we ran!’ Nona couldn’t believe she hadn’t reached for her serenity. Some novices still took a while to sink into the trance but many could summon the mindset in a few moments. The fear had got into her before she thought to wall it away.

‘Ancestor! Look at us!’ Jula stretched out her habit. Grey underskirt showed through a tear as long as her hand. Nona glanced down at herself. Smears of mud streaked her in horizontal lines where she had collided with walls on the mad dash out.

‘Sister Wheel will kill us!’ Ruli examined herself in horror.

‘Sister Mop you mean,’ Ara said.

‘Both of them will!’ Ketti jumped to her feet. ‘Let’s get back!’

‘You’re worried about Wheel and Mop?’ Nona pointed at the dark slot hidden back along the cliff side. ‘What about that. Just now?’

Jula frowned and brushed a grimy hand back over her hair. ‘I’m not going in there again.’ She looked down at the rip. ‘Oh, we’re in so much trouble.’

Darla followed Ketti, muttering to herself. Jula and Ruli set off up the track behind them. ‘Ara?’ Nona stood amazed. ‘What happened in there? Why are they just leaving?’

Ara looked puzzled. The smudge of dirt below her right cheekbone just seemed to make her more beautiful. She narrowed her eyes as if trying to capture some memory, then shook her head. ‘I don’t think we should come back.’ She glanced once towards the fissure, shuddered, and turned to go.

‘What’s that?’ Nona pointed to something gleaming among the rocks at Ara’s feet.

‘Oh.’ Ara didn’t look down. ‘It’s just a knife. Jula picked it up in the …’ She shrugged and turned to walk away.

‘Stay.’ Nona caught Ara’s hand in hers. ‘That thing in there … that monster. You remember it? Yes?’ Their fingers laced. Ara’s blue eyes met the darkness of Nona’s and for a moment there was a recognition of … something. Each took a step towards the other.

‘No.’ Ara shook her head. ‘I’m sorry.’ The fragile moment broke. She pulled free and hurried after the others. And Nona felt as if some chance that might never come again had escaped her.

Nona stood watching the five of them wind their way up the track zigzagging its way up towards the plateau.

What just happened?

You shouldn’t go back to the caves.

Don’t you try and pretend something didn’t just chase us out of there.

It did. A holothour. I told you.

So why are Ara and the others walking away?

They don’t want to die.

I mean why are they more concerned about having to wash their habits and stitch a few tears … There’s something more to this. Don’t lie to me, demon. I’ll force you into my fingers and hold them to the flame again.

I’ll chew your bones and make you spit blood!

But you know I’ll win. So tell me.

The fear tied them.

Untied?

The threads that bound them to that place, to these caves – the fear untied them. It set those memories loose. By the time they reach the top this will all have been a dream for them. The holothour made them forget.

And me? Why do I still care?

I protected you.

I don’t believe you. You’re made of lies.

Nona bent to pick up the knife. ‘I know this weapon.’ A straight blade, dark iron, just a faint tracery of rust, the pommel an iron ball, a narrow strip of leather wound around the hilt. A throwing knife. She had found one of the same design in her bed once, and seen another jutting from Sister Kettle’s side.

Keot reached above the collar of her habit, a hot flush rising. I know it too.

You liar. How would you?

The woman who held it came to see a dead man.

Why?

To understand the person who killed him, so that she might in turn kill them.

Nona asked the question though she knew the answer. Who did she come to see?

Raymel Tacis. He was dead but the mages wouldn’t let him die. And I was the first to find my way beneath his skin.

And the woman?

Was a Noi-Guin. Tasked to kill you.

8

In the week that followed Nona tried each day to broach the subject but none of her friends would do much more than admit, under pressure, that there might be caves beneath the Rock. It reached the point at which Nona saw Jula pretend not to notice her and turn a corner in order to avoid the chance of further questioning. She decided to drop the matter for a few days and see if the holothour’s mark would wear off and return her companions to her.

Mystic Class lessons continued to challenge. Nona improved with the sword, practising a handful of basic cut-and-thrust combinations until they started to feel natural. In Spirit Sister Wheel set them the task of writing an essay about a saint of their choice. Nona took herself to the convent library – the smaller one attached to the scriptorium rather than the larger store of holy texts held within the Dome of the Ancestor – to research. By the week’s end she had found three possible candidates from antiquity, all of whom had something in their story that would offend Mistress Spirit.

Sister Pan continued to immerse Nona, Zole, and Joeli in thread-work, showing them new tricks. Sometimes she would demonstrate thread effects most easily achieved whilst in the serenity trance, at other times fine-work requiring the clarity trance. Changing a person’s mood was something that might be achieved in a serenity trance, changing a particular decision required clarity. Neither were quick or easy to achieve, and Sister Pan warned that some people were much harder to manipulate than others.

Nona applied these lessons to the problem of the mark the holothour had set upon her friends. She could see the damage in the halo of threads around each girl but the solution lay beyond her skill. In the serenity trance she could see connections that must be undone or loosened. And in the clarity trance she could see entanglements on the smallest scale that would need to be unravelled. But working on either problem would make the other worse. They needed to be worked on together. Which required two people. And the only thread-worker she trusted to help, Ara, whose skills were pretty basic, was also one of those who needed fixing.

Sister Pan might be able to solve the problem but she clearly didn’t bother herself with thread-work on novices or she would have noticed Zole’s peculiar lack long ago. Nona could draw Sister Pan’s attention to the area of damage but the old woman would ask questions, and as she said: ‘everything’s connected’. Give Sister Pan one corner and she would soon pull out the whole story, and that would be the end of their adventuring.

Shade lessons focused on disguise. A whole week passed without mention of poisons, save to note some that were useful in small doses for altering the hue of a person’s skin or the colour of their eyes. Sister Apple likened the business of disguise to an extended lie told with the body, with the tone of one’s voice, and with the clothes that wrapped you. In Mystic Class every novice took the first of the Grey Trials, which involved crossing Thaybur Square undetected by other class members. Good disguise skills were a must!

In Academia Sister Rail made a spirited attempt to bore the class to death with mathematics. Nona felt she had achieved under Sister Rule, at great personal cost, a tenuous grip on arithmetic. A triumph, considering there were few people in her village who could count past twelve with confidence. Sister Rail introduced her to algebra, and not gently. The only moment of interest came when Darla, despairing of letters that were numbers but not any particular number, demanded to know what use such things were.

‘Our forebears used algebra to build the moon, novice!’ Sister Rail drew herself to her full height, which wasn’t much more than Darla’s when seated. ‘The curve of its mirror is governed by equations like these.’ A gesture to the chalk scrawls behind her. ‘It’s how they tightened the focus as the world grew colder. Other equations allow it to be steered as it was in the past, tilted to deal with the uneven advance of the ice.’

Nona frowned. Jula had mentioned something about changing the focus of the moon. Something she’d read about the Ark years ago: whoever owned the Ark could speak to the moon. ‘It could be a weapon.’

‘What’s that, Nona? Your expertise extends past assaulting classmates and reaches the moon now?’ Sister Rail tilted her head in inquiry.

Tittered laughter around Joeli.

‘It could be a weapon. If the focus was narrowed further it could burn cities.’

‘Nonsense. The moon is not a weapon of war. There’s no reason to believe the focus can be narrowed to that degree even if someone wanted to do it.’ Sister Rail waved the suggestion away with a bony hand.

‘If it can be tilted it could be steered from the Corridor entirely then returned,’ Nona said, staring at the glistening white of the globe on Rail’s desk. ‘Whole nations could be denied the focus and the ice would swallow them. It could melt vast lakes on the ice then connect them to the Corridor, washing away armies and cities …’

‘We were discussing the formula for a circle.’ Sister Rail banged a heel to the floorboards and the lesson sank back into a confusion of letters and symbols.

Nona had let the nun’s words slide past her and sat gazing at the distorted sky offered through puddle-glass windows. Memory filled her vision. Yisht stumbling away chased by shadow, the shipheart in her hand. Four shiphearts to open the Ark? One Ark to control the moon. One moon to own the world?

By the seven-day nothing had changed in the others’ reaction to talk of returning to the caves. Not ready to explore alone, Nona agreed to accompany Ara on a visit to Terra Mensis, a distant cousin of hers.

‘It’ll be great to get you off the Rock for once!’ Ara grinned, hugging her range-coat around her.

‘I don’t think the abbess plans to let me out on my own even when I’ve got the Red.’ Nona peered around the pillar, squinting against the ice-wind. The Mensis escort was late. They were sending a dozen of their house guard, enough to satisfy Abbess Glass that neither Ara nor Nona would be at risk from kidnap or assassination.

‘There is no point to strength if it is never tested.’ Zole stood in the open before the pillar forest, scowling at the world. Nona had been surprised when Ara extended the invitation to the ice-triber, more surprised when she accepted, and astounded when Abbess Glass permitted it. Nona supposed that Zole felt as trapped as she did on the Rock. Perhaps if the abbess worried that if Zole felt too trapped, she would simply run away.

Sister Kettle leaned against the pillar beside Nona and rolled her eyes, grinning. When Nona had heard the abbess was demanding an escort of her own in addition to the house troops she had worried they might get stuck with Sister Scar, Sister Rock or someone equally joyless. Perhaps even Sister Tallow. Nona respected Tallow but didn’t imagine she would be a particularly lenient chaperone in Verity. The arrival of Sister Kettle to watch over them had been a pleasant surprise. She still looked too young to be a nun. In the bathhouse with the black shock of her hair shaved to her scalp she could easily pass as a novice.

‘They’re coming.’ Kettle kept her back to the pillar.

Nona leaned out again. ‘Don’t see them.’ She spat an ice-flake. ‘Zole?’

Zole stood silent, leaning into the wind. Then, just as Nona was about to repeat herself, ‘I see something.’

A few minutes later the twelve guards swaddled in black furs that now hung with ice gathered around the nun and three novices. Sister Kettle cast an eye over each of them in turn then nodded and allowed them to lead the way, back towards the Vinery Stair.

‘Your cousin won’t be pleased to see me and Zole with you.’ Nona knew that any Sis would spot her peasant roots no matter how many years of convent education she might be carrying on top of them. ‘Well, she might be pleased to see Zole.’ The Argatha was a novelty. The rich could overlook low breeding in a novelty.

‘The Chosen One can hardly travel without her Shield.’ Ara grinned, face red from the wind. ‘And besides, Terra will like what I tell her to like. The Mensis have been scions to the Jotsis for generations.’ At Nona’s frown she elaborated. ‘We get to boss them about.’

The Vinery Stair led down from the Rock of Faith along a gradient gentle enough for cart and horse, though Nona would not want to be that horse. Below them the vineyards huddled against the base of the Rock, sheltered from the worst of the wind. The vines had their leaves folded tight. They wouldn’t open until the ice-wind relented, although Sister Hoe – who had charge of the wine-making – had told Nona that a heavy dose of fertilizer would coax most plants to open their leaves whatever the weather.

‘They can’t abide to lose the chance,’ the old woman had said. ‘Worried some other plant will thieve it first. They’re not so different from people really. There’s not much most wouldn’t risk to stop a rival having the benefit of something they want.’

At the bottom of the Vinery Stair a turnpike gate offered token resistance to any without proper business up at the convent and it was here that a crowd of perhaps two dozen pilgrims waited.

‘That must be her!’ A shout from the crowd.

Zole lowered her head, pulling the hood of her range-coat down across her face. The opposite of what Sister Apple had been teaching them all week. And rather than inconspicuous she just looked guilty.

‘It must be!’

‘All those guards!’

‘She’s here!’

‘Be watchful.’ Sister Kettle stepped to the front, tapping the lead guardsman’s shoulder. ‘Clear a path. Don’t hurt anyone.’

As the guardsmen approached to pull the pike aside the crowd parted letting a man emerge with his burden. Hulking in his sheepskins he must have had a touch or more of gerant, and in his arms he carried a child, limp and pale.

‘He’s sick. The Argatha can heal him.’ The boy he offered up showed no signs of life. He looked to have no more than six years, seven at most. ‘Please.’ Somehow the plea from so big a man in so deep a voice tore at Nona, making her eyes prickle.

A few of the guardsmen turned to stare at Zole. Nobody had named her to them but perhaps the red of her ice-tribe skin was enough.

‘It’s her!’ Figures around the man with the child pointed Zole out, following the guardsmen’s looks.

‘Bless me, Argatha!’

‘I just need to touch her.’

The mass of people began to surge forward. With an oath Zole turned and ran back along the Vinery Stair.

‘Zole! You don’t have to—’ Kettle turned, hand raised, but Zole had quick feet and was gone. The pilgrims sighed with a single voice, disappointment rising.

‘It wasn’t her.’

‘The Argatha wouldn’t run.’

Ara caught Nona’s gaze, biting her lip, a small shake of her head. ‘You’re lucky to have her. I’m lucky to have you. Neither of us would want this.’

Kettle went to examine the child in the man’s arms. He stepped back at her approach, as if sensing the shadow in her, but the crowd held him.

‘I’m sorry.’ Kettle lifted her fingers from the boy’s neck. ‘The Ancestor has your son. He is a link in a chain without end, still joined to you, still joined to everyone who has ever cared for him. We will all be one in the Ancestor. Nothing passes from this world that is not remembered.’

They left then, walking towards the distant city.

Ara moved to walk beside Kettle. ‘Well spoken, sister.’

Kettle shook her head. ‘A parent’s grief runs deeper than words can reach, novice. We speak them to help ourselves.’

The Mensis escort forged a passage through the tight-packed streets of Verity with practised ease. They seemed more confident within the city walls, and in their midst Nona thought she had a taste of what it must be like to be born of money and name.

She watched the colour and variety of the crowd, the density and energy of it. With no shadow, wholly black eyes, and no apparent talent for disguise, Nona had begun to despair of passing the Shade Trial. But, reminded of the city’s chaos, the prospect of crossing Thaybur Square unchallenged seemed to inch from totally impossible towards merely very unlikely.

‘The Shade wardrobe doesn’t match this …’ Nona watched a woman pass by in a cloak of dark green velvet trimmed with fox fur. To stand a chance in the Shade Trial and cross the square unchallenged by her classmates her disguise would have to be perfect.

‘No?’ Ara hadn’t yet been introduced to the wardrobe. ‘I should think the older novices can recognize most of what the Poisoner has in there anyway. A lot of the girls get clothes from outside for the trial …’ Ara trailed off, presumably remembering Nona’s poverty and complete lack of family in Verity.

Nona had thought the variety and quality packed into the Shade wardrobe was astounding, but seeing Verity’s streets again she reassessed her opinion.

‘I’ll work something out.’ She kept on walking.

The house the guardsmen led them to was set back among trees behind a high wall on a street lined with grand homes. Nona had seen buildings to dwarf it: the Dome of the Ancestor, the Academy, and the palace itself, but never a private home. Windows marched for a hundred yards to either side of a great portal of polished redwood. Enormous sandstone blocks had been fitted together to build the walls, each block meeting the next with such precision that even without mortar the smallest insect would find no space to crawl between them.

A doorman opened the doors as Ara climbed the stairs.

‘I’ll explore the gardens,’ Kettle said.

‘You don’t have to, sister.’ Ara gestured to the doorway. ‘Join us. Please.’

Kettle shook her head, faint shadows flowing like the memory of past bruises. ‘I’ll be close when you’re ready to leave.’

A footman led Ara and Nona through the Mensis foyer. Having spent so much time in the Dome of the Ancestor meant that Nona was able not to gape at the mosaicked floor and towering marble columns. The corridor that led from the foyer was punctuated by niches though and the statuettes and vases within held Nona’s gaze, filling her hands with a longing to touch. She found it hard to imagine that anyone lived here, day by day, striding through these corridors and knowing that they owned it all.

Nona suddenly felt very drab and dull in her habit and wondered what this high lady would make of her. It felt like little more than a sack compared to the finery she’d seen in Verity’s streets. At the same time she had to admit that Ara somehow managed to look beautiful in hers, the simplicity of it contrasting with the gold of her hair, the hard lines of her body evident as she moved.

The footman knocked on an imposing set of double doors, then entered. ‘The Lady Arabella Jotsis to see you, ma’am, and her companion.’

Ara strode into the room, a sumptuously appointed chamber strewn with stuffed couches and deep chairs that looked so comfortable they might swallow a person whole. High above them the ceiling had been painted sky-blue and clouds scattered the plaster heavens.

‘Terra! You’re looking wonderful! This is my friend Nona. She’s Shield to the Argatha and she’ll make the best Red Sister the empire’s seen!’ Ara spoke with an animation Nona had never witnessed in her before and in the accent she’d brought with her to the convent more than five years earlier, each word clipped short and stressed in strange places.

There’s something wrong with your friend. Keot ran up her neck, spreading across her scalp beneath the black thicket of her hair.

She’s fitting in. Shut up and stay hidden.

‘Arabella!’ Terra stood from her chair, a tall girl in a sparkling green dress, her hair long and sandy, confined by a gold band, her face pleasant enough, though dominated by an unfortunate nose. ‘Nona, do sit down.’ She glanced around. ‘I thought we were expecting – ’ she raised her hands palms forward and shook them in mock adulation, ‘ – the Chosen One! No?’

Ara fell dramatically onto the nearest couch. ‘No. We discovered her hidden weakness. She’s allergic to being adored.’

‘No matter. In any case, I have a guest of my own to share!’ Terra’s pout gave way to a mischievous smile, any disappointment forgotten. Nona found herself liking the young woman. ‘You brought your warrior – behold mine!’ She leaned across to ring a silver bell on a small stand beside her chair and looked towards the main doors.

‘Do they have to do battle?’ Ara grinned, following Terra’s gaze.

Nona shifted in the comfort of her chair, wondering that Terra considered her a warrior. She didn’t seem to realize that Ara could probably defeat any man in her house guard without breaking a sweat.

It’s hard to see old friends with new eyes.

What would you know? You don’t have any friends. Nona tried to force Keot down onto her back but abandoned the effort as the doors began to open.

A tall, darkly handsome man walked in. The black sweep of his hair reached past a starched white collar. His jacket, deepest purple and embroidered with silver wire in the bold designs favoured by Verity’s gentry, must have cost a year’s salary for the average city worker.

‘I know him!’ Ara sat up, suddenly interested.

‘You should, he’s one of the empire’s finest ring-fighters!’ Terra clapped her hands, excited.

Nona stared at Ara and her friend. They were discussing the man as if he wasn’t there. She looked back, apologetic, seeing his face properly for the first time. ‘Regol?’

‘Indeed.’ Regol sketched a bow. ‘At your service, Nona the Nun.’ She recognized the sardonic smile and the dark humour in his eyes even if she didn’t recognize the finery he wore now.

‘You’ve met?’ Terra clapped again. ‘Where? You must tell me!’

‘The last time I saw little Nona she was on her back, surrendering to me,’ Regol said.

Terra frowned. ‘Surely novices aren’t allowed to do that sort of thing?’ She grinned again, all curiosity. ‘What have you been up to, Nona?’

‘He’d kicked me in the chest then elbowed me in the head.’ Nona remembered that it had hurt, a lot. ‘I reckoned I should let him win and save my strength for someone I really didn’t like.’

‘A big ginger gerant.’ Regol nodded. ‘And technically you did win that fight against Denam.’

‘Denam?’ Terra looked shocked. ‘That man’s a monster. Nona couldn’t have …’

‘You were what? Twelve at the time?’ Regol shook his head. ‘Denam never quite lived that down …’

‘I don’t believe—’ Terra started towards her feet.

Ara set a hand to her cousin’s leg. ‘It’s true. But Denam lost by disqualification. He tried to attack Nona outside the ring.’

Regol came and took the chair beside Nona, uninvited. ‘From what I hear you could have killed both of us that day if you’d wanted to.’

Terra stared at him. Regol nodded. ‘Magic.’ He mouthed the word silently and nodded again.

Terra began to tell Ara about Regol’s victories in the Caltess. Nona leaned back, letting it wash over her. She found herself watching Regol, who in turn kept his gaze on Terra, smiling that smile of his. Nona shook her head, it seemed she and Ara weren’t the only ones with magic at their disposal; Regol appeared able to fascinate the other two just by sitting there, and she’d found herself being drawn into it too, letting her gaze wander the length of him. Perhaps he had a touch of the marjal empathy that Markus had once spoken of.

In time lunch was served and the four of them went through to a dining room that was even longer, wider, and taller than the Sweet Mercy refectory where fifty novices ate their meals. In the centre stood a long, polished table down which Nona had a sudden urge to slide, sending a dozen candlesticks flying. She suppressed the urge and took a seat opposite Regol at one end. Terra and Ara sat to either side of him. Watching them, Nona realized that Terra must be a good few years older than Ara and herself, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, of an age with Regol. A spike of jealousy drove its way into her: Terra, living her grand life beneath her father’s golden roof, producing Regol as a novelty for the entertainment of her friend.

If you killed her you could take her house and claim the male.

Shut up, Keot.

Nona turned her attention to the bowl of soup that had been set before her. A delicious aroma rose from the orangey liquid. She had no idea what the ingredients might be. Several silver spoons were arranged around the place setting. She took the nearest, a fluted affair, and applied it gingerly to the liquid. The bowl itself was finest porcelain, eggshell-thin and delicately painted with lilacs. Nona took each spoonful in mortal fear that she might somehow damage the bowl.

‘Nona? What do you think?’

‘What?’ Nona looked up, suddenly worried she had been slurping. ‘Yes?’

Regol, who had asked the question, gave her a puzzled look.

If you want to breed with him you should just tell him so.

‘I don’t—’ I don’t want to breed with him and if you don’t shut up I will force you into my little finger and CUT IT OFF! ‘Sorry …’

‘Is the soup disagreeing with you?’ Terra looked concerned.

‘Something was,’ Nona said. Then, seeing Terra’s distress, ‘No, not the soup, it’s lovely. What’s in it?’

Terra brightened. ‘Do you know, I’ve never thought to ask. I can summon the cook. It’s persimmon and something, I expect. Everyone is eating persimmons these days. I had one with codfish at Dora Reesis’s the other day! I’ll have Edris get the cook—’

‘No need! It’s lovely.’ Nona bent her head and took another spoon, consuming it as silently as a Sister of Discretion.

What’s a persimmon?

I have no idea. And shut up.

Keot slid down the back of her neck, curling towards her stomach, presumably to investigate in person.

Ara and Terra chattered about this or that lady of the Sis, though Terra’s knowledge of who wore what dress and which colour was in favour at court seemed to wear down even Ara’s tolerance for such detail. At last Ara swept the blonde sheaf of her hair over one shoulder and turned those blue eyes of hers on Regol. ‘Have you beaten any other novices senseless lately?’

‘No.’ Regol shook his head sorrowfully. ‘That’s a treat reserved for apprentices. I get to dance with Gretcha now, and she punches hard!’

‘Yours is a dangerous profession, sir.’ Ara pushed her plate back.

‘It has its advantages.’ Regol mopped his plate with a hunk of bread, his manners those of the Caltess. ‘Free lunches, for example.’

‘Where else have you dined?’ Ara arched an eyebrow. She looked much older than her fifteen years, Nona thought.

‘It’s where I will dine that interests me most.’ A degree of genuine excitement broke through Regol’s habitual mask. ‘Sherzal herself has requested the pleasure of my company at her palace!’

Nona sat up at that, almost toppling the exquisite glass they’d brought her water in. ‘Sherzal!’

Ara half-raised her hand, a placatory gesture. ‘Ring-fighters are popular guests at many high tables. Raymel Tacsis made the whole business fashionable and it’s a trend that seems to have outlived him.’

Terra’s smile had a touch of nerves about it. ‘I hear Sherzal takes all manner of pleasure in the company of ring-fighters. Keep your guard up, Regol.’

‘Always, lady.’ He nodded. ‘Around Gretcha especially, but hardly less so in the homes of the rich and powerful. Present company excepted of course.’

They all laughed at that, though probably for four different reasons.

‘And when, pray tell, is Sherzal to have the pleasure of your company, Regol?’ Ara asked, every bit the Sis.

‘Just over a month.’ Regol dipped his spoon into the soup, clearing it with an admirable lack of slurping. ‘The feast of … Stevvan?’

‘Oh!’ Terra clapped. ‘The feast of Stevvan? You won’t be alone then, Regol dear. Everyone who is anyone is going. Sherzal has sent out invitations by the cartload. I doubt there’ll be a Sis mansion with anyone under fifty left in it that day. I wouldn’t be surprised if she hasn’t invited Durnish princes and Scithrowl warlords! She’s promised something spectacular!’

‘I can hardly wait.’ Regol seemed disappointed to learn his meals at the palace would likely prove less intimate than he had expected.

The meal moved from soup to salad, four servants required so that the plates could be simultaneously swept away and replaced. The main courses arrived: individual peafowls, deliciously roasted and garnished with mushrooms, then redketch, fished from the meltwater rivers off the southern ice. Nona ate with dedication, amazed at the idea that food could be so much better than what was served in the Sweet Mercy refectory, which she had considered to be a paradise.

Hard on the heels of the servants removing the second set of plates came a maid bearing a tray of porcelain cups each brimming with a fragrant, steaming liquid. Nona peered at hers uncertainly.

‘It’s chai, Nona.’ Ara picked up hers. ‘An infusion of leaves from Gerula. Drunk in all the best houses.’

Gerula rang a bell, a land far to the east. Nona picked up her cup and sniffed.

‘It’s an acquired taste.’ Regol grinned at her across the table. ‘You have to work at enjoying many of the most expensive things in life!’

Something hit the door with such violence that the lock burst open. Surprise set Nona’s cup slipping from her fingers. Instinct kicked in and Nona dug into the moment. Even with whatever threat might be exposed as the door continued its swing Nona’s first act was to catch the cup again, intercepting its lazy fall and setting it on the table.

By the time the door stood wide enough to reveal Sister Kettle, Nona, Ara, and Regol were all on their feet, chairs tumbling behind them. The swinging door banged against the wall.

‘Don’t drink it!’ The chairs crashed to the floor as Kettle walked into the room. Her gaze seemingly fixed on Regol.

‘Wh—’ Terra, still seated with her cup halfway to her lips, blinked and looked around her, astonished to see everyone else standing.

‘Don’t drink it,’ Kettle repeated, leaning over the table to take the steaming cup from Terra’s hand.

Nona followed Kettle’s gaze. Not Regol – the serving maid behind him. Regol, understanding, spun around, but the woman caught him by the wrist and neck, pressing on a nerve cluster to force him to his knees.

‘The chai isn’t poisoned, Kettle.’ The woman stood straight, looking less like a serving maid with each passing second.

She lied to you. With her body. Like your poisoned apple has been trying to teach you.

‘I came to speak with Zole. If I’d wanted your novices dead you would be collecting their warm corpses now.’ The woman let Regol go with a shove that sent him sprawling. She was younger than Nona had thought, perhaps as young as Kettle, her hair hunska-black, tied into a tight plait. Dark eyes watched from above high cheekbones. There was a hard beauty to her. And a threat.

‘I know you.’ Regol from the floor, rubbing his neck. ‘You come to the Caltess forging every year and watch the novices.’ His pursed lips took on a rueful smile. ‘My charms failed me last year. And the year before.’

‘Zole’s not here, Safira,’ Kettle said, moving to put herself between the woman and the table. ‘What made you think she might be?’

‘I didn’t tell anyone.’ Terra found her feet at last. ‘I swear it!’

‘I can see she’s not here.’ Safira stepped towards the door. ‘I’ll leave you to your dessert. Your maid’s unconscious in a cupboard in the cold pantry.’

Kettle moved to block Safira’s exit. Regol gained his feet, wincing.

Who is this female? You know her too. Keot edged towards Nona’s neck, a red flush rising.

Safira. She trained Zole for the emperor’s sister. She was banished from the convent years ago when she stabbed Kettle.

At last! Keot pushed Nona’s flaw-blades into being. Someone you can kill.

No. But Nona made no effort to dispel her blades.

‘Get out of my way, Mai.’ Safira advanced on the door.

Mai?

Must be Kettle’s real name. Shut up.

‘You’re coming to the convent. There are questions to be answered.’ Kettle settled into a blade-fist stance, soft-form, arms raised.

‘I’m not.’ Safira echoed the stance.

‘She knows about Yisht and the shipheart!’ Nona leapt onto the table, her concern for the crockery forgotten. Jump on her! Shred her flesh. Open her body! Keot spread, shading crimson along her limbs.

‘And she stabbed Kettle!’ Ara hissed.

Safira shook her head, a narrow smile on her lips. ‘It wasn’t like that. You don’t know anything. You’re children.’

‘It was a bit like that.’ Kettle kept her eyes on Safira’s.

‘Apple poisoned her against me, Nona.’

Nona blinked, surprised to find herself addressed.

Safira continued. ‘Apple does that. You’ll find out but it will be too late by then. Sherzal is our only hope. Crucical lacks the imagination. Velera is a blunt weapon. We can sink together with the emperor or some of us can swim.’

‘Sherzal—’

‘Sherzal didn’t order your friend’s death, Nona. Yisht is dangerous but you use the tools you have.’ Safira glanced towards her. ‘I’m not your enemy. The Noi-Guin haven’t forgotten you. That’s a warning from a friend.’

Nona shook her head. ‘If you’re a friend you can come and tell your stories to the abbess. She’ll know what to make of them.’ She moved to the table’s edge, feet careful, avoiding the plates. Ara and Regol advanced too.

‘No! Just me.’ Kettle’s command was iron. Surprise at such authority from the nun held Nona in her place. Kettle was always smiles and fun. Nona didn’t recognize this Kettle.

In the next moment the two women closed to fight, Safira sweeping her leg to topple Kettle. Both employed the strain of blade-fist favoured by Sisters of Discretion, their combat fluid. Where Sister Tallow concentrated on blocking and on blows aimed to inflict as much damage in as short a time as possible the grey-fist centred on evasion and on unbalancing the opponent, often seeming more of a dance. The two moved in a flowing contest of position and stability, flurries of blows finding nothing but air. It might be a dance, and a beautiful one at that, but Nona knew the form held scores of moves for disabling or killing a less skilled opponent in a quiet and efficient manner, any of which could be used in a heartbeat if either woman gained sufficient advantage.

A quick clash, hands finding purchase, a rapid adjustment of feet, grips broken. Kettle and Safira spun apart, both unbalanced. A moment later they closed again, punches ducked, kicks evaded with the minimum twist necessary, Kettle a blur of swirling habit. Without warning Kettle managed to seize Safira’s trailing plait and, yanking her head back, drove an elbow into her face.

Safira stepped back, panting, wiping the blood from her nose. ‘As much as I love to play with you, Mai, I don’t have time for this.’ She opened her hand to reveal a small leather tube, pitch-sealed. ‘Grey mustard. Not really the ideal condiment for social gatherings. Perhaps I should just go?’

Kettle stepped back from the door, eyes hard.

Throw yourself on her! You could cut her hand off before she—

No. Nona didn’t know much about grey mustard but she knew it was a poison that Sister Apple didn’t let any novice work with until they reached Holy Class, and then only if they were marked for the Grey.

Safira opened the door and turned in the doorway, finding Nona again. ‘Tell Zole what I said. Sherzal is bound for greatness and there is a place for both of you at her side.’

A moment later she was gone.

9

On seven-day they heated the pool water. With the shipheart gone it now required that coal be burned in a chamber beneath the laundry where the pipes lay exposed. Black smoke belched from the new chimney and the Corridor wind stripped it away. Come evening, after four hours, the water steamed. On some six-days during the freeze Nona had to break a film of ice in the bathhouse, so the seven-day was a blessing. After four hours burning coal the pool was as hot as it would get and almost as hot as in the year she had joined Sweet Mercy.

Nona and Ara had returned from lunch with Terra Mensis in Verity in good time to bathe but Nona left the dormitories late, deep in her considerations. She hadn’t spoken to Zole and remained undecided about what to do with Safira’s message. Probably she should let the abbess decide.

Kettle had been quiet on the journey back, locked in her thoughts. The best thing to come out of the visit had been when, as they were leaving, Ara had asked Terra to let Nona borrow some clothes the next time she was in town.

‘It’s a convent thing,’ she had said. ‘A sort of fancy dress. I don’t know what she’ll want.’

‘Of course …’ Terra had seemed uncertain, perhaps imagining her finest dress walking out the door along with borrowed jewellery.

‘Servant’s uniform perhaps. Or a wig if you still have some?’ Ara had said.

Terra brightened considerably at that. ‘Arabella! I have so many wigs! Velera wore that silver one three years ago and … well, you know … but now? Nobody wears them. You can have six if you want, Nona!’

The other novices had rushed off to enjoy the heat as soon as the message went out that Sister Mop had opened the bathhouse doors, Ara with them. Nona had lain on her bed staring at the ceiling, ignoring Keot’s urgings. He loved the pool.

The holothour filled her thoughts. The memory of that consuming fear. The anger she felt at the shame of it. The creature’s mark on her friends. Of all the novices who came with Nona from the caves that day only Ara would even acknowledge they existed. The others grew irritated if she talked about them and would try to change the subject, and failing that just walk away. Even Ara, though she agreed there were caves, and that a hidden entrance existed, was vague and evasive when it came to talking about what might be down there and whether they had ever explored together.

Take me to the bathhouse!

You just want to see the novices naked.

I am older than your civilization and find your bodies no more attractive than those of spiders.

It’s no big thing to be centuries old if you can’t remember anything further back than a few years.

Keot seemed to know very little. He didn’t even know what he was or where he came from. Or if he did he wasn’t telling. He claimed to enjoy the heat of the water, but every time Nona’s attention wandered she would find him trying to creep into one of her eyes to see better.

At last Nona rolled off her bed and left the dormitory. She needed to be free of the day’s grime, not least the sweat of that remembered fear. She also wanted an end to Keot’s moaning. The dorms lay silent. Her feet echoed on the stairs. Nobody stayed long when the pool was steaming.

‘I thought you were never coming.’ Joeli Namsis stepped into her path in the entrance hall, emerging from the Red dorm. Nona had been too deep in thought to see her until the last moment. Apart from her air of cruelty her appearance – tall, with golden hair cascading around her shoulders – was very similar to Ara’s. ‘I suppose it must be true. Peasants do like being dirty.’

Two girls, so alike they might be true sisters, came out behind her: Elani and Crocey, Joeli’s constant companions, both hunska half-bloods. Two more exited from Grey dorm. These two, on her right, were from Holy Class, both of them marked for Red Sisters. Elani and Crocey stepped past Joeli, both holding quarterstaffs. Not from the Blade Hall stores but rough pieces of timber that looked to have been looted from the cooper’s yard.

Joeli smiled. ‘I don’t think you’ll report us however badly we beat you. But I’m quite eager to get into the world and put my skills to use, so being thrown out would be a price I’m willing to pay to see you crawl, Nona.’

‘My price is higher.’ Keot got into Nona’s tongue. ‘But holding your guts in my hands will cover it.’

Nona bit down on further threats and the air around her fingers shimmered as flaw-blades sprang into being. She wouldn’t cut a novice except to save her life – but the quarterstaffs would get no mercy and dicing them would put fear into Joeli’s friends. The convent knew her secret now, but knowing and seeing were different things. Nona let the planet spin to a near halt and stepped forward, offering no defence. She snapped out an arm at the nearest staff. The half-bloods were fast by normal standards but her speed made them seem slow. Her hand swung past the staff close to where the girl gripped it. The wood, that should have been sliced into sections, remained untouched.

Nona glanced down at her fingers. The flaw-shimmer had gone from them. Just the tingling in her bones remained as it so often did when she withdrew their sharpness from the world.

Nona stepped away quickly. A look up revealed both the older hunska novices coming at her around the sides of the other two. Joeli was falling back behind the staff-bearers, her hands still raised in a plucking motion.

She pulled your claws back in.

Why didn’t you stop her? You stopped the holothour drawing my threads!

Then she would know I exist. But if you want to kill her …

Nona snarled and twisted into the first of the empty-handed novices, a lean girl named Meera, a prime with several years’ advantage. Nona’s anger pushed her speed towards its limits. She hammered her forearm into Meera’s throat and caught the girl’s shoulder to vault over her reaching arm, bringing both feet into the middle of the staff held by Elani behind her. The half-blood stood mired in the moment, her face contorted in a roar. The staff splintered and Nona’s momentum carried her through Meera’s grasp, both heels thudding into Elani’s stomach, bringing her down.

Nona came out of her roll beside Joeli. Kicking the girl’s knee resulted in a satisfying crunch but she should have focused on Hellan, the other hunska, a full-blood, taller and more heavily built than Meera. Hellan thundered into Nona, barrelling her to the ground even as Joeli began to scream.

They fought as they fell, battling for holds. Hellan had the weight and strength advantage, Nona an edge on speed. Nona’s struggle to free her arms from where Hellan had pinned them to her sides only succeeded in moving the girl further up her body so they fell face to face. Unable to break free, Nona settled for bending her leg and turning her heel to the ground so the impact with the floor would power her knee into Hellan’s thigh. In addition, to prevent the back of her head crashing against the flagstones Nona drove forward at the last instant, hammering her forehead into Hellan’s nose.

The ground knocked the wind from Nona’s lungs and she lay for a moment, her vision full of strange lights, and Hellan’s blood. A large, fast something drove through the confusion of flashes. The heel of a quarterstaff hammering down towards her face. Nona turned her head and the wood grazed her ear before cracking against the stone beside her.

With a roar Nona forced Hellan off her and rolled clear, a slow and ungainly move with Hellan still clutching at her. The swing of the quarterstaff couldn’t be avoided. Nona took the blow on the triceps of her left arm. Better a bruise than a fracture. She swept Crocey’s legs from beneath her as she rose. Elani came at her now, swinging half her broken staff in each hand. Behind her Meera staggered towards the fray, clutching her throat, blood on her chin.

Nona caught one of the shortened staffs in her hand, using it as a lever to twist Elani’s arm while she blocked the other on her forearm. Without hesitation, and still holding the trapped staff, she threw her body weight down on Elani’s twisted elbow. It snapped beneath her.

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