Copyright

HarperVoyager an imprint of

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2017

Copyright © Mark Lawrence 2017

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018 Cover images: © Tomasz Jedruszek (girl), Shutterstock.com (background images)

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: 9780008152291

Ebook Edition © April 2017 ISBN: 9780008152314

Version: 2018-10-26

Dedication

To Celyn, who needs no words for eloquence.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Author’s Note

Red Class

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

Grey Class

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

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Also by Mark Lawrence

About the Publisher

Author’s Note

Rather than place this background information in an appendix at the back where you might not notice it until you’ve finished the book (I’ve done that before) I’m putting it here at the front. However, it is best to skip it and return only if you find you need it. All the information here is given to you in the text and unfolds naturally with the story.

The people of Abeth descend from four ‘tribes’. These tribes were:

Gerant – distinguished by their great size

Hunska – distinguished by their speed. A dark-haired, dark-eyed people

Marjal – distinguished by their ability to tap into the lesser magics

Quantal – distinguished by their ability to walk the Path and work greater magics

The great families of empire adopt the suffix -sis when the head of the family is named a lord by the emperor. The emperor’s own family are the Lansis. Other families of note include the Tacsis, Jotsis, Memsis, Galamsis, Leensis, Gersis, Rolsis, and Chemsis.

In the Convent of Sweet Mercy novices move through four classes on their way to taking holy orders. A novice must graduate from each class. The classes are named after the four orders of nun:

Red Class – typical novice age 9-12

Grey Class – typical novice age 13-14

Mystic Class – typical novice age 15-16

Holy Class – typical novice age 17-19

On taking holy orders novices become nuns. They follow one of the following paths:

Bride of the Ancestor (Holy Sister) – a nun concerned with honouring the Ancestor and maintaining the faith. The most common calling

Martial Sister (Red Sister) – a nun skilled in armed and unarmed combat, usually showing hunska blood

Sister of Discretion (Grey Sister) – a nun skilled in espionage, stealth, and poisons. Often showing marjal blood and a talent for shadow-work

Mystic Sister (Holy Witch) – a nun able to walk the Path and manipulate threads. Always showing quantal blood

Dramatis Personae

Nuns (in order of superiority)

Glass: Abbess of Sweet Mercy Convent, also known as Shella Yammal

Rose: Sister Superior, Holy Sister, runs the sanatorium

Wheel: Sister Superior, Mistress Spirit, Holy Sister, teaches Spirit classes

Apple: Mistress Shade, Grey Sister, also known as the Poisoner, teaches Shade classes

Pan: Mistress Path, Holy Witch, teaches Path classes

Rule: Mistress Academia, Holy Sister, teaches Academia classes

Tallow: Mistress Blade, Red Sister, teaches Blade classes

Chrysanthemum: Holy Sister, mostly known as Sister Mop

Flint: Red Sister, Grey Class mistress

Kettle: Grey Sister

Oak: Holy Sister, Red Class mistress

Rock: Red Sister

Novices

Alata: junior novice

Arabella Jotsis: junior novice, quantal and hunska blood

Clera Ghomal: junior novice, Nona’s friend, hunska blood

Croy: junior novice

Darla: junior novice, gerant blood

Ghena: junior novice, hunska blood

Hessa: junior novice, Nona’s friend from Giljohn’s cage, quantal blood

Jula: junior novice, Nona’s friend, studious

Kariss: junior novice

Katcha: junior novice

Ketti: junior novice, hunska blood

Leeni: junior novice

Mally: junior novice, Grey Class head-girl

Ruli: Nona’s friend, marjal blood

Sarma: junior novice

Sharlot: junior novice

Sheelar: junior novice

Suleri: senior novice

Others

Emperor Crucical: his palace is in the city of Verity

Sherzal: the emperor’s sister. Her palace is close to the Scithrowl border

Velera: the emperor’s sister. Her palace is on the coast

High Priest Jacob: head of the Church of the Ancestor

Archon Nevis: high-ranking priest

Archon Anasta: high-ranking priestess

Archon Philo: high-ranking priest

Archon Kratton: high-ranking priest

Thuran Tacsis: lord, head of the Tacsis family

Raymel Tacsis: heir to Thuran Tacsis, Caltess ring-fighter, gerant blood

Lano Tacsis: Thuran Tacsis’s second son, hunska blood

Academic Rexxus Degon: senior Academy man

Markus: child from Giljohn’s cage, marjal blood

Saida: child from Giljohn’s cage, gerant blood

Willum: child from Giljohn’s cage, marjal blood

Chara: child from Giljohn’s cage, marjal blood

Partnis Reeve: owner of the Caltess fight-hall

Gretcha: Caltess ring-fighter, gerant blood

Maya: Caltess apprentice, gerant blood

Regol: Caltess trainee, hunska blood

Denam: Caltess trainee, gerant blood

Tarkax: known as ‘the Ice-Spear’, renowned warrior from the ice-tribes

Yisht: warrior from the ice tribes, serves Sherzal

Zole: girl from the ice tribes, Sherzal’s ward

Irvone Galamsis: high court judge

Sister Owl: legendary Red Sister (dead)

Sister Cloud: legendary Red Sister (dead)

Safira: former senior novice, works for Sherzal

Malkin: Abbess Glass’s cat

Argus: prison guard at Harriton

Dava: prison guard at Harriton

John Fallon: prison guard at Harriton

Herber: graveman

Jame Lender: prisoner executed at Harriton

Red Class

Prologue

It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size. For Sister Thorn of the Sweet Mercy Convent Lano Tacsis brought two hundred men.

From the front of the convent you can see both the northern ice and the southern, but the finer view is out across the plateau and over the narrow lands. On a clear day the coast may be glimpsed, the Sea of Marn a suggestion in blue.

At some point in an achingly long history a people, now lost to knowledge, had built one thousand and twenty-four pillars out on the plateau: Corinthian giants thicker than a thousand-year oak, taller than a long-pine. A forest of stone without order or pattern, covering the level ground from flank to flank so that no spot upon it lay more than twenty yards from a pillar. Sister Thorn waited amid this forest, alone and seeking her centre.

Lano’s men began to spread out between the columns. Thorn could neither see nor hear her foe approach, but she knew their disposition. She had watched earlier as they snaked up the west trail from Styx Valley, three and four abreast: Pelarthi mercenaries from the ice-margins, furs of the white bear and the snow-wolf over their leathers, some with scraps of chainmail about them, ancient and dark or bright as new, depending on their luck. Many carried spears, some swords; one man in five carried a short-bow of recurved horn. Tall men in the main, fair-haired, their beards short or plaited, the women with lines of blue paint across their cheeks and foreheads like the rays of a cold sun.

Here’s a moment.

All the world and more has rushed eternity’s length to reach this beat of your heart, screaming down the years. And if you let it, the universe, without drawing breath, will press itself through this fractured second and race to the next, on into a new eternity. Everything that is, the echoes of everything that ever was, the roots of all that will ever be, must pass through this moment that you own. Your only task is to give it pause – to make it notice.

Thorn stood without motion, for only when you are truly still can you be the centre. She stood without sound, for only silent can you listen. She stood without fear, for only the fearless can understand their peril.

Hers the stillness of the forest, rooted restlessness, oak-slow, pine-quick, a seething patience. Hers the stillness of ice walls that face the sea, clear and deep, blue secrets held cold against the truth of the world, a patience of aeons stacked against a sudden fall. Hers the stillness of a sorrow-born babe unmoving in its crib. And of the mother, frozen in her discovery, fleeting and forever.

Thorn held a silence that had grown old before first she saw the world’s light. A quietude passed down generations, the peace that bids us watch the dawn, an unspoken alliance with wave and flame that lets both take all speech from tongues and sets us standing before the water’s surge and swell, or waiting to bear witness to fire’s consuming dance of joy. Hers the silence of rejection, of a child’s hurt: mute, unknowing, a scar upon the years to come. Hers the unvoiced everything of first love, tongue-tied, ineloquent, the refusal to sully so sharp and golden a feeling with anything as blunt as words.

Thorn waited. Fearless as flowers, bright, fragile, open to the sky. Brave as only those who’ve already lost can be.

Voices reached her, the Pelarthi calling out to each other as they lost sight of their numbers in the broken spaces of the plateau. Cries rang across the level ground, echoing from the pillars, flashes of torchlight, a multitude of footfalls, growing closer. Thorn rolled her shoulders beneath black skin armour. She tightened the fingers of each hand around the sharp weight of a throwing star, her breathing calm, heart racing.

‘In this place the dead watch me,’ she breathed. A shout broke out close at hand, figures glimpsed between two pillars, flitting across the gap. Many figures. ‘I am a weapon in service to the Ark. Those who come against me will know despair.’ Her voice rose along with the tension that always presaged a fight, a buzzing tingle across her cheekbones, a tightness in her throat, a sense of being both deep within her own body, and above and around it at the same time.

The first of the Pelarthi jogged into view, and seeing her, stumbled to a halt. A young man, beardless though hard-eyed beneath the iron of his helm. More crowded in behind him, spilling out into the killing ground.

The Red Sister tilted her head to acknowledge them.

Then it began.

1

No child truly believes they will be hanged. Even on the gallows platform with the rope scratching at their wrists and the shadow of the noose upon their face they know that someone will step forward, a mother, a father returned from some long absence, a king dispensing justice … someone. Few children have lived long enough to understand the world into which they were born. Perhaps few adults have either, but they at least have learned some bitter lessons.

Saida climbed the scaffold steps as she had climbed the wooden rungs to the Caltess attic so many times. They all slept there together, the youngest workers, bedding down among the sacks and dust and spiders. They would all climb those rungs tonight and whisper about her in the darkness. Tomorrow night the whispers would be spent and a new boy or girl would fill the empty space she left beneath the eaves.

‘I didn’t do anything.’ Saida said it without hope, her tears dry now. The wind sliced cold from the west, a Corridor wind, and the sun burned red, filling half the sky yet offering little heat. Her last day?

The guard prodded her on, indifferent rather than unkind. She looked back at him, tall, old, flesh tight as if the wind had worn it down to the bone. Another step, the noose dangling, dark against the sun. The prison yard lay near-deserted, a handful watching from the black shadows where the outer wall offered shelter, old women, grey hair trailing. Saida wondered what drew them. Perhaps being so old they worried about dying and wanted to see how it was done.

‘I didn’t do it. It was Nona. She even said so.’ She had spoken the words so many times that meaning had leached away leaving them just pale noise. But it was true. All of it. Even Nona said so.

The hangman offered Saida the thinnest of smiles and bent to check the rope confining her wrists. It itched and it was too tight, her arm hurt where Raymel had cracked it, but Saida said nothing, only scanned the yard, the doors to the cell blocks, the outer buildings, even the great gates to the world outside. Someone would come.

A door clanged open from the Pivot, a squat tower where the warden was said to live in luxury to rival any lord’s. A guardsman emerged, squinting against the sun. Just a guardsman: the hope, that had leapt so easily in Saida’s breast, crashed once more.

Stepping from behind the guardsman a smaller, wider figure. Saida looked again, hoping again. A woman in the long habit of a nun came walking into the yard. Only the staff in her hand, its end curled and golden, marked her office.

The hangman glanced across, his narrow smile replaced by a broad frown. ‘The abbess …’

‘I ain’t seen her down here before.’ The old guardsman tightened his fingers on Saida’s shoulder.

Saida opened her mouth but found it too dry for her thoughts. The abbess had come for her. Come to take her to the Ancestor’s convent. Come to give her a new name and a new place. Saida wasn’t even surprised. She had never truly thought she would be hanged.

2

The stench of a prison is an honest one. The guards’ euphemisms, the public smile of the chief warden, even the building’s façade, may lie and lie again, but the stink is the unvarnished truth: sewage and rot, infection and despair. Even so, Harriton prison smelled sweeter than many. A hanging prison like Harriton doesn’t give its inmates the chance to rot. A brief stay, a long drop on a short rope, and they could feed the worms at their leisure in a convict ditch-grave up at the paupers’ cemetery in Winscon.

The smell bothered Argus when he first joined the guard. They say that after a while your mind steps around any smell without noticing. It’s true, but it’s also true of pretty much every other bad thing in life. After ten years Argus’s mind stepped around the business of stretching people’s necks just as easily as it had acclimatized to Harriton’s stink.

‘When you leaving?’ Dava’s obsession with everyone else’s schedule used to annoy Argus, but now he just answered without thought or memory. ‘Seventh bell.’

‘Seventh!’ The little woman rattled out her usual outrage at the inequities of the work rota. They ambled towards the main holding block, the private scaffold at their back. Behind them Jame Lender dangled out of sight beneath the trapdoor, still twitching. Jame was the graveman’s problem now. Old Man Herber would be along soon enough with his cart and donkey for the day’s take. The short distance to Winscon Hill might prove a long trip for Old Herber, his five passengers, and the donkey, near as geriatric as its master. The fact that Jame had no meat on him to speak of would lighten the load. That, and the fact two of the other four were small girls.

Herber would wind his way through the Cutter Streets and up to the Academy first, selling off whatever body parts might have a value today. What he added to the grave-ditch up on the Hill would likely be much diminished – a collection of wet ruins if the day’s business had been good.

‘… sixth bell yesterday, fifth the day before.’ Dava paused the rant that had sustained her for years, an enduring sense of injustice that gave her the backbone to handle condemned men twice her size.

‘Who’s that?’ A tall figure was knocking at the door to the new arrivals’ block with a heavy cane.

‘Fellow from the Caltess? You know.’ Dava snapped her fingers before her face as if trying to surprise the answer out. ‘Runs fighters.’

‘Partnis Reeve!’ Argus called the name as he remembered it and the big man turned. ‘Been a while.’

Partnis visited the day-gaol often enough to get his fighters out of trouble. You don’t run a stable of angry and violent men without them breaking a few faces off the payroll from time to time, but generally they didn’t end up at Harriton. Professional fighters usually keep a calm enough head to stop short of killing during their bar fights. It’s the amateurs who lose their minds and keep stamping on a fallen opponent until there’s nothing left but mush.

‘My friend!’ Partnis turned with arms wide, a broad smile, and no attempt at Argus’s name. ‘I’m here for my girl.’

‘Your girl?’ Argus frowned. ‘Didn’t know you were a family man.’

‘Indentured. A worker.’ Partnis waved the matter aside. ‘Open the door, will you, good fellow. She’s down to drop today and I’m late enough as it is.’ He frowned, as if remembering some sequence of irritating delays.

Argus lifted the key from his pocket, a heavy piece of ironwork. ‘Probably missed her already, Partnis. Sun’s a-setting. Old Herber and his cart will be creaking down the alleys, ready for his take.’

‘Both of them creaking, eh? Herber and his cart,’ Dava put in. Always quick with a joke, never funny.

‘I sent a runner,’ Partnis said, ‘with instructions that the Caltess girls shouldn’t be dropped before—’

‘Instructions?’ Argus paused, key in the lock.

‘Suggestions, then. Suggestions wrapped around a silver coin.’

‘Ah.’ Argus turned the key and led him inside. He took his visitor by the quickest route, through the guard station, along the short corridor where the day’s arrivals watched from the narrow windows in their cell doors, and out into the courtyard where the public scaffold sat below the warden’s window.

The main gates had already opened, ready to admit the graveman’s cart. A small figure waited close to the scaffold steps, a single guardsman beside her, John Fallon by the look of it.

‘Just in time!’ Argus said.

‘Good.’ Partnis started forward, then faltered. ‘Isn’t that …’ he trailed off, lips curling into a snarl of frustration.

Following the tall man’s gaze, Argus spotted the source of his distress. The Abbess of Sweet Mercy came striding through the small crowd of onlookers before the warden’s steps. At this distance she could be anyone’s mother, a shortish, plumpish figure swathed in black cloth, but her crozier announced her.

‘Dear heavens, that awful old witch has come to steal from me yet again.’ Partnis both lengthened and quickened his stride, forcing Argus into an undignified jog to keep pace. Dava, on the man’s other side, had to run.

Despite Partnis’s haste, he beat the abbess to the girl by only a fraction. ‘Where’s the other one?’ He looked around as if the guardsman might be hiding another prisoner behind him.

‘Other what?’ John Fallon’s gaze flickered past Partnis to the advancing nun, her habit swirling as she marched.

‘Girl! There were two. I gave orders to— I sent a request that they be held back.’

‘Over with the dropped.’ Fallon tilted his head towards a mound beside the main gates, several feet high. Stones pinned a stained, grey sheet across the heap. The graveman’s cart came into view as they watched.

‘Damnation!’ The word burst from Partnis loud enough to turn heads all across the yard. He raised both hands, fingers spread, then trembling with effort, lowered them to his sides. ‘I wanted them both.’

‘Have to argue with the graveman over the big one,’ Fallon observed. ‘This’un.’ He reached for the girl at his side. ‘You’ll have to argue with me over. Then those two.’ He nodded at Dava and Argus. ‘Then the warden.’

‘There’ll be no arguing.’ The abbess stepped between Fallon and Partnis, dwarfed by both, her crozier reaching up to break their eye contact. ‘I shall be taking the child.’

‘No you won’t!’ Partnis looked down at her, brow furrowed. ‘All due respect to the Ancestor and all that, but she’s mine, bought and paid for.’ He glanced back at the gates where Herber had now halted his cart beside the covered mound. ‘Besides … how do you know she’s the one you want?’

The abbess snorted and favoured Partnis with a motherly smile. ‘Of course she is. You can tell by looking at her, Partnis Reeve. This child has the fire in her eyes.’ She frowned. ‘I saw the other. Scared. Lost. She should never have been here.’

‘Saida’s back in the cells …’ the girl said. ‘They told me I would go first.’

Argus peered at the child. A small thing in shapeless linen – not street rags, covered in rusty stains, but a serf’s wear none the less. She might be nine. Argus had lost the knack for telling. His older two were long grown, and little Sali would always be five. This girl was a fierce creature, a scowl on her thin, dirty face. Eyes black below a short shock of ebony hair.

‘Might have been the other,’ Partnis said. ‘She was the big one.’ He lacked conviction. A fight-master knows the fire when he sees it.

‘Where’s Saida?’ the girl asked.

The abbess’s eyes widened a fraction. It almost looked like hurt. Gone, quicker than the shadow of a bird’s wing. Argus decided he imagined it. The Abbess of Sweet Mercy was called many things, few of them to her face, and ‘soft’ wasn’t one of them.

‘Where’s my friend?’ the girl repeated.

‘Is that why you stayed?’ the abbess asked. She pulled a hoare-apple from her habit, so dark a red it could almost be black, a bitter and woody thing. A mule might eat one – few men would.

‘Stayed?’ Dava asked, though the question hadn’t been pointed her way. ‘She stayed ’cos this is a bloody prison and she’s tied and under guard!’

‘Did you stay to help your friend?’

The girl didn’t answer, only glared up at the woman as if at any moment she might leap upon her.

‘Catch.’ The abbess tossed the apple towards the girl.

Quick as quick a small hand intercepted it. Apple smacking into palm. Behind the girl a length of rope dropped to the ground.

‘Catch.’ The abbess had another apple in hand and threw it, hard.

The girl caught it in her other hand.

‘Catch.’

Quite where the abbess had hidden her fruit supply Argus couldn’t tell, but he stopped caring a heartbeat later, staring at the third apple, trapped between two hands, each full of the previous two.

‘Catch.’ The abbess tossed yet another hoare-apple, but the girl dropped her three and let the fourth sail over her shoulder.

‘Where’s Saida?’

‘You come with me, Nona Grey,’ the abbess said, her expression kindly. ‘We will discuss Saida at the convent.’

‘I’m keeping her.’ Partnis stepped towards the girl. ‘A treasured daughter! Besides, she damn near killed Raymel Tacsis. The family will never let her go free. But if I can show she has value they might let me put her into a few fights first.’

‘Raymel’s dead. I killed him. I—’

‘Treasured? I’m surprised you let her go, Mr Reeve,’ the abbess cut across the girl’s protests.

‘I wouldn’t have if I’d been there!’ Partnis clenched his hand as if trying to recapture the opportunity. ‘I was halfway across the city when I heard. Got back to find the place in chaos … blood everywhere … Tacsis men waiting … If the city guard hadn’t hauled her up here she’d be in Thuran’s private dungeon by now. He’s not a man to lose a son and sit idle.’

‘Which is why you will give her to me.’ The abbess’s smile reminded Argus of his mother’s. The one she’d use when she was right and they both knew it. ‘Your pockets aren’t deep enough to get young Nona out of here should the Tacsis boy die, and if you did obtain her release neither you nor your establishment are sufficiently robust to withstand Thuran Tacsis’s demands for retribution.’

The girl tried to interrupt. ‘How do you know my name? I didn’t—’

‘Whereas I have been friends with Warden James longer than you have been alive, Mr Reeve.’ The abbess cut across the girl again. ‘And no sane man would mount an attack on a convent of the faith.’

‘You shouldn’t take her for a Red Sister.’ Partnis had that sullen tone men get when they know they’ve lost. ‘It’s not right. She’s got no Ancestor faith … and she’s all but a murderer. Vicious, it was, the way they tell it …’

‘Faith I can give her. What she’s got already is what the Red Sisters need.’ The abbess reached out a plump hand towards the girl. ‘Come, Nona.’

Nona glanced up at John Fallon, at Partnis Reeve, at the hangman and the noose swaying beside him. ‘Saida is my friend. If you’ve hurt her I’ll kill you all.’

In silence she walked forward, placing her feet so as not to step on the fallen apples, and took the abbess’s hand.

Argus and the others watched them leave. At the gates, they paused, black against the red sun. The child released the abbess’s hand and took three paces towards the covered mound. Old Herber and his mule stood, watching, as bound by the moment as the rest of them. Nona stopped, staring at the mound. She looked towards the men at the gallows – a long, slow look – then returned to the abbess. Seconds later the pair had vanished around the corner.

‘Marking us for death she was,’ Dava said.

Still joking. Still not funny.

3

A juggler once came to Nona’s village, a place so small it had neither a name nor a market square. The juggler came dressed in mud and faded motley, a lean look about him. He came alone, a young man, dark eyes, quick hands. In a sackcloth bag he carried balls of coloured leather, batons with white and black ribbons, and crudely made knives.

‘Come, watch, the great Amondo will delight and amaze.’ It sounded like a phrase he didn’t own. He introduced himself to the handful of villagers not labouring in field or hut and yet brave enough to face a Corridor wind laced with icy rain. Laying his hat between them, broad-brimmed and yawning for appreciation, he reached for four striped batons and set them dancing in the air.

Amondo stayed three days, though his audience dried up after the first hour of the first evening. The sad fact is that there’s only so much entertainment to be had from one man juggling, however impressive he might be.

Nona stayed by him though, watching every move, each deft tuck and curl and switch. She stayed even after the light failed and the last of the children drifted away. Silent and staring she watched as the juggler started to pack his props into their bag.

‘You’re a quiet one.’ Amondo threw her a wizened apple that sat in his hat along with several better examples, two bread rolls, a piece of Kennal’s hard goat’s cheese, and somewhere amongst them a copper halfpenny clipped back to a quarter.

Nona held the apple close to her ear, listening to the sound of her fingers against its wrinkles. ‘The children don’t like me.’

‘No?’

‘No.’

Amondo waited, juggling invisible balls with his hands.

‘They say I’m evil.’

Amondo dropped an invisible ball. He left the others to fall and raised a brow.

‘Mother says they say it because my hair is so black and my skin is so pale. She says I get my skin from her and my hair from my da.’ The other children had the tan skin and sandy hair of their parents, but Nona’s mother had come from the ice fringes and her father’s clan hunted up on the glaciers, strangers both of them. ‘Mother says they just don’t like different.’

‘Those are ugly ideas for children to have in their heads.’ The juggler picked up his bag.

Nona stood, watching the apple in her hand but not seeing it. The memory held her. Her mother, in the dimness of their hut, noticing the blood on her hands for the first time. What’s that? Did they hurt you? Nona had hung her head and shook it. Billem Smithson tried to hurt me. This was inside him.

‘Best get along home to your ma and pa.’ Amondo turned slowly, scanning the huts, the trees, the barns.

‘My da’s dead. The ice took him.’

‘Well then.’ A smile, only half-sad. ‘I’d best take you home.’ He pushed back the length of his hair and offered his hand. ‘We’re friends, aren’t we?’

Nona’s mother let Amondo sleep in their barn, though it wasn’t really more than a shed for the sheep to hide in when the snows came. She said people would talk but that she didn’t care. Nona didn’t understand why anyone would care about talk. It was just noise.

On the night Amondo left, Nona went to see him in the barn. He had spread the contents of his bag before him on the dirt floor, where the red light of the moon spilled in through the doorway.

‘Show me how to juggle,’ she said.

He looked up from his knives and grinned, dark hair swept down across his face, dark eyes behind. ‘It’s difficult. How old are you?’

Nona shrugged. ‘Little.’ They didn’t count years in the village. You were a baby, then little, then big, then old, then dead.

‘Little is quite small.’ He pursed his lips. ‘I’ve two years and twenty. I guess I’m supposed to be big.’ He smiled but with more worry in it than joy, as if the world made no more sense and offered no more comfort to bigs than littles. ‘Let’s have a go.’

Amondo picked up three of the leather balls. The moonlight made it difficult to see their colours but with focus approaching it was bright enough to throw and catch. He yawned and rolled his shoulders. A quick flurry of hands and the three balls were dancing in their interlaced arcs. ‘There.’ He caught them. ‘You try.’

Nona took the balls from the juggler’s hands. Few of the other children had managed with two. Three balls was a dismissal. Amondo watched her turning them in her hands, understanding their weight and feel.

She had studied the juggler since his arrival. Now she visualized the pattern the balls had made in the air, the rhythm of his hands. She tossed the first ball up on the necessary curve and slowed the world around her. Then the second ball, lazily departing her hand. A moment later all three were dancing to her tune.

‘Impressive!’ Amondo got to his feet. ‘Who taught you?’

Nona frowned and almost missed her catch. ‘You did.’

‘Don’t lie to me, girl.’ He threw her a fourth ball, brown leather with a blue band.

Nona caught it, tossed it, struggled to adjust her pattern and within a heartbeat she had all four in motion, arcing above her in long and lazy loops.

The anger on Amondo’s face took her by surprise. She had thought he would be pleased – that it would make him like her. He had said they were friends but she had never had a friend and he said it so lightly … She had thought that sharing this might make him say the words again and seal the matter into the world. Friend. She fumbled a ball to the floor on purpose then made a clumsy swing at the next.

‘A circus man taught me,’ she lied. The balls rolled away from her into the dark corners where the rats live. ‘I practise. Every day! With … stones … smooth ones from the stream.’

Amondo closed off his anger, putting a brittle smile on his face. ‘Nobody likes to be made a fool of, Nona. Even fools don’t like it.’

‘How many can you juggle?’ she asked. Men like to talk about themselves and their achievements. Nona knew that much about men even if she was little.

‘Goodnight, Nona.’

And, dismissed, Nona had hurried back to the two-room hut she shared with her mother, with the light of the moon’s focus blazing all about her, warmer than the noon-day sun.

‘Faster, girl!’ The abbess jerked Nona’s arm, pulling her out of her memories. The hoare-apples had put Amondo back into her mind. The woman glanced over her shoulder. A moment later she did it again. ‘Quickly!’

‘Why?’ Nona asked, quickening her pace.

‘Because Warden James will have his men out after us soon enough. Me they’ll scold – you they’ll hang. So pick those feet up!’

‘You said you’d been friends with the warden since before Partnis Reeve was a baby!’

‘So you were listening.’ The abbess steered them up a narrow alley, so steep it required a step or two every few yards and the roofs of the tall houses stepped one above the next to keep pace. The smell of leather hit Nona, reminding her of the coloured balls Amondo had handed her, as strong a smell as the stink of cows, rich, deep, polished, brown.

‘You said you and the warden were friends,’ Nona said again.

‘I’ve met him a few times,’ the abbess replied. ‘Nasty little man, bald and squinty, uglier on the inside.’ She stepped around the wares of a cobbler, laid out before his steps. Every other house seemed to be a cobbler’s shop, with an old man or young woman in the window, hammering away at boot heels or trimming leather.

‘You lied!’

‘To call something a lie, child, is an unhelpful characterization.’ The abbess drew a deep breath, labouring up the slope. ‘Words are steps along a path: the important thing is to get where you’re going. You can play by all manner of rules, step-on-a-crack-break-your-back, but you’ll get there quicker if you pick the most certain route.’

‘But—’

‘Lies are complex things. Best not to bother thinking in terms of truth or lie – let necessity be your mother … and invent!’

‘You’re not a nun!’ Nona wrenched her hand away. ‘And you let them kill Saida!’

‘If I had saved her then I would have had to leave you.’

Shouts rang out somewhere down the steepness of the alley.

‘Quickly.’ The alley gave onto a broad thoroughfare by a narrow flight of stairs and the abbess turned onto it, not pausing now to glance back.

‘They know where we’re going.’ Nona had done a lot of running and hiding in her short life and she knew enough to know it didn’t matter how fast you went if they knew where to find you.

‘They know when we get there they can’t follow.’

People choked the street but the abbess wove a path through the thickest of the crowd. Nona followed, so close that the tails of the nun’s habit flapped about her. Crowds unnerved her. There hadn’t been as many people in her village, nor in her whole world, as pressed into this street. And the variety of them, some adults hardly taller than she was, others overtopping even the hulking giants who fought at the Caltess. Some dark, their skin black as ink, some white-blond and so pale as to show each vein in blue, and every shade between.

Through the alleys rising to join the street Nona saw a sea of roofs, tiled in terracotta, stubbled with innumerable chimneys, smoke drifting. She had never imagined a place so big, so many people crammed so tight. Since the night the child-taker had driven Nona and his other purchases into Verity she had seen almost nothing of the city, just the combat hall, the compound where the fighters lived, and the training yards. The cart-ride to Harriton had offered only glimpses as she and Saida sat hugging each other.

‘Through here.’ The abbess set a hand on Nona’s shoulder and aimed her at the steps to what looked like a pillared temple, great doors standing open, each studded with a hundred circles of bronze.

The steps were high enough to put an ache in Nona’s legs. At the top a cavernous hall waited, lit by high windows, every square foot of it packed with stalls and people hunting bargains. The sound of their trading, echoing and multiplied by the marble vaults above, spoke through the entrance with one many-tongued voice. For several minutes it was nothing but noise and colour and pushing. Nona concentrated on filling the void left as the abbess stepped forward before some other body could occupy the space. At last they stumbled into a cool corridor and out into a quieter street behind the market hall.

‘Who are you?’ Nona asked. She had followed the woman far enough. ‘And,’ realizing something, ‘where’s your stick?’

The abbess turned, one hand knotted in the string of purple beads around her neck. ‘My name is Glass. That’s Abbess Glass to you. And I gave my crozier to a rather surprised young man shortly after we emerged from Shoe Street. I hope the warden’s guards followed it rather than us.’

‘Glass isn’t a proper name. It’s a thing. I’ve seen some in Partnis Reeve’s office.’ Something hard and near invisible that kept the Corridor winds from the fight-master’s den.

Abbess Glass turned away and resumed her marching. ‘Each sister takes a new name when she is deemed fit to marry the Ancestor. It’s always the name of an object or thing, to set us apart from the worldly.’

‘Oh.’ Most in Nona’s village had prayed to the nameless gods of rain and sun as they did all across the Grey, setting corn dollies in the fields to encourage a good harvest. But her mother and a few of the younger women went to the new church over in White Lake, where a fierce young man talked about the god who would save them, the Hope, rushing towards us even now. The roof of the Hope church stood ever open so they could see the god advancing. To Nona he looked like all the other stars, only white where almost every other is red, and brighter too. She had asked if all the other stars were gods as well, but all that earned her was a slap. Preacher Mickel said the star was Hope, and also the One God, and that before the northern ice and the southern ice joined hands he would come to save the faithful.

In the cities, though, they mainly prayed to the Ancestor.

‘There. See it?’

Nona followed the line of the abbess’s finger. On a high plateau, beyond the city wall, the slanting sunlight caught on a domed building, perhaps five miles off.

‘Yes.’

‘That’s where we’re headed.’ And the abbess led away along the street, stepping around a horse pile too fresh for the garden-boys to have got to yet.

‘You didn’t hear about me all the way up there?’ Nona asked. It didn’t seem possible.

Abbess Glass laughed, a warm and infectious noise. ‘Ha! No. I had other business in town. One of the faithful told me your story and I made a diversion on my way back to the convent.’

‘Then how did you know my name? My real name, not the one Partnis gave me.’

‘Could you have caught the fourth apple?’ The abbess responded with a question.

‘How many apples can you catch, old woman?’

‘As many as I need to.’ Abbess Glass looked back at her. ‘Hurry up, now.’

Nona knew that she didn’t know much, but she knew when someone was trying to take her measure and she didn’t like things being taken from her. The abbess would have kept on with her apples until she found Nona’s limit – and held that knowledge like a knife in its sheath. Nona hurried up and said nothing. The streets grew emptier as they approached the city wall and the shadows started to stretch.

Alleyways yawned left and right, dark mouths ready to swallow Nona whole. However warm the abbess’s laughter, Nona didn’t trust her. She had watched Saida die. Running away was still very much an option. Living with a collection of old nuns on a windswept hill outside the city might be better than hanging, but not by much.

‘Master Reeve said that Raymel wasn’t dead. That’s not true.’

The abbess pulled her coif off in a smooth motion, revealing short grey hair and exposing her neck to the wind. She quickly threw a shawl of sequined wool about her shoulders.

‘Where did— You stole that!’ Nona glanced around to see if any of the passers-by would share her outrage but they were few and far between, heads bowed, bound to their own purposes. ‘A thief and a liar!’

‘I value my integrity.’ The abbess smiled. ‘Which is why it has a price.’

‘A thief and a liar.’ Nona decided that she would run.

‘And you, child, appear to be complaining because the man you were to hang for murdering is not in fact dead.’ Abbess Glass tied the shawl and tugged it into place. ‘Perhaps you can explain what happened at the Caltess and I can explain what Partnis Reeve almost certainly meant about Raymel Tacsis.’

‘I killed him.’ The abbess wanted a story but Nona kept her words close. She had come to talking so late her mother had thought her dumb, and even now she preferred to listen.

‘How? Why? Paint me a picture.’ Abbess Glass made a sharp turn, pulling Nona through a passage so narrow that a few more pounds about her middle would see the nun scraping both sides.

‘They brought us to the Caltess in a cage.’ Nona remembered the journey. There had been three children on the wagon when Giljohn, the child-taker, stopped at her village and the people gave her over. Grey Stephen had passed her up to him. It seemed that everyone she knew watched as Giljohn put her in the wooden cage with the others. The village children, both littles and bigs, looked on mute, the old women muttered, Mari Streams, her mother’s friend, had sobbed; Martha Baker had shouted cruel words. When the wagon jolted off along its way stones and clods of mud had followed. ‘I didn’t like it.’

The wagon had rattled on for days, then weeks. In two months they had covered nearly a thousand miles, most of it on small and winding lanes, back and forth across the same ground. They rattled up and down the Corridor, weaving a drunkard’s trail north and south, so close to the ice that sometimes Nona could see the walls rising blue above the trees. The wind proved the only constant, crossing the land without friendship, a stranger’s fingers trailing the grass, a cold intrusion.

Day after day Giljohn steered his wagon from town to town, village to hamlet to lonely hovel. The children given up were gaunt, some little more than bones and rags, their parents lacking the will or coin to feed them. Giljohn delivered two meals a day, barley soup with onions in the morning, hot and salted, with hard black bread to dip. In the evening, mashed swede with butter. His passengers looked better by the day.

‘I’ve seen more meat on a butcher’s apron.’ That’s what Giljohn told Saida’s parents when they brought her out of their hut into the rain.

The father, a ratty little man, stooped and gone to grey, pinched Saida’s arm. ‘Big girl for her age. Strong. Got a lick o’ gerant in her.’

The mother, whey-faced, stick-thin, weeping, reached to touch Saida’s long hair but let her hand fall away before contact was made.

‘Four pennies, and my horse can graze in your field tonight.’ Giljohn always dickered. He seemed to do it for the love of the game, his purse being the fattest Nona had ever seen, crammed with pennies, crowns, even a gleaming sovereign that brought a new colour into Nona’s life. In the village only Grey Stephen ever had coins. And James Baker that time he sold all his bread to a merchant’s party that had lost the track to Gentry. But none of them had ever had gold. Not even silver.

‘Ten and you get on your way before the hour’s old,’ the father countered.

Within the aforementioned hour Saida had joined them in the cage, her pale hair veiling a down-turned face. The cart moved off without delay, heavier one girl and lighter five pennies. Nona watched through the bars, the father counting the coins over and again as if they might multiply in his hand, his wife clutching at herself. The mother’s wailing followed them as far as the cross-roads.

‘How old are you?’ Markus, a solid dark-haired boy who seemed very proud of his ten years, asked the question. He’d asked Nona the same when she joined them. She’d said nine because he seemed to need a number.

‘Eight.’ Saida sniffed and wiped her nose with a muddy hand.

‘Eight? Hope’s blood! I thought you were thirteen!’ Markus seemed in equal measure both pleased to keep his place as oldest, and outraged by Saida’s size.

‘Gerant in her,’ offered Chara, a dark girl with hair so short her scalp shone through.

Nona didn’t know what gerant was, except that if you had it you’d be big.

Saida shuffled closer to Nona. As a farm-girl she knew not to sit above the wheels if you didn’t want your teeth rattled out.

‘Don’t sit by her,’ Markus said. ‘Cursed, that one is.’

‘She came with blood on her,’ Chara said. The others nodded.

Markus delivered the final and most damning verdict. ‘No charge.’

Nona couldn’t argue. Even Hessa with her withered leg had cost Giljohn a clipped penny. She shrugged and brought her knees up to her chest.

Saida pushed aside her hair, sniffed mightily, and threw a thick arm about Nona drawing her close. Alarmed, Nona had pushed back but there was no resisting the bigger girl’s strength. They held like that as the wagon jolted beneath them, Saida weeping, and when the girl finally released her Nona found her own eyes full of tears, though she couldn’t say why. Perhaps the piece of her that should know the answer was broken.

Nona knew she should say something but couldn’t find the right words. Maybe she’d left them in the village, on her mother’s floor. Instead of silence she chose to say the thing that she had said only once before – the thing that had put her in the cage.

‘You’re my friend.’

The big girl sniffed, wiped her nose again, looked up, and split her dirty face with a white grin.

Giljohn fed them well and answered questions, at least the first time they were asked – which meant ‘are we there yet?’ and ‘how much further?’ merited no more reply than the clatter of wheels.

The cage served two purposes, both of which he explained once, turning his grizzled face back to the children to do so and letting the mule, Four-Foot, choose his own direction.

‘Children are like cats, only less useful and less furry. The cage keeps you in one place or I’d forever be rounding you up. Also …’ he raised a finger to the pale line of scar tissue that divided his left eyebrow, eye-socket, and cheekbone, ‘I am a man of short temper and long regret. Irk me and I will lash out with this, or this.’ He held out first the cane with which he encouraged Four-Foot, and then the callused width of his palm. ‘I shall then regret both the sins against the Ancestor and against my purse.’ He grinned, showing yellow teeth and dark gaps. ‘The cage saves you from my intemperance. At least until you irk me to a level where my ire lasts the trip around to the door.’

The cage could hold twelve children. More if they were small. Giljohn continued his meander westward along the Corridor, whistling in fair weather, hunched and cursing in foul.

‘I’ll stop when my purse is empty or my wagon’s full.’ He said it each time a new acquisition joined them, and it set Nona to wishing Giljohn would find some golden child whose parents loved her and who would cost him every coin in his possession. Then at last they might get to the city.

Sometimes they saw it in the distance, the smoke of Verity. Closer still and a faint suggestion of towers might resolve from the haze above the city. Once they came so close that Nona saw the sunlight crimson on the battlements of the fortress that the emperors had built around the Ark. Beneath it, the whole sprawling city bound about with thick walls and sheltering from the wind in the lee of a high plateau. But Giljohn turned and the city dwindled once more to a distant smudge of smoke.

Nona whispered her hope to Saida on a cold day when the sun burned scarlet over half the sky and the wind ran its fingers through the wooden bars, finding strange and hollow notes.

‘Giljohn doesn’t want pretty,’ Saida snorted. ‘He’s looking for breeds.’

Nona only blinked.

‘Breeds. You know. Anyone who shows the blood.’ She looked down at Nona, still wide-eyed with incomprehension. ‘The four tribes?’

Nona had heard of them, the four tribes of men who came to the world out of darkness and mixed their lines to bear children who might withstand the harshness of the lands they claimed. ‘Ma took me to the Hope church. They didn’t like talk of the Ancestor.’

Saida held her hands up. ‘Well there were four tribes.’ She counted them off on her fingers. ‘Gerant. If you have too much gerant blood you get big like they were.’ She patted her broad chest. ‘Hunska. They’re less common.’ She touched Nona’s hair. ‘Hunska-dark, hunska-fast.’ As if reciting a rhyme. ‘The others are even rarer. Marjool … and … and …’

‘Quantal,’ Markus said from the corner. He snorted and puffed up as if he were an elder. ‘And it’s marjal, not marjool.’

Saida scowled at him, and turning back she lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘They can do magic.’

Nona touched her hair where Saida’s hand had rested. The village littles thought black hair made her evil. ‘Why does Giljohn want children like that?’

‘To sell.’ Saida shrugged. ‘He knows the signs to look for. If he’s right he can sell us for more than he paid. Ma said I’ll find work if I keep getting big. She said in the city they feed you meat and pay you coins.’ She sighed. ‘I still don’t want to go.’

Giljohn took the lanes that led nowhere, the roads so rutted and overgrown that often it needed all the children pushing and Four-Foot straining all four legs to make headway. Giljohn would let Markus lead the mule then – Markus had a way with the beast. The children liked Four-Foot, he smelled worse than an old blanket and had a fondness for nipping legs, but he drew them tirelessly and his only competition for their affection was Giljohn. Several of them fought to bring him hoare-apples and sweet grass at the day’s end. But, of all of them Four-Foot only loved Giljohn who whipped him, and Markus who rubbed him between the eyes and spoke the right kind of nonsense when doing it.

The rains came for days at a time making life in the cage miserable, though Giljohn did throw a hide over the top and windward side. The mud was the worst of it, cold and sour stuff that took hold of the wheels so that they all had to shove. Nona hated the mud: lacking Saida’s height she often found herself thigh-deep in the cold and sucking mire, having to be rescued by Giljohn as the wagon slurped onto firmer ground. Each time he would knot his fist in the back of her hempen smock and heft her out bodily.

Nona set to scraping the goo off as soon as he set her down on the tailgate.

‘What’s a bit of mud to a farm-girl?’ Giljohn wanted to know.

Nona only scowled and kept on scraping. She hated being dirty, always had. Her mother said she ate her food like a highborn lady, holding each morsel with precision so as not to smear herself.

‘She’s not a farm-girl.’ Saida spoke up for her. ‘Nona’s ma wove baskets.’

Giljohn returned to the driver’s seat. ‘She’s not anything now, and neither are the rest of you until I sell you. Just mouths to feed.’

Roads that led nowhere took them to people who had nothing. Giljohn never asked to buy a child. He’d pull up alongside any farm that grew more weeds and rocks than crop, places where calling the harvest ‘failed’ would be over generous, implying that it had made some sort of effort to succeed. In such places the tenant farmer might pause his plough or lay down his scythe to approach the wagon at his boundary wall.

A man driving a wagonload of children in a cage doesn’t have to state his business. A farmer whose flesh lies sunken around his bones, and whose eyes are the colour of hunger, doesn’t have to explain himself if he walks up to such a man. Hunger lies beneath all of our ugliest transactions.

Sometimes a farmer would make that long, slow crossing of his field, from right to wrong, and stand, lean in his overalls, chewing on a corn stalk, eyes a-glitter in the shadows of his face. On such occasions it wouldn’t take more than a few minutes before a string of dirty children were lined up beside him, graduated in height from those narrowing their eyes against the suspicion of what they’d been summoned for, down to those still clutching in one hand the stick they’d been playing with and in the other the rags about their middle, their eyes wide and without guile.

Giljohn picked out any child with possible gerant traits on a swift first pass. When they knew their ages it was easier, but even without anything more than a rough guess at a child’s years he would find clues to help him. Often he looked at the backs of their necks, or took their wrists and bent them back – just until they winced. Those children he would set aside. On a second pass he would examine the eyes, pulling at the corners and peering at the whites. Nona remembered those hands. She had felt like a pear picked from the market stall, squeezed, sniffed over, replaced. The village had asked nothing for her, yet still Giljohn had carried out his checks. A space in his cage and meals from his pot had to be earned.

With the hunska possibles the child-taker would rub the youngster’s hair between finger and thumb as if checking for coarseness. If still curious, he would test their swiftness by dropping a stone so that it fell behind a cloth he held out, and make a game of trying to catch it as it came back into view a couple of feet lower. Almost none of the children taken as hunska were truly fast: Giljohn said they’d grow into it, or training would bring their speed into the open.

Nona guessed they might make ten stops before finding someone prepared to swap their sons and daughters for a scattering of copper. She guessed that after walking the lines of children set out for him Giljohn would actually offer coins fewer than one time in a dozen, and that when he did it was generally for an over-large child. And even of these few hardly any, he said, would grow into full gerant heritage.

After Giljohn had picked out these and any dark and over-quick children, he would always return to the line for the third and slowest of his inspections. Here, although he watched with the hawk’s intensity, Giljohn kept his hands to himself. He asked questions instead.

‘Did you dream last night?’ he might ask.

‘Tell me … what colours do you see in the focus moon?’

And when they told him the moon is always red. When they said, that you can’t look at the focus moon, it will blind you, he replied, ‘But if you could, if it wasn’t, what colours would it be?’

‘What makes a blue sound?’ He often used that one.

‘What does pain taste of?’

‘Can you see the trees grow?’

‘What secrets do stones keep?’

And so on – sometimes growing excited, sometimes affecting boredom, yawning into his hand. All of it a game. Rarely won. And at the end of it, always the same, Giljohn crouched to be on their level. ‘Watch my finger,’ he would tell them. And he would move it through the air in a descending line, so close his nail almost clipped their nose. The line wavered, jerked, pulsed, beat, never the same twice but always familiar. What he was looking for in their eyes Nona didn’t know. He seldom seemed to find it though.

Two places in the wagon went to children selected in this final round, and each of those cost more than any of the others. Never too much though. Asked for gold he would walk away.

‘Friend, I’ve been at this as long as you’ve tilled these rows, and in all that time how many that I’ve sold on have passed beneath the Academy arch?’ he would ask. ‘Four. Only four full-bloods … and still they call me the mage-finder.’

In the long hours between one part of nowhere and the next the children, jolting in the cage, would watch the world pass by, much of it dreary moor, patchy fields, or dour forest where screw-pine and frost-oak fought for the sun, leaving little for the road. Mostly they were silent, for children’s chatter dies off soon enough if not fed, but Hessa proved a wonder. She would set her withered leg before her with both hands, then lean back against the wooden bars and tell story after story, her eyes closed above cheekbones so large they made something alien of her. In all her pinched face, framed by tight curls of straw-coloured hair, only her mouth moved. The stories she told stole the hours and pulled the children on journeys far longer than Four-Foot could ever manage. She had tales of the Scithrowl in the east and their battle-queen Adoma, and of her bargains with the horror that dwells beneath the black ice. She told of Durnishmen who sail across the Sea of Marn to the empire’s western shore in their sick-wood barges. Of the great waves sent up when the southern ice walls calve, and how they sweep the width of the Corridor to wash up against the frozen cliffs of the north, which collapse in turn and send back waves of their own. Hessa spoke of the emperor and his sisters, and of their bickering that had laid waste many a great family with the ill fortune to find itself between them. She told of heroes past and present, of olden day generals who held the border lands, of Admiral Scheer who lost a thousand ships, of Noi-Guin scaling castle walls to sink the knife, of Red Sisters in their battle-skins, of the Soft Men and their poisons …

Sometimes on those long roads Hessa spoke to Nona, huddled close in a corner of the cage, her voice low, and Nona couldn’t tell if it were a story or strange truths she told.

‘You see it too, don’t you, Nona?’ Hessa bent in close, so close her breath tickled Nona’s ear. ‘The Path, the line? The one that wants us to follow it.’

‘I don’t—’

‘I can walk in that place. Here they took my crutch and I have to crawl or be carried … but there … I can walk for as long as I can keep the Path beneath me.’ Nona felt the smile. Hessa moved back and laughed – rare for her, very rare. She told a story for everyone then, Persus and the Hidden Path, a tale from the oldest days, and even Giljohn leaned back to listen.

And one day, wonder of wonders, the twelfth child squeezed into the cage, and Giljohn declared his wagon full, his business complete. Turning west, he let Four-Foot lead the way to Verity, soon finding a wide and stone-clad road where four hooves could eat up the miles double quick.

They arrived in the dark and in the rain. Nona saw nothing more of the city than a multitude of lights, first a constellation hovering above the black threat of the great walls, and once through the yawn of the gates, a succession of islands where a lantern’s illumination pooled to offer a doorway here, a row of columns there, figures hidden in their cloaks, emerging from the blind night to be glimpsed and lost once more.

Broad streets and narrow, cut like canyons through the neck-craning height of Verity’s houses, brought the wagon in time to a tall timber door. A legend set in iron letters above the door declared a name, but recognizing that the shapes were letters took Nona to the borders of her education.

‘The Caltess, boys and girls.’ Giljohn pushed back his hood. ‘Time to meet Partnis Reeve.’

Giljohn pulled up in the courtyard that waited behind the high walls and ordered them out. Saida and Nona clambered down, stiff and sore. Before them a many-windowed hall rose to three times the height of any building that Nona had seen until she reached the city. The yard was largely deserted, lit by the flames guttering in a brazier set at the centre. Peculiar equipment lay abandoned in corners, including pieces of leather-bound wood the size and shape of men, set on round-bottomed bases. A few young men sat on benches beneath the lanterns, all of them polishing pieces of leatherwork, save one who was mending a net as if he were a fisherman.

Partnis Reeve kept the children lined up for more than an hour before he emerged from his hall. Long enough for dawn to infiltrate the yard and surprise Nona with the knowledge that a whole night had passed in travel.

Saida fidgeted and pulled her shawl about her. Nona watched as the sun edged the ridge of the hall’s black-tiled roof with crimson. Beyond the walls the city woke, creaking and groaning like an old man leaving his bed, though it had hardly slept.

Partnis came down the steps, always taking the next with the same leg. A heavy-featured man, tall and well fed, with iron-grey hair, dark eyes promising no kindness, wrapped against the cold in a thick velvet robe.

‘Partnis!’ Giljohn held his arms wide and Partnis Reeve copied the gesture, though neither man stepped forward into the promised embrace. ‘Celia well? And little Merra?’

‘Celia is … Celia.’ Partnis lowered his arms with a wry grin. ‘And Merra is living in Darrins Town, married to a cloth merchant’s boy.’

‘How did we get so old?’ Giljohn returned his arms to his sides. ‘Yesterday we were young.’

‘Yesterday was a long time ago.’ Partnis turned his attention to the merchandise. ‘Too small.’ He walked past Nona without further comment. ‘Too timid.’ He passed Saida. ‘Too fat. Too young. Too ill. Too lazy. Too clumsy. Too much trouble.’ He turned at the end of the line and looked at Giljohn. They were of a height, though Partnis looked soft where Giljohn looked hard. ‘I’ll give you two crowns for the lot.’

‘I spent two crowns feeding them!’ Giljohn spat on the grit floor.

The haggling took another hour and both men seemed to enjoy it. Giljohn enumerated the reasons why the children would become valuable fighters in Partnis’s contests, pointing out gerant or hunska traits.

‘This girl here is eight!’ Giljohn set a hand to Saida’s shoulder, making her flinch. ‘Eight years old! Tall as a tree. She’s a gerant prime for sure. A full-blood even!’

‘Even a full-blood’s only got labour value if there’s no fight in ’em.’ Partnis barked a wordless shout into Saida’s face. She stumbled back with a shriek of fear, raising both hands to her eyes. ‘Worthless.’

‘She’s eight, Partnis!’

‘So her father said. She looks fifteen to me.’

Giljohn grabbed Saida’s arm and pulled her forward. ‘Feel her wrists!’ He pushed her head forward and ran a finger over the vertebrae knobbling the back of her neck. ‘Look here!’ He straightened her by her hair. ‘Fathers lie, but bones don’t. This one’s a prime at the least. Ain’t seen a gerant to beat her this trip. Could be full-blood.’

Partnis took Saida’s wrist and squeezed until she whimpered. ‘She’s got a touch, I grant you.’

‘Touch? She’s no damn touch.’

‘Half-blood if you’re lucky.’

And so it went on, Partnis allowing some of the children might be a touch or even half-bloods, Giljohn insisting they were all primes or even full-bloods.

Nona and a boy named Tooram he claimed showed clear evidence of hunska bloodlines. He slapped Tooram, then tried again and the boy interposed his arm before the blow could land. When he tried it on Nona she let him slap her, the hard length of his hand impacting the side of her head, leaving her ear buzzing and her cheek one hot outrage of pain. He did it again, with a scowl, and she scowled back, making no effort to avoid the blow which took her off her feet and replaced the grey sky with bright and flashing lights.

‘… idiot.’

Nona found herself on her feet, her shoulder in Giljohn’s iron grip, blood filling her mouth. She remembered the force of the slap, how her teeth had seemed to rattle.

‘You saw how fast she turned towards me.’

It was true – Nona’s lips felt four times their size and white spears of pain lanced up her nose. She had faced into the blow at the last moment.

‘I must have missed that part,’ Partnis said.

Nona swallowed the blood. She let the pain run through her – the cost she paid for taking money from Giljohn’s pocket. Some of the children, sold by their own fathers, almost saw the child-taker as their replacement. Stern, certainly, but he fed them, kept them safe. Nona took a contrary view. Her father had died on the ice and what memories she kept of him warmed her in the cold, tasted sweet when the world ran sour. He would have known how to treat a man like Giljohn.

The gerants had no such choice to make, their size argued their case without need for demonstration. Though in Saida’s place Nona thought she might have agreed with Partnis when he accused her of being fifteen.

Partnis took them in exchange for ten crowns and two.

‘Be good.’ Giljohn, a father to them all for three long months, had no other words for them, climbing up behind Four-Foot without ceremony.

‘Goodbye.’ Saida was the only one to speak.

Giljohn glanced her way, stick half-raised for the off. ‘Goodbye,’ he said.

‘She meant the mule.’ Tooram didn’t turn his head, but he spoke loud enough for the words to reach.

A grin slanted across Giljohn’s face and, shaking his head, he flicked at Four-Foot’s haunches, encouraging him through the doors that Partnis’s man had set open once more.

Nona watched the wagon rattle off, Hessa, Markus, Willum and Chara staring back at her through the bars. She would miss Hessa and her stories. She wondered who Giljohn would sell her to and how a girl unable to walk would make her way in the world. She might miss Markus too, perhaps. The miles had worn away his sharp edges, the wheels had gone round and round … somehow turning him into someone she liked. In the next moment they were all gone.

‘And now you’re mine,’ Partnis said. He summoned the young man mending the net, lean but well-muscled under his woollen vest, hair dark, skin pale, but not so dark or so pale as Nona. ‘This is Jaymes. He’ll take you to Maya who is your mother now. The slapping kind.’ Partnis offered them a heavy smile. ‘I don’t expect to notice any of you until you’re this high.’ He held his hand to his chest. ‘And if I do, it will probably be bad news for you. Do what you’re told and you’ll be fine. You’re Caltess now. Bought and paid for.’

Maya stood more than a foot taller than Partnis, arms thick as a man’s thighs, her face red and blotched as if a constant rage held her in its jaws. To compensate for her complexion the Ancestor had given her thick blonde hair that she braided into heavy ropes. She stood on the attic ladder after shepherding the new arrivals up it, only her head and shoulders emerging into the gloom.

‘No lanterns up here. Ever. No candles. No lamps. Break that rule and I break you.’ She made the motion with heavy-knuckled hands. ‘When you’re not working you’re up here. Meals are in the kitchen. You’ll hear the bell when it’s time. Miss it and you won’t eat.’

Nona and the others crouched close to the trapdoor, watching the giant. The musty air reminded Nona of James Baker’s grain store at the village. Around them the shadows rustled. Cats most likely, rats and spiders of a certainty, but also other children watching the new arrivals.

Maya raised her voice. ‘Don’t pick on the new meat. There’s time enough for that down below.’ She stared at a patch of darkness seemingly no darker than any other. ‘I see any lumps and bumps on Partnis’s new purchases, Denam, Regol, and I’ll knock your heads together so hard you swap brains. Hear me?’ A pause. ‘Hear me?’ Loud enough to shake the roof.

‘I hear you.’ A snarl.

‘Heard.’ Chuckled in the distance.

The others emerged as soon as Maya withdrew. Two long-limbed boys dropped from the rafters into the midst of the newcomers. Nona hadn’t seen them lurking there. Others scampered in from the shadows, or strolled, or crept, each according to their nature. None of them as small or as young as Nona, but most of them not many years older. From the direction in which Maya had stared came a huge boy, a scowl beneath a thick shock of red hair, muscles heaped and shifting below his shapeless linen shift. Moments later a lad near as tall but willow-thin joined him, black hair sweeping down across his eyes, a crooked smile hung between the corners of his mouth.

A throng gathered, many more than Nona had anticipated. Huddled and watchful, waiting to be entertained.

The red-haired giant opened his mouth to threaten them. ‘You—’

‘Oh hush, Denam.’ The dark-haired boy stepped in front of him. ‘You’re newbies. I’m Regol. This is Denam, soon-to-be apprentice, and the toughest, fiercest warrior the Caltess attic has ever seen. Look at him wrong and he’ll chew you up then spit out the pieces.’ Regol glanced back at Denam. ‘That’s the gist, ain’t it?’ He returned his gaze to the newbies. ‘Now we’ve got the chest-thumping out of the way and saved Maya the bother of spanking Denam you can find yourself a place to sleep.’ He waved a hand airily at the gloom. ‘Don’t tread on any toes.’

Regol turned as if to go then paused. ‘Sooner rather than later someone will try to convince you that the reason so many of us up here are titchies like yourselves is that Partnis eats children, or there’s some test so deadly that almost nobody survives it, or sometimes Maya forgets to look before she sits down. The truth is that you’ve been bought early and cheap. Most of you will be disappointments. You won’t grow into something Partnis can use. He’ll sell you on.’ Regol raised a hand as Denam started to speak. ‘And not to a salt mine or to be used as the filling in a pie – just to any place that has a need you can meet.’ He lowered his hand. ‘Any questions?’

A cracking sound filled the immediate silence and it took Nona a moment to realize it was Denam’s knuckles as he formed fists. The giant’s scowl deepened. ‘I really hate you, Regol.’

‘Not a question. Anyone else?’

Silence.

Regol walked back into the darkness, stepping rafter to rafter with the unconscious grace of a cat.

Life in the Caltess proved to be a big improvement on an open cage rattling along the back-lanes of empire. Truth be told, it was an improvement on life in Nona’s village. Here she might be the smallest but she wasn’t the odd one out. The isolation of the village bred generations so similar in looks you might pick any handful at random to make a convincing family. Nona alone hadn’t fit the mould. A goat in the sheep herd. The family Partnis’s purse had furnished him with mixed every size and shape, every colour and shade, and in the attic’s gloom they were much of a muchness even so.

In addition to the four dozen children Partnis kept immediately beneath his roof, he housed a dozen apprentices, and seven fighters in their own set of rooms around the great hall. The apprentices shared a barracks house out in the rear of the compound.

Nona found a spot wedged between grain sacks larger than herself. Saida had more difficulty finding a space to squeeze into and was turned away by older residents time and again, even those she dwarfed. But in the end she settled on the boards close to Nona’s sack-pile, further back where the roof sloped so low that she had to roll into place.

That first night the hall opened its doors and the world flowed in to see men bleed. Denam and Regol got to watch from the highest rungs of the ladder in the furthest corner of the great hall, behind counters where the apprentices sold ale and wine to the crowd. The eldest of the remaining children crowded around the trapdoor. Everyone else had to find some chink among the rafters through which the events below might be glimpsed.

Nona’s spot afforded her a narrow view of the second ring. She wondered that they called it a ring when in fact the ropes strung between the four posts enclosed a square perhaps eight yards on a side, the whole thing a raised platform so that the fighter’s feet were level with the average man’s brow. She could see the tops of many heads, hundreds packed tight. The hubbub of their voices filled the attic. As the crowd built so did the noise, each of them having to shout just to be heard by their neighbour.

Saida lay close by, her eye to a crack. At her side an older boy, Marten, peered through a knot hole to which he laid ownership.

‘It’s all-comers tonight,’ Marten said, without looking up. ‘Ranking bouts on the seven-day, all comers on the second, exhibitions on the fourth. Blade matches are the last day of the month.’

‘My da said men fight in pits in the city …’ Saida said timidly, waiting to be told she was wrong.

‘In the Marn ports some do,’ Marten said. ‘Partnis says it’s a foolishness. If you’ve got willing fighters and a paying crowd you put them up on a platform, not down in a hole, where only the first row can see them.’

Nona lay, watching the throng below her while fights progressed unseen at the hall’s far end. Her view offered only the tops of heads, but she judged reactions by the pulse and flow of the crowd. Their roaring sounded at times like the howl of a single great beast, so loud it resonated in her chest, throbbing in her own voice when she yelled her challenge back at them.

At last a figure climbed into the ring beneath them. All around her Nona could feel other children scrambling for a view. Someone tried to lift her from her spot but she caught the hands that grabbed her and dug her nails in. The unknown someone dropped her with a howl and she put her eye back to the crack.

‘Raymel!’ The voices around her echoed the cries of the mob.

In the ring he looked a heavily-built man with thick blond hair, naked save for the white cloth bound around his groin, his skin gleaming with oil, the muscles of his stomach in sharp relief, showing each band divided from the next. Nona had glimpsed him wandering the hall earlier in the day and knew that he was enormous, taller even than Maya, and moving with none of her awkward blunder. Raymel prowled, a killer’s confidence in each motion. The man was a gerant prime. In the attic’s dimness Nona had learned the code that Partnis and Giljohn had used when selling her. The range ran from touch through half-blood and prime to full-blood. A touch could be thought of as quarter-blood and a prime as three-quarters. For gerants, primes often made the best fighters, full-bloods though rarer still and larger were too slow – though perhaps they just said that at the Caltess as they had none to show.

‘You’ll see something now!’ A girl’s voice, excited, at Nona’s left.

Marten had explained that any hopeful wishing to win a fight purse, or even to join the Caltess, could present themselves on all-comers’ night and for a crown they might pit themselves against Partnis’s stable.

‘Raymel will kill them,’ Saida said, awestruck.

‘He won’t.’ Even shouting above the roar Marten managed to sound scornful. ‘He’s paid to win. He’ll put on a show. Killing’s not good for business.’

‘Except when it is.’ Another voice close at hand.

‘Raymel does what he wants.’ The girl to Nona’s left. ‘He might kill someone.’ She sounded almost hungry for it.

A challenger entered the ring: a bald man, fat and powerful, the hair on his back so thick and black as to hide his skin. He had arms like slabs of meat – perhaps a smith given to swinging a hammer every day. Nona couldn’t see his face.

‘Doesn’t Partnis tell Raymel—’

‘No one tells Raymel.’ The girl cut Saida off. ‘He’s the only highborn to step into a ring in fifty years. Regol said so. You don’t tell the highborn what to do. The money’s nothing to him.’

Nona had heard the same tone of worship in the Hope church where her mother and Mari Streams called on the new god and sang the hymns Preacher Mickel taught them.

The bell sounded and Raymel closed with the blacksmith.

Nona saw a slice of the ring, from one fighter’s corner to the other’s. When they stepped to the side she lost them. Raymel moved with an unhurried precision, stopping the blacksmith’s advance with punches to the head, moving back to let him recover, luring him forward into the next. It didn’t seem a contest, unless you considered the blacksmith to be competing to see how many times he could stop the giant’s fist with his face.

The baying of the crowd rose with each impact, with each spray of blood and spittle. By the time Raymel stopped punching the smith long enough for the man to fall over, his opponent had yet to land a blow.

‘Why would anyone do that?’ Saida asked, lifting from her peephole, shuddering. ‘Why would they fight him?’

‘Lot of money in that fight purse,’ Marten said. ‘It gets fatter every time someone tries and fails.’

Nona kept watching as Raymel strode back and forth across the ring. She said nothing but she knew there was more to it than money. Every hard line the fighter owned was a challenge, written across him. The masses’ roar fanned the fire, but it was Raymel that lit it. Come and try me.

Two more tried before the night was over, but the fighter in the other ring, Gretcha, had more takers. Perhaps she was more of a performer, letting her opponents take a shot, putting them down with more style and less brutality. Raymel treated his foes with disdain, dropping them to the boards bloody and humiliated.

The work Maya set was neither long, nor arduous, being split between more children than was necessary. In the great hall Nona polished, swept and scrubbed. In the kitchens she peeled, carried, washed, sliced and stoked. In the privies she slopped, bailed, wiped and retched. Maintenance of the fight equipment, the sparring rings, the training weapons and the like all fell to the apprentices. The fighters cared for their own weapons, as would anyone who trusted their life to a sharp edge or sturdy mail.

Sometimes groups of the older children were hired outside the Caltess to pick fruit, and dig ditches, but mostly, as Regol had said, their main task was to grow and to show the promise for which they had been purchased. Maya confided that none of them would be sold on for at least a year, probably two or three.

‘Sometimes the promise won’t show properly until a girl bleeds. I wasn’t half my height at thirteen. Ain’t no point Partnis putting you in training until he knows what you’ll be. Training costs. And it’s wasted on most. Nobody ain’t never going to make ring-fighter without the old blood showing in them. And even when he’s sure you’ve got the gift for it Partnis likes to wait – says best training’s done when you’re mostly grown into your size and speed, so you don’t have to be adjusting all the time.’

Twice a day Maya had the whole attic out in the yard for an hour, first clearing the fighters’ weights back into their chests in the storeroom, then running endless laps, regardless of rain or wind. Nona looked forward to these daily escapes from the closed-in boredom of the attic and the routine of indoor chores. She worked with Saida and Tooram, who had been the last of Giljohn’s acquisitions, to lift the smaller dumbbells abandoned in the yard and return them to the equipment room. In truth, she and Tooram were probably more hindrance than help to Saida. Denam would pass them as they struggled up the steps, one of the heavier dumbbells in each hand, just the sweat plastering the red flame of his hair to his forehead to let them know the effort he was hiding.

They stopped to let him pass, then Saida led them on. ‘Heave!’

Nona didn’t mind that she wasn’t helping much, or that her arms ached, her back hurt and her eyes stung with sweat. She liked to feel part of something. Saida was her friend and whilst she might not need Nona’s help with the weights, she appreciated it.

In their friendship Nona found something absent in the faith of the village, or her mother’s Hope, absent in Nana Even’s moral instruction, or in the bonds of family she had seen break. Something she considered holy and worthy of sacrifice. Making friends came hard to Nona – she didn’t see how it worked, only that sometimes it happened. She had had just one friend, only briefly, and lost him, she wouldn’t lose another.

‘Tell me how you ended up at Harriton, child. Looking up at a noose.’ Abbess Glass’s voice punctured Nona’s remembering and she discovered herself walking along a stony road that divided broad, windswept fields given over to horses and sheep. Left and right the occasional farmstead dotted the terrain, the low-gabled roofs of a villa lay ahead, and beyond that the steep escarpment below the plateau.

‘What?’ Nona shook her head. She had almost no recollection of leaving the city. Glancing back, she saw it lay a mile or more behind her, and that two nuns now flanked the abbess.

‘You were going to tell me what happened with Raymel Tacsis,’ the abbess said.

Nona looked again at the nuns, both taller than Abbess Glass, one very lean, the other with more curves to her, their habits fluttering about them. She half-remembered them joining the abbess at some small gate through the city wall. One had perhaps as many years as the abbess, her face pinched and weathered, eyes cold, lips thin. The other was younger, green-eyed, returning Nona’s distracted inspection with a full smile that made her look away.

Nona fixed her eyes on the horizon. The convent was no longer visible, set back from the edge of the escarpment. ‘Saida was told to clean the floors in Raymel’s rooms. I heard her screaming.’ It hadn’t sounded like a person. In the village when Grey Jarry slaughtered pigs … it sounded like that. Not until one of the boys crowded around the trapdoor had said ‘Raymel’s rooms’ had some cold hand taken hold inside Nona’s chest and drawn her forward.

‘I came down the ladder. Fast.’ It had been slower than falling, but not much slower. She had run into the foyer. Saida had left a bucket and mop to hold the door open, a great slab of oak with scrolling brass hinges.

‘There were pieces of pottery all over the floor. And he was hurting her.’ Saida had knocked something from its niche – she was always clumsy. Raymel had her arm in his fist, his hand swallowing it from wrist to elbow, and he’d lifted her from the ground. He just stood there turning his hand from one side to the other while Saida struggled and wriggled, trying to reduce the awful strain on elbow and shoulder, shrieking all the while.

‘I told him to put her down but he didn’t hear me.’ Nona had run to try to support her friend’s weight, but Saida weighed twice what she did. Raymel noticed her then and, laughing, shook Saida so that Nona flew free. Something cracked in Saida’s arm when he did it – loud enough to register over her screams.

‘So I stopped him. I cut his throat.’

The younger nun snorted behind her. ‘They say he’s nine foot tall.’

‘I climbed.’ Raymel wasn’t nine foot but he was over eight. He had gone down on one knee, still holding Saida off the ground by her broken arm, taunting Nona with an ugly grin on his handsome face.

Nona had sprinted forward. There was time for the surprise to register in Raymel’s eyes, but not for him to move. She had leapt onto his knee to gain the necessary height then slashed her hand across his throat.

‘How did you cut him?’ The older nun, from behind.

‘I …’ Nona pictured Raymel, golden hair curling across an unfurrowed brow, the smile opening into something else, blood sheeting crimson from the slices she’d set deep in the meat of his neck. ‘I pulled the dagger from his hip as I climbed.’

‘That,’ said the younger nun, ‘sounds unlikely.’

Abbess Glass replied before Nona could deliver her sharp reply. ‘Nevertheless, if you look more closely, Sister Apple, you will see that the girl’s tunic was once white rather than brown – a brown which, if the guards at Harriton are to be believed, is a combination of drying blood and prison grime. Moreover she and her friend were both to be hanged for the murder of Raymel Tacsis.’

‘Then why isn’t he dead?’ Nona asked. She wanted Raymel to be dead.

‘Because his father is very rich, Nona.’ The abbess led them from the road onto a narrower track aimed towards the towering walls of the escarpment. ‘Not just a little bit rich but rich enough to buy a different mansion to sleep in every night from now until age claims him.’

‘Money doesn’t matter when you’re bleeding.’ Nona frowned. Rich or poor, people looked the same on the inside.

‘Thuran Tacsis is rich enough that he owns Academy men.’ The abbess hitched up her habit to help her climb the slope. ‘I miss my crozier already. An old lady without her stick to lean on is a sad thing indeed.’

Nona said nothing, not understanding the abbess’s words.

‘Academy men … Wizards, Nona! Mages. Sorcerers. Witches and warlocks. Children with marjal blood. Educated and raised at the emperor’s expense and bound to the Ark and to his service, but free to earn a living outside the palace until such time as he requires their skills.’

‘They can raise a man from the dead?’ Suddenly she thought of her father, unable to remember anything of him but thick black hair and strong, safe arms.

‘No, but they can stop a live one becoming dead. There’s a boundary, a place where we cross over to join the Ancestor. Some among us can visit that boundary and hold a person there while their body heals from wounds that would otherwise make an end of them.’

‘So rich people never die?’ Nona wondered at it, buying off death with gold coins.

The abbess shook her head. ‘No warlock stays by the boundary for long.’ Her breath came shorter now as the way grew steeper. ‘Thuran has a dozen warlocks working in shifts to hold his son from crossing. And many of the things that kill us the body can’t repair, no matter how much time it is given. Cut flesh though, and lost blood … a healthy body can mend one and replace the other. The real risk is when they bring a person back to their body – there are … beings … that will try to follow in their wake and find a home in their minds. The longer the person is kept on the boundary, the harder it is to keep out such passengers.’

Nona thought of Raymel Tacsis lying in his father’s halls surrounded by Academy men sweating to keep him from death. Saida was dead – Nona had seen her feet poking beneath the sheet in the prison yard, their wrappings still stained with Raymel’s blood. She had no pity for him.

‘I hope he comes back full of devils and they eat his heart.’

4

‘You could send the child on her way here, abbess.’

They stood at the point where the track began its steep ascent up the tumbled cliffs of the plateau, cutting back and forth across the gradient in a dozen hairpin turns. The older nun turned to Nona and pointed across the woods and fields to the west. ‘Morltown is five miles that way. A girl could make herself useful there, find fieldwork.’

Sister Apple stood shoulder to shoulder with Sister Tallow. ‘The high priest will be on this in a heartbeat. The Tacsis won’t even have to ask.’

‘Pick your fights and pick your ground, abbess,’ Sister Tallow said. ‘Jacob would love to get his feet back under the convent table. This would be the perfect excuse.’

‘And you did just steal her from prison …’ Apple frowned, glancing back towards the distant city.

‘Mistress Blade tells me not to fight.’ A smile, then the abbess turned to begin the climb. ‘And Apple tells me not to steal …’ Nona started to follow her. ‘You’re nuns. Show a little faith.’

A last edge of the sun clung to the horizon as Abbess Glass led the way towards a peculiar forest of stone pillars, their shadows reaching across hundreds of yards of rock towards the travellers’ approach. Nona followed, flanked by the two nuns, neither of them winded by the long climb that had set the abbess wheezing. The old one, Sister Tallow, looked as if she could climb all day. The younger, Sister Apple, at least had the decency to appear flushed. Nona, toughened by endless laps at the Caltess, felt the climb in her legs, and the dampness of her shift where sweat stuck it to her back, but made no complaint.

The plateau, really one huge slab of rock, narrowed to a neck of land before widening into a promontory. The pillars stood across the neck, from cliff to cliff, dozens deep, scores across. Abbess Glass led the way through – finding her path seemingly at random. All about them the columns, taller than trees, stretched towards the darkening sky. The place held an odd silence, the wind finding nothing to sing its tune, only stirring the dust and grit among the towers of carved stone. Nona liked it.

The pillars bounded Sweet Mercy Convent one side, and on the other the edges of two cliffs marched towards a sharp convergence. The main dome rose black against the crimson sky, a dozen and more outbuildings visible to either side. Nona followed the nuns towards its arched entrance, the weight of the day on her shoulders now, fatigue wrapping her in its dull grip, making both her anger and her sorrow grow more distant, shaping them into things that might be set apart for a night of dreams.

‘You live in there?’ As they drew closer Nona began to realize how large the dome was. The whole of the Caltess would fit inside several times over, stacked on top of itself.

‘That’s the Dome of the Ancestor, Nona. The Ancestor lives there, nobody else.’

‘Is he terribly big?’ Nona asked. Behind her Sister Apple stifled a laugh.

‘The Ancestor occupies any space built in their honour. In Verity the Ancestor is present in ten thousand household shrines, some into which even you would find it hard to squeeze, others larger than most houses. Here on the plateau the church was able to give the Ancestor a grander home – a gift of Emperor Persus, third of his name.’

Nona followed on in silence, her lips buttoned against the thought that the Ancestor seemed very greedy to be taking up so much room while the children at the Caltess wedged themselves into any nook or cranny that would take them.

‘This is my house.’ Abbess Glass waved a hand at a blocky stone building looming out of the deepening shade. ‘At least for as long as I am abbess here. It’s also Malkin’s home.’ A large grey cat lay coiled on the steps. The abbess turned to face Nona and the two sisters. ‘Sister Apple will find you somewhere to sleep and in the morning you’ll be introduced to your class, after which—’

‘Class?’ Nona blinked. In the village Nana Even had held class every seven-day, teaching the older children their numbers and such. Nona had tried to listen in but bigs chased her away as if their stupid numbers were a secret too important for her ears.

‘You’re here to join the convent, Nona.’ Shadow hid the abbess’s face but perhaps there was a smile there. ‘If you want to. And that means living here and learning all the things a sister needs to learn. There are classes every day except seven-day.’ She turned and walked away.

‘Come, Nona.’ Sister Apple held out her hand. Nona regarded it, uncertain whether the woman wanted something from her. After a moment Apple returned her hand to her side and continued on around the curve of the dome. Sister Tallow followed, her habit flapping about her legs.

Darkness had swallowed the plateau behind them and the wind roamed there. Nona stared back along the path the nuns had brought her by, the pillars invisible now. The heat of the climb had left her and the Corridor wind ran sharp fingers through her Caltess shift, filching any remaining warmth. It carried a salt edge – perhaps the sea, though it lay so many miles away. Nona shivered, hugged herself, and followed the nuns.

At the rear of the dome a long, low building extended like a tail on a huddled dormouse. Sister Apple stopped at a sturdy door beneath the peak of a tiled roof. A lantern swung on a hook, sparing enough light for the nun to match the iron key she drew from her habit to the keyhole in the door’s locking plate.

Sister Apple lifted the lantern down from its hook, adjusting its cowl. ‘These are the nun’s cells.’ She kept her voice low.

‘Cells!’ Nona took a step back.

‘Not like prison cells.’ Sister Apple smiled, then frowned. ‘Well, quite similar truth be told, but they’re clean and there are no locks on the doors.’ She stepped through the doorway. ‘You’ll sleep here tonight. If you study hard and do well you might get to come back for another night in about ten years.’

The door gave onto a long corridor. The beam of Sister Apple’s lantern revealed the passage extended all the way to a black door where it reached the dome. Left and right, repeating every few yards, a pair of round-topped doors guarded nun’s cells. Sister Apple walked in, stepping softly. Sister Tallow turned without a word as they passed the third pair and passed into the darkness of the cell to the left. The black door at the end drew Nona’s eyes. Something about it.

Eighteen doors in, about half the length of the corridor, Sister Apple stopped and pushed open the door to the right. She leaned in and took a candle from the box on the wall, lighting it from the lantern. ‘You’ll be in here. There’s linen and a blanket on the pallet. I’ll collect you in the morning.’ She handed the candle to Nona. ‘Don’t start any fires.’

Nona watched Sister Apple walk back towards the main door, the light diminishing with her departure. Finally the nun entered one of the cells close to Sister Tallow’s, leaving Nona in her own small and flickering pool of light. The silence that had rolled back with the shadows now returned, deeper and thicker than any Nona had known. She stood, held by its completeness. No sound. Not the wind’s moan. Not the creak of timbers or rustle of leaves. Not the skittering of rats or the distant complaint of owls. Nothing.

The door at the end of the corridor reclaimed her attention, although the darkness had hidden it. The memory of that door, black and polished, pressed like a finger between her eyes. Her feet wanted to take her there, her hands to set themselves flat against the smooth wood and to feel up close the vast and slumbering … fullness … that lay beyond.

Somewhere a few cells back a woman coughed in her sleep, breaking the silence and the strangeness. Freed from both paralysis and compulsion, Nona raised a hand to shield her candle’s flame and advanced into the narrow room that Sister Apple had led her to.

Even her cell at the Harriton had boasted a window, high and barred perhaps, but offering the condemned the sky. Nona’s new cell had a slit wide enough to reach her arm through, shuttered with a pine board. She made a circle. A sleeping pallet, a pillow, a chair, a desk. A pot to piss in. Last and strangest, a length of metal running along the outer wall at ground level. It emerged from the cell to the left and vanished through the wall to the right. Round as a branch and just a little too thick to close her hand around.

Nona sniffed. Dust, and the stale air of an unused room. She went to the pallet. Heat rising from the metal stick burned on her cheeks. The whole cell held the warmth of it. Nona pulled the pallet away from the hot metal, mistrusting it. She set the candle down, pulled the blanket over her, and laid her head on the pillow. One last look at the room and she blew out the flame. She stared at the darkness, her mind too full for sleep, certain that she would lie awake the whole night.

A moment later the clanging of an iron bell opened Nona’s eyes. The door swung open, banging against the wall. Nona levered herself up from the pallet and blinked towards the entrance, the darkness now a gloomy half-light. A groan escaped her, every limb stiff and aching though she only recalled straining her legs on the climb.

‘Up! Up! No slug-a-beds here! Up!’ A small, angular woman with a voice that sounded as if it were being forced violently through a narrow hole. She strode into the cell, reaching over Nona to throw back the shutter. ‘Let the light in! No hiding place for sin!’

Through fingers held up to defend against the daylight Nona found herself staring into a humourless face pinched tight around prominent cheekbones, eyes wide, watery and accusing. The woman’s head, which had seemed a most alarming shape in the gloom, sported a rising white headdress, rather like a funnel, and quite different to those the other nuns had worn the previous evening.

‘Up, girl! Up!’

‘Ah, I see you’ve met Sister Wheel.’ Sister Apple stepped through the open doorway holding a long habit, the outer garment grey felt, the inner white linen.

‘Sleeping after the morning bell, she was!’ The old woman raised her hands, seemingly unsure whether to strike Nona or to use them to better depict the enormity of her crime.

‘She’s new, Wheel, not even a novice yet.’ Sister Apple smiled and looked pointedly at the doorway.

‘A barefooted heathen is what she is!’

Sister Apple spread her fingers towards the exit, still smiling. ‘It was commendable of you to notice the cell had an occupant.’

The older nun scowled and ran her hands over her forehead, tucking a stray strand of colourless hair back into her headdress. ‘There’s nothing that goes on in these cells I don’t notice, sister.’ She narrowed her watery eyes at Sister Apple then sniffed hard and stalked back into the corridor. ‘The child stinks,’ she offered over her shoulder. ‘It needs washing.’

‘I brought you some clothes.’ Sister Apple lifted the habit. ‘But I forgot how dirty you are. Sister Wheel is correct …’ She folded her arms over her stomach. ‘Come with me.’

Nona followed Sister Apple out of the room, weaving around various nuns emerging from their cells or speaking in low tones in the corridor. A couple raised an eyebrow at her approach but none addressed her. At one point an angular nun brought Sister Apple to a halt by laying a hand upon her shoulder. She towered above the others, her height seemingly gained by stretching a regular woman far beyond her design, leaving her dangerously thin.

‘Mistress Blade reports armed men beyond the pillars. An emissary came before first light.’

‘Thank you, Flint,’ Sister Apple nodded.

Sister Flint tilted her head, her face so dark that in the gloom Nona could see only black eyes, glittering as they made a study of her. The nun took her hand from the smaller woman’s shoulder, releasing her to her task.

Sister Apple led the way out into the brittle light of morning. By daylight Nona could see that the convent comprised so many buildings that back in the Grey it would qualify as a village. She suspected it had more stone-built buildings than Flaystown, though she had only glimpsed that metropolis from Giljohn’s cage on the day he drove her from her home.

‘Sister Flint said men are coming. Are they here for me?’ Nona asked. She wondered what help a score of nuns would be if Thuran Tacsis had sent his warriors for her. She should have lost herself in the city when she had a chance.

‘Perhaps.’ Sister Apple glanced back at the great Dome of the Ancestor and frowned. ‘Perhaps not. In any case, it would be best if you joined our order sooner rather than later – and you can’t do that dirty, now can you?’ She led on at a brisk pace.

‘Scriptorium, refectory, bake-house, kitchens.’ Sister Apple reeled off names as they passed various buildings. Few of them meant much to Nona but bake-house she knew and the aroma of fresh bread when they passed the door filled her mouth with drool. ‘The Necessary.’ The nun pointed to a small building, flat-roofed and seemingly clinging to the edge of the cliff a hundred yards off.

‘Necessary?’ Nona asked.

‘You’ll go there when you need it.’ Sister Apple shook her head and smiled. ‘The smell will let you know it’s the right place.’

They passed a long range of buildings with many small square windows, all shuttered on the windward side. ‘Stores and dormitories.’

Nona found herself observed, a dozen pairs of eyes at various of the windows. Some of the girls called out, perhaps to each other. She caught snatches, carried by the wind.

‘… chosen … never!’

‘… that can’t be her …’

‘… peasant …’

‘… she’s not the …’

‘Chosen?’

The voices followed them, words lost in the distance but the tone still hanging in the air. Nona knew it well enough, sharp and unkind.

‘Bathhouse.’ Sister Apple pointed to a squat building built of unadorned black stone, steam escaping from a row of narrow windows, only to be stripped away by the wind. The Corridor wind scoured the plateau, and crossing the gap between the dormitories and the bathhouse Nona found herself exposed to its teeth. She’d spent a lifetime learning to ignore it – just another hard edge of a hard life – but one warm night had left her soft and shivering.

They reached the shelter of the bathhouse walls. The nun unlocked the heavy door and ushered Nona in. Hot wet air wrapped her immediately, the steam reducing her vision to a few yards. Wooden benches lined the foyer and a tall arch gave onto what might be a rectangular pool, its surface offered only in glimpses.

Metal shafts ran beneath the benches in profusion. ‘One of those was in my room!’ Nona pointed.

‘Pipes, child. They’re hollow – mineral oil runs through them. Very hot.’ Sister Apple nodded at the arch. ‘Let’s get the prison filth off you.’

Nona started uncertainly towards the pool, wondering how deep it was, and how hot. The streams around the village never reached much past your knees and quickly stole the feeling from everything below that point.

‘You’re not going in wearing clothes.’ Sister Apple’s voice held a mixture of amusement and exasperation.

Nona turned to stare defiantly up at the nun, her lips pressed together in a puckered scowl. Sister Apple stood with her arms folded. One silent second followed the next and at last Nona started to tug off her Caltess smock, stiff with Raymel Tacsis’s dried blood. She made a slow and awkward job of it: in the village even the littlest of the littles rarely ran around naked; the ice stood too close for that. Only around the harvest fires or in the all-too-brief kiss of the focus moon had Nona ever been as warm as there in the convent bathhouse.

‘Hurry along. I doubt you’re hiding anything unusual under there,’ Sister Apple said, pulling back her headdress as the heat got to her too. She had long hair, red and curling in the wet air.

Nona stepped out of her smock, arms folded about herself, with only the steam for modesty. She made a dart for the pool.

‘Wait!’ Sister Apple raised a hand. ‘You can’t go in filthy. You’ll turn the water black.’ She took a leather bucket from one of the many pegs lining the walls above the benches. ‘Stand over there.’ She pointed to an alcove between the benches on the left.

Nona did as directed, her whole body clenched. The alcove was wide enough for two or three people. The floor, tiled and perforated by finger-width holes, felt strange beneath her feet.

‘What—’ An explosion of hot water stole the rest of the question. Nona wiped her eyes clear in time to see the misty outline of the nun at the poolside having refilled the bucket.

‘There’s a brush on the floor. Use it.’ Another wave of hot water broke across Nona’s chest.

Nona reached, dripping, for the brush. She’d never felt anything quite as wonderful as a bucketful of hot water. Not even fresh bread and butter came close. Not even eggs, or the bacon she had smelled cooking at the Caltess. If scrubbing herself with a bristly brush was the price she had to pay to get into a whole pool of it, she would scrub.

Two buckets later Sister Apple declared her clean enough for the pool. Nona ran to the edge and lowered herself in, toes questing for the bottom. ‘How deep is it?’ The rising steam blinded her, the heat delicious.

‘This end is shallow. On you … to your shoulders?’

The water reached her neck before Nona’s feet found a smooth floor and she released her death-grip on the side. She stood, arms floating at her sides, sure that she had never been truly warm before.

Time skipped a beat. It skipped an untold number of beats. Nona hung in the blind heat of the pool. A sharp clap brought her attention back to the world.

‘Out you get. You’re clean … well, cleaner.’ Sister Apple stood at the water’s edge. In concession to the heat she had hung the outer cloak of her habit up on the pegs. She clapped again. ‘Out! We’ve both got things to do.’ She pointed to the corner of the pool. ‘There are steps there.’

Nona went to the steps, too limp to want to struggle back over the edge. At the top she found the nun holding out a large rectangle of thick cloth towards her. It didn’t seem to have any armholes or ties. ‘How do I …’

Sister Apple snorted. ‘It’s a towel.’ She thrust the thing into Nona’s hands. ‘Dry yourself with it.’

Nona wrapped herself in the towel, finding it thick and luxurious. If it had arms she would have worn it.

‘Dry your hair too.’

When Nona finished rubbing at her hair she was alarmed to see Sister Apple had sprung a second head, this one young and impish with short black hair, chin resting on the sister’s shoulder, cheek next to hers.

‘What is it?’ the new head asked.

‘It’s a Nona,’ Sister Apple replied.

‘A what?’

‘A ring-fighter from the Caltess.’

The new head frowned. Two slim hands slid into view holding the tops of Sister Apple’s arms. ‘It looks rather small and skinny for that. Someone should feed it. It looks more like a farm-girl.’ The second nun slipped away from Sister Apple. ‘Are you a farm-girl, Nona?’

Nona clutched her towel to her and found she was biting her lip too hard to explain that her mother wove baskets. She shook her head.

‘I don’t much care for farm-girls,’ the new nun sniffed, her smile removing any sting.

‘This is Sister Kettle,’ Sister Apple explained, shooing the other woman away. ‘And,’ raising her voice as Sister Kettle vanished into the steams, ‘she loves country girls.’ She returned to the benched area. ‘Come on. Get dressed.’

Nona followed her and reached for the habit. Sister Apple brushed her hand away with a tut. ‘Smallclothes first.’ She held out a confusing piece of white linen. Nona took it, frowning. Sister Apple watched her a moment then shook her head. ‘Farm-girls …’

It took a couple of minutes and significant amounts of advice before Nona finally stepped out of the bathhouse in the full attire of a novice of the Sweet Mercy Convent of the Ancestor. The wind was shockingly cold on her face but the rest of her seemed surprisingly well protected. She stood in her double-sleeved robe, tied at the middle with a woollen belt, two underskirts rustling beneath, her feet feeling most strange in leather shoes drawn tight around them with laces. The only difference between her habit and Sister Apple’s appeared to be the lack of a headdress, the nun having restored the garments she’d shed inside.

‘The novices will be at breakfast in the refectory.’ Sister Apple turned her head sharply and waved to someone across the wide yard. ‘Suleri!’

The figure stopped, turned, and hurried towards them, a tall girl with long dark hair. ‘Yes, sister?’

‘This is Nona: she’s to join Red Class for lessons. Take her to their meal table.’ Sister Apple seemed suddenly more stern, someone to be reckoned with.

‘Yes, sister!’ The older girl, perhaps fifteen, glanced down at Nona, ‘Come on.’ And she walked away at a brisk pace, forcing Nona to run to keep up.

They crossed a courtyard and turned a corner into a passageway, the bake-house on one side, the kitchens on the other. Suleri stopped and rounded on Nona, blocking her path.

‘You’re not her!’ She seemed both furious and unconvinced. ‘The Chosen One wouldn’t be a skinny little hunska.’

5

When hunger has been your lifelong companion the smell of food is a physical thing, an assault, a seduction, a deep-sunk hook that will reel you in. Nona forgot about Suleri’s anger. The convent’s wonders slipped from her mind. The flood of warmth on passing through the tall oak doors, the rapid, high-pitch babble of many voices that became almost a roar … none of it mattered. The aroma of fresh bread held her, the captivating scent of bacon sizzling, buttery eggs, scrambled and sprinkled with black pepper.

‘This way!’ Suleri’s voice carried the edge added when someone has had to repeat themselves.

She led Nona through a crowd of older novices chatting animatedly by the entrance. Nona’s head barely rose above belt-height on many of them.

Four long tables ran across the width of the hall, each surrounded by high-backed chairs and with large bowls set along the centre. A dozen or more girls sat around each table save the nearest one where only a couple of novices had yet taken their place, both looking like grown women to Nona.

‘Is that her?’ A voice from behind.

The conversation around the doorway died to nothing and, glancing back, Nona found the novices staring down at her.

‘Red Class at the back, Grey Class next, Mystic …’ Suleri slapped the table immediately before them. ‘And Holy!’ She waved Nona away. ‘Go!’

Nona advanced into the room under the scrutiny of the girls by the doors, arms straight at her sides, hands in fists. Despite the crowd she had never felt more alone. She bit her bottom lip hard enough to taste blood. Easing her jaw, she pressed her lips together in a thin, defiant line.

The conversation failed at each table as she passed; by the time she reached the fourth the girls there were turning their chairs to watch.

Nona stopped at the last table. The girls there ranged across a few years in age, though none looked quite as small or young as her. The hunger that had wrapped her stomach in its iron fist slipped away under the stares of half a hundred novices. She looked for a chair but all of them were occupied.

‘She’s not the one.’ Suleri’s voice cut across the room. ‘She’s the dirty peasant we saw earlier. Look at her!’ Ignoring her own command, the novice turned her attention to the plate before her, heaping it with bacon and bread.

Nona’s treacherous stomach chose that moment to rumble more loudly than she had thought possible. The laughter that followed made her cheeks blaze and she stood, furious, staring at the floor, willing it to crack and burn. Instead, it was the laughter that cracked and fell into silence.

Tall men in the furs of the red bear, and armoured beneath in bronze scales, came through the doors, novices scattering from their path. The warriors carried themselves imperiously, as though they might just walk over any too slow to get out of their way. Each wore a helm coiffed with chainmail and visored to mimic the sternest of faces without hint of mercy.

Tacsis men! Come with their own rope to set right the mistake at Harriton, or perhaps to administer crueller justice of their own. Nona snatched the knife from the nearest girl’s plate and holding it before her, level with her eyes, she started to back towards the service door in the rear wall.

The men ignored her. They stepped to either side, clearing the main entrance, and raised their visors to reveal faces that admitted no more compassion than had been engraved upon the metal. The abbess came through the open doors behind them, one hand gripping her crozier, its golden curl rising above her head, the other resting on the shoulder of a blonde girl perhaps a year older than Nona.

‘Novices, this is Arabella Jotsis. She will be joining our order.’

‘As was foretold!’ Sister Wheel stepped out from behind the abbess, Sister Tallow to the other side. ‘As was foretold!’ She cast about rapidly, her watery stare challenging anyone to disagree.

Abbess Glass frowned. ‘We can be sure she is Arabella and that she is Jotsis. Anything else is open to interpretation.’ She struck the heel of her staff to the floor, the sharp retort cutting off the novices’ mutterings. ‘We can also be sure that Arabella will study hard and be treated no differently from any other novice.’

Sister Wheel seemed on the point of saying something but at a glance from the abbess closed her mouth with a snap.

‘Additionally, we may be certain that Novice Nona understands that it is impolite to point a knife at guests,’ the abbess added, tilting her head in Nona’s direction.

Nona set the blade back on the table with a guilty hand as laughter rose about her.

‘Gentlemen.’ Abbess Glass looked left then right. ‘Your duty is dispatched. Arabella is now the charge of the convent and her care rests in my hands.’

The four men inclined their heads and turned, marching out of the building without a word to either the abbess or the girl they had delivered.

Arabella herself didn’t appear to notice their departure. She looked, to Nona, like a different kind of creature, set apart from the dull and dirty humans who scurried about the world. Her hair seemed to glow golden in the light that reached through the still-open doors. Her travelling clothes were a wonder of brushed suede and fur-edged leather, with a magnificent dark red cape across her shoulders secured by a gold chain. Where others might be described by their collection of flaws Arabella Jotsis’s only identifying feature seemed to be that she was without blemish. Perhaps the Ancestor looked like this, but people didn’t.

‘Your table is at the end, Arabella. I’m sure Red Class will welcome you into their ranks. Nona too.’ The abbess nodded towards the end of the room and took her guiding hand from the girl’s shoulder.

‘Best behaviour!’ Sister Tallow added, running a hard stare across the room. And with that, Abbess Glass led the nuns from the refectory.

Arabella Jotsis surveyed her new classmates with a sort of serene confidence and stepped forward as if not only had she lived here all her life, but also as if she owned the place and paid the wages of everyone around her. As she drew near the table an older girl from table three hurried up behind her with a spare chair.

The girl whose knife Nona had snatched stood up the moment the doors closed behind the departing nuns. Tall, slim and pale, her hair a black and wild tangle of curls, she seemed less impressed with the golden newcomer than the rest of the novices. ‘You’ll find that the Ancestor doesn’t order any special treatment for royalty here, Arabella. Minor or otherwise. Your father’s title might let him crush honest men down in Verity, but up here fights are one on one and it’s skill that counts, not rank.’

Arabella hardly deigned to glance at the girl. ‘Your father put himself in prison, Clera Ghomal. He made a poor merchant.’ She sat, like a princess, in the offered chair. ‘And a worse thief.’ Her accent was new to Nona, rich and precise, words clipped, the emphasis on odd syllables.

Clera balled her hands into fists. ‘Be careful what you say—’

‘Oh please. You come from a family of money-grubbers who have lost their money … which makes them just … grubbers. Let it lie. From what I understand we will all have plenty of opportunity for hitting each other later. So do be quiet and let me eat.’ Arabella took a roll of crusty bread and broke it onto her plate.

‘Thank you for making it so clear.’ Clera sneered. ‘How terrible for you to have to endure the company of people who don’t own their bodyweight in jewellery. How can you stand to mix with us?’ She reached out and took Nona’s hand. ‘I suppose you hate Nona here most of all. Imagine, a peasant girl dining at the same table as a daughter of the Jotsis!’

Arabella spread butter onto the halves of her roll. ‘I’m not in the least interested in you or your skinny hunska peasant, Ghomal. Now do sit down, you both look ridiculous.’

Clera dropped Nona’s hand and took a step towards Arabella. ‘I—’

‘Clera!’ Suleri’s voice cut across her from the far end of the room. ‘Sit down. Shut up. Save it for Sister Tallow’s class or you’ll find yourself working in the laundry for a month.’

Clera sat down, mouth set in a vicious line. A heartbeat later she grinned, leaned back and pulled across a chair just vacated by a novice leaving the next table. ‘Nona. Take a seat. You look hungry.’

6

On his wagon Giljohn had fed Nona far better than her mother had ever been able to. At the Caltess the food had been better still and Nona’s bones had begun to sink from sight like a city child’s. The refectory at Sweet Mercy Convent put the Caltess meals to shame. Nona ate meat in whole pieces for the first time she could remember, not just a shred here or there but thick slices of bacon still hot from the pan. She wrapped them in crusty bread and chewed with dedication, scattering crumbs everywhere, while Clera chatted easily at her side.

The merchant’s daughter made no further mention of Arabella, not even glancing down the table in her direction. Instead she rattled on cheerfully about what could be expected from the day, requiring little from Nona in return save the occasional grunt or ‘yes’ in the brief gaps when her mouth wasn’t full.

‘Ghena’s the youngest in the class, she’s still nine. Me and Ruli are eleven. We’ll probably move into Grey soon – that’s Class Two. Class One is Red. Sister Oak is our mistress but we don’t see a lot of her.’ Clera paused to watch Nona eat. ‘You really were hungry!’

‘Mgmmmm.’

‘Our first class is Academia with Sister Rule – that’s everything from numbers and reading to history and geometry. Right now we’re doing geography.’

A full mouth saved Nona from having to admit that she didn’t know what geometry or geography were.

‘We have Blade this afternoon – we’re doing unarmed, but later we learn knives and stars, the older ones learn swords, and tactics and strategy too. In Red Class everyone studies everything. Later on the Holy Sisters do more Academia and Spirit classes. Martial Sisters do mostly Blade. Sisters of Discretion concentrate on Shade. Mystic Sisters spend their time learning Path. Everyone calls the Martial Sisters the Red Sisters, and the Mystic Sisters are Holy Witches – but don’t let a nun hear you call them witches!’

Nona kept eating, letting the confusion of names wash over her. It would sink in given time. She finished the bacon, struggled through the scrambled egg, but the bread bowl defeated her, sitting before her with three crusty rolls still nestled at the bottom. She had never stopped eating while food remained before her: to do so seemed desperately wrong.

‘Come on!’ Clera put a hand on her shoulder. ‘We’ll be really late.’

Looking up, Nona saw that they were the last two at the table. She glanced behind her and saw that only three other novices remained in the hall.

Clera hurried towards the main doors. ‘Come on!’

Nona followed, hands folded over her aching belly, so full it hurt to walk, let alone run. Clera led the way back past the dormitory building and across a quadrangle, cloisters to one side, a rectangular pool and fountain in the middle. Above the range forming the western end the sails of a windmill could just be seen passing through the top of their cycle. Clera hurried Nona out through a corridor penetrating the north range.

‘That’s the Academia.’ She pointed ahead to an ornate tower close to the cliffs on the plateau’s north side. Together they half walked, half ran to the archway at its base. A rapid ascent by the stone steps of a spiral staircase brought them to an oak door, the steps continuing up. Clera stopped at the door and pushed on through to the room beyond.

‘There’s no one here.’ Nona felt stupid the moment the words left her, a peasant girl stating the obvious. The classroom lay in shadow. A large, elderly cat watched from its grey curl in the far corner: Malkin, the abbess’s beast. Four rows of empty desks faced a polished table in front of a chalk-marked board. A confusion of maps and charts decorated the wall behind that, so many that pieced together they might show the whole world.

‘Damnation!’ Clera ran to one of the windows and threw open the shutters. Diamonds of glass, leaded together into a continuous sheet, ensured that only the light came in while the cold stayed out. She pressed her face to the panes, turning one way then the other. ‘She’s taken them out somewhere – can’t see them …’

Nona advanced towards the desk. It held all manner of fascinating objects, not least three leather-bound books and a large ledger beside a quill and inkpot. The objects that drew her though were a dog’s skull, a clear crystal nearly a foot long and too wide to close her hand about, and a glistening white ball in a brass stand. This last held her attention until she found herself beside it, knees bumping against the desk.

‘What is it?’ Nona set a finger to the enamelled whiteness of the ball, finding it rough beneath her touch, tiny ridges catching the light. It was a little larger than her head and perfectly round. A stand held it top and bottom so that it could rotate. And around its middle, like a belt, a very thin strand of colour no thicker than a piece of string.

‘Don’t touch! Mistress Academia would have a fit!’ Clera elbowed Nona out of the way and immediately ignored her own instruction by setting the thing spinning on its pivots. ‘It’s the world, silly.’

‘The world?’ That made no sense at all.

‘Abeth.’ Clera huffed her breath out as if Nona’s stupidity had hit her in the stomach. ‘A model of it.’

Nona blinked. Her world had been the village, the forests, the fields, and in the distance the northern ice forming one wall of the Corridor. She hadn’t ever considered that it might have a shape and if she had she would not have guessed at a ball, white or otherwise.

‘It’s a globe.’ Clera reached out to stop it spinning. ‘We live … here.’ She put her finger on the line around the middle.

‘We do?’ Nona leaned in to look more closely.

‘Want to see something special?’ Clera grinned. Without waiting for an answer she set one hand to the top of the globe and the other to the bottom then, with a little effort, rotated each in opposite directions. Smoothly and without noise the lower part of the white surface began to retreat. Nona saw that it was not one piece as she had imagined but comprised many bladed parts that shuffled beneath each other like the feathers of a folding wing. In consequence the cord-thin strip of colour girdling the globe widened, first to a finger’s width, then wider and wider still until Nona’s whole hand couldn’t cover it. The pattern of jewel-enamelled blues and greens and browns fascinated her eye.

‘What—’

‘That’s the world fifty thousand years ago, long before the tribes even came.’ Clera rotated the halves back slowly and the ice advanced. ‘All the people that lived across all these lands, pushed back.’ She returned the ice sheets to their original position. ‘Pushed into this tiny corridor as the sun got old and weak.’

‘How could they fit?’ Nona imagined them running before the ice.

Clera shrugged. ‘Mistress Blade says people need room. You can squash them in only so far, then the bleeding starts, and when it’s done … there’s just about enough room again.’

‘It’s good to see that some of your lessons stick, Novice Clera.’

Both girls turned to see the doorway behind them now almost entirely full of Sister Rule, the convent’s Mistress Academia, a woman of considerable height and still more considerable girth, all wrapped in the dark grey of a nun’s habit. Sister Rule pushed on into the classroom, the rest of Red Class filing in behind her, diverging towards their allotted desks. Arabella already had three girls pressed around her and they took seats beside each other, all of them smirking behind their hands.

‘Explain yourselves, novices.’ The nun fixed them with dark and beady eyes.

‘We were …’ Clera searched for an explanation … and could find nothing better than the truth, which she settled on with a sigh of defeat. ‘Nona was very hungry!’

A scatter of laughter went up at that, cut off sharply as Sister Rule’s yardstick cracked across a desktop. She reached the table, looming over both girls. ‘Well, Nona does appear to need some feeding up. Do not be late to my class again, Nona. Today you missed a quick observation of the layered structure of this plateau where the Glasswater sinkhole exposes it. Next time you could miss considerably more than that – dinner included.’

Clera slipped away to her desk near the door. Nona stayed by the table. She looked up at Sister Rule’s face, which was at once both fleshy and severe, then let her eyes slip to the globe again.

‘You can take either of those two desks at the back, Nona.’ Mistress Academia laid her yardstick against her table and let out a sigh. ‘I do hope you’re not going to slow us down too much, child. The abbess casts her nets very wide sometimes …’

Nona dropped her gaze to the floor and took a step in the direction the nun had waved at. A mixture of anger and defiance boiled behind her eyes but stronger than that, more than that, was the desire to know. Besides, she was too full to be properly angry.

‘I … don’t know what geography is.’

Sister Rule’s yardstick killed the laughter before it started. ‘Good. You’re clever enough to ask questions. That’s better than many I’ve had through these doors.’ She took her seat behind the desk, straightened her habit, then looked up. ‘Geography is like history. History is the story of mankind since we first started to record it. The story and the understanding of that story. Geography is the history of the world beneath our feet. The mountains and the ice, rivers, oceans, land, all of it recorded in the very rocks themselves for those with the wit to read what’s set there. Consider this slab of rock our convent rests upon, for example. The history of this plateau is written in the limestone layers that can be seen in the sinkhole two hundred yards west of this tower.’ She sent Nona on towards her desk with a gentle poke of her stick. ‘Our history is wide and we are narrow, so perhaps its lessons no longer fit. Cut your cloth to your measure, some say. But the history of the land has lessons more important than those of kings and dynasties. The history of the ice is written there. The tale of our dying sun, etched into rock and glacier. These are the lessons we all live by. And when the moon fails we will die by them too.’

7

Nona resolved to make it to Blade on time. Over lunch in the refectory Clera explained the meaning of the various bells that sounded throughout the day.

‘There are three bells. That’s the iron bell, Ferra, which just rang. It’s got a hollow sound and dies off quickly. That’s for the sisters, to tell them about prayers mainly. It hangs in the little belfry up on the Dome of the Ancestor. The one that looks like a nipple.’

‘Clera!’ Jula scolded. She had taken the chair on Nona’s other side and now turned to join the conversation. ‘Bray is the brass bell that hangs in the Academia, at the top of the tower. It sounds the hours, and that’s what you have to listen to for class and meals.’

‘And lights out and getting up.’ Clera cut back in. ‘Bray has a deep voice that hangs.’ She made her own deep and sonorous, a singer’s voice, Nona thought. ‘Afternoon class is sixth bell, lunch is fifth, dinner is seventh.’

‘Blade this afternoon.’ Jula rolled her eyes. ‘I hate Blade.’

‘Holies always do.’ Clera smirked.

Nona considered Jula for a moment. The girl had a studious look about her, slender despite more than a year eating at the convent table. She had mousey hair, cut at neck length. Nothing about her suggested that hunska or gerant blood might show in years to come. Almost nobody showed up quantal or marjal, however good the signs, so Jula would almost certainly be a Holy Sister. Nona knew very little about the Church of the Ancestor but the idea of a life spent in prayer and contemplation held no appeal at all. If the life in question didn’t also include being well fed and having a warm safe place to live then Nona might have felt sorry for the girl.

‘After Blade you’ll think you’ve met the hardest mistress,’ Clera said. ‘But Mistress Shade makes her seem gentle. Everyone calls her the Poisoner or Mistress Poison because she always has us grinding up stuff for one poison or another. She’s supposed to teach us stealth, disguise, and climbing and traps … but it’s always poison. Anyway, don’t ever call her Mistress Poison.’ Clera shuddered.

Jula nodded, looking grim. She picked up her fork and got it halfway to her mouth before remembering the bells. ‘Bitel is the third bell. The steel bell.’ She returned the fork to her plate, perhaps still thinking of poisons. ‘That’s almost always bad news, and you won’t confuse it for the others – it’s sharp and very loud. The abbess will ring Bitel if there’s a fire, or an intruder, or something like that. Hope you never hear it. But if you do and if nobody tells you different, go to the abbess’s front door and wait.’

‘I heard …’ The girl across the table spoke up, loud enough for everyone to hear. ‘I heard the abbess herself brought you up from Verity.’ The rest of the class had been focused on Arabella who had been telling them some story about the emperor’s court. Nona had only caught the odd word and had imagined it a fairy tale of the sort told about princesses around the hearth in her village … but then she had remembered Clera calling Arabella royalty and it struck her that the fairy story might actually be true.

‘I heard Abbess Glass brought you up the Seren Way in the middle of the night.’ The speaker was the one Clera had called Ghena and had said was the youngest in the class, a girl with a tightly curled cap of short, black hair. In the village Grey Stephen had a staff that had been his father’s and his father’s: where so many hands had polished the dark wood for so long it was the colour of Ghena’s skin. ‘I heard you’re a peasant. Where are you from? How did your people even pay the confirmation fee?’

‘I—’ Nona found she had the whole table’s attention. Even Arabella broke off her tale to stare.

‘You hear too much, Ghena.’ Clera cupped both hands behind her ears and laughed. ‘You were at the window all night looking to see “the Chosen One” arrive.’ She tilted her head just a fraction in Arabella’s direction. ‘Did you see the abbess going by with dust on her skirts and know she’d come up by Seren Way?’

Ghena scowled and looked away.

After lunch, and before Bray spoke for the sixth time that day to let them know they must hurry to class, there was time to wander or to sit. Arabella left the refectory with most of the class at her heels.

‘They’ll take her to the novice cloisters,’ Clera said.

‘It’s where most of us spend time after lunch,’ Jula explained. ‘It’s not like the nuns’ cloisters – it’s full of chat – too loud to think.’ She looked disapproving where Clera looked wistful.

‘We’ll take you to the sinkhole,’ Clera said. ‘You missed it today—’

‘I’m not swimming!’ Ruli interrupted, the last of those who’d stayed.

‘Me neither.’ Jula crossed her arms and pretended to shiver.

‘We’ll just sit and throw stones,’ Clera declared. ‘And my new friend Nona can tell us why her parents gave her up.’

The Glasswater sinkhole awed Nona. It looked as if some giant had poked a finger into the plateau when it was soft and new, leaving a perfectly round depression whose vertical stone walls dropped forty feet to the surface of dark and unrippled waters. She wondered what lay beneath the surface – hiding in unknowable depths.

The pool was about forty foot across. On the far side an iron ladder, bolted to the stone, led down into it. Nona could see the layers that Sister Rule had mentioned, showing in the sinkhole’s walls, as if the whole plateau were made of one thin slice laid atop the next.

The four novices sat on the edge, legs dangling out over the drop. Nona’s shoes were the finest pair she had ever owned, the only ones made of leather. She was terrified she’d lose them and clenched her toes inside, even though they were laced on tight. For a while none of them spoke. Clera played a copper penny across the backs of her fingers with practised ease. Nona enjoyed the silence. She didn’t want to tell her story, not yet … not ever. She didn’t want to lie either.

‘Everyone tells,’ Clera said, as if reading her mind.

‘Mother died trying to give me a little brother,’ Jula spoke into the awkward gap. ‘Father got very sad after that. He’s a scribe, not a practical man, he said. He thought the nuns would look after me better than he could.’

‘My dad ships convent wine across the Sea of Marn but he wasn’t paying the duty.’ Ruli grinned. ‘My uncles are all smugglers too. The ones they haven’t hanged. The abbess came to the trial and said she’d take me in. Dad had to agree, and it saved his neck.’

They both looked at Nona, waiting.

Clera raised her eyebrows, inviting Nona to speak. When they could rise no further, she herself spoke. ‘On the first day you tell why your parents didn’t want you any more. It’s supposed to stop it hurting. Sharing does that. Later you hear everyone else’s stories and you know you’re not the only one. If you’d ever been to prison you’d know that’s the first thing people do there – they tell what they did.’

Nona didn’t like to say that she had been to prison and that she hadn’t needed to tell because the guards had shouted it out as they led her to her cell. Murderer. It was on her lips to ask what a merchant’s daughter knew about such places – but as she opened her mouth to speak she remembered the cruel things Arabella had said about Clera’s father. He put himself in prison. And instead she began to answer the question that she had been trying to avoid. Nona’s story should have begun, ‘A juggler once came to my village. He was my first friend.’ She didn’t start there though. She started with a question of her own.

‘Did you ever have a dream that they were coming for you, in the night?’ she said, staring at her feet and the black water far below them.

‘Who?’ asked Clera.

‘Yes.’ Ruli lifted her head, shedding long pale hair to either side to reveal her long pale face.

‘They?’ Jula frowned.

‘They. Them. Bad people who want to hurt you,’ Nona said, and she told the girls a story. And though at first her words stumbled and she spoke as a peasant girl from the wild Grey lands of the west, out where the emperor’s name is rarely spoken and his enemies are closer than his palaces, she found her tongue and painted in the girls’ minds a picture that took hold of them all and wrapped them in a life they had never tasted or imagined.

‘I dreamed I was asleep in my mother’s house in the village where I had always lived. We weren’t like them, Mother and me. The villages along the Blue River are like clans, each one a family, one blood, the same looks, held by the same thinking. My father brought us there, me in my mother’s belly, but he left and we didn’t.

‘I dreamed of the focus moon, burning its way down the Corridor, and the boys and girls rising from their beds to play in the heat of it. The children joined hands around my mother’s hut, singing that old song:

She’s falling down, she’s falling down,

The moon, the moon,

She’s falling down, she’s falling down,

Soon, soon,

The ice will come, the ice will close,

No moon, no moon,

We’ll all fall down, we’ll all fall down,

Soon, too soon.

‘In the focus the boys and girls look so red they could be covered in blood. They’re coming. The bad ones. I know they’re coming. I see their path in my mind, a line that runs through everything, zig-zagging, curving left, right, coiling, trying to throw them off, but they’re following it – and it leads to me.

‘Outside the hut the children fall down. All at once. Without a scream.

‘I wake. All at once. Without a scream. It’s dark, the focus has passed and the fields lie restless beneath the wind. I sit up and the darkness moves around me like black water, deep enough to drown. For the longest time I sit there, shivering, my blanket wrapped tight around me, eyes on the door that I can’t see. I’m waiting for it to open.’

Dogs barking. A distant scream. Then a crash close at hand. The door-bar breaks at the first kick and a warrior fills the doorway, a lantern in one hand, sword in the other. He’s tall as any man in the village and muscle cords the length of him.

‘Take her!’ He steps in and others follow. The lantern finds dull glints among the iron plates on his leather shirt. He moves towards the workshop door, the other room where Mother sleeps on the reeds piled for her weaving.

Strong hands seize me, iron-hard and pinching. The men have braided beards. A woman slips a loop of rope around my wrists and draws it tight. Her face is marked with vertical bars of paint. Wooden charms hang in her tangle of dreadlocks. A Pelarthi. Raiders from the ice-margins.

Mother breaks from the workshop as the first raider reaches it. She’s very fast. Her reed-knife makes a bright sound as the blade skitters across the iron plates over his stomach. He swings his heavy sword but she’s not there. Her hand is at the neck of the woman holding me – the knife buried in the woman’s throat. My mother hauls me towards the main door. We nearly get there, but the man in leather and iron turns and swings again. The point of his sword finds the back of her neck. She falls. I fall beneath her. And the night goes dark again, and quiet.

‘The raiders sold you?’ Jula asked, horrified.

Nona had fallen silent, staring down at the water far below. ‘No. My village did.’ Nona looked up and saw the three girls staring at her as if she was something altogether new to them. ‘The raiders took me, but they didn’t get far. When dawn broke they camped in the Rellam Forest. The village hunters don’t go there. They say there are spirits in those woods, and not kind ones.

‘The Pelarthi broke into small groups. There weren’t more than twenty to start with. Five stayed with me: four men and the sister of the woman my mother stabbed. I found I had blood on me.’ Nona looked at her hands, turning them over as if the story might be written there. ‘While the Pelarthi were settling to sleep the forest fell silent. They didn’t seem to notice but I felt it watching us, the whole place – the trees, the ground, the darkness – all of it watching. A warrior came out from the shadow where the trees grew thick. He had bramble in his beard and a shock of wild hair. He didn’t speak, just raised his sword and came on barefoot. None of the Pelarthi even looked up – just me, lying on my side with my hands tied behind my back. I thought he might be one of them, only he looked too … wild, as though he hadn’t ever lived anywhere but right there in the Rellam. And his sword was polished wood, black, or very deep brown.

‘First the wildman slew the warrior who had killed Mother. He just swung his sword overhead and brought it down on the Pelarthi’s neck. The man’s head came right off. The others jumped up then and they weren’t slow, but he moved among them as though it were a dance – didn’t say a word, didn’t make a sound … none of them met his blade with theirs … and every time he changed direction there was a wound behind him spraying blood, and someone falling.

‘The woman fell over me, stumbling away from a swing of the wildman’s sword. By the time I’d struggled out from underneath her it was all over. The Pelarthi lay dead and the man had gone. Just me and the corpses and the forest moving all around us.

‘A party of hunters that had tracked the raiders out from the village found me an hour after sunrise, covered in blood and with bodies all around me … in the haunted wood. They brought me back but the old women were already washing Mother for the pyre and Mari Streams had run off to White Lake to get Preacher Mickel to stop them. Preacher Mickel says when the Hope arrives then all the dead will step from their graves and be made whole … so they must be buried and not given to the fire, because even the Hope can’t make live men and women from smoke and ash.

‘It didn’t take long for the whispering to start. … came out of the Rellam covered in blood – not a scratch on her … … who killed the Pelarthi? … … bodies … … blood … … spirits …

‘I don’t know who said witch first, but the first to hiss it at me was the smith’s wife, Matha. She’d hated me since her little Billem tried to beat me with a stick and I hurt him back. It didn’t take long before they were all saying it, as if the Pelarthi hadn’t even come, as if the bodies in the forest hadn’t belonged to men who killed my mother and dragged me off. I think they were angry that of all those stolen by the Pelarthi I was the only one they got back. The one they hadn’t wanted in the first place.

‘The smith and Grettle Eavis wanted to tie me in a bag and drown me in the Blue River. They said that’s the way to kill a witch so she doesn’t come back – wrap her in iron chain, put her in a bag and drown her. Grey Stephen said no – he’s the one who gets to say how things will be in the village on account of he fought the Pelarthi way back when there was an empress, and he killed some too. Grey Stephen said no and that the tinker had seen a child-taker on the road and if the village wouldn’t have me the “taker would”.

‘I—’ The voice of a bell spoke over her, deep and throbbing in the sinkhole’s void. ‘Bray! That’s for the lesson!’ Nona leapt to her feet, unconcerned that she stood on the very brink of a high fall.

The other girls were slower to get up, pushing themselves back from the sinkhole’s lip.

‘That’s horrible,’ Jula said, brushing the grit from the seat of her habit.

‘It’s incredible!’ Ruli said. ‘Weren’t you terrified when—’

‘Is it true?’ Clera frowned, weighing Nona with a speculative gaze.

‘We have to get to Blade.’ Nona was already hurrying towards the Academia tower. ‘I can’t be late twice!’ She hesitated and looked back. ‘Where’s the lesson?’

Clera laughed at that. ‘Come on. She’s right – Sister Tallow will have us running up and down the Seren Way, you know what she’s like!’

A moment later the three novices were walking briskly towards a building at the far edge of the plateau, with Nona jogging to catch up.

‘That’s the Blade Hall.’ Clera pointed to a tall building with high arched windows. Walls of huge limestone blocks supported a peaked roof with stone gargoyles roaring beneath the eaves. To the south a row of carved buttresses reinforced the wall that faced out over the plateau’s edge. ‘And that’s the Heart Hall.’ Clera nodded to the building on their left as they passed its many-pillared portico.

‘The Persus Hall.’ Jula finished tying her hair back with a black cord. ‘After Emperor Persus, third of his name, whose line ended when the current—’

‘Everyone calls it the Heart Hall because it was built for the shipheart.’ Clera led up the steps of Blade Hall, almost running but not quite.

‘What’s the ship—’

But Clera had already pushed open the heavy door and slipped inside. Ruli followed.

‘I still don’t understand who paid your confirmation fee.’ Jula came up behind Nona.

Nona didn’t understand either. She worried that perhaps it had been overlooked and this evening or maybe tomorrow a sister would come with ledger and quill and a demand for ten gold sovereigns. Talking about it with the others seemed like tempting fate.

‘Nona!’ Sister Tallow called her name the moment Nona stuck her head around the door. ‘Come here beside me.’

Nona, saved from answering Jula, hurried across. The old woman shot her a narrow look then returned her gaze to the rest of Red Class, the last few of them lining up in a second rank. Arabella, now in a habit, stood at Mistress Blade’s other side, golden and perfect, her hair looking as if a trio of handmaids had spent an hour combing and pinning it.

The hall extended about half the length of the building, ending in galleried seating around a short tunnel that led to the remaining chambers. The ceiling vaulted above them high enough for an oak tree to grow to maturity at the centre. Apart from a collection of a dozen or so man-height leather-wrapped wooden posts on stands in a far corner the hall lay echoingly empty, the floor an inch of sand over flagstones.

‘I need partners for these two.’ Sister Tallow had enough steel in her voice that even simple observations became life or death ultimatums. She cast a dark eye across the girls lined before her. ‘Novice Ghena, you will be with Nona. Novice Jula, with Arabella.’

Ghena fixed her gaze on Nona and allowed herself a thin smile. Jula looked surprised.

‘Time to change.’ Sister Tallow clapped her hands. ‘Anyone dawdling gets their head shaved.’ She directed her attention to Ghena who, now that Nona considered it, looked as if she might have suffered just such a fate only a few weeks ago. ‘Make sure the new girls get habits that fit.’ Another clap of the hands. ‘Go!’ And the dozen novices were off, running towards the tunnel beneath the tiered seating, sand spraying out beneath their heels.

Ghena moved swiftly and Nona had to sprint to catch up. The gloom of the tunnel stole Nona’s sight after the brightness of the hall. As she slowed to let her eyes adjust Ghena pulled away while others came pounding up behind. At the end of the passage most of the girls bundled to the left, but Jula led Arabella to the right, and Nona followed.

Ghena was waiting for them in a long and narrow storeroom. She pulled back the shutters and light from the window at the far end revealed both walls lined with shelves. Further back all manner of goods were stacked: earthenware jars, rolled mats, heavy leather balls, staves, sticks, canes, even the hilts of what might be daggers or swords. Closer at hand shelves boasted piles of neatly folded tunics and shoes of thick black cloth.

‘The smallest are by the door. Make sure you get one that fits well,’ Jula said. ‘Too tight and if someone wants to get a hold they’ll have to grab a handful of you as well. Too loose and you’ll be tripping up or have it pulled off.’

Nona and Arabella pulled out fighting tunics, each top paired with ankle-length trousers, holding them against themselves under the critical eye of their partner.

‘Too small, even for you,’ Ghena barked. Jula had already led Arabella off to the changing room, the new girl seemingly more anxious to keep her golden curls than worry overmuch about the fit of her tunic.

‘It looks about right …’ Nona hadn’t ever chosen clothes before, but it did look about right.

‘When someone grabs you.’ Ghena lunged forward and seized a fistful of the tunic. ‘Do you want them to have a handful of this or a handful of your skin?’

‘I don’t want them to grab me,’ Nona said. ‘A loose tunic makes it easier.’

Ghena snarled and ripped the tunic top from Nona’s hands. ‘You’re partnered with me, farm-girl. Every mistake you make makes me look bad. Mistress Blade will test you and if you fail I get punished. And if that happens I’ll take it out on you.’

Nona snatched the top back. ‘Winning is never a mistake.’ She met Ghena’s dark and furious eyes, feeling her own snarl begin to twist her face, remembering how she had screamed out her fury as she ran towards Raymel Tacsis. A second later the heat blew from her, as if a cold wind had rattled through the room. She saw the hangman’s sheet again, Saida just a shape beneath it. Anger hadn’t saved her. Winning hadn’t saved her. Nona took the tunic two places along from the one she’d tried last and held it up against her. ‘Good enough?’

‘Good enough.’

They reached the changing room to find the first novice already leaving. ‘You two will make a lovely couple with your shiny heads.’ Ketti ran her hands over her brow as she passed them, grinning, her own thick cascade of black hair tied back tightly with a white cord.

‘… pigs and cows.’ Arabella broke off, aiming a bright smile at the door as Nona and Ghena entered. All the novices laughed, a couple trying to hide it behind their hands.

Nona set her teeth, and finding a space on the long bench began to struggle out of her unfamiliar clothing, throwing it up on the pegs above as the other girls had. The room smelled of old sweat, of bodies packed close – you could smell it out in the main hall, faint but pervasive. It reminded her of the village.

‘Hurry up!’ Clera offered the advice apologetically as she left, ready in her fighting habit, belt tight about her waist, hair scraped back with not so much as a single curl escaping.

‘Come on! Come on!’ Jula stood at the door frantically looking down the corridor. ‘Arabella!’

Arabella ran for the door and both of them sprinted away. Nona and Ghena were last to leave the changing room.

‘Come on!’ Ghena started running.

Nona made to give chase but at the doorway she spotted one of the dark linen belts, abandoned on the floor. Without thinking, she scooped it up and took it with her to return to its owner, tucking it down the front of her tunic to keep her hands free. Moments later she was sprinting down the tunnel towards the bright hall beyond. Dazzled by the sunshine as she emerged Nona couldn’t see who ran past her in the opposite direction.

‘Cutting things fine, novice.’ Sister Tallow turned to watch Nona’s breathless arrival hard on the heels of Ghena’s.

Nona bowed her head and went to join Ghena at the end of the second row. She looked about … one person missing. She opened her mouth to comment but Ghena deployed a swift, sharp elbow to her ribs.

A moment of silence passed. Another. A whole minute where eleven novices watched the sandy floor beneath their feet and tension rose around them.

‘And here she comes.’ Sister Tallow dropped the words with the same weight the judge had spoken Nona’s death sentence.

Arabella came running from the tunnel, clutching her fight tunic closed across her chest. ‘I couldn’t find it! It wasn’t anywhere!’ She pulled up breathless and close to tears.

‘An inventive child would have taken a replacement from the stores and claimed it as hers. An attentive child would not have lost her belt within moments of receiving it in the first place.’ Sister Tallow returned her gaze to the class. ‘At convent the rules apply to king and commoner alike. Once the class is finished Novice Jula will shave Novice Arabella’s head and then Arabella will perform the same duty for her.’

Nona realized her mistake. She hesitated, then reached beneath her own tunic to draw out Arabella’s belt. ‘Sister—’

‘Ah!’ Mistress Blade proved to have quick eyes. ‘I see that Nona has demonstrated an enduring and valuable truth. We may fight here in this hall and think that because our battles are unconstrained by rules that we truly understand what it is to make war.’ Sister Tallow strode the length of the first line. ‘Do not be deceived. No real fight is bound by four walls. No real fight ends at a particular doorway or when we wash off the sweat and the blood. Fights end with defeat. And death is the only defeat a warrior understands. While we draw breath we are at war with our enemies and they with us.’ The nun turned at the end of the line and approached Nona, taking the belt from her hand. ‘In future, Nona, save such demonstrations of the secret war for Mistress Shade’s class where they will be better appreciated. Though try not to irk her. Our sister of the shadow is far less … kind … than I am.’ She tossed the belt to Arabella. ‘Laps! Sharlot, lead off.’

The tallest girl in Red Class, a willowy redhead, took off running, the rest falling in behind her.

Nona was used to laps from the Caltess and she fell into an easy rhythm. She could sense Arabella behind her, last in the running order, and doubtless staring daggers at the back of her neck. At each corner Clera glanced back, offering a grin. After the first few circuits of the hall Nona let her mind empty of everything except the pattern of her feet hitting the sandy floor. She let go of the story she had told at the sinkhole, let the worry over her confirmation fee slip away, let Arabella Jotsis and her revenge fade, even thoughts of Raymel Tacsis and his revenge becoming lost beneath the placing of one foot before the other. Only the line remained, bright and burning, as it had been in her dream.

‘I will repeat myself for the new girls,’ Sister Tallow said when she had them in two rows once more, sweating and labouring over their breath. ‘It’s a message many of you could do with hearing again. Perhaps you’ll take more meaning from it after so many lessons in this hall.

‘We are not built for war. We are not fast – most every animal can outrun or evade us, be it hound, cat, rat, or sparrow. We are not strong – a mule, a hoola, a bear, all of them are pound for pound three, maybe five times as strong as man. And you are not men.

‘What we are is clever and precise. These are our tools. Wit and precision. I am teaching you to fight without weapons for two reasons. First, because there are times when you will be without a weapon. Second, because in training for such conflict you will learn about pain without getting broken, and you will learn about rage without killing.’ She held up her hands. ‘These are poor weapons. When we fight we fight to win. This—’ From nowhere six inches of gleaming steel appeared in her hand. ‘This is a better weapon. However, I can punch you with my fist and you will learn a lesson. The knife’s lesson is short and terminal.’

Sister Tallow flexed her wrist and the blade vanished into her sleeve. ‘The stories tell us that battles are about right and wrong. That winning requires heart and passion. That the Ancestor will reach out to those who believe and lend strength to their arm. The truth is that the Ancestor will gather your essence to the whole when you die. I’m sure you’re told more about that in Spirit, but in Blade just know that until you die the Ancestor will only watch.

‘Fighting is about control. Control of your fear, your pain, and your anger. Control of your weapon. Control of your opponent. Fighting is about mechanics, levers, breaking points, and speed. Your body is a mechanism. It is time to learn how it works, how far you can push it or allow it to be pushed, not before it hurts, but before it breaks. Unarmed combat requires the application of force to disable the opponent’s machine before they disable yours.

‘In Blade we value quickness. Sufficient speed makes every other aspect of combat irrelevant. If your opponent is a statue it doesn’t matter how strong or skilled they might be – find their throat or an eye and make an end of them. Speed is the way of the sisterhood.

‘You will have heard the old stories of Red Sisters, of Sister Cloud and the Western King, or Sister Owl maybe, when she tamed the Black Castle. The wordsmiths in Verity will spin such tales out for you for a quarter penny and tell you about the fist storm, about a dozen of the king’s close-guard left lying in Cloud’s wake.’ Sister Tallow spat into the sand. ‘Stories are just words. Words have no place in a fight. The truth is that almost every time two people raise their empty hands against each other they will both end up on the floor long before one of them dies or is otherwise broken.

‘On the ground strength tells, and very often you will not be the strongest. I will teach you about joints. How they will and won’t move. In which direction they tear most easily. In which place the force you apply will find the longest levers to stress those joints. How to twist yourself out of similar holds. How to bite and gouge. How to win where winning is an option.

‘More importantly you will learn about pain, fear, rage, and control. You will learn how to balance the first three to achieve the fourth. And you will carry those lessons into Grey Class where I will put weapons in your hands and teach you what it is to be a Red Sister. In Grey Class I will teach you how to make the fuckers bleed.

‘Arabella, Nona, Jula, Ghena, to the front.’

Nona followed the others to the spot Sister Tallow indicated.

‘You two over there—’ Sister Tallow waved Arabella and Jula off to the side. ‘Both of our new arrivals come with reports of great potential. Let’s see how far potential gets them. Jula and Arabella first. Don’t hurt her, Jula.’ She stepped back and clapped once more. ‘Fight.’

Jula snapped into a fighting stance, body turned sideways to Arabella, fists raised at chest height, one a few inches behind the other, legs wide and braced. Arabella ignored her, looking instead at Sister Tallow. ‘Fight, Mistress Blade? How should—’

‘Fight!’ Sister Tallow spread her hands. ‘Kick her, punch her, bite her if you must. Put her down.’

‘But …’

Sister Tallow nodded to Jula. She exploded forward into a flying kick that hit Arabella on the shoulder and sent her sprawling to the floor.

‘The leg is stronger than the arm. The foot less delicate than the hand. Though to strike with them sacrifices balance.’ Sister Tallow motioned upward with fingers. ‘Get up, girl.’

The attack surprised Nona. Jula looked so bookish … she found herself smiling at the contrast, then noticed Arabella scowling at her from the ground.

Arabella rubbed her shoulder and got slowly to her feet.

‘Fight!’ Another clap.

Jula repeated the kick. Arabella stepped to the side, her speed remarkable. Jula kicked again, missed again. The two girls squared up, fists raised. Arabella threw the first punch, a swing, blindingly fast. Somehow Jula stepped into it and caught the blonde girl’s wrist, twisting her own body under Arabella’s to throw her over her shoulder. Arabella landed heavily on her back and, along with all the air in her lungs, spat out a word that Nona wouldn’t have thought ever got used in the emperor’s court.

Nona looked up at Sister Tallow for her reaction to the display and found her, together with the whole class, staring at Arabella, wide-eyed. The nun’s surprise was mixed with some emotion that Nona couldn’t identify but it was strong enough to make the lines of old scars stand out against her paling skin.

Jula said it first, even as she stood there in her victory. ‘She moves like a hunska.’

As a child in the ignorance of her village Nona had barely known about the four tribes of men or how their blood might show, but her months with Giljohn and then at the Caltess had taught her how deep one simple truth ran. Hunska-born were dark of eye and hair. She knew then why Arabella might be so special that the Church of the Ancestor would have negotiated to take her from a noble house. She knew it even before the first of the novices whispered ‘mixed’. Two-bloods were rare as a sheet-thaw. There hadn’t been a three-blood in the three centuries since Aran the Founder who carved out the realm from the chaos of wildmen and petty kingdoms. At least that’s what they said at the Caltess. If Arabella Jotsis showed the signs of the gerant line too she would be stepping into history. If she showed up quantal or marjal she could be stepping into legend.

‘Enough.’ Another of those claps that hurt the ears. ‘Nona, our ring-fighter from the Caltess …’ The novices laughed at the joke. ‘It’s your turn. Ghena? Are you ready?’

Nona turned to face Ghena and found her already in the fighting stance, eyes narrow with concentration, no smile, no snarl. The girl was perhaps an inch taller than her, making them the two smallest in the class. Her dark limbs were nearly as lean as Nona’s, every part of them muscle and bone.

The common sense behind the blade-stance was obvious: it presented a smaller area for attack while keeping a wide, stable base. Nona stood as she always stood though. She would learn and use the blade methods but it felt foolish to ape the stance immediately and face her first fight in a position she wasn’t used to.

‘Ready?’ Ghena asked. She hadn’t taken the advantage of surprise like Jula had, but looking at her Nona knew pride lay behind the restraint, not kindness. Ghena wanted to own her victory whole.

Nona gave a slight nod and Ghena snapped a punch at her, a straight jab, not Arabella’s clumsy swing announced by her whole body before she even started. This came sudden and direct. Nona blocked the fist with both hands, palms crossed before her face. The smack of flesh on flesh echoed in the space of the hall and the impact hurt far more than Nona had imagined.

She lowered her hands to see a look of surprise on Ghena’s face.

‘You’re fast.’ Ghena tilted her neck left, then right, stretching.

Without warning the novice launched a flurry of punches, advancing a step with each, a furious attack with no quarter granted. Nona let the world slow around her, the split seconds crystallizing into that clarity she had always been able to call upon. She stepped back, swaying out of the path of one punch, knocking the next aside so it passed within a hair’s breadth of her cheek. Ghena was quick. Very quick. Hunska-fast. Nona pushed aside another punch, another, sidestepped a third. Ghena’s mask cracked and her fury showed. Anger made her blows more wild but only seemed to increase her speed. Nona found herself having to work harder, saving herself only by the narrowest of margins. She gritted her teeth and dug deeper into the moment until her brain buzzed inside her skull like a trapped bee and even Ghena’s whip-crack blows became lazy things that she could step around.

Nona saw, even in the fractions their fight occupied, awareness start to enter Ghena’s eyes, a widening, a dilation of pupils. She knew the look – she had seen it before in the eyes of her first friend when he had tossed her a fourth ball and she added it to her juggling thinking to please him … She let Ghena’s fist catch her on the left shoulder, and spun with the impact, allowing it to carry her to the floor. A great spray of sand marked her arrival and she stayed there, panting.

A long moment passed and Nona let the world run at its own pace again, feeling the sand grains between her lips, the ache in her shoulder, the sting still in her palms. At last Mistress Blade’s clap broke the silence. Nona sat up, climbed slowly to her feet, and went to rejoin the line. The novices nodded their approval. Clera and Ruli looked impressed, Arabella sour. Of all of them only Ghena’s gaze held a measure of confusion, and in Sister Tallow’s there was a quiet speculation.

8

Nona liked the dormitories better than the nun’s cell of the night before. The building had three storeys, Red and Grey classes dividing the ground floor between them in two long, low rooms, Mystic and Holy each having their own floor, with study rooms for the Holies at the top. The beds were larger and more comfortable too, being raised on legs, each with a mattress of folded blankets over boards. Nona lay on hers while the class moved about her, chatting and getting ready for sleep. In the bed to Nona’s left Ghena had already crawled beneath her covers and lay dead to the world.

Nona stretched, yawning. The exercises in Blade, one punch and one throw repeated over and over, never quite to Sister Tallow’s satisfaction, had left her sore and sweat-soaked. The bathhouse afterwards took away the ache and stink of exercise and left in its place a warm and bone-deep weariness. If Clera hadn’t reached down a hand to help her out of the pool Nona suspected that she might still be there, floating helpless amid the steam.

Ruli came to sit at the end of Nona’s bed, her long hair pushed up into a nightcap bulging comically atop her head. ‘I’m surprised you can keep your eyes open after that.’ She nodded towards Ghena’s bed.

‘Did I do all right?’ Nona asked.

‘You were great! You’re fast, Nona! Ghena doesn’t have a lot of technique because she’s only been here three months, but she’s really, really quick, a prime for sure. Only Clera’s quicker than Ghena and some say—’

‘They say I’m the fastest the convent has seen in years.’ Clera sat on the next bed along and favoured Nona with a dangerous smile. ‘Hunska full-blood.’

‘Are there other convents?’ Nona remained flat on her back, the blanket pulled to her neck, gaze returning to the dance of shadows on the ceiling.

‘Six.’ Ruli began to count them off on her fingers. ‘Silent Patience, Chaste Devotion, Gerran’s Crag—’

‘Sweet Mercy is the only one to teach Blade, Path, or Shade. The rest just train Holy Sisters.’

‘Just?’ Jula from a nearby bed, still sounding sour about her lost hair.

‘Holy Sisters are as important to the Ancestor as any other sister,’ Ruli chipped in with a conciliatory tone. ‘The abbess is a Holy Sister and she’s in charge of us all.’

Nona let them talk and watched the shadows play. She didn’t want to see Arabella, strangely alien now with her pink scalp and patchy blonde stubble. She didn’t want to catch the girl’s eye and start another round of accusations. Jula had taken her shaving with poor grace but her reaction was as nothing compared to Arabella’s outburst. Nona had wondered for a moment if Sister Tallow would have to hold her down …

Abbess Glass had said Nona was free to leave at any time, but when Arabella had demanded to go home in the tone of someone used to being obeyed, Sister Tallow had said no.

‘I’m not letting a novice hack at me with a razor because some wild-land peasant stole my belt!’ And with that Arabella had started to stride towards the main doors.

What followed had been ugly to watch, but no matter how Arabella raged or how dire her threats the nun had shown no hint of backing down, and eventually a tearful Arabella Jotsis sat in the chair provided while Jula removed her golden hair with a long razor and a trembling hand.

By the time it was Arabella’s turn to shave Jula’s head she did so with a steady grip on the blade, her eyes red-rimmed and full of cold accusation aimed in Nona’s direction.

Nona opened her eyes with a start. Sleep had nearly taken her. She rolled her head to the left. Clera sat on the edge of the bed in her long white nightgown, the copper penny she so often played with in her hand. The other girls were settling into their beds. ‘We’re friends then?’ she asked without preamble, watching Nona’s eyes.

‘“Friend” can be a dangerous word,’ Nona said.

Clera laughed. ‘Friend? Really?’

‘It is if you mean it.’ Nona didn’t smile. She thought of Amondo and of Saida. ‘Friend’ was a bond. Much of what people did, how they acted, confused Nona. But ‘friend’ she understood. A friend you would die for. Or kill for.

‘Well I mean it.’ Clera let her own smile slip.

‘Then we are.’

It seemed enough for Clera. She rose from Nona’s bed and went to her own, flipping the penny once and humming some tune, low and sweet.

Nona let exhaustion close her eyes. The dormitories were heated by the same pipes that ran in the bathhouse and cells. She hadn’t imagined that commoners ever wholly escaped the cold, perhaps the emperor before his ever-blazing fires, but not girls like her, not like this. One of the high windows was even a quarter open to stop it being too muggy, as if heat were something that could be given to the wind rather than something precious to be hoarded.

In the village mothers cut their children’s hair to a fuzz whenever the weather turned. When the ice-wind surrendered to the Corridor wind and the cold grew less bitter the knives came out. They did it to reduce lice, fleas, and nits to a manageable level, but Nona had always felt it marked the start of something new: new growth, new possibilities. Her last thoughts before dreams stole her were that if a shaved head were the worst thing to have happened to Arabella Jotsis so far then she had lived a charmed life. Also, Nona thought, annoyingly the loss of that golden mane had done nothing to mar the girl’s beauty. If anything she looked somehow more perfect.

Folded in the soft hubbub of voices and with the warmth of her bed drawing her down into sleep Nona let the contest with Ghena play across the back of her eyelids. The whole thing had lasted only moments, moments in which Ghena had thrown a dozen or more punches, a well-practised dance on her part, instinct and reflex on Nona’s. Memory of one fight slipped into memory of another, returning Nona to the sawdust and sweat of the Caltess, watching the apprentices spar. Partnis Reeve’s fight-masters taught discipline but left room for aggression.

A week or two after Nona’s arrival Raymel Tacsis had strolled into the great hall where the apprentices were training. Nona, Saida and two other attic children engaged in sweeping the floor paused their labours and leaned on their brooms to watch the fighter. Up close his size was intimidating. Nona realized that her head wouldn’t even reach the man’s hip and that with the strength of one arm he would be able to toss her, Saida, and the other two sweepers across the room, not separately but together.

‘I’ve a better lesson for these puppies.’ Raymel climbed over the ropes into the ring where two gerant apprentices had been wrestling, both of them enormous but lacking more than a foot on the older man. He stood huge, blond, and glorious between them, somehow wearing his wealth though all that covered him was a loincloth and a sheen of oil.

The fight-master stepped forward, an objection on his lips, but Raymel boomed across him, ‘And the rest of you.’ He beckoned another three apprentices from across the hall. Two hunskas holding nets and a gerant girl with a ponderous brow that looked as if it would break the fist of anyone foolish enough to punch her in the head.

As the girl clambered in behind the two swifter apprentices Raymel drove an elbow into the throat of the gerant behind him. ‘Don’t ever wait to attack.’ The apprentice fell, clutching his neck. The rest stood, too stunned or nervous to act. Raymel slapped the girl, his huge hand covering half her face and sending her back into the ropes, spitting blood. His grin was an ugly thing, corrupting the good looks he’d been born with.

Beside Nona, Saida covered her eyes, turning to reach for her broom.

‘Aren’t you going to watch?’ Nona couldn’t look away. The hunska apprentices had launched themselves at Raymel, two blurs of fists and feet.

‘I hate it.’ Saida resumed her sweeping. ‘It makes my stomach feel bad, seeing people hurt.’

‘But …’ Nona winced as Raymel trapped one hunska against the ropes and snatched him up by the leg. ‘Partnis bought you to fight. You’re going to have to.’

She sensed rather than saw Saida’s broad shoulders shrug. ‘I’d rather mend people than break them. Is that a thing in the city? Mending people?’

‘I don’t know.’ Nona watched Raymel swing the hunska apprentice against the ring post. Part of her wanted to be unleashed within the roped enclosure. Another part wanted Saida’s hope to be true, wanted there to be people who put as much passion into healing as Raymel did into hurting.

‘Raymel!’ the fight-master barked. ‘Ease up.’

Raymel continued to choke the apprentice in his hands, still seemingly impervious to the attacks of the last hunska remaining on her feet.

Nona found herself turning away too, the undirected anger that built in her whenever she saw a fight now dissipating. ‘You won’t have to fight, Saida. They’ll see you’re no good at it and give you a different job. Regol said the old man who comes to the horses can sew up wounds like a seamstress. Perhaps he’ll need an apprentice soon. He is very old.’

Saida managed a shy smile. ‘I’d like to help. I don’t want Partnis to give me away. I would miss you.’

‘I’d miss you too.’ Nona found her chest aching at the thought. ‘So I won’t let it happen!’ She said it with such fierce confidence that Saida’s smile had widened into something that made her blunt face suddenly beautiful.

The dream turned darker, colder, shadows invading the Caltess hall. They were alone now, Saida and Nona, a sense of profound unease stalking between them.

‘Don’t hurt me!’ Saida was suddenly backing away from Nona, terrified.

‘Saida! I won’t let anyone—’

‘Don’t hurt me!’ Saida pointed at Nona, cowering.

Nona tried to reassure her but found instead that she towered over Saida, holding her friend’s arm in a massive fist. The grey hall around her became the walls of Raymel’s apartment, Saida dangling above the thick luxury of a bearskin rug.

Nona tried to let Saida go. ‘It’s not me. I’m not like him. I’m not!’

‘No, please! I didn’t mean to.’

Anger flared somewhere deep in Nona’s chest. She was trying to help the silly girl. Why was she scared? Did she think Nona had anything in common with a creature like Raymel Tacsis? ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’ She found to her horror though that she was shaking Saida, the fist on her friend’s arm emphasizing her points as she spoke.

‘Let go!’

‘I am letting go …’ But the fist gripped tighter, twisted, and Saida’s screaming began.

Nona drew a sharp breath and opened her eyes. The colours of her nightmare vanished leaving only black. It took a moment to realize where she was. The soft sounds of sleeping surrounded her on each side. At the back of her mind the dream carried on as if it neither wanted her attention nor required her permission to proceed. She had been following something, a line that ran its narrow path with danger to either side, on one flank a dark and consuming hunger, on the other a blindness, fierce as staring at the sun. And somehow she had been following someone else at the same time, black-clad, swift, certain, moving through a starless night, plotting a sure path between high buildings. The figure had found what it sought, looked up, reached out to find cold stone walls, and had started to climb.

Nona strained her ears, hunting beneath the novices’ gentle snores and sighs, the soft turning of a body in sleep, the whisper of the wind … a scrape, a sudden movement … hard to judge at what distance in the unbroken night. Without warning, surprising herself, Nona jolted upright, as swift a motion as she had ever made, the blanket pulled from her. Perhaps some new sound had sat her up, perhaps nothing, just one of those twitches that comes out of nowhere and jerks your body as if by a string. Somewhere else in the dark a muffled impact, the sound of air leaving lungs fast and without orders …

‘Wuh-what?’ At the end of the row Ketti, the eldest of them, unhooded the lantern that sat beside her bed for anyone needing to make the trip to the Necessary in the dead of night.

Just below the rolled blanket where Nona’s head had lain a small black object stood proud of the bed. She blinked, trying to focus – the hilt of something? Close by, Clera rose groggily from her own bed. ‘Can’t be morning already?’ Her voice thick with sleep. A figure stood between them, revealed in the light of the unhooded lantern – Arabella Jotsis, her face a mask.

Nona took hold of the hilt – leather-bound, the pommel a ball of iron the size of an eye – and tugged. It took most of her strength to free the point from the boards, and when she saw the gleaming blade start to slide out from the slot it had put in her blankets she quickly covered it. Only Arabella noticed, her eyes moving from Nona’s hand on the hilt to Nona’s face as their eyes met.

‘Get back in bed! It’s the middle of the night.’ Ketti closed the lantern’s cowl until just a glow remained.

Arabella hurried towards Ketti and moments later left the room holding the lantern.

‘Shut the window. It’s cold in here.’ Clera from her bed, the words all running together. Nobody replied.

Nona lay back, pulling the blankets over her. It had grown cooler – the wind must have caught the window and pulled it wide – even so, if Clera called this cold then she had never known what it was to face the ice-wind, hungry and with only wattle walls for shelter.

She drew out the knife from under the covers. The blade reached for about two widths of her hand, narrow as two fingers, all of it cold steel. Nona could only think that Arabella must have stolen it from the stores at the training hall. The real question though, was had she meant to stab Nona to death or just to leave her a pointed warning? At the core of her something red and primal snarled at the blade’s challenge, demanding blood, demanding the weapon be returned with a hard lesson. Nona fought the impulse to go after Arabella. She could catch her before she reached the Necessary hunkering on the edge of the cliff. How would that encounter end? Nona with a sharp knife in her hand and blunt accusations in her mouth? Anger had its place, it was a weapon not to be neglected, but so did patience, and Nona decided that control lay in deciding which to use and when.

She stayed in her bed. It was cold outside and dangerous in all manner of ways. The knife must have been meant to scare her. Even someone as high-born as Arabella Jotsis couldn’t expect to murder people in their sleep in a crowded dormitory and get away with it … Unless she really did think a village girl was no more than a cow or pig compared to someone who had been invited to the emperor’s palace?

At some point, with one thought chasing the next in endless circles, Nona fell asleep and though she tossed and turned she didn’t wake until Bray spoke the waking hour and all across the dormitory grey shapes started to move beneath their covers, grumbling at the day.

‘Path and Spirit today,’ Clera groaned. ‘Worst of the lot.’

‘Breakfast first!’ Ruli with a grin, pulling off her nightcap and shaking down her hair.

‘Spirit is what we’re all here for.’ Jula gave a sniff, patting her head and finding her hair hadn’t returned overnight.

‘I’m here because I was sent here,’ Clera said. ‘When I’m a Red Sister if anyone asks me to repeat the catechism I’ll stab them in the eye.’

‘If you paid closer attention in Spirit, you would know that stabbing people in the eye is frowned upon.’ Jula straightened her habit and started to make her bed. ‘Anyway, it’s Path first.’

‘Yawn!’ Clera tugged her habit over her underskirts. ‘I hope Pan lets us pathless go play again.’

Nona slid from her covers and started to dress. She reached beneath her pillow, to touch the knife one more time to reassure herself it hadn’t been a dream. Still there, warm from her body now, a hard, sharp, and undeniable truth. She wanted to take it with her, strapped to her body, the blade wrapped in a strip of linen, but she lacked both time and privacy. She would have to leave the weapon in her bed and hope that Arabella had no chance to reclaim it.

Nona found herself one of the last out of the dormitory, hurrying with Clera to the refectory for breakfast. The pair of them clattered down the front steps, finding an unusually still day, a cloudless sky, and a rare warmth on offer.

By the dormitory wall a plump, red-faced sister attacked an area of the flagstones with a stiff brush, pausing to slosh down more water from her bucket. She glanced up at the girls. ‘Hurry!’ And returned to her task, scrubbing furiously at a dark stain. ‘Away with you.’

Clera stuck her tongue out at the woman’s back and ran off towards the refectory, giggling. ‘That’s Sister Mop. She thinks novices only have two aims in life: to get stuff dirty and to get in her way.’

‘She called herself Mop?’ Nona running behind.

‘No, but everyone else calls her that. She chose some flower name, Crysanthe-something, but nobody can pronounce it or remember it.’

A hundred yards on they passed Sister Tallow, coming from the abbess’s house. She looked away towards the eastern sky as they ran by but not before Nona saw the abrasion across the left side of her face and the bruise darkening around it.

Nona waited until they were out of earshot around the corner of the refectory. ‘What happened?’

‘Don’t know. Can’t imagine anyone getting the best of old Blade,’ Clera panted. ‘Maybe the abbess slapped her!’ She laughed, then more serious, ‘Did you see she had her arm hidden inside her habit?’

Nona hadn’t and once through the doors the sight of food bowls, full and steaming, pushed any questions from her mind. Breakfast was a hasty affair but Nona still made a valiant attempt at leaving nothing edible behind by the time she left the table.

‘Come on!’ Clera turned and beckoned as Nona jogged to keep up, one arm over her over-full stomach. Fortunately the Path cloisters came into view soon enough, past the beehives lined in the lee of the abbess’s house. Four arms of the building reached towards the compass points from a round central tower. Each arm was a framework of ornately-worked stone, open to the elements, with delicate corner pillars and trellised masonry reaching between them to complete the structure. The central tower stood dark against the sky, defying the years with the arrogance of stone, seeming in one moment foreboding and in the next beautiful. Four doors gave onto the ground floor, one for each arm of the surrounding structure.

Ahead of Nona and Clera a novice laboured towards the tower in limping steps, a crutch under her left armpit.

‘Someone must have got kicked a bit hard in Blade yesterday!’ Nona slowed her pace as they caught the girl up. No one had been limping in the dormitory, and yet there was something familiar about the novice.

‘Ha!’ Clera shouted, ‘That’s just Stumpy!’ She raced past, jostling the girl enough to make her stagger.

Nona came to a halt, almost level with the novice, reaching to catch her, then pulling back her hands as she saw it wasn’t needed. The girl was hardly taller than her, hair the colour of straw set about her head in a hundred tight curls. ‘Nona,’ she said, without turning.

Nona knew the voice. ‘Hessa?’

Hessa pivoted on her crutch. The length of the habit hid her withered leg, but only the tip of her shoe touched the ground on that side. ‘We’ve come a long way from Giljohn’s cage.’

Nona had her arms about her before she had time to blink. ‘They killed Saida.’

‘I’m sorry for it.’ Hessa lifted a hand uncertainly to pat Nona between the shoulders.

‘How are you here? Why haven’t I seen you?’ Nona released her and stepped back.

‘I’ve been in the sanatorium. Sister Rose wanted to keep me in until I got rid of this cough.’ Hessa thumped a fist against her narrow chest. ‘I’ve been here for weeks. Giljohn tried to sell me at the Academy but I failed their tests. They said I was the wrong sort, quantal maybe, but definitely not marjal. He tried to sell me to three different mages. Their houses are so big, Nona! I thought we were going into the emperor’s palace—’

‘NooooOOOooona!’ Clera hollering from the north door. ‘We’ll be late!’

‘Coming!’

‘We’d better hurry.’ Hessa shifted her weight and set her crutch forward.

A bony hand closed on both their shoulders. ‘The heathens have found each other, I see!’ Sister Wheel pushed between them. ‘The peasant and the cripple, plotting together. We’ll soon clear out those muddy little minds. Scrub away heresy and falsehood so the Ancestor may find you worthy. Even simple clay can be moulded and fired into something of worth.’

Nona opened her mouth to say something sharp. ‘I—’

‘Yes, Sister Wheel! I’m looking forward to our Spirit class.’ Hessa smiled up at the nun so sweetly that Nona almost believed she meant it. ‘But we’d best go now or Mistress Path will be cross with us.’

Sister Wheel made a sound of disgust and released both of them, wiping her hands on her habit. ‘Quickly then!’

Hessa showed a fair turn of pace with her crutch, her withered leg swinging beneath her skirts. Nona matched her speed, glancing back at Sister Wheel, now making for the dome. ‘I don’t like that old woman!’

‘Hah, Wheel’s all right once you know her ways.’ Stump, swing, stump, swing. ‘Just wait till you meet the Poisoner. Now she is scary!’

Nona entered the Tower of the Path with Hessa, using the east door. Novices were supposed to be drawn to a particular door but none of them called to her. All four doors led into the same room – an echoingly empty one with a stone spiral stair at the centre, and around the walls the strangest pictures Nona had seen, though in truth until she entered the ring-fighters’ rooms at the Caltess she had never seen paintings. While Hessa laboured up the stairs Nona took a moment to glance around at the two dozen or so portraits, nuns all of them, but with their hair uncovered and the most peculiar flights of fancy added. One lacked half a face, with tatters extending across the gap out over a night-black background. Another in place of one eye had a red star, its rays reaching in all directions. Another still had no mouth and in her hair flowers of a kind Nona had never seen, the deep blue of evening sky.

‘Nona!’

She sped up the stairs after Hessa. The stairway seemed long enough to reach the tower top but offered no doors into any rooms along the way before emerging into the middle of a classroom. At least Nona assumed it to be a classroom – it looked more like a church. Apart from the chairs on which Red Class sat, and a large iron-bound chest at the front, the room was completely bare. Even so, it had a beauty to it. Four tall and narrow windows broke the light into many colours. Scores of stained-glass panels made each window into a glowing, abstract picture that threw reds, and greens, and blues, across the walls and floor. For a moment all Nona could do was gape at the alien wonder of the place.

The nun standing before the chest was the oldest Nona had seen. Quite possibly the oldest woman she had ever seen. Nana Even’s older sister, Ora, had died a year back. Nona’s mother claimed the woman had seen eighty years come and go. Yet lying there on the pyre in the square before Grey Stephen’s stone-built home old Ora had looked young compared to Mistress Path.

‘Take a seat, Hessa.’ The ancient nun had a surprisingly young voice. ‘You too, novice …?’

‘Nona.’ Nona took a chair, little more than a stool really, the back a single narrow plank.

‘Knower?’ Mistress Path came a step closer, leaning in.

‘Nona!’ Clera all but shouted it.

‘Ah, Nona.’ The nun clapped her hand to Nona’s shoulder. ‘Like the merchant-queen?’

Nona wasn’t alone in offering this last question a blank look, though she caught Clera nodding.

‘No matter – no matter.’ Mistress Path moved off, shaking her head. ‘It was long ago and her sons are all gone to dust.’

‘We’re all gathered now?’ Mistress Path looked around the room, her eyes so pale as to be without colour, the whites creamy with age. ‘Two new girls, yes?’

‘Yes, Mistress Path.’ A loud chorus.

‘I’ll do my introductions then. I am Sister Pan. Within these walls, Mistress Path is my name.’ She paced towards the front of the class and, with an exaggerated sigh, settled herself upon the great chest. Nona noticed that the woman’s right hand, that she had thought lost in the sleeve of her habit, was more lost than that, the arm ending at the wrist in an ugly mess of scar tissue.

Sister Pan lowered her head and tapped her fingers on the lid of the chest. She was quiet for so long that Nona wondered if she had dropped into a doze, but a moment later she looked up, eyes bright. ‘In these lessons we study the Path. For most of you this will be a journey to serenity, to states of mind that can help you with patience or with concentration. Or perhaps they may help quiet your fears, or put sorrow aside for a while until you have time for her visit. For those few of you who might have it in your blood to see the Path clearly rather just sense it as an idea these lessons are the first steps to discovering hidden worlds, the boundary between them, and the power that may be won by those who dare to venture in such places.’

Clera leaned across to Nona, speaking in a low voice. ‘If any of us do go there we’ll be doing it alone. They say the old girl hasn’t put a toe on the Path for thirty years.’

Nona pressed her lips together, gesturing with her eyes towards Mistress Path.

‘She’s deaf as a post, silly.’ Clera grinned and raised her tone a fraction. ‘Those that can, do – those that can’t, teach. At least in Path. The doers are too valuable to waste on us.’

Sister Pan paused and frowned at Clera, who dutifully faced front and centre. ‘Now, we have … Arabella.’ The nun focused on the Jotsis girl, whose shaved head was spattered with coloured light. ‘A bold stare she has. Hmmm. But what can she see?’ Sister Pan approached and leaned in close. ‘Don’t look away, dear. Keep your eyes on mine. In this place the world sings for us. Can you hear it?’ She took Arabella’s wrist in the gnarled claw of her hand. The nun’s skin was the black of a dusty slate, darker than her habit: Arabella’s fingers looked white as bone in that grip. ‘A three-part song. Life.’ She lifted their joined hands. ‘That which has never lived.’ She moved her stump into a pool of deep red light and followed the shaft of it up towards the window. ‘And death.’ A quick glance back towards the chest. ‘The notes of the song …’ Sister Pan intoned three notes, pure but somehow sad, the start of a melody that Nona wanted to hear more of. The nun released Arabella’s wrist and started to pace before the seated novices. ‘There’s a boundary between what lives and what does not. It runs through all things, and around them. It’s a path that is hard to follow but each step taken is a holy one. When you walk the Path you approach the divine. The Path flows from the Ancestor and the Ancestor waits at the end of it. At the end of all things.

‘We are mortal though. We are flawed. Poor vessels for divinity. Each step is harder than the last, the Path twists and turns, it is narrow and in motion, the power that it gives is … difficult to contain. Sooner rather than later everyone slips from the Path no matter what their heart desires, no matter how pure their faith.

‘Our knowledge of the Path is the gift of the fourth tribe – the last to beach their ships on Abeth. Among the stars the quantal built their lives around the Path, generation upon generation, until it lived in their veins. That blood was mixed to meet the challenges of a new world – but in some few it shows, even now after so many years have passed.

‘Have you seen the Path, child?’ Sister Pan, at Arabella’s shoulder once again, took the girl’s chin, angling her eyes back to her own.

‘I … Sometimes I see a bright line, like a crack running through my dreams …’

‘Have you touched it?’ Sister Pan asked.

‘A-almost. One time. I reached out for it …’ Arabella looked away, towards one of the glowing windows. ‘It felt as though I were running … my heart … and my head filled with angles. All sharp and wrong …’

‘And then what happened?’ Sister Pan released the girl’s chin.

‘I fell out of bed and woke up with a headache.’

Laughter rippled, half amused, half nervous.

‘And what about …’ Sister Pan blinked and looked around until she found Nona, sitting on the far side of the class. ‘… our other new girl?’

‘She’s hunska, Mistress Path!’ Clera called out, slapping Nona on the shoulder. ‘One of us reds!’

‘Hmmm …’ Sister Pan turned her gaze back to Arabella and started to ask more questions.

‘She’ll leave you alone now,’ Clera said in an undertone. ‘Only cares about the mystics.’

‘The what?’ Nona whispered.

‘Mystics. If Empress Arabella isn’t lying then she’ll be the second quantal in the class, the other being your friend hop-along. Only our bald friend is also hunska-fast which makes her oh-so-special, which is why all the nuns are wetting themselves over her – the Chosen One.’ Clera raised her hands in mock worship. ‘At the end of our studies, if we’re judged fit, we take holy orders and join the convent as nuns. Girls who follow the Path take their orders as Mystic Sisters – everyone calls them Holy Witches. I told you before. You and I, we’ll focus on Blade and take our orders as Martial Sisters, which everyone calls Red Sisters. Most who come here end up as Holy Sisters … and everyone calls them Holy Sisters … or if they’re being fancy, Brides of the Ancestor. That sounds creepy to me … And some take Shade in the last year. Those are Sisters of Discretion. Grey Sisters. There are lots of other names people use for those, none of them nice. But—’

‘Novice Clera!’ Deaf or not, Sister Pan had good enough eyesight to spot two novices with heads so bowed in conversation, they nearly touched.

‘I was telling Nona about the blade-Path, Mistress! Can I show her? Please!’

Sister Pan lifted her eyes to the heavens and signed her faith, laying her index finger over her heart, pointing upward. ‘The child has only been here a few moments!’ She drew a deep breath. ‘Today we will be meditating. Continuing to develop the serenity that helps to bring us to the Path. And, Nona, whilst it is true that for many of you girls no amount of quiet contemplation will bring the complexity and beauty of the Path into focus within your mind’s eye there are many other benefits, both spiritual and physical, to achieving the mental states we seek to unlock in this class. In a girl’s first year I endeavour to teach her, through meditation, mantras and the control of breathing, the three-fold mind. The necessary states of clarity, patience, and serenity. When you have the basics of the trio my seal will be on your scroll for advancement to Grey Class.’

Sister Pan left Arabella’s side and hobbled towards Nona and Clera. ‘Whilst it is essential that a Mystic Sister be the mistress of these techniques, all three are of benefit to any novice. The Holy Sister will find her communion with the Ancestor deepened by reaching clarity. The Sister of Discretion will carry out her duties with greater efficiency if she attains patience. And, ironically, the Martial Sister will be all the more deadly if before combat she has reached the peace of serenity. However, as this is Nona’s first day and I have a number of tests to go over with Arabella any novice who wishes to practise their blade-path may do so.’

The scraping of half a dozen chairs immediately followed this pronouncement as girls leapt to their feet all around the room and started to head for the stairwell at the centre.

‘Clera!’ Sister Pan called after them, her voice resonating down the stairs with surprising volume. ‘You can ask for the key to Blade Hall at the sanatorium!’

The six girls burst laughing from the base of the Tower of the Path and ran off towards the plateau’s narrowing point. The four hunska girls outdistanced Ruli and Kariss, but their natural speed counted for less in a race than it did in a fight: hunska blood gave whip-crack reflexes and a startling twitch that could move a hand from one place to another seemingly without the tedium of having to occupy any of the spaces in between, but it couldn’t, for example, move a full body-weight faster than a horse over four hundred yards.

The sanatorium sat at the compound’s outermost edge, built from limestone blocks hewn from the plateau itself, hunkered down against the wind, with a long and pillared gallery on the lee side. Clera ran on into the office while the other novices came to a halt by the door. ‘Why did we have to come here?’ Ketti frowned, hunched over to make herself a height with the other girls.

‘I saw Sister Tallow limping this morning,’ Ghena said. ‘She must be hurt.’

‘How?’ Ruli asked.

Ghena shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

Nona tried to imagine Sister Tallow slipping and coming to grief on a flight of stairs. She couldn’t do it. She had yet to see Mistress Blade fight but everything about the way the woman moved said she would not be taken unawares by the inanimate. Which left …

‘Maybe someone sent assassins after Arabella,’ Ketti said.

‘Assassins? Why?’ Nona had only heard of assassins in the old stories. The Noi-Guin, trained in secret, deployed to end wars, or start them, or to cut away any life that might constitute an offence to someone with enough money to pay fees that even old nobility found staggering.

Ghena grunted at Nona’s obvious stupidity. Ketti raised both eyebrows and did something with her lips that signalled supreme surprise at the depths of Nona’s ignorance. ‘She’s the Chosen One. The Ancestor’s gift. You think there aren’t people fighting over who owns her? Or, if it’s clear that the person who owns her isn’t going to be them, you think they’re not ready to kill her just to stop someone else gaining the benefit?’

‘I heard Sherzal tried to take her from the Jotsis estate,’ Ruli said.

Even in the village the names of Emperor Crucical’s two sisters were known. Sherzal was said to be the worst of them, a plotter that the emperor had had to banish almost to the Scithrowl border before he felt safe behind his walls.

Clera interrupted Nona’s questions by hurrying out of the office, a grin on her face, a large iron key swinging from her hand. Behind her the bulky form of Sister Rose waddled to the door, her cone-like headdress just like Sister Wheel’s. ‘Careful on the line, novices. I mean it, Ketti! Make sure the new girls don’t end up on my doorstep this afternoon …’

Clera led the race back to Blade Hall and hurried them on across the training floor, along the corridor beneath the stands and straight on to the door at the end.

‘Shouldn’t we change?’ Ruli, turning left towards the changing room.

‘We need balance sticks …’ Kariss, panting as she caught them up and turning right towards the stores.

‘Pah. Sticks are for babies, and hunska balance better in their common habits.’ Clera flapped her sleeves like wings. She pushed on through into a corridor too dark to yield any detail.

Nona, Ketti, and Ghena followed, Nona at the rear, stumbling blind up a tight wooden stairway. Somewhere far above a door opened and light reached down towards her. She kept climbing.

‘Careful up here,’ Ketti warned. ‘There’s not much space on the platform.’

Nona edged out through the door behind the older girl, her initial questions immediately replaced by new ones. They stood on a platform just below the ceiling of a huge room lit by many small square windows in the furthest wall. Apart from great nets strung between posts in each corner and suspended a couple of yards above a sand-covered floor the room was almost completely empty. A great pendulum hung on the wall to the left, thirty yards long, nearly the height of the room, a heavy brass bob on the end of a long thin iron rod. Above it a round dial, as wide across as Nona could stretch her arms and marked around the edge with evenly spaced graduations. Running in a convoluted path from the platform where the girls stood to a door at ground level on the opposite side was a pipe of the sort that carried the hot oil through the nuns’ cells and bathhouse. It rose, fell, twisted, turned, and at one point made a corkscrew with three turns.

‘What is it?’ Nona found herself the only one still standing. The others sat on the edge of the platform, removing their shoes, their valuables in linen bags against the back wall. Ketti had hers off already, legs dangling over the drop.

‘The line,’ Clera said. ‘Blade-path.’ She pulled a small earthenware tub from her habit and started to dab the dark substance in it onto the soles of her feet. ‘This is—’

‘Pine resin.’ Nona could smell it.

‘I use tar,’ Ketti said. ‘Better grip.’

‘Pine resin’s cheaper.’ Clera applied it with a miser’s care.

‘The blade-path?’ Nona asked.

‘It’s the closest a hunska can get to the Path. Closest anyone who’s not a quantal can get. They say it helps the body teach the mind – but really it’s just to give us humble mortals something to do, and so we appreciate how hard it is for the poor witches sitting back there in Path with legs crossed and eyes closed.’

‘You walk down it,’ Ghena said in a rare helpful moment. ‘The pendulum counts how long you take.’ She pointed to a lever in the wall behind her. ‘That starts it and there’s one down there by the door that stops it.’

‘I’ll show you,’ Clera said.

But Ketti had already shuffled to the start, careful not to make the platform sticky, and stood just before the start of the narrow pipe. ‘Too slow!’ And she stepped out with infinite care, arms spread.

To Nona’s horror she saw that the cables reaching down from the roof to eye-rings on the pipe weren’t there to help steady the structure – they were its only support and the moment Ketti settled her weight on it the whole edifice began to sway, even rotating about joints at half a dozen spots along its length.

Ghena pulled the lever on the wall to release the great pendulum. It swung, swift and silent, taking perhaps ten beats of Nona’s heart to reach the limit of its range and start to return. During that first swing the wheel above turned through five of the small divisions on its rim.

Finding her balance, Ketti began to advance, being careful not to let the slope of the pipe accelerate her. She moved with a certain grace, her long thin body making a dozen subtle shifts each moment, swaying in counterpoint to the path beneath her, each new step changing the rhythm.

Coming to the first rise, Ketti slowed still further, and waited for the whole structure to adjust to her weight that now levered it in a new direction. The drop beneath the platform seemed huge to Nona. More than enough to kill. Tall as a tree. How much would it hurt to hit those nets at such speed? Would they hold?

‘Ah!’ Ketti found herself in trouble, arms wheeling at full extent.

The three girls on the platform watched, transfixed. A moment later Ketti had control again and advanced twenty feet along a steeply descending curve.

‘Now it gets difficult,’ Clera said.

Ketti stepped towards the rise where the pipe began its spiral of three complete turns, so tall that she could fit within them. With agonizing slowness she began the transfer from the inner to the outer surface, relying on the traction from her tarred feet to anchor her to the cold metal. Against Nona’s expectation she reached the top of the first spiral.

Nona turned to see the dial, now almost through a complete circuit. ‘How long will it take h—’ A wail of rage and despair cut her off. Far below them Ketti hit the net and bounced, screaming in frustration.

‘She does better than that normally,’ Ghena said.

‘Your go, Nona!’ Clera gestured towards the start point.

Nona glanced at the resin pot in Clera’s hand but Clera looked away, leaning over to tease Ketti, who was now scrambling for the edge of the net by the door. Ghena pulled the lever, which trapped the pendulum at the end of its swing and set the dial to its original position. Turning back, she nodded to the dark patch on the platform just where the pipe started. ‘Stamp about there. You’ll get your soles sticky enough. Mistress Blade has the path cleaned every day – we think she must have a deal with the resin sellers. But she doesn’t tell us to clean the platform … so we don’t!’

Nona slipped her shoes off. The tar and resin felt tacky under her toes. She tried to concentrate on the sensation rather than all the empty space between her and the ground. Clera’s hoarding of her resin pot hurt a little but Nona knew that need and generosity have their own cycles. In hungry times the village was wont to share food – but when the hunger built to a certain point everybody, even the kindest of them, closed in on themselves, sharing only with their closest family. Perhaps there even came a point when famine could stop mother feeding child. Nona understood better than most that even the most sacred bonds could be broken under enough stress. Clera wasn’t hungry – but she was once rich and now was not. Perhaps to someone raised in luxury that was like starvation …

Nona tried to push thoughts of her mother aside and seal her anger away. Gritting her teeth, she stepped forward. The pipe shifted beneath her foot the moment she pressed down. Far below the net trembled.

‘The convent keeps records of the best times,’ Clera said. ‘The best time in each class in each year, the best time in the whole year, the best time ever.’ The lever made a deep clunk as Ghena set the pendulum going again.

‘I don’t— How can—’ Nona found her other foot glued to the platform by more than a sticky patch of floor. No part of her wanted to commit herself to the path. She had never been a great climber of trees, fearing the helplessness of the fall almost as much as the pain of reunion with the ground.

‘Go on!’ Clera urged.

The sound of footsteps on the stairs behind her pushed Nona out over the drop. Shame can exert as much pressure as anger. She put her arms out and slowed the turning of the world just a fraction. Balance relies on an understanding of the motion of things: of swing, of momentum, of the constraints that gravity’s laws place on all matter, be it flesh or stone. Slow the world too much and you lose that intuition, you break your connection to the interlinked web of moving pieces, and while you may fall by degrees, taking an age to realize you’ve passed the point of no return, you will still fall.

The slope of the path pulled at Nona, her feet on the point of slipping at every moment. The pipe swayed treacherously. She came to the curve, her shallow breaths drawn in time to the motion of her body as she struggled to stay upright. Her arms ached already as if she were hanging by them not merely balancing. Somehow she made it around the first long and descending curve!

The steep rise of the corkscrew seemed an impossible barrier, lifting above her head in the space of a few strides. Nona took it in tiny steps, hearing nothing but the rasp of her breath and the pounding of her heart. To her surprise she found herself at the top of the spiral’s first turn, staring down at the impossibly steep descent to the bottom of the next turn. She knew her feet would slip there with the path running away from her.

‘Go on!’ Shouted from the platform, almost angry.

Nona held for a moment, with the drop to every side screaming for her to fall, the tension in her legs unbearable. Then she jumped.

Her lead foot caught the top of the next loop of the spiral and, swinging her trailing leg, thrusting up with both arms, she carried on to the top of the third and final loop. Where, with arms pinwheeling, she caught herself with one foot. She had in two leaps carried herself to a point a little over a quarter of the way along the blade-path.

Nona brought her other foot onto the pipe and, with the exaggerated care of a drunkard, turned to the side. In that movement she saw the other novices crowded onto the platform staring at her, mouths open. It was a look she knew: the same shock had registered on Amondo’s face when she had learned too quickly to do his tricks. It was the start of a look that ended in hurt and anger.

Nona’s heel slipped from the iron pipe. She let out a yelp and fell backwards. By the time she hit the net she was screaming.

She bounced twice and rolled over, wheezing as she tried to draw the air back into her lungs. An awkward scramble brought her to the edge of the net and strong hands helped her down. She found herself looking up into the impish eyes of Sister Kettle who had last appeared behind Sister Apple in the steams of the bathhouse.

‘Well that was … unorthodox.’ Sister Kettle smiled. ‘Not strictly what I would call following the path, but an impressive piece of acrobatics even so!’

‘H-how long—’ Nona heaved in a breath.

‘Did you take?’ Sister Kettle looked up at the platform. ‘Ghena? How long before she fell?’

‘One and twenty!’

‘One cycle and twenty,’ Sister Kettle repeated. ‘That’s eighty counts. Do you know what your class record is for completion, Nona?’

‘No.’

‘Guess.’

Nona tried to imagine it. ‘Three hundred counts?’

‘Ketti?’ Sister Kettle asked.

‘Nobody currently in Red has completed the blade-path. Suleri was the last to finish it while still in Red. Her count was two hundred and ninety.’ Ketti was standing by the door. Her eyes flitted to the path above them. ‘I’ve almost made it to the end though. Almost.’

‘Suleri can do it faster now,’ Sister Kettle said, turning for the door. ‘She’s the fastest novice still at the convent. Her record is one hundred and eighteen.’

‘What’s the fastest it was ever done?’ Nona asked.

Sister Kettle paused, the door half open. ‘Our records say that a little over two hundred years ago a certain Sister Owl – yes, the one in the stories, the Black Fort and all that – the ledgers record her setting a time in Holy Class of twenty-six counts. It does seem hard to credit though. Perhaps the timing mechanism has been adjusted over the years …’

‘Twenty-six!’ Nona blinked. It didn’t sound even vaguely possible.

‘Something to aim for.’ Sister Kettle went through the door with a slight limp, leaving Nona and Ketti to stare at each other. Way above them Ruli started out on the path.

‘Why was Sister Kettle here?’ Nona asked, to break the silence more than anything.

‘To watch the new girl, of course,’ Ketti said. ‘She’ll be reporting back to Sister Tallow. That’s what she does. Watches and reports. She’d be Mistress Shade if we didn’t already have the Poisoner! I expect—’ She paused as Ruli plummeted down into the net with a shriek of frustration. ‘I expect she’d have come anyway to size up the competition. Kettle holds the convent record for the blade-path – the record for anyone still living here – sixty-nine counts.’

Nona tried the path half a dozen more times, moving less quickly and falling, not to stay part of the group but because gravity seemed to have got its hooks into her. Quite how she had got so far before she couldn’t say, for now the path swayed beneath her like a foreign sea, its ways alien to her feet. Even so she got further along than Ruli, Ghena and poor Kariss, who barely made the first yard and never the third.

The sixth impact with the net left her ears ringing.

‘Bray!’ Clera shouted. ‘Oh hells!’ She dropped off the platform, habit swirling about her head, long legs out before her.

Nona hung on tight to the ropes. The only rule they’d told her was not to try the path while someone is still in the net, as you could bounce them out.

Clera scrambled for the edge. ‘We’ll be late for Spirit!’

Nona glanced up at the platform. Empty. She and Clera had been so deep in their competition they hadn’t seen the others leave.

‘Come on!’ Clera tossed Nona her shoes and dropped to the floor. ‘Mistress Spirit is the worst!’

‘I thought you said the Poisoner was the worst!’

‘They’re all the worst when you’re late!’ And Clera was running.

9

Racing around the Dome of the Ancestor Nona started to think that the place had no door, her breath came ragged and Clera’s longer legs were opening a lead. The pain of a stitch stabbed beneath her lungs and she slowed, grabbing her side. Fortunately a few more paces brought sight of the great doors that she had seen on her first night. The line of Red Class was already filing in through the narrow gap where a hand held the leftmost door ajar. Clera and Nona joined the end of the line, sweaty and breathless, just as Ketti and Ruli slipped through ahead of them. Ketti had to duck below the hand which turned out to be attached to Sister Wheel. Nona scowled, having yet to forgive the nun for turfing her from her bed with such holy zeal on her first morning at the convent.

‘Quickly! Quietly!’ Sister Wheel ushered them on.

At first the dim light yielded only an impression of great columns and a polished floor, with some brighter space beyond. Nona followed Clera’s back, blinking to help her eyes adjust. They were in a grand foyer that itself was bigger than all but the richest houses in Verity. Sister Wheel led them along the wall to the left towards a small door at the side of the foyer, as if allowing novices to venture any further in would sully so holy a place. From the view of the interior, glimpsed between sleek columns of black marble, Nona understood the space to be both singular and vast, lit by scores of long and narrow windows radiating from the dome’s apex, with a statue gleaming at the centre, tiny in such a space but far bigger than a man.

The pull that Nona had felt that first night in the nuns’ cells was here too. Not so strong as it had been when she stood just yards from the black door that entered the rear of the dome … but there even so. The huge and echoing space, the sunlight shafting in through many windows, the golden statue, they were grand things, impressive, perhaps even holy, but they were not the source. Something filled that dome, almost to bursting, but its centre lay deeper …

‘Nona!’ Clera at the open side door, beckoning. ‘Stop dawdling!’

Nona hurried on into a small classroom dimly lit by three of the high porthole windows that formed a ring perforating the wall of the great dome.

‘Late to class but never late to dinner!’ Sister Wheel’s fingernails-on-slate voice reached a surprising volume as she pointed Nona and Clera out in the doorway.

This seemed a harsh judgement to Nona, who had attended just one convent dinner so far.

The sister stood at the far end of the classroom in one of the circles of light cast by the windows, the white funnel of her headdress all aglow and the wisps of grey hair that escaped it seeming to float about her face. ‘Come along! The road to damnation is paved with tardy steps!’

Nona hurried to an empty desk near the door, head down, puzzling over how a road might be paved with steps. Clera took the next desk along, flashing a grin towards her. Fishing in her habit, she pulled out a tightly rolled scroll of parchment, a slate, a piece of chalk, a small and stoppered pot, and a quill. This latter gave the impression that the bird from which it was taken had died of some wasting disease, falling from its perch into a dirty puddle before being run over by several carts and finally thoroughly chewed by a hungry cat.

The novices at the other desks already had their scrolls unrolled before them, some dipping their quills into inkpots. Arabella’s quill caught the light, becoming something ethereal. A perfect swan’s feather, pristine and glistening.

‘We will continue with the eighteenth part of the catechism. Later I will be examining you on the names of the saints, the dates of their name-days, and the services and traditions particular to each— New girl! Get your parchment and quill out! Or do you not consider my remarks worthy of record?’

‘No …’ Laughter on all sides, Arabella’s a musical peal. ‘I mean yes, Sister Wheel.’

‘Sister Wheel? There’s no Sister Wheel in this class, girl. You will address me as Mistress Spirit. Now get your scroll out!’

‘But— I don’t …’ Nona patted her habit as if the items she required might somehow have been stowed in one of the interior pockets without her knowledge.

‘Quickly!’ Sister Wheel slapped an iron hand on Jula’s desk in the front row and began to advance on Nona, weaving her path between the desks, the girls head-down as she passed.

Nona felt a familiar anger starting to boil deep down where her thinking never ventured. Even if she had been given such things as quill and parchment she had never held either in her life and could no more make the required marks with one upon the other than she could fly.

‘Well?’ Sister Wheel, now looming above Nona, her pale and watery eyes meeting Nona’s stare.

Nona stood up, sharply.

‘Novice Nona’s entry to the convent was … non-standard.’ Abbess Glass had entered without being noticed and now settled a hand on Nona’s shoulder, returning her to her seat. ‘This precluded the usual correspondence regarding the supplies an entrant is expected to bring with them, Mistress Spirit.’ The abbess laid a grey-plumed quill and fat scroll of parchment on the desk. ‘Nona will, however, be a listening pupil rather than a writing one until such time as Sister Kettle pronounces her sufficiently advanced in her extra-curricular studies. She will—’

Sister Wheel’s pale face reddened. ‘I know exactly what kinds of extra-curricular activity Sister Kettle gets up to, and with whom, and I—’

‘Sister Kettle will improve Nona’s reading and writing to the standard required in Red Class.’ The abbess fixed Sister Wheel with a stare. ‘The matter is now closed.’

Sister Wheel scowled and stumped off towards the head of the class.

Abbess Glass rolled out the top portion of Nona’s scroll and produced an inkpot to hold it in place. She dipped the quill and in what seemed one flowing motion left a beautiful confusion of lines upon the parchment, black and glistening, coiling like a vine. ‘Your name,’ she said. She dipped again, and beneath it placed three very different lines, interlocked squiggles, careless where the name had been precise. The abbess produced a blotter and patted the design. ‘And there is you.’

Nona stared at the pattern, furrowing her brow.

‘And since I am here,’ the abbess continued, ‘I shall address the novices.’ She followed Sister Wheel, smiling at the girls to either side. ‘Some here may not yet have heard my welcome to the faith – certainly Arabella and Nona will not have – and it will do no harm to refresh those that have.’

Nona reached out a finger to trace the lines of her name, and as she did so the larger pattern beneath her name suddenly made sense … her face, caught in three black squiggles. A face that had last stared at her from a mirror on Raymel Tacsis’s wall. She blinked and stifled a laugh, wondering how she could ever not have seen what the lines meant. Perhaps writing would reveal its meaning to her in the same manner one day.

Abbess Glass reached the front and shooed Sister Wheel aside to take centre stage. ‘Sister Wheel teaches the important details of our veneration of the Ancestor. The mechanics of the thing, if you like. The hows and the whens. She does it well and we thank her for it. It falls to me though to remind us all of the whys.

‘Nona, for example, was a follower of the Hope before she came to us, and whilst the Hope is a sanctioned heresy that falls within the framework of the Ancestor we— Yes, Nona?’

Nona had raised her hand like the bigs did when they wanted to ask a question in Nana Even’s seven-day class in the village. Few of them ever did actually ask because the answer was generally: because I say so. ‘My mother went to the Hope church in White Lake but I never said the words. One star is white and the others red … why should I kneel to it?’ That’s what her father had said. ‘In my village they pray to the gods who are many and have no names.’ The novices tittered as if this were funnier than their dome and golden statue.

Abbess Glass pursed her lips. ‘Such practices are unusual in Verity, Nona. In the wild lands to the east and across the border into Scithrowl there are remnants of many faiths and the emperor is tolerant of them, at a distance, but the Ancestor—’

‘My father hunted on the ice and even in the tunnels that go beneath.’ Nona remembered almost nothing of her father save the stories he told. None of those tales had stuck with her quite so strongly as the ones that told of the tunnels. River-carved, they ran beneath the ice, drained when the waters found some better path or froze at source. In those stories her father and his clan had hunted beasts from every tale she’d ever heard. But the best of his stories told of the Missing, those who were not men and who lived on Abeth before the four tribes descended from the stars. No man had ever set eyes upon the Missing but their servants remained, a remnant now, haunting the dark places beneath the ice where sites holy to the Missing lay exposed once more. Such ruins could be found here and there where the tunnels ventured across the cities that the Missing had carved deep into the very rock itself. ‘My father said that the Ancestor might watch over us in the Corridor but in the dark places of this world it’s the gods that the Missing left behind who matter.’

There was no laughter at this, only the silence of held breath, waiting for the hammer to fall.

Abbess Glass pursed her lips as if she had tasted something particularly sour. She studied Nona a moment, raising one hand towards Sister Wheel as the nun seemed about to get her first word out around her outrage. The abbess relaxed her face into a smile.

‘The emperor has forbidden worship of false idols, Nona. Much of our own history – ten thousand years and more of it – lies buried beneath the ice. A record of triumphs, follies, and a slow defeat beneath a dying sun. There are enough heresies and heathen gods of our own devising without pursuing the mysteries of creatures less like you and me than a dog is like a fish.’

The same anger that had boiled out of some red place within Nona when Raymel hurt Saida began to bubble through her again. She stood up so fast that her chair would have fallen but for Clera’s quick hands. ‘My father—’ The words, hard and angular, stuck in her throat. She bit down on them – anger had lost Nona her place in the village, then the Caltess …

‘I am here to address the why.’ Abbess Glass continued smoothly as if a small girl weren’t standing in defiance before her, fists balled at her sides. ‘We venerate the Ancestor because in doing so we connect with what is holy in the human spirit, what is holy in us—’

‘You’re not holy!’ Nona couldn’t stop the words. Warm beds and good food were too great a treasure to be sacrificed, but with them came knives in the dark and laughter behind hands and this woman calling herself holy. ‘You watched Saida die! You watched her strangle and choke!’

‘Sister Wheel!’ The abbess raised her voice to a shout, drowning whatever the nun had to say. ‘Bring me a wire-cane from the Blade stores.’

A sharp intake of breath sounded all around the room. Sister Wheel’s face split with an uncustomary grin. ‘Yes, Abbess Glass, yes indeed. A good choice. A fine choice for a beating.’ And she hurried from the room, her speed surprising.

The abbess waited for the door to close. She pulled up one of the chairs from an unused desk and sat on it, presenting a slightly comical image, portly abbess perched on child’s seat. ‘I’m not holy? What is holy? Nona? Anyone?’ Silence. Nona would have answered but found that she didn’t know. ‘I believe in the Ancestor – in the spirit of the Ancestor.’

‘Believe? Like Sister Wheel believes?’ Nona couldn’t keep the venom from her words – when she looked at Wheel it seemed that something had been left out in the making of the woman. Nona felt the same way about herself most of the time – as if some part had been omitted in her construction, so wholly absent that she couldn’t even say what it was, only that a void lay where it should be. ‘I hate Sister Wheel.’ It’s harder to forgive someone else your own sins than those uniquely theirs. Much harder.

‘You don’t know Sister Wheel, Nona. You’ve only just met her.’

Nona scowled. ‘I know plenty. I’ve seen plenty. More than you can see from up here in your nice warm convent, paid for by all the people working down there in the city and out in the Corridor growing your food from the mud. What good is holy if it can’t feed and clothe itself? This is a place to turn children into old women, praying for the sins of the world and never seeing them.’ Some of the words were her father’s but she owned all the anger. ‘What good is holy if it watches my friend die – not because she did something wrong but because her blood wasn’t good enough?’