Grey Sister
Ahead, with the shadows of the trees slanting across the trail like cage bars, the green arch opened and the land lay exposed to the sky. Nona left the Rellam, still feeling the eyes upon her back, and followed the path up through the moor towards the fields and huts of her village.
* * *
• • •
IT’S BEEN TOO easy. Keot burned across the back of her neck and she lowered her hood to let the Corridor wind cool him.
It wasn’t easy. Though as she said it Nona realized that it had been. A walk through the empire’s garden lands and into the Grey.
She said they meant to kill you. The dark one said it.
Nona shrugged. Kettle was probably just trying to scare me into leaving more quickly and not coming back. They would certainly have whipped me and sent me from the Rock. She frowned. Perhaps the inquisitors might even have thrown her into the Glasswater to add her bones to the bottom. But why would they pursue her once she’d gone?
Only as she closed the last mile did Nona’s thoughts wander to the kind of reception she might find waiting. In her head the village had been an indivisible object, a ball of memories tight-bound, all or nothing. Now long-banished thoughts of her mother intruded for the first time in an age. Would she recognize her daughter? Would she be angry? Would she pull back from the blackness of her eyes, or open her arms with the mother’s love that haunted Nona’s most vague and distant recollections, soft, encompassing, safe, and forgiving?
You’ll see it now. My village. Nona crested the low rise that the village knew as Heddod’s Ridge. Her heart suddenly took to pounding as the land opened out before her. Her eyes tried to make sense of a scene that should have been familiar. At first it looked as if she had been mistaken and the village must lie over the next rise. The houses were gone. But here a spar stood, black and alone, there a scattering of tumbled stones, and everywhere the ghosts of pathways, covered now with grass and bushes, but clear enough if you knew where to look.
TURN AROUND! Keot’s voice exploded into her skull.
Nona found herself obeying without question, but sluggishly, as if her mind were an anchor her muscles had to drag, still mired in the scene before her. With hunska speed Nona’s body wrenched itself through the degrees, fighting inertia. Her head led the turn and out of the corner of her eye she saw the projectile’s glimmer as it sped towards her back. Confused, shocked, Nona felt her grip on the moment slipping. She drove her flaw-blades out from the fingers of the hand she was reaching over her shoulder. The missile held her focus, thin as a nail, long as a hand, flighted, spinning, some kind of disk around the shaft an inch back from the tip, as if the bolt had pierced a copper penny on its way through the air. Somewhere back behind it a blurred figure stood in the roadway.
Nona reached for her speed. Even if she got her fingers to the spike she doubted she could slow it enough to stop it skewering her shoulder. It became a race, a yard left for the bolt, ten inches for her fingertips to intercept its path. Only her hand and the bolt moved. No heartbeat, no breath, no sound, no chance. The bolt came too fast for her to grasp it. Instead Nona turned the tip of the flaw-blade extending from her index finger, presenting the flat and angled side of the invisible blade to the bolt. Deflected, the bolt carried on, its path slanting upwards. It tore into the material of her range-coat a thumb’s width above her skin, and came to a jolting halt there, stopped by the ridge set an inch behind the point.
Nona’s eyes adjusted, bringing the figure on the road into sharp focus as she completed her turn. He stood twenty yards back, having emerged from the thicket of dendron bushes that flanked the lane. A tall man, grey-haired, gaunt in his heavy coat, a crossbow raised and bolstered against his shoulder, one eye staring down its length at her. He didn’t need to close the other: the socket gaped empty, divided by a scar that travelled to his cheek.
“Damn.” Giljohn lowered his crossbow. “I always knew you’d be fast.”
22
NONA TUGGED GILJOHN’S bolt from her range-coat and glanced at it. The disk was to stop the shaft penetrating too deep, angled so as to allow it to fly straight though. She wondered what venom it had been smeared with.
She looked back at the man. “Not going to run?”
Giljohn shrugged. He looked older than she remembered. “I had one chance. It should have worked. Now I have none.” He frowned. “How did you know?”
Nona’s turn to shrug. “Magic.” She hadn’t heard of any magic that would give you eyes in the back of your neck, but marjals had been known to manifest all manner of odd powers. She walked towards the child-taker.
Kill him!
“Are you going to kill me?” Giljohn shared Keot’s interest. He looked resigned rather than worried. He made no attempt at a defence. The child-taker knew enough about hunskas to understand it would do him no good. “Well?”
“Honestly?” Nona closed the gap between them. “I don’t know.”
She stabbed him with the bolt, punching it into the meat of his pectoral muscle as far as the collar would allow. She had to reach up—the man was still a head taller than her.
“Ahhh!” Giljohn slapped a hand to the puncture wound. “Not like that you won’t.”
“No?”
Giljohn wobbled and sat down. “Groton paste. Fast acting.”
“Where were you going to take me?”
Giljohn waved an uncoordinated arm to the west, shook his head, and collapsed. He lay with eyes open, pupils dilated, watching nothing in particular.
Nona knelt to check the child-taker’s breathing and pulse. It looked odd to see the man who had ruled over her, Hessa, and the others, lying there like that, hair in disarray, cheek to the cold ground. For so many miles his rule had been absolute as he sat, his back to the cageful of children, Four-Foot plodding ahead of him. She relieved him of his pack and coin purse, then tied him hand and foot with the rope he had on him.
“That was foolish,” she muttered, standing.
Yes. You should have cut him open!
I should have asked my questions before testing his own venom on him.
“Well.” She looked down at Giljohn. “If you weren’t going to kill me, then you must have a horse nearby. Probably a cart too. You weren’t going to carry me over your shoulder.”
Nona hefted Giljohn’s pack then shook his purse. It hung limp with hardly a jingle of coins. She remembered it as ever-full, Giljohn emptying it with maddening sloth as he purchased a child here, a child there, for a scatter of copper pennies.
* * *
• • •
NONA SET OFF back along the path looking for any sign of tracks just as Sister Tallow had taught her. But in the end she saw not so much as a single hoofprint and found both horse and cart by exercising common sense and checking in the places she would have hidden a cart if she’d arrived ahead of a target she wished to waylay.
Giljohn had left his transport along the last of a dozen old charcoal burners’ trails that led from the main track through the Rellam Forest. He’d made no attempt to disguise it, just taken it far enough to be hidden from the track. She stopped as she sighted the mule, grey and unkempt, and behind it the cage in which she had travelled, huddled between Saida and Hessa. Her friends. Now dead.