Grey Sister

Darla lay, white-faced, lips blue-tinged. “What kept you . . . runt?” Darla managed a smile, then grimaced and coughed. Dark blood ran over her lip, dribbled down her chin.

Nona swung around to stare up at the people standing around her: Glass, Melkir, Ara, Kettle. She fixed on the nun. “You can help her.”

“Nona . . .” Kettle looked down, head shaking.

“You can! You’ve got supplies. You’ve got—” Nona bit off whatever she had been going to say, suddenly stricken by some realization.

“. . . s’too late . . .” With immense effort Darla closed a big hand around Nona’s. “. . . tired . . .” Her brown eyes clouded with confusion, a kind of wonder, staring at some distant place above Nona’s head.

A moment passed. Another. Darla’s gaze remained fixed.

“She’s gone, Nona.” Kettle put her hand on the girl’s shoulder. Nona flinched it off as if it burned.

Sister Agika bowed her head. “The Ancestor has taken her to—”

“Damn the Ancestor!” Nona gripped Darla’s fingers. “Get up. Darla, get up. I’m taking us out of here. We’re going back to the convent. We’re going . . .”

Ara took Nona under both arms, drawing her up, choking back tears. “She’s gone, Nona.” Smoke rolled over them both.

Glass retreated from the heat and smoke, coughing, making for the carriage. A panicked horse ran past her, nearly sending her to the floor. She reached the steps and helped Lord Glosis into the carriage ahead of her, Agika coming up behind. The survivors were packed along two broad bench seats, crowding the stuffed leather, and crammed upright in the space between.

Nona, Ara, and Kettle came from the fire. It swirled around the three of them like a cloak of shadows and flame. Nona, pale in her rags, her black eyes unreadable, looked as though the blaze had birthed her. She looked like something not of the world.

“You can’t. It’s madness.” Ara lacked conviction now.

But what choices were there?

46

“THE SHIPHEART IS here. I’ve stood before it. I am restored.” Nona took Ara’s hands from hers. She needed Ara safe. “Get into the carriage.”

“There’s no room.”

“Then get onto it and watch for arrows.”

Nona closed her eyes, closed her ears to the roar of the fire, and opened her heart to the banked fury that had trembled in every limb since she left Darla, still warm, among the hay.

The Path had seldom seemed so distant. Just a thread. Little more than the crack that had run through her dreams back in the day when Giljohn first put her into his wooden cage. She saw it as a wisp, there and not-there. Her feet remembered the blade-path, its narrow treachery, the fall yawning beneath. Darla had hated that thing. She never managed more than four steps. But she returned to it time and again, no fear in her. Nona had asked her why once. Darla had given that fierce grin of hers. “My father told me, your weaknesses have more to teach you than your strengths.”

General Rathon wouldn’t know his daughter was dead. Not yet. He wouldn’t know that Nona had used the last of the flesh-bind that might have saved her. He wouldn’t know that it had been spent on hollow revenge against a man not fit even to look at his daughter.

Seven moons to be safe. Nona hadn’t any interest in being safe. If the Path tore her apart she would welcome it and hope only that no stone of Sherzal’s palace was left atop another. She would turn her helpless rage to a fire that would purge the mountain, a fire that would consume the pallid flames behind her, scouring the tunnels of the Tetragode.

She looked again for the Path and found it blazing, a river, twisting through more dimensions than a mind should know, running at right-angles to imagination. The shipheart’s pulse beat in her ears. Without hesitation Nona threw herself forward.

This time it was different. The Path wasn’t something narrow, veering through sudden angles, trying to throw her at every step. The Path had become a plane, a flowing expanse of molten silver so wide that falling from it seemed an impossibility. Even if she weren’t running, the Path would draw her on. She could race forever, untiring, each step bringing new energy. The world lay behind her. Time had no hold. The Path enfolded, filled, led, gave direction.

The hard part wasn’t staying the course, it was turning from it. Too many steps taken, and leaving would cease to be an option—at least leaving and remaining whole. That was true of many paths perhaps. Nona saw Clera’s dilemma now, how hard it must have been for her to do what had seemed so simple from Nona’s side, how easy it would be to return to her course.

Nona ran the Path and all her hurts were left behind her in the very first step. Her wounds, her exhaustion, even the ache of Darla’s death, something small behind her, growing pale and faint. Each step flooded her with an energy so fierce, so exhilarating, that it overwrote her, became her, replaced her centre.

In the end only Darla brought her back. Nona would have run the Path forever. Something so right couldn’t be denied. But for the fact of her friend’s death diminishing behind her. Something like that couldn’t simply be thrown away, discarded, abandoned as if it held no worth or meaning. And with a howl Nona turned in a place where there could be no turning, and fell back into the world.

She hit the ground and only with effort managed to stop falling. The world held too many possibilities and her body wanted to explore them, wanted to flow like the smoke, dance like the flames licking around her, follow gravity’s pull deep into the ground; wanted to run as she had run on the Path, not in one direction but in all of them at once. Aspects of Nona began to separate, some to answer the horses’ distress, some to explore the smoke, others to play with fire.

A faint noise penetrated the vastness of Nona’s wonder and she turned towards it, towards the black carriage, wrapped in smoke. A figure clung to its side. Ara!

Nona drew a breath as if breaking the surface of some bottomless lake. It hurt, as if her lungs were wrapped in broken glass, but she had been schooled in pain of late. Nona drew the breath and drew back into herself the possibilities, the myriad choices, until at last she was focused, one, whole, shuddering with power.

She approached the carriage, suddenly aware of the fragility of everything around her, even the flagstones beneath her feet. In the past she had thrust the Path’s power from her rather than keep it. She had thrown it as heat when she brought fire to the forest outside Verity, and as lightning against the Noi-Guin. Now, though, she turned it inward, running it through muscle and bone, owning it as strength, not just the kind that moves mountains but the kind that preserves the flesh doing the moving. Sister Pan had explained that one at length. The strength to punch through walls is of little use if the arm you punch with shatters before the rock does.

Nona moved behind the carriage. She inched her hands forward with caution. Too much pressure too swiftly and her palms would break through the timber before her and she would be elbow-deep in splintered wood. Hands met lacquered panelling, pressure mounted. And Nona’s bare feet began to slide across the flagstones.

“No!”

Armoured in the Path’s energies, Nona kicked at the stones beneath her feet, pulverizing the rock, excavating small craters to push against. The boards beneath her palms creaked and the huge carriage stole into motion. Nona kept up the pressure, feet scraping the flagstones, shattering several more.