Red Sister

‘Send out Nona Reeve!’ The shout came from outside. ‘The rest of you can go free.’

‘I thought Clera said they wanted Ara …’ Ruli looked confused.

‘They lied to her. Raymel is behind this, not Thuran.’ Nona wondered what would have happened if the Tacsis agent had told Clera the truth, would her price have gone up because of their friendship, or down because Nona had nobody to avenge her? She wondered how long Clera had been slipping into the Tacsis pocket. What information had she first sold to turn that copper penny into a silver crown …

‘Send out Nona Reeve!’

On the floor Clera opened her eyes and started to struggle in her bonds, grunting around the strip of cloth that Darla had gagged her with. How long had she been feigning unconsciousness? Just one more deception? And why this sudden panic? Nona met her gaze and realized she felt anger, but no hate. Her friend would never have sold her. The Tacsis had used Clera, tricked her, played on her resentment of Ara’s wealth.

‘Just the girl!’ Shouted from the slope.

Nona spun around. ‘I’ll go to them, but we’re going to have to fight either way.’

‘Fight?’ Darla snorted and kicked Clera into stillness. ‘With what? We’re going fists against swords?’

Nona pressed Clera’s throwing star into Ruli’s palm. ‘That’s one dead right there.’ She retrieved Tarkax’s forgotten tular from the shadows, surprised by the weight of it, and put it into Darla’s hands. ‘Get his jacket and trews on. You’re not that much bigger. Keep your hood. If they’re scared of you it gives you an edge.’ She bent and pulled the long knife and hatchet from Tarkax’s belt. Close up he smelled of woodsmoke and a spice she didn’t recognize. ‘Jula, take these.’ She pushed them at her.

‘W-what are you going to use?’ Jula asked, the weapons trembling in her grip. She was a natural warrior despite her affection for books, but also terrified, and why not? The Tacsis soldiers would make as short work of the novices as Partnis Reeve’s apprentices had. They were adults against children, and well-trained. Darla might be a man’s match in strength but she held an unfamiliar sword and it shook in a white-knuckled grip. Also, there were twelve out there and in the cave Nona was the only hunska standing.

‘Let me tell you a story,’ she said.

‘What?’ Darla seemed unimpressed, angry at her own fear.

‘A story.’ Nona motioned for them to sit. ‘We have time. If they weren’t going to check Tarkax’s kills then they would have rushed us by now.’

‘What story?’ Ruli asked, turning the throwing star over and over in her hand, her gaze on Clera.

‘A true story.’ Nona looked across to where Ara lay watching, trapped in her poisoned body. ‘I lied before, about why my village gave me to the child-taker … why my mother let them … I lied and lied again. Now it’s time to tell the truth.’ She had their attention now. Even Darla who she had told no lies would have heard the story from others. Perhaps even Zole knew it.

‘A juggler once came to my village. He was my first friend.’ And Nona let the words run from her tongue. It had been the truth that she told the second time, of how Amondo had left and her mother blamed Nona for it, and Nona had believed her mother even though the reasons were beyond her understanding. It had been the truth when she said that she had followed the juggler, taking directions from Mother Sible out in the far-fields. It had all been the truth up until the first trees of the Rellam Forest rose around the road.

Everywhere has its ghosts, Amondo had said, but in most places those ghosts are at least hidden in the corners, or tucked away at right angles to the world, waiting their moment. In the Rellam Forest you could see the ghosts, patterned on the gloom beneath the canopy, the distortion of their faces frozen into the bark of ancient trunks. And you could hear them too, screaming into the silence, not quite breaking it but making it tremble.

I followed, not caring about ghost or faerie, because when a true fear takes hold of you it drives out the others, the ones people try to give you, try to put into the heart of you with stories and dark looks. A true fear grows in the bones of you.

I followed because I thought that if I turned back then I would keep turning back, turning away from every other fear, from every new thing, and that I would never leave that place to which my father had brought me. I would live, toil, grow old, and die, all within sight of my mother’s hut, and the ice would remain forever a line glimpsed in the distance, and I wouldn’t matter to the world nor would it matter to me.

That was a bigger fear than the shadows between the trees.

I let the path lead me, not stopping for it’s when you stop that things catch up with you. And not quickening my pace, for in a haunted forest any increase in the speed with which you walk is a slippery slope to blind panic and the mad dash that sees you lost in the deep wood with a broken ankle.

I walked until it grew too dark to see the trail and then I sat with my back to an oak and watched the dark. Rain came, thick with sleet, pattering down among the leaves, gathering and dripping, sliding to forest floor with the soft wet sounds imagination can fashion into nightmare.

When the focus came it woke me, first patterning the world in glowing red, and black shadow, the undergrowth writhing beneath the sharp relief of branches. As the ground began to steam I thought I heard a shout, far off, and I took to the trail, running hard, knowing it would be Amondo.

I met him on the path, rushing towards me out of the fog as fast as I was running towards him. He nearly flattened me but I’m quick and I slipped aside at the last second. It happened so swiftly that he didn’t even see me. I shouted after him, but he was lost in the pink blanket of the fog.

I thought he was gone, but the sound of his feet pounding the track stopped in one sudden moment.

‘Nona?’

‘It’s me! I followed you.’

‘Dear Ancestor! Hide! Hide in the trees!’

I heard the sounds of his pursuit, more pounding feet, more shouts and cries.

‘Bleed me!’ And Amondo came running back, the hot mist swirling as it released him. He grabbed my arm and dragged me off the track, out into the forest. The thorns tore my skirt and cut my legs.

‘Shhhh.’ Amondo pulled me behind a tree, one hand over my mouth.

The band chasing him thundered by, clinking metal, rasping breaths, heavy boots.

A minute later Amondo drew his hand away and unclenched the other from around my arm.

‘Why were they chasing you?’

‘I owe them something.’

‘Why did you leave?’

‘I wore out my welcome on the first day, Nona. The real question is why would anyone stay?’

The focus was passing and already the fog lay in streamers being trailed through the tree trunks by the wind. The moon’s light, no longer fierce, showed Amondo’s face, worried and watchful.

‘I want to know—’

‘People always want to know things … until they hear them, and then it’s too late. Knowledge is a rug of a certain size, and the world is larger. It’s not what remains uncovered at the edges that should worry you, rather what is swept beneath.’

‘I don’t understand.’ He didn’t look like the juggler who had thrown and caught for a heel of bread. He looked older and sadder and wiser.