Red Sister

‘Who? Sister Wheel?’

‘From a tiny village called … I forget, but it sounded like a hard place to survive. We were novices together, you know?’

‘Sister Wheel from the Grey?’ Nona found that hard to imagine. ‘You were in the same classes?’ That seemed scarcely easier to believe. ‘But she’s old!’

Sister Rose laughed at that. ‘Wheel’s got more than a touch of hunska. The years haven’t been kind. And wrinkles don’t show on us … well-filled … individuals.’

‘She doesn’t have the accent.’ Nona remained unconvinced.

‘You’ve lost half of yours in two years. Stay here a few more and nobody will know Nona Grey unless you let her out.’ Sister Rose began to wash the cuts.

The fresh pain saved Nona from thinking of a reply to that. She gritted her teeth and buried her face in the pillow with a snarl.

Sister Pan came to visit Nona that evening – using her rank to overcome the barriers still keeping the novices at bay. She sat down with one hand in her lap, cradled over the stump of the other. ‘Well,’ she said.

Nona offered the nun a small smile. Since Nona’s first day in Path this was perhaps the only time Pan had looked at her with any particular interest. Nona liked Sister Pan: the old woman had a sharp wit but was never unkind, she entertained and guided, rather than directing or dictating. Even so, she seemed almost blind to those without at least a touch of quantal, as if the novices were interchangeable, save for Hessa and Ara, and she only became truly animated with those two.

‘You seem to have reached the Path via a route I didn’t teach you,’ Sister Pan said.

‘Why didn’t you teach it?’ Nona asked. Perhaps, even with all her years, Pan hadn’t known the way.

The nun smiled, ancient in her wrinkles, displaying the worn columns of her remaining teeth. ‘Abbess Glass might object if I chained each novice to a wall and beat them bloody on the off-chance they might run from the whip and reach the Path.’ She rubbed her chin. ‘Also, even on quantals it almost never works. And when it does, it’s of limited use. Serenity allows a person to approach the Path in a slow and measured way. To stay on the Path is incredibly difficult. It requires years of training and rare innate skill. Taking more than a few steps on the Path is hard even when a person edges carefully onto it. When rage or pain take you there … Consider the blade-path game that Sister Tallow keeps in her hall. Serenity is a novice edging out from the platform, feet placed with care, arms spread for balance, considering what lies ahead. Rage is a novice bursting from the door at full pelt and racing out over the drop. She may touch the blade-path on her way down, but she’s not truly walking it.’

‘That was just a touch?’ Even as she spoke Nona knew it to be true. She had fallen from the Path as soon as she ‘set foot’ upon it – not that feet were involved, but the image helped her to make sense of the experience.

‘We will examine this matter in class, Nona. There may be exciting times ahead! For now though, practise your serenity. It will help with the pain. That should be motivation enough by itself, even without the Path waiting for you.’ Sister Pan stood with an audible creak. ‘Seek the Path, but do not touch it!’ She glanced around. ‘Sister Rose would not forgive you for damaging the sanatorium! Sister Tallow is far from pleased with the damage wrought in Blade Hall. Also, you would likely die. You were very lucky to have been able to shape and push the Path’s energies into the wall.’ A speculative look. ‘We will talk about how you managed that. Later.’

Sister Pan turned to go, shuffling towards the door with the speed of an old lady twenty years her junior.

‘Thank you, sister.’ Nona spoke the words quietly to Sister Pan’s back, but the nun, overturning Clera’s insistence that she was deaf, spun around as she said them. ‘Thank you, novice. When you get to my age you need things like this to keep you alive. Take it from me. I have been too young to know, and I have been too old to care. It’s in that oh-so-narrow slice between that memories are made. So enjoy it.’ And with that she was gone, the door swinging shut behind her. ‘Exciting times. Exciting times.’

Nona lay staring at the door. The animation in Sister Pan’s face when she spoke of the Path returned her to that moment of contact, the awful energy that had filled her like a fire under her skin. The memory pushed aside the pain from her wounds, leaving it a mere tickle at the edge of things. There had been an instant of release as she had driven her talons into the wall and emptied the Path’s power into the stone. She wanted that feeling again. She hadn’t felt anything like it before. Shelter and a fire’s warmth after the ice-wind didn’t come close, not even food offered to a stomach left empty for too many days. She wanted it again.

Clera, Ruli, and Jula came the next day, bustling in behind Sister Rose, Ruli leaning out to the side to grin at Nona past the nun’s rotundity. They descended on her bed, making her wince as the mattress shifted under their weight.

‘I’m in Grey Class!’ Jula crossed her legs at the far end of the bed. ‘The Poisoner finally gave me my Shade stamp!’

‘That’s great!’ Nona would have missed Jula, especially her help in Academia. They grinned at each other. More than for her ability to guide Nona’s hand to make perfect letters on the slate in place of her wobbly attempts, Nona liked Jula for the way her bookishness fell away on the sands of Blade Hall. If you didn’t keep your wits about you the scribe’s daughter would set you on your backside, hard, and all without a drop of hunska in her veins.

‘How are you?’ Ruli leaned in worried, reaching a tentative hand for Nona’s arm. ‘You look awful.’

‘She’s fine!’ Clera said. ‘She took down the damn wall. Showed that bitch Zole.’

Nona eased herself into a sitting position, manufactured a smile, and let the conversation flow about her. It just took a ‘yes’ here, a ‘why’ there to keep it running on and she found comfort in the familiar rhythm of their gossip.

Ara, apparently, would be in to see her later. She wanted to come on her own, feeling very guilty about the whole whipping girl thing. ‘And so she should!’ Clera cut across Ruli. ‘They all do it. The Sis spit on us all the time. Even if they don’t mean to. They just think of us as things to be used.’

Zole had remained when Sherzal left, and was taken into Grey Class, where she kept a watchful silence, not rising to taunts or threats. Clera was glad to report that the tribe-girl had fallen off the blade-path within five yards of starting and showed no particular aptitude for Academia. Of particular note and worthy of a mimed impression was her introduction to the Poisoner, one that saw her fleeing the cave just minutes into the class, a hand clutching both main orifices.

Sister Tallow, according to Ruli, had spent the whole of their last lesson aiming a brooding stare at the cratered wall and letting the older novices beat the younger ones black and blue.

‘She did promise to teach us to counter that Torca move Zole used on you though,’ Clera said. She smiled at that then veered into a new topic. ‘And my father’s still in the debtors’ jail, but they let Mother and my sisters visit him.’ No novice ignored the convent’s disapproval of discussing family quite so impressively as Clera. She scowled. ‘He should have been released by now: the only debts left to clear are ones that everyone knows are fake.’