Red Sister

‘We?’ Clera looked up from her bowl, wiping her mouth with the back of a hand. ‘You’re going sneaking in the undercaves, Jula? You’ve never broken a rule in your holy little life.’

‘Nona needs us.’ Jula looked down.

‘She needs me,’ Clera said. ‘I can open that lock.’

‘How?’ Ara asked.

Clera pursed her lips and paused, glowering beneath the black shock of her hair. ‘I’ll steal the key from Bhenta.’

The novices shushed Clera, whose voice had grown quite loud, but nobody seemed to have noticed amid the hubbub of the four classes all eating and talking and clattering.

‘I’ll open the lock,’ Hessa said, voice low. ‘I can do it. That doesn’t change the fact we don’t even know what antidote we need to make.’ She stumped off towards the main doors.

The others watched her go, paused for a moment to glance at each other, then nodded. Hessa wasn’t given to boasts. If she said she could do it, then she could.

Zole arrived, pushing through the novices standing to leave from the next table. Grey Class shot her sideways glances and the conversation ran short.

‘Tonight,’ Nona said, then turned her attention to the stew.

Nona stopped at the scriptorium that evening on the way to the dormitory. She knocked and waited. A light rain laced the wind, on the edge of freezing. She huddled in the doorway and had raised her hand to knock again when the heavy door shuddered open.

‘Nona!’ Sister Kettle smiled down at her, though not from such a height as she used to. ‘Get in.’

Nona slipped through the gap and looked around the room as Kettle shut the door behind her. Four large, sloping desks took up most of the space, each with open scrolls secured across them, quills and inks to hand. Sister Scar sat at the only occupied one, a heavy book in a lectern before her, lanterns on stands to either side. She spared Nona the briefest of glances before returning her gaze to her scroll. Clera said the nun had named herself for the scar that divided her cheek, skipped a blind white eye, and ran through her short grey hair. Jula said that Scar had taken the wound on a mission long after she took holy orders and the name related to some other scar or secret.

‘What can we do for you, Nona?’ Kettle’s eyes held their usual mischief. ‘You have a book you want transcribed?’

‘I wanted to use the library.’

Kettle clapped her hands, delighted, earning a reproving glance from Sister Scar. ‘I taught you to read and now you want to tackle a book! This must be what it’s like when your baby takes a first step! Come on! Come on!’ She hurried towards the door at the rear of the room.

Nona followed Kettle into the convent library, a chamber of similar size to the first but lacking any window, its walls hidden by floor to ceiling with bookshelves. Another door stood open to a long gallery lined with deep box-shelves on which hundreds of scrolls rested.

‘So, we have holy texts, spiritual writings, the lives of saints and of revered sisters of our order.’ Kettle swung an arm to encompass the whole of the opposite wall. ‘Over there we have treatises on fight styles throughout the Corridor and beyond. Here are the histories and genealogies of the Sis. Over there works on the mysteries of the Path – don’t expect to find any sense in them.’ She pointed out sections on the wall to the right. ‘The grey books are up there on the highest shelf. And here …’ Kettle spread her fingers over the leather spines of a dozen or so books behind a locked rail, ‘… we have fiction!’

‘Why are they locked in?’ Nona asked. She had thought the poisons books might be. But these …

Kettle grinned and lifted her hands from the books with some reluctance. ‘“Tell me a story” began every seduction ever.’

‘The abbess doesn’t keep those sorts of books!’ Nona felt herself colouring.

Kettle shook her head. ‘Well, not here at least.’ Again the grin. ‘But be warned, young Nona: a book is as dangerous as any journey you might take. The person who closes the back cover may not be the same one that opened the front one. Treat books with respect.’

‘I can just … read them?’ Nona asked.

‘Any time you want. Just make sure to put them back when you leave. And don’t damage them. They’re my babies. My old leathery babies. And I have a very unpleasant poison from Sister Apple for anyone who so much as folds a page.’

‘How do I reach the ones on the high shelves?’ Nona scanned the highest shelf that ran the circuit of the room just below the ceiling.

‘Grow!’ Kettle gave her an amused stare. ‘You won’t want to read any of those books, little Nona. Not until you’re taller.’ With that she returned to the door. ‘I’ll be in here with Sister Scar if you want me.’

‘Did you find it?’ Ara was waiting by the dormitory door when Nona came back. In the hall behind her the other novices were all in bed already, or changing into their nightgowns.

‘Yes.’ Nona walked past Ara into the room, holding her arms tight across her chest. A fever had sunk its teeth into her and clutching herself seemed to help keep the shivering to a minimum. She fell into her bed, too cold and trembly to want to undress, though her habit stuck to her where she’d been sweating. Clera and Ara watched as she dragged her slate from the habit’s inner pocket. With a groan she leaned down to place it beneath the bed so the carefully scratched instructions wouldn’t be blurred.

‘You got it then,’ Clera whispered.

‘Yes.’ Nona fell back. The recipe had been in a tome by Sister Copper of Gerran’s Crag, written more than two hundred years ago. The warnings had been more dire than Hessa’s – but she had it. She had the black cure.

33



‘Hurry up!’ Clera stood with her face pressed to the gap between two bars of the gate across the tunnel mouth. On the other side steps led down to the Shade class chamber. ‘Quickly!’

‘She’s coming as fast as she can,’ Ara said.

Hessa stumped towards them, her bad leg swinging with her crutch. With her back to the wall Nona peered at the convent buildings all around them, dark and silent. Somewhere an owl hooted, and in dark corners rats scurried. Ara uncovered the lantern, just a touch, to guide Hessa in.

‘Watch the steps.’ Nona moved to catch Hessa should she fall.

‘Here.’ Ara opened the lantern’s cowl enough to let its light flood out over the gate.

The sun wouldn’t show for an hour: focus had passed, its heat faded from the stones; the stars hid in a coal sack sky. These were the grey hours when mankind lay fast in slumber and the world stood open to the bold.

Should any novice in the Grey Class dormitory rise to use the Necessary they would discover the lantern gone. Apart from that, the danger was discovery by whichever nuns were scheduled to open the bakehouse that morning, or by Sister Tallow or one of her Red Sisters on their nightly patrols.

Hessa came up to the gate. When the lantern’s light caught her face it showed the curve of a half-smile, the tranquillity that Sister Pan taught would lead the true-blood to the Path. Hessa set her hand over the lock.

‘Don’t blast it!’ A sudden fear seized Nona, and with it the image of a wrecked gate and Sister Apple standing before it with the morning sun at her shoulders.