Red Sister

‘You didn’t get the pupils,’ Clera said, still raging over Ruli’s feat.

‘When a sharp piece of metal hits you in the eye you’re going to have a really bad day whichever part it strikes.’ Nona shrugged.

‘Keep telling yourself that.’ Ruli grinned. ‘One day you’ll meet an enemy with really tiny eyes and you’ll wish you had me with you!’

In the bathhouse after Blade Nona hung in the hot water while the class splashed and chattered around her or sat on the pool’s edge recovering in the steams. She put her head back, floating, embraced by heat, nothing but whiteness above her, the steam’s slow swirl echoing in her mind. Tomorrow the Academy would show off its students before Sister Pan and some grand audience. Hessa would show them the subtleties of thread-work in return, and Ara the channelled power of the Path gathered over as many as three or even four steps and released in controlled bursts of destruction. And Nona … the peasant girl from the Grey … the would-be murderer spirited from beneath a descending death sentence … what had she got to show them that they wouldn’t smirk behind their hands at?

And when she came back she would still be poisoned, still face the dilemma of whether to confess her attack on Raymel or risk the black cure in an attempt to solve her own problems. And on top of all that. Or rather, beneath it, there was Yisht, burrowing into something secret like a worm at the convent’s heart.

Nona signed and realized that sometimes even a hot bath couldn’t help.

The convent hired a cart to take Sister Pan and the three novices to the Academy. The rest of the class saw them off outside Path Tower. The girls, with the exception of Zole, clustered around, variously slapping shoulders or swapping hugs, dependent on their nature.

‘Make us proud!’ Darla sent Nona staggering with a semi-affectionate shove.

‘Show those Academy brats something new!’ Clera mimed an explosion.

‘Ancestor watch over you.’ Jula smiled and held Nona’s hands in a brief clasp.

‘Be careful!’ Ruli hugged her.

‘Don’t lose.’ Alata with a warning look.

Ara and Nona helped Hessa up into the cart.

‘You’re lucky,’ Clera said, leaning in as Sister Pan took her place beside the driver. ‘The church seems to think nuns should walk everywhere. Seriously. Even Sister Cloud didn’t get a horse! If Hessa wasn’t a hop-along and Pan wasn’t a hundred and nine you’d be walking to the Academy.’

The driver twitched his whip over the two horses and the cart lurched into motion. Nona clutched the side and remembered Giljohn’s cart. Another journey beginning …

The cart rattled on along the track that led around the back of the piggeries and ‘the chicken house’ a long hall far too grand for its current purpose. To the track’s left the cliff edge lay just yards away over bare rock. Clera claimed a novice’s prank had once startled the supply wagon horse and sent it back down to the plains below by the most direct route, along with the supply wagon and the driver. Fortunately on this occasion no such prankster came forward and the cart survived to thread a path through the stone forest. Nona lay back to watch the pillars reaching for the sky as the driver wove his way around them. Even Sister Rule had no idea who had set them there. No book in the library spoke of it. As they broke clear Nona wondered how long the ripples she left behind would last before they faded and Abeth forgot her. Even if she built a thousand stone pillars taller and thicker than the biggest trees, the world would roll on and remember her no better than it did the mysterious founders of the stone forest.

‘I know what you’re thinking.’ Hessa shifted across to join Nona watching the pillars retreat into the distance.

‘You do not.’

‘I don’t think there’s enough time left for us to be forgotten. Not if we do extraordinary things. If we burn bright enough we’ll be remembered until the moon falls and the Corridor closes.’

‘That’s not so bad then.’

‘It will be if we’re still alive to see it!’

Sister Pan eyed them darkly. ‘It is never a good idea for two novices to become thread-bound. That experiment of yours was ill-advised, Novice Hessa, even if you didn’t know that Novice Nona had the blood.’ She rubbed absently at her stump. ‘And now you share idle thoughts as well as dreams and pain … The lives of any so closely bound tend to become mirrors of each other, their rhythms coming into time until there are no coincidences, only a sharing in the patterns of crisis and peace.’

Hessa looked down, ashamed. Nona reached out a hand to her shoulder, tentative. ‘It doesn’t sound so bad. If we stick together it just means we’ll share our troubles.’

The cart took the Vinery Stair, a longer descent to the plains but less treacherous than the Seren Way, and despite its name, stairless. Once clear of the plateau they curved back past the convent vineyards nestled in the arms of the cliffs, and took the Rutland Road into Verity.

The grand gates of the city stood open, with as many people seeming to have urgent business inside as had urgent business in the world beyond, leading to a great press of humanity, many employing elbows and whips to forge a path, and all of them shouting.

Nona sat hunched about her knees as the cart inched through.

‘I’d forgotten the smell,’ Hessa said. She’d been the only member of Grey Class not to come to watch the forging at the Caltess.

Ara wrinkled her nose, watching the crowd with fascination. ‘You should come down on a holy-day! There’s so much to …’ She trailed off, remembering that while she was trapped on the rock by Sherzal’s avarice Hessa was trapped by her leg just as effectively. ‘Sorry.’

The abbess kept Ara in the convent at her uncle’s request, the Jotsis lord still concerned that Sherzal planned to abduct his niece. Practically all of Ara’s anger at Zole could be laid at the feet of this fact that loomed over every seven-day. Ara literally ached for Verity. Shopping, she said, was the greatest of pleasures. Nona, having never purchased anything or owned money, had no opinion on the matter, but judging by the street stalls jammed along the high street leading from the gates, it seemed to be one of the more popular contact sports in the city.

Once past the gate the crush eased and within a hundred yards they were moving at walking pace along the broad, cobbled street. To either side grand-looking establishments towered to three and four storeys, restaurants below, guest rooms above. Blacksmiths, wheelwrights, leatherworkers, saddle-makers, tack shops, and all manner of hostelries crowded the side roads. Later the high street gave over to tailors and jewellers, silversmiths and goldsmiths, with luxurious apartments above, occasionally with one of their balconies occupied by some wealthy tenant sipping wine and watching the world go by, literally beneath their attention.

The colours fascinated Nona’s eye. In the convent everything was grey or black or the faint yellow-green of limestone. When a Red Sister wore her official habit it was a vivid splash on an otherwise dull palette. In Verity’s crowds a Red Sister would scarcely give the eye pause as it swept across the scene.

The driver turned at a main junction and carried on up a gentle gradient into areas given over to private homes. Nona began to get a sense of having already visited the streets they were passing. She turned to see Hessa glancing her way. Hessa looked suddenly very young, her bony body too small for her habit, her face so thin and angular that she might pass as one of the forest nixies that Nana Even used to tell stories about. The sun, still low in the eastern sky, made something ethereal of the wispy curls of her blonde hair, turning it into a kind of halo. It seemed for a moment that Hessa hadn’t changed from their journey with Giljohn years ago, not even a little bit.