Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor 1)

‘Who are you?’ Nona asked. She had followed the woman far enough. ‘And,’ realizing something, ‘where’s your stick?’

The abbess turned, one hand knotted in the string of purple beads around her neck. ‘My name is Glass. That’s Abbess Glass to you. And I gave my crozier to a rather surprised young man shortly after we emerged from Shoe Street. I hope the warden’s guards followed it rather than us.’

‘Glass isn’t a proper name. It’s a thing. I’ve seen some in Partnis Reeve’s office.’ Something hard and near invisible that kept the Corridor winds from the fight-master’s den.

Abbess Glass turned away and resumed her marching. ‘Each sister takes a new name when she is deemed fit to marry the Ancestor. It’s always the name of an object or thing, to set us apart from the worldly.’

‘Oh.’ Most in Nona’s village had prayed to the nameless gods of rain and sun as they did all across the Grey, setting corn dollies in the fields to encourage a good harvest. But her mother and a few of the younger women went to the new church over in White Lake, where a fierce young man talked about the god who would save them, the Hope, rushing towards us even now. The roof of the Hope church stood ever open so they could see the god advancing. To Nona he looked like all the other stars, only white where almost every other is red, and brighter too. She had asked if all the other stars were gods as well, but all that earned her was a slap. Preacher Mickel said the star was Hope, and also the One God, and that before the northern ice and the southern ice joined hands he would come to save the faithful.

In the cities, though, they mainly prayed to the Ancestor.

‘There. See it?’

Nona followed the line of the abbess’s finger. On a high plateau, beyond the city wall, the slanting sunlight caught on a domed building, perhaps five miles off.

‘Yes.’

‘That’s where we’re headed.’ And the abbess led away along the street, stepping around a horse pile too fresh for the garden-boys to have got to yet.

‘You didn’t hear about me all the way up there?’ Nona asked. It didn’t seem possible.

Abbess Glass laughed, a warm and infectious noise. ‘Ha! No. I had other business in town. One of the faithful told me your story and I made a diversion on my way back to the convent.’

‘Then how did you know my name? My real name, not the one Partnis gave me.’

‘Could you have caught the fourth apple?’ The abbess responded with a question.

‘How many apples can you catch, old woman?’

‘As many as I need to.’ Abbess Glass looked back at her. ‘Hurry up, now.’

Nona knew that she didn’t know much, but she knew when someone was trying to take her measure and she didn’t like things being taken from her. The abbess would have kept on with her apples until she found Nona’s limit – and held that knowledge like a knife in its sheath. Nona hurried up and said nothing. The streets grew emptier as they approached the city wall and the shadows started to stretch.

Alleyways yawned left and right, dark mouths ready to swallow Nona whole. However warm the abbess’s laughter, Nona didn’t trust her. She had watched Saida die. Running away was still very much an option. Living with a collection of old nuns on a windswept hill outside the city might be better than hanging, but not by much.

‘Master Reeve said that Raymel wasn’t dead. That’s not true.’

The abbess pulled her coif off in a smooth motion, revealing short grey hair and exposing her neck to the wind. She quickly threw a shawl of sequined wool about her shoulders.

‘Where did— You stole that!’ Nona glanced around to see if any of the passers-by would share her outrage but they were few and far between, heads bowed, bound to their own purposes. ‘A thief and a liar!’

‘I value my integrity.’ The abbess smiled. ‘Which is why it has a price.’

‘A thief and a liar.’ Nona decided that she would run.

‘And you, child, appear to be complaining because the man you were to hang for murdering is not in fact dead.’ Abbess Glass tied the shawl and tugged it into place. ‘Perhaps you can explain what happened at the Caltess and I can explain what Partnis Reeve almost certainly meant about Raymel Tacsis.’

‘I killed him.’ The abbess wanted a story but Nona kept her words close. She had come to talking so late her mother had thought her dumb, and even now she preferred to listen.

‘How? Why? Paint me a picture.’ Abbess Glass made a sharp turn, pulling Nona through a passage so narrow that a few more pounds about her middle would see the nun scraping both sides.

‘They brought us to the Caltess in a cage.’ Nona remembered the journey. There had been three children on the wagon when Giljohn, the child-taker, stopped at her village and the people gave her over. Grey Stephen had passed her up to him. It seemed that everyone she knew watched as Giljohn put her in the wooden cage with the others. The village children, both littles and bigs, looked on mute, the old women muttered, Mari Streams, her mother’s friend, had sobbed; Martha Baker had shouted cruel words. When the wagon jolted off along its way stones and clods of mud had followed. ‘I didn’t like it.’

The wagon had rattled on for days, then weeks. In two months they had covered nearly a thousand miles, most of it on small and winding lanes, back and forth across the same ground. They rattled up and down the Corridor, weaving a drunkard’s trail north and south, so close to the ice that sometimes Nona could see the walls rising blue above the trees. The wind proved the only constant, crossing the land without friendship, a stranger’s fingers trailing the grass, a cold intrusion.

Day after day Giljohn steered his wagon from town to town, village to hamlet to lonely hovel. The children given up were gaunt, some little more than bones and rags, their parents lacking the will or coin to feed them. Giljohn delivered two meals a day, barley soup with onions in the morning, hot and salted, with hard black bread to dip. In the evening, mashed swede with butter. His passengers looked better by the day.

‘I’ve seen more meat on a butcher’s apron.’ That’s what Giljohn told Saida’s parents when they brought her out of their hut into the rain.

The father, a ratty little man, stooped and gone to grey, pinched Saida’s arm. ‘Big girl for her age. Strong. Got a lick o’ gerant in her.’

The mother, whey-faced, stick-thin, weeping, reached to touch Saida’s long hair but let her hand fall away before contact was made.

‘Four pennies, and my horse can graze in your field tonight.’ Giljohn always dickered. He seemed to do it for the love of the game, his purse being the fattest Nona had ever seen, crammed with pennies, crowns, even a gleaming sovereign that brought a new colour into Nona’s life. In the village only Grey Stephen ever had coins. And James Baker that time he sold all his bread to a merchant’s party that had lost the track to Gentry. But none of them had ever had gold. Not even silver.

‘Ten and you get on your way before the hour’s old,’ the father countered.

Within the aforementioned hour Saida had joined them in the cage, her pale hair veiling a down-turned face. The cart moved off without delay, heavier one girl and lighter five pennies. Nona watched through the bars, the father counting the coins over and again as if they might multiply in his hand, his wife clutching at herself. The mother’s wailing followed them as far as the cross-roads.