Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor 1)

‘Raymel!’ the fight-master barked. ‘Ease up.’

Raymel continued to choke the apprentice in his hands, still seemingly impervious to the attacks of the last hunska remaining on her feet.

Nona found herself turning away too, the undirected anger that built in her whenever she saw a fight now dissipating. ‘You won’t have to fight, Saida. They’ll see you’re no good at it and give you a different job. Regol said the old man who comes to the horses can sew up wounds like a seamstress. Perhaps he’ll need an apprentice soon. He is very old.’

Saida managed a shy smile. ‘I’d like to help. I don’t want Partnis to give me away. I would miss you.’

‘I’d miss you too.’ Nona found her chest aching at the thought. ‘So I won’t let it happen!’ She said it with such fierce confidence that Saida’s smile had widened into something that made her blunt face suddenly beautiful.

The dream turned darker, colder, shadows invading the Caltess hall. They were alone now, Saida and Nona, a sense of profound unease stalking between them.

‘Don’t hurt me!’ Saida was suddenly backing away from Nona, terrified.

‘Saida! I won’t let anyone—’

‘Don’t hurt me!’ Saida pointed at Nona, cowering.

Nona tried to reassure her but found instead that she towered over Saida, holding her friend’s arm in a massive fist. The grey hall around her became the walls of Raymel’s apartment, Saida dangling above the thick luxury of a bearskin rug.

Nona tried to let Saida go. ‘It’s not me. I’m not like him. I’m not!’

‘No, please! I didn’t mean to.’

Anger flared somewhere deep in Nona’s chest. She was trying to help the silly girl. Why was she scared? Did she think Nona had anything in common with a creature like Raymel Tacsis? ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’ She found to her horror though that she was shaking Saida, the fist on her friend’s arm emphasizing her points as she spoke.

‘Let go!’

‘I am letting go …’ But the fist gripped tighter, twisted, and Saida’s screaming began.

Nona drew a sharp breath and opened her eyes. The colours of her nightmare vanished leaving only black. It took a moment to realize where she was. The soft sounds of sleeping surrounded her on each side. At the back of her mind the dream carried on as if it neither wanted her attention nor required her permission to proceed. She had been following something, a line that ran its narrow path with danger to either side, on one flank a dark and consuming hunger, on the other a blindness, fierce as staring at the sun. And somehow she had been following someone else at the same time, black-clad, swift, certain, moving through a starless night, plotting a sure path between high buildings. The figure had found what it sought, looked up, reached out to find cold stone walls, and had started to climb.

Nona strained her ears, hunting beneath the novices’ gentle snores and sighs, the soft turning of a body in sleep, the whisper of the wind … a scrape, a sudden movement … hard to judge at what distance in the unbroken night. Without warning, surprising herself, Nona jolted upright, as swift a motion as she had ever made, the blanket pulled from her. Perhaps some new sound had sat her up, perhaps nothing, just one of those twitches that comes out of nowhere and jerks your body as if by a string. Somewhere else in the dark a muffled impact, the sound of air leaving lungs fast and without orders …

‘Wuh-what?’ At the end of the row Ketti, the eldest of them, unhooded the lantern that sat beside her bed for anyone needing to make the trip to the Necessary in the dead of night.

Just below the rolled blanket where Nona’s head had lain a small black object stood proud of the bed. She blinked, trying to focus – the hilt of something? Close by, Clera rose groggily from her own bed. ‘Can’t be morning already?’ Her voice thick with sleep. A figure stood between them, revealed in the light of the unhooded lantern – Arabella Jotsis, her face a mask.

Nona took hold of the hilt – leather-bound, the pommel a ball of iron the size of an eye – and tugged. It took most of her strength to free the point from the boards, and when she saw the gleaming blade start to slide out from the slot it had put in her blankets she quickly covered it. Only Arabella noticed, her eyes moving from Nona’s hand on the hilt to Nona’s face as their eyes met.

‘Get back in bed! It’s the middle of the night.’ Ketti closed the lantern’s cowl until just a glow remained.

Arabella hurried towards Ketti and moments later left the room holding the lantern.

‘Shut the window. It’s cold in here.’ Clera from her bed, the words all running together. Nobody replied.

Nona lay back, pulling the blankets over her. It had grown cooler – the wind must have caught the window and pulled it wide – even so, if Clera called this cold then she had never known what it was to face the ice-wind, hungry and with only wattle walls for shelter.

She drew out the knife from under the covers. The blade reached for about two widths of her hand, narrow as two fingers, all of it cold steel. Nona could only think that Arabella must have stolen it from the stores at the training hall. The real question though, was had she meant to stab Nona to death or just to leave her a pointed warning? At the core of her something red and primal snarled at the blade’s challenge, demanding blood, demanding the weapon be returned with a hard lesson. Nona fought the impulse to go after Arabella. She could catch her before she reached the Necessary hunkering on the edge of the cliff. How would that encounter end? Nona with a sharp knife in her hand and blunt accusations in her mouth? Anger had its place, it was a weapon not to be neglected, but so did patience, and Nona decided that control lay in deciding which to use and when.

She stayed in her bed. It was cold outside and dangerous in all manner of ways. The knife must have been meant to scare her. Even someone as high-born as Arabella Jotsis couldn’t expect to murder people in their sleep in a crowded dormitory and get away with it … Unless she really did think a village girl was no more than a cow or pig compared to someone who had been invited to the emperor’s palace?

At some point, with one thought chasing the next in endless circles, Nona fell asleep and though she tossed and turned she didn’t wake until Bray spoke the waking hour and all across the dormitory grey shapes started to move beneath their covers, grumbling at the day.

‘Path and Spirit today,’ Clera groaned. ‘Worst of the lot.’

‘Breakfast first!’ Ruli with a grin, pulling off her nightcap and shaking down her hair.

‘Spirit is what we’re all here for.’ Jula gave a sniff, patting her head and finding her hair hadn’t returned overnight.

‘I’m here because I was sent here,’ Clera said. ‘When I’m a Red Sister if anyone asks me to repeat the catechism I’ll stab them in the eye.’

‘If you paid closer attention in Spirit, you would know that stabbing people in the eye is frowned upon.’ Jula straightened her habit and started to make her bed. ‘Anyway, it’s Path first.’

‘Yawn!’ Clera tugged her habit over her underskirts. ‘I hope Pan lets us pathless go play again.’

Nona slid from her covers and started to dress. She reached beneath her pillow, to touch the knife one more time to reassure herself it hadn’t been a dream. Still there, warm from her body now, a hard, sharp, and undeniable truth. She wanted to take it with her, strapped to her body, the blade wrapped in a strip of linen, but she lacked both time and privacy. She would have to leave the weapon in her bed and hope that Arabella had no chance to reclaim it.