Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor 1)

One of the men holding me chuckled into his hand.

‘Make her sing,’ the tall man hissed. ‘That’ll bring him if he’s close.’

One of them twisted my arm behind me. I ground my teeth together and grunted. He tugged it harder and the pain lanced through me. It’s easy enough to make a body hurt past the point of any resolve. Within a few more seconds I was screaming and screaming was all I knew about. I don’t know how long it took. It seemed like half a lifetime. It stopped suddenly. The man doing the twisting let go and sat down, clutching his neck. The focus had nearly passed, the mists glowed crimson with the last of the light.

‘What are you playing at?’ The man holding my other arm.

Blood, dark as wine, leaked between the fingers his friend had clasped around his throat.

‘He’s here!’ My captor drew his sword, still holding me. ‘He’s—’ The handle of a knife appeared under his chin, blade hidden in his neck.

‘Get among the trees!’ The tall man barked the order and followed it in the same moment.

The man holding me released my arm and wrenched the knife from his neck, as if that might save him. He stood for three or four heartbeats, blood spraying from the wound, warm, the salt of it on my lips, then sank to his knees, using his sword as support. He didn’t look angry, or scared, just disbelieving, eyes staring into the mist.

‘Run, Nona!’ Amondo’s shout.

I saw a dark shape moving among the trees, cries, curses, the light dying moment by moment. A scream. A wet thunk. Low branches snapping. My legs wouldn’t take me anywhere. I had nowhere to go.

Darkness. No noise but the creak and moan of the Rellam once more, as if it had just bitten its tongue, waiting for the light to move on. I held my breath, and somewhere in the distance, just audible above the night sounds, the broken stumble of someone limping away, or dragging themselves through the undergrowth.

I stayed there, small and silent in the restless dark, waiting for the ghosts of the dead to leave their flesh and find me like they did in all the stories. But in the end the dawn made its way among the trees and with it James Baker and Willum Streams. They weren’t searching for me, they were thinking to catch up with Amondo – Baker’s hoard of coin went missing the day the juggler left. They were lucky only to find me, all bloody and surrounded by corpses.

Nona drew a deep breath and looked up. ‘The rest is as I told you before. They called me a witch, and a thief, and gave me to the child-taker.’

‘Only your mother wasn’t dead,’ said Clera, almost a whisper.

‘No.’

‘She let them do it,’ said Ruli, without surprise as if perhaps her mother had done the same, albeit wrapped in different circumstances.

‘She said I’d helped Amondo steal from the Bakers.’ Nona bowed her head.

‘And that’s why the judge came …’ Clera said. ‘Because of the dead men. And the missing money. Were they soldiers? Or some local lord’s men?’

‘I don’t know.’ Nona got off the bed and went to her own, weighed down with memories and the lies she had told.

‘How did Amondo throw his daggers?’ Jula, still on the other bed, frowning. ‘You said the mist was—’

‘I’m going to sleep now.’ Nona fell headlong onto her bed, and lay silent and unmoving until the lanterns were extinguished and the sounds of sleeping rose around her.

11

The focus woke Nona. Every crack in the shutters wrote itself red upon the dormitory walls, snaking over the novices in their beds, describing each in as few lines as Abbess Glass had used to capture Nona’s face. She watched the lines move with the moon’s passage, flowing over the sleeping forms about her. The building creaked and groaned as the heat penetrated. Somewhere, far away, the great walls that stepped up to the White would be weeping, shedding rotten ice, losing the slow gains they had made during the day. That battle ebbed and flowed of course. For a century the Grey and all its towns and villages had been swallowed by an advance before the focus finally wore the ice back. Even now the topsoil lay thin, poor stuff that only the desperate would farm and the wild hunt upon. The glaciers had pushed the good black earth of millennia thirty miles into the Corridor and made the Hernon territories the garden lands of empire.

Nona lay back and thought of her village, the people scraping their living from the shallow ground. Even after just a few months it was hard to imagine it – hard to imagine that their world rolled on without her.

‘Nona.’

Nona sat up. Looked around.

‘Nona.’

Nothing. Nobody.

‘Nona.’

For a moment the moon’s light, caught in bright lines upon the floor, seemed to align into a single thread, leading from the room. Nona slipped from her bed, barefoot on the cold stone. She wrapped a blanket around herself and followed, with the hall whispering all about her and her sisters sleeping.

‘You came!’ Hessa sat on the steps of the scriptorium across the square from the dormitory block, wrapped like Nona in a thin convent blanket. The heat from the focus moon made the puddles steam and set Nona sweating beneath her cover.

Nona looked up. The line she had been following was gone. She wasn’t sure now that there had ever been one. ‘Why are you up?’

‘I don’t sleep well.’ Hessa patted her bad leg. ‘Not since the cage.’ She frowned. ‘Not since ever.’

Nona sat beside her on the steps. ‘It’s a strange place, this convent.’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t trust them.’

Hessa shrugged. ‘I like most of the nuns.’

‘I don’t trust the Ancestor either,’ Nona said. ‘But I’m not running away. Not yet, anyhow.’

‘The faith is one thing, the church and its people are another.’ Hessa shifted her leg and leaned back to bathe in the moonlight. ‘You can believe in the Ancestor, or not. But the church is just people, some good, some bad.’

They sat in silence for a long minute, then another, the focus reaching its peak and starting to slide.

‘I had a bad dream,’ Hessa said.

Nona looked around at her.

‘About Markus.’

‘Markus?’ Nona hadn’t thought of the boy since she cut down Raymel Tacsis. ‘Where did Giljohn sell him? Did he have to throw Four-Foot into the bargain?’ She smiled, remembering Markus’s bond with the child-taker’s mule.

‘I had a bad dream,’ Hessa repeated herself, staring over the rooftops, a tremble in her voice, ‘but the real thing was worse.’ She turned to Nona. ‘I can show you, I think. Sister Pan said I had a gift for stories, for the path they take. And memory is its own story with its own path …’

‘Show me.’

Hessa reached out her hand, cupped and ready, her eyes on Nona’s. And Nona, having nothing else to give, placed her own there. Hessa turned Nona’s hand palm up. ‘I’ve only tried this with Sister Pan. You might get a sort of fuzzy idea, or nothing. Nothing is probably better …’ She set her index finger so that the edge of her nail bit against the base of Nona’s palm. ‘I might have to do this several times.’ She started to trace a line across Nona’s palm, scoring hard enough to make her want to fold her hand up.