Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor 1)

Nona lay relaxing in the dormitory, nursing a cramped hand, when Clera returned. The sun had already started to sink, its red light painted in bars across the ceiling now.

‘You’re supposed to put the ink on the parchment.’ Clera nodded towards Nona’s fingers before slinging herself down on her bed.

Nona spread the ink-stained digits of her right hand before her. At Nona’s insistence Sister Kettle had let her try with quill and lowest grade paper after hours with chalk and slate. It had been more difficult than Nona expected, the result a scratchy mess of jerky lines and ink pools.

‘How was your father?’ Nona asked.

Clera rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling. ‘Where is everyone? Did they all drown while swimming?’

Nona shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I saw Ruli going into Blade Hall. Some of them must be practising blade-path.’ Clera looked worn out. Sad too, flipping her penny up high, catching it, flipping it. ‘How was—’

‘He’s fine. He has an appeal hearing in a month. It looks promising.’

‘That’s good?’ Nona wasn’t sure what an appeal hearing was.

‘Yes.’ Clera caught her penny in her palm and closed her hand about it. In the dying light it looked silver. ‘Did you ever consider just running away, Nona? Just running and running and losing yourself somewhere?’

‘Where?’ Nona had considered it, but running to was better than running from.

‘Just anywhere. Making a new life.’

‘It’s hard out there.’ Nona gazed towards the windows. ‘Running’s all right, but when you stop there’s the freezing and the starving and the dying. If you had money then—’

‘Yes.’ Clera sat up suddenly. ‘Yes, money makes it better. Money fixes everything.’ She stood. ‘Let’s go find them. Have some fun, make trouble, make a noise. Classes tomorrow. Classes forever. Let’s—’

‘That’s a silver crown!’ Nona pointed to it in Clera’s fingers.

‘I made one become many.’ Clera tucked the coin into her pocket. It dropped with a faint chink. ‘I had some luck.’ She smiled but she looked sad.

‘How—’ But the door flew open and Ruli raced in shrieking and wrapped in towels, Jula and Ketti hard on her heels.

‘Catch her!’

‘Get her!’

And Clera leapt into the chase, her grin both wide and wild.

14

Nona’s first full week in the convent passed in a blur, exhausting herself in Blade’s endless repetition of punches, throws, and holds, straining her brain in Academia against topics like glaciation, erosion, and the formation of rocks, gorging herself at meals, still unable to truly believe they would keep coming three times a day.

In the dormitory Nona shared two more dreams with Hessa, both nightmares. Hessa said they must be echoing down the remnants of the connection through which she had shared her memory. The phenomenon would fade away, she said. Also, Ketti had a fight with Ghena and both were put on laundry for a week. And, to Clera’s delight, the abbess’s cat urinated on Arabella’s habit on three-day night.

In Shade they brewed two more poisons, one to cause blindness, another confusion, learning the nature of the ingredients, the antidotes, where such existed, and the means by which the resulting pastes might be introduced to victims or avoided by novices. Sister Apple proved as unpleasant within her cave as she was sweet while outside it. Ketti spent a day without sight after failing to prevent the Poisoner from duping her with the same trick she had just described on the chalkboard. Ruli spent a day in the Necessary after whispering too loudly with Ghena at the back of the class. Nobody knew how the Poisoner got to her, but she was vomiting by the time she reached the top of the stairs on the way out. And Jula caught the sharp edge of Apple’s tongue for a moment’s daydreaming – reduced to tears by a critique of her alchemical failings that had the rest of the class laughing despite themselves.

Path proved to be Nona’s least favourite class, worse even than the tedium of Spirit where Wheel led them through the endless small ceremonies that seemed to occupy every Holy Sister’s day. She soon came to dread Sister Pan’s room, alight with colour and harmony. She stared at the patterns until she thought her eyes would bleed but nothing the old woman said to do made the mystic Path open up before her. There was none of the strange and alarming energy that Arabella had spoken of during her first Path class, just a boredom so profound it made her want to scratch her eyes out. The visualizations for serenity made Nona angry; the ones for quiet filled her head with clamouring for something different.

By the time the seven-day came around again Nona was starting to consider the convent her home. Memories of the Caltess seemed distant, those of Giljohn and his cart a dream, and recollections of the village a story told about someone else.

On the walk to Academia Tower Nona paused to make a slow turn on the spot, taking in the buildings that had so quickly grown familiar: Heart Hall and Blade Hall, with the Dome of the Ancestor looming behind them, the dormitories and the refectory, the nuns’ cloisters and the wide courtyard before the bathhouse. A lone chicken strutted in the shadow of the scriptorium, pausing to scrape and peck as if looking for any dropped punctuation. Between the laundry and the sanatorium Nona could see a wagon parked outside the winery, loaded with barrels of the latest vintage to be released. The novices in Holy Class were allowed a glass of the convent wine with their evening meal on any seven-day that happened to also be a holy holiday, which most of them seemed to be. Ruli claimed the convent earned far more of its income from shipping barrels of Sweet Mercy around the Corridor than from educating and training novices.

‘Of course, if any of them had met the Poisoner they’d all be emptying their wine jugs down the sewer.’

Clera was waiting in the dormitory when Nona returned from her next lesson with Sister Kettle, hand cramped, white with chalk, and ink-stained about the fingers. Sister Kettle’s parting words had been about Clera and Nona had crossed the windswept courtyards frowning under the weight of them.

‘A word to the wise.’ Kettle had set her hand over Nona’s as she reached for her slate. ‘The hardest lesson I ever learned was that every bad thing you see a friend do to someone else they will some day do to you. Some people in this world are users and some givers. When two such form a bond it often ends poorly. Find more friends, Nona. Clera Ghomal spends enough time thinking about herself without you to help her do it. Don’t—’

Nona had pulled free and hurried from the tower, but she could still feel the sister’s fingers on the back of her hand, still hear her speaking. She rubbed hand against habit and tried to shake off the foul mood that had risen in her. She had had few friends in her life and the bonds that bound her to them were more sacred to her than the Ancestor was to any nun. Friendship wasn’t something you gave up on or let slip: it wasn’t something to be done in small measure or cut in half.

She had still been angry when she thrust the dormitory door open.

Most of the novices had yet to return from their various diversions but Jula lay across her own bed, head hanging over the edge as she studied a scroll, and Ghena lay sleeping – the girl always seemed to be rushing about or sleeping, with no real pause between one and the other. Ketti raged past in her smallclothes holding her habit before her, nose wrinkling. ‘Someone let that damned cat in here! He’s peed on my underskirts! Sister Rule should drown the thing!’