Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor 1)

‘I opened that discussion with her.’ Sister Tallow narrowed her eyes at the memory. ‘But a second assassin from her order interrupted us. By the time I’d dealt with the interruption the first of them had fled … and the second, well he was in no condition to answer questions. So I ask you again – where did you get it?’

‘It was in the storeroom …’

Sister Tallow raised a brow. ‘I inventory the weapon stores on a regular basis. The novices in Holy Class clean and maintain all the blades daily. I’ve not seen this weapon or its like in two years.’

‘It was in the storeroom.’ Nona gritted her teeth.

Sister Tallow’s narrowed eyes became gimlet. She drew breath for what might have been harsh words, but Sister Kettle spoke first. ‘Do you know how it got there, Nona?’

‘The abbess told me to put it there.’ Nona knew what they wanted but something deep inside her had always kept tight hold on every secret she owned. She found she could no more easily volunteer such truths than she could lie.

‘When did she tell you this?’ Kettle asked.

‘On my second night at the convent.’

‘And where did you first get the knife?’

‘It was in my bed.’ Nona frowned. ‘I sat up in the night, and when I looked back at where I had been lying the knife was there, sticking into blankets as if it had been stabbed there.’

‘Or thrown there.’ Sister Tallow glanced across at Sister Wheel. ‘We thought the assassins came for Arabella, but it looks as though they were here for Nona. The Noi-Guin are anything but cheap but perhaps Thuran Tacsis found their prices more reasonable than those of the high court judge whose arrival followed their failure. Ancestor knows what funds Tacsis put behind the visit of our own high priest and archons after that …’

Sister Wheel cast a sour eye over Nona then made a sickly smile for Arabella. ‘Our priority should be the Chosen One, the emperor’s sister made her interest clear there. A Shield should be able to look after herself or what use is she?’

Sister Tallow made a small sound that might have been all of a long-suffering sigh that escaped her discipline. ‘Sherzal is certainly not known for letting slip anything on which she has designs … But these titles are unhelpful. Chosen One? The abbess herself revealed the truth to us, sister.’

Sister Wheel moved behind Arabella and set a bony hand to each shoulder. ‘It is called “faith” rather than “reason”, sister. The Argatha comes to us out of stories, and even if the stories about those stories differ, they all agree that they came from the mouths of the holy. A nun? A priest? For this purpose, or that purpose.’ She lifted a hand as if to wave away smoke. ‘The story exists. It was born within the church and many have faith in it. I have faith in it. That is enough.’

Sister Tallow returned her dark gaze to Nona. ‘Did the knife in your bed look as if it could have been thrown there?’

Nona screwed her eyes shut, bringing back the image she had played through her mind so many times before. She’d imagined the knife stabbed there, Arabella Jotsis’s hand about the hilt … but the angle … ‘The window! It could have been thrown from there – it was open that night.’

‘What honest reason would anyone have for keeping a thing like that secret?’ Sister Wheel discarded Ara and moved in closer, leaning to be level with Nona, watery eyes studying her face as if a lie might be discovered there.

‘She didn’t keep it secret,’ said Sister Tallow. ‘The abbess knew: she told Nona to put the blade in stores … Though that and her silence on the subject are both very strange.’

‘The abbess told us Thuran Tacsis pledged to the emperor himself that it was over!’ Ara spoke up from the side, perhaps to stop Tallow brooding over Nona’s story. She offered everyone a bright smile. ‘My father saw him say so, before the whole court. Why should we still be worried about assassins?’

Tallow and Wheel exchanged a glance at that. Sister Tallow answered. ‘It pays to be cautious, novice. The Noi-Guin do not like to fail and they are patient. Besides, now Thuran Tacsis has sworn on this matter Nona is a liability to him and his enemies might have an interest in seeing her harmed, thinking to bring the emperor’s wrath on the House of Tacsis. And so this blade …’

‘How did you all come to be here?’ Nona asked, not wanting the conversation to return to her silence on the matter of the knife and to reveal the strong suspicions she’d held regarding Ara’s part. ‘And …’ She turned around to look up at Kettle. ‘How did you … you just came from nowhere!’

‘I’m a Sister of Discretion.’ Kettle offered a tiny grin, just enough to show the whiteness of her teeth. ‘You see me when I want you to.’

‘Threads brought us here, Nona.’ Sister Flint, peering down from her grave heights. ‘Mistress Path will teach you about threads soon enough, now you’re in Grey Class.’

22

Sister Tallow set Ara to instructing Nona in the basics of knife-work. With the other novices all busy at blade-path the pair of them had Mistress Blade’s full attention: never a comfortable thing. They circled, working in a silence cut by the sharpness of drawn breath and punctuated by the distant wails of girls falling from the blade-path.

‘No.’ Sister Tallow took Nona’s wrist and shoulder, moving her arm into the block she had been shown.

After thirty more repetitions of the same block and same cut Nona tried another variation.

‘No.’ Sister Tallow adjusted Nona’s arm again. ‘The muscles need to learn it, not the mind. There need to be patterns your body can fall back on when there’s no time for thinking. Once those are bedded into you then you start to improvise.’

Nona fell back into the rhythm: circle, cut, block, circle. From the frequency of the distant cries even the novices with most practice were finding the blade-path particularly difficult in their heavy blade-habits. Of the girls who trained on the path in their free time the majority were hunska, half-bloods and primes. Though given that just getting to the end of the blade-path proved a major challenge, speed really wasn’t a requirement. Nona guessed that the competitive element just appealed more strongly to those with their eyes on the martial habit; though of late the studious Jula had demonstrated quite a talent for it, completing the whole path, albeit achingly slowly, a feat that of the recent graduates from Red Class only Clera had managed before moving up.

A moment’s lapse of concentration and Ara had slashed a black line across the pale leather of Nona’s blade-habit.

‘Again!’ Sister Tallow barked.

Circle, slash, block, circle, slash. Block.

‘When you stab you may find the opportunity to mortally injure your opponent, but to sink your blade you must come in closer than to cut with it. When you stab and find flesh your blade may become trapped by the bones of a twisting opponent. Both the necessity of stepping closer and the danger of a trapped blade open you to retaliation. There is almost no stab you can make that is so swiftly fatal that it will prevent the counter-blow.’

Circle. Slash, block. Circle, slash. Block.

‘Even the whisper of a well-honed knife can cut through cloth, skin, and the muscle beneath. Knife fights are a war of attrition. Your foe is brought down by the combination of blood loss and the lost mobility due to various wounds, allowing an eventual coup de grâce.’