Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor 1)

‘I think I strained everything but my voice.’ Nona looked around for an unused bed.

Ara came in behind her, hair caked with ice at the front, still steaming at the back. ‘I saw Sister Wheel telling Mop to put you on cleaning the privies …’

‘Fortunately Moppy has novices she really doesn’t like,’ Nona said. She knew the best way to earn the nun’s ire was to leave a mess in the refectory. The nun approved of anyone who left nothing on their plate, so Nona had become something of a favourite.

‘She likes you because you’re a peasant,’ Clera said. ‘Mop likes girls who aren’t scared of hard work. Me she would have had washing the cliff below the Necessary, while Sister Rule used it.’

Ara pushed on into the room and with a short sprint launched herself over two girls lying on their blankets, belly-flopping onto an unoccupied bed. Nona frowned, still hunting a bed to claim as her own. At the far end of the room Darla hulked, her back to them, hunched over something in her lap.

‘Who sleeps there?’ Nona pointed at an empty bed opposite Ara’s. It was quite neatly made but still perhaps a touch too untidy to be unclaimed.

‘Alata.’ Clera nodded to the bed behind her.

Nona blinked. Two feet protruded from the heap of blankets but it wasn’t the number of feet that drew her eye – just the fact that one was darkest brown, the other milky. At the top end she could see only a fan of red hair, spread across the pillow. They said in Red Class that some older novices kept the same beds but Nona had never seen it before.

The shutters rattled as the ice-wind peppered them with hail. Clera patted the blanket beside her. ‘Going to be cold tonight. You can share if you like.’ She said it lightly but the words carried a weight even so.

Nona’s eyes strayed to the two bare feet again, one rubbing the other now. She felt her cheeks blaze and looked away confused.

‘This one’s free!’ Ara waved, pointing at a bed a few further along from her.

‘I ache too much to share.’ Nona clutched her side. ‘Darla knows how to kick.’ She hobbled on down the aisle between the beds, not wanting to see if she’d put any hurt in Clera’s eyes.

Nona eased herself into her new bed like an old woman, the bruises from her beating starting to stiffen. She hoped that Darla’s injuries hurt more than hers did. The big girl shot her a dirty look but held her tongue. With her right hand and left foot both bandaged she probably had no appetite for further trouble. Either way, Nona lacked the energy to care. She rolled her head towards Ara. ‘What are threads?’ Sisters Flint, Wheel, and Kettle had been drawn to the assassin’s knife, all arriving at Blade Hall within minutes of each other. Quite how that happened had been nagging at Nona all the while she scrubbed and cleaned.

‘Threads are complicated,’ Ara said, her head on her pillow.

‘I’m too tired for complicated,’ Nona said.

‘They’re almost the Path, but not quite. Everything has its own threads and they tangle with each other. A trained quantal can weave one person’s threads with another’s, or with a thing. Or an untrained one can do it by accident – like Hessa did with you.

‘A Mystic Sister must have linked the threads from something left behind by the escaped assassin to some of our nuns. They probably used the twin to the dagger you got, which was why the link was so strong. And they did it so that they might be able to sense if she came back.’

‘Sister Pan did that?’

Ara snorted. ‘Pan? She’s too old. She hasn’t touched the Path in years. No, it must have been a proper Mystic. A Holy Witch!’

‘So … why didn’t they find the knife ages ago?’

‘It’s complicated.’

‘You don’t know?’

Ara laughed. ‘Not really, no. But I know there are threads to draw you to a thing that is still, and threads that will pull on you when a thing is moving. I guess they chose and tied threads that would pull on the sisters if the assassin was moving close to the convent – and that included her possessions which they assumed she would be carrying. They had one of her other two knives to work with. And then when you moved the first knife … they came!’

‘Ouch.’ Nona remembered Sister Kettle seemingly unwrapping herself from the shadows at the base of the wall and cannoning into her already beaten body. She frowned. ‘The nuns were there before I even touched the knife.’

‘They say a really strong bond can give a premonition. Some things bind better than others, but with time the threads always come loose.’

They lay without speaking for a while and the room quietened around them. Eventually another question floated to the surface of Nona’s sleepiness. She yawned hugely then asked it. ‘Why don’t the emperor’s sisters have titles? Shouldn’t they be Princess Sherzal and Princess Velera?’

‘You’ve listened to too many bards’ tales.’ Ara yawned her own yawn. ‘We haven’t had kings and queens, princes and princesses, for hundreds of years. Maybe they still have them somewhere if you follow the Corridor long enough.’

‘But they’re his sisters and he’s the emperor …’

‘Crucical doesn’t trust either of them further than he could spit them.’ Ara snuggled beneath her blanket, only her hair showing. ‘Titles would just encourage them. The lack of them reminds everyone where the emperor’s favour lies, and where it doesn’t. It’s like that in high families.’

Nona closed her eyes. Treachery and deceit weren’t confined to high families. Blood bonds were neither chosen nor hard to break, whatever the Ancestor might have to say on the subject. She lay still, ignoring her pain, knowing sleep would be hard to find. She thought of her fight with Darla, not that it had been a fight from her side, but Darla at least showed some anger, some brutality. That to Nona was a fight. The arts that Mistress Blade taught, while deadly, were without passion. The contests felt to Nona more like dances. Dances that would end in pain and blood if you missed a step, but dances even so, devoid of rage or hatred. Sister Pan told them the serenity trance would help their blade-fist and their blade-path too. It married well to the science of combat that Sister tallow instructed them in. Nona saw the logic of it. But there was a piece missing.

Back in the village the children had always chased Nona for being dark where they were light, for being silent and watchful, outside the circle. They seldom caught her, but sometimes the bigs would come upon her unawares. Those were fights. Snarling, desperate, savage, and full of rage.

Control. How many times had Mistress Blade used that word in the class today?

In the Caltess Nona had been caught only once, by Denam, the red-haired gerant who ruled the attic, at least when Regol, swift and dark, wasn’t there to keep him in order. She had been in the narrow corridor leading to the exit that looked out over the rear of the stables block. Denam had come up behind her while she gazed at the two stallions being exercised. He had taken her forearms, one in each meaty fist. ‘What’ve we got here?’

Nona had kicked back hard and twisted for all she was worth. The contact hurt her foot more than it seemed to hurt the boy. He stood shy of six foot but his strength was iron: she couldn’t slip his grasp any more than she could lift the building. Snarling, she bent to bite his hand, managing to draw blood before he stretched out her arms painfully, putting his fists beyond reach.