Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor 1)

‘No I don’t care.’

‘She was trying to steal the shipheart, Ara,’ Ruli said. ‘And you hate her.’ Ruli looked as though she were trying to convince herself as much as Ara.

‘She’s probably going to murder us all if she sees us again, and I doubt we could stop her, so I really don’t care if she dies in there.’ Clera set the barrel rolling and ducked after it out into the ice-wind. ‘Come on!’

39

‘She’s gone!’ Ruli came bustling up to the Grey table, the refectory loud with the usual lunchtime chatter. ‘Rattling her way down Vinery Stair as we speak!’

‘Thank the Ancestor for that!’ Ara glanced towards Zole at the far end of the table. The girl had her head down, attacking her food.

‘Thank the Ancestor,’ Hessa said, uncharacteristically pious. She reached up to rub her neck. ‘I never want to see that woman again.’

Nona nodded, finding her own hand at her neck, touching the bruises there. Hessa had said that the thread-link between them should fade away given time, and Nona had thought it was doing so, but Hessa had suffered through every bit of Nona’s choking. It was pure luck that nobody in the dormitory had woken and rushed to fetch Sister Rose: the dose of boneless Hessa had tested helped there, stopping her thrashing and making a noise. But for that, the novices’ absence would have been noticed and the whole plan discovered. ‘We’ve just got to make sure the abbess finds out what she was up to now.’ Nona scooped more scrambled egg into her mouth, began to say more and thought better of it.

‘Let them notice she’s gone first,’ Ara said. ‘They’ll check her room. They’ll discover the shaft then. When they do it should be easy enough to tell.’

Nona had been expecting the abbess or at least Sister Pan to come and talk to her about her revelations. She’d been hiding her blades since the day of her arrival. Now, to have them discovered one day and ignored the next and the next left her puzzled. Ara had gone on about how rare a thing any three-blood was, and the Academics had certainly seemed impressed with the discovery. But the abbess had just sat in her house ignoring Nona, doing whatever it was she did in there, and then left for the palace. Was anyone even going to train her to use her marjal talent for anything other than shadow-work?

A cheer went up. ‘Time?’

‘Two hundred and six,’ Ara called down.

Nona blinked. Far below, partly obscured by Nona’s toes, Clera was doing her victory dance. A new personal best for completing the blade-path, and a new record for the current Grey Class to boot. She’d beaten Croy’s record by four counts.

‘Your turn!’ Ara pulled the lever to arrest the pendulum and reset the dial.

‘Bleed this!’ Nona swung her legs up onto the platform and walked with sticky feet to the start of the course. ‘I’m going to do it this time.’

She stepped out, cautious, feeling her way. As ever, the whole blade-path felt as if it were somebody else’s glove, something that refused to fit her no matter what she did. And if it were a glove then it wasn’t just a case of being the wrong size for her, it was the wrong hand too. With too few fingers!

Nona got just past the halfway point. A record for her at least. And fell with a wail of frustration.

Clera, still by the lower stop-lever, followed Nona back up the long flight of wooden stairs offering advice. Nona ignored her.

The ice will come, the ice will close

She called on her serenity mantra. She’d found serenity while in the agony of a marjal-quantal blood-war.

No moon, no moon

She’d found serenity under the critical eyes of a score of Academics.

We’ll all fall down, we’ll all fall down

She’d found serenity in the face of Luta gathering shadows to strike terror into her heart.

Soon, too soon.

‘Shut up!’ Nona spun on a step, Clera nearly running into her. ‘Shut up, Clera, or I swear I’ll push you down these stairs.’

Clera stepped back, hands raised. ‘Fine, all right. I was just trying to help.’ Hurt in her voice, her expression hard to see in the stairwell’s gloom.

Nona turned back and continued to stamp up the steps.

We’ll all fall down, we’ll all fall down …

When she was up on the platform once more Nona stood with her back against the wall rather than sitting at the edge with the others. She stared at the blade-path, ignoring everything, her mantra trembling unvoiced behind her lips.

‘It’s your turn.’ Clera, braving Nona’s threat, stood from the edge and came to wave her hand before Nona’s face. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine.’ Nona stepped forward. She stopped just before the pipe, her feet black with resin. ‘I’m serene.’ She took her first step. ‘I’m so fucking serene that if I miss my footing I’ll just walk on the air instead.’

Nona felt as if she were wrapped in a blanket of golden light. She saw the world both with perfect ease and as if she were viewing it from the end of a long tunnel, removed from the currents of its need, distant from its immediacy.

She took a step. Took three more. Another.

And fell. She thought she might waft like a feather, but she plummeted as fast as ever. The only difference was that she didn’t mind so much.

Clera fell off before Nona had even reached the lever to time her run. She bounced and flipped over the edge of the net, landing on her feet. ‘Too eager. Always happens after I complete.’ She paused. ‘Anyway, I have to rush, Flinty’s taking me to town.’ Her smile dropped away. ‘Father’s back in Rutter – that’s the jail they put him in when all this started, the worst one.’

‘I thought they were about to clear him?’ Nona would never understand the details of the case. It wasn’t debt as she understood it – the debts of friendship and duty – Clera’s father seemed to be caught in a shifting miasma of paper debts, penalty clauses, interest, dividends, and fines.

‘It’s all politics.’ Clera shook her head, her victory on the blade-path washed away. ‘I’m scared he’ll die in there. It’s not a good place. Rats and disease. And his main creditor has filed for twenty lashes and more fines …’

‘I hope he’s all right.’ Nona reached out to touch Clera’s shoulder. ‘I’m sorry I shouted at you.’

Clera managed a grin, eyes bright. She stuck her tongue out, turned on a heel, and hurried off to meet with Sister Flint and the other novices allowed into Verity with an escort.

Nona kept at her blade-path practice until lunch, with others coming and going. She had ten tries and got no further than a third of the way. The pipes swung wrong, the sections revolved wrong, the whole thing was just wrong. No matter how slowly she took it, how carefully … the ground just kept reaching up to claim her.

She joined the others at the Grey table, last to lunch, which had never happened before. Clera sat alone at the far end of the table staring at nothing over a bowl of soup. Nona went to join her.

‘How did it go?’ Nona reached for bread and started to ladle soup from the great glazed bowl between them.

‘Family’s important, isn’t it?’ Clera’s gaze didn’t move from the nothing that had trapped it.