Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor 1)

‘Try,’ said Nona. ‘You’re unlikely to get a better bed tomorrow night.’

The convent had chartered a boat to bear the ranging party to Harran Fens. It looked to Nona like the rowing boats the fishermen used on the White River, only ten times as long. It had a tall mast folded into the length of its hull and a sail wrapped tight; both would be raised for the return journey upstream, but to bear the novices to the fens the Rattle’s current was all that was required.

Nona, Ara, and Clera sat together in the prow, braving the weather. The wind’s blasts raised flurries of ripples across the river, driving them forward before overwhelming them and beating them flat again.

‘I’m going to be something,’ Clera said, not looking at either of them.

‘You are something,’ Nona said.

‘I wasn’t born to be a high Sis. I’m not a two-blood with prophecies hanging off my shoulders. But I’m going to be something. Whatever it takes.’

‘You sound as if you think we’re in your way,’ Ara said.

Clera looked around as if noticing them for the first time. ‘We’re a new generation in an old world. It’s all ours for the taking.’ She returned her gaze to the water. ‘It just requires that you pay the price. That’s how the world works. Trade and loss. Supply, demand, prices to be paid. At least that’s how it works for those of us who aren’t born with fortune written in our blood. You do things you don’t want to do, for people you don’t like, and you keep on doing them, because you know that one day things will change and you’ll be the one doing the telling.

‘I’ve got a plan. I can’t see how all the pieces fit yet, or even what all the pieces are yet.’ She held a gloved hand out as if the components lay there in her palm. ‘They’re bright and sparkling and complex – but somehow I’ll fit them all together, and on that day I’ll break the world and make another.’

Ara snorted. ‘Are you practising a part for a play, Clera? Or have you been sniffing what’s left of the stores Nona stole from the Poisoner?’

Clera put her head down. ‘I’m just saying what’s on my mind. What’s been on my mind for a long time. The ranging’s a dangerous thing, whatever they tell you. Not everyone makes it back. So if you’ve got something to say, the boat’s a good place to say it.’

Nona discovered that she didn’t have anything to say and they sat in silence.

The boat dropped anchor alongside an icy stretch of beach, the bank behind rising in an earth cliff to overhanging sod and ice-rimed bushes beyond. Jula was the first ordered ashore, jumping from the prow into the shallows. She looked a small and lonely figure, black against the shingle, waiting for the other novices as the boatmen struggled to keep their craft steady in the current.

Ruli was next off, followed by a stream of her classmates. Nona followed Ara. The shingle gave onto earth before reaching the six-foot bank. She scrambled up, muddy-handed. Before her the land stretched out towards a desolate expanse of frozen mire, spotted with bulrushes in brittle stands.

Tarkax came last, clearing the shallows with a leap from the side of the boat. He strode up the beach grinning. ‘I’m here to watch over that girl.’ A loud declaration, finger pointed squarely at Zole. ‘You, you, and you.’ He jabbed at the cluster of novices atop the bank. ‘I won’t lift a finger for. Nuns’ orders. Run into trouble and I’ll watch you die. So pretend I’m not here.’ He sprang up the bank in two bounds and ambled off to inspect the ground.

Sister Tallow addressed the novices from the boat’s prow. ‘You’ll need to get to the Kring within four days, novices.’ Behind her the boatmen busied themselves with the matter of turning their vessel about. ‘The countryside will be dangerous. It’s possible there will be Durnish raiding parties, but worse than them by far will be our own people. There’s not much that’s less predictable than a frightened peasant. They’ll be on edge, suspicious, ready to strike first and without warning. Our people may also be your salvation: the kindness of strangers is often all that sustains us. If your groups are too large you will be unlikely to find anyone to take you in. If they are too small you will be vulnerable to the ill-intentioned.’

The keel ground against the riverbed and two crewmen with long poles worked to turn the boat as it nosed out into the current. Sister Tallow raised her hand in farewell. ‘Ancestor go with you, girls.’

‘I hope the Ancestor is bringing sack of food and a warm tent.’ Nona managed a grin she didn’t feel. Seeing Darla struggling to climb the wet bank, she jumped down to help, only to find herself ankle-deep in freezing slime. ‘Bleed on it. I hate mud.’

Darla snorted a laugh and got up the bank by herself with a lunge.

The crewmen leaned on their poles, the boatman turned the rudder, and with a shifting of shingle the boat pulled forward into deeper water. The raised sail filled with the ice-wind and within the space of a minute Nona could cover Sister Tallow, the crew, then the whole boat all with one raised thumb at the end of an outstretched arm.

Suddenly very alone, despite her classmates grumbling on the bank, Nona looked down to see the mud starting to close over the tops of her shoes. ‘Damn.’

40

While the dozen novices argued over how many groups they should divide into and which of them would be in which group Nona took herself to the side and watched the river. She knew the direction they had to head in. East, down the Corridor. In the warmth of the convent it had sounded simple enough.

‘You’ll find your way easy – you grew up in the wild.’ Alata had mixed scorn with jealousy.

Nona hadn’t bothered to explain that when you lived in the Grey on the sharp edge of starvation you didn’t spend your days trekking through the wild, you spent it trying to scrape a living from the mean soil. The village had its hunters who took to the wild in search of game, but for every hunter with their forest-craft there were ten farmers who knew how the winds turned and what to plant where who had never gone more than five miles from the earth-floored hut where their mothers had brought them squalling into the world.

When your path lay between two mile-high walls of ice it sounded hard to get lost. But on the ground with a forest rising about you it was easy to wander a random spider’s crawl, lost in the space of a few dozen acres, despite your best efforts to steer a straight course. The Corridor might be a scant fifty miles wide, but walking it, with your view hemmed in by tree and hill, it might as well be ten thousand miles wide. Nona thought of the globe in Sister Rule’s classroom: Abeth in white with its narrow girdle of colour, so thin you might miss it at first glance. So many things depended on perspective – on where you stood, and when.

In her class Sister Pan had shown the novices those drawings that the mind could see two ways, or three, or even four. Serenity, clarity, patience were all like that. Nothing changed except the way you looked at the world. One minute you saw it as you had always seen it, but with a mental step to the left, and with the right perspective, everything could flip, everything could find a new interpretation and in a moment the whole world would change.

Nona wondered if the same were true with the wider mysteries of the world. Could Abbess Glass look upon the tangled mess of church and court politics, on the complex web of favour and obligation, and with a small change in the way she saw it, a new emphasis on some seemingly unimportant interaction, suddenly perceive it with new clarity? See it as some simple engine that applying pressure here, pressure there, could drive in the direction of her desires?