Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor 1)

Were friendships like that? Could Nona step outside the mystery of her entanglements with Ara and with Clera and see from some new vantage something simple and understandable?

Behind her it sounded as if things were being resolved. She would be with Ara, Clera, and Ruli. Jula with Alata, Leeni, and Zole; with the others in a third group. Argument resurged over the initial routes for each group. Nobody wanted to head through the fens. All three groups wanted to trek upstream to the pine forest they’d passed on the way, hoping to find sheltered paths through. The dispute took an hour to resolve and Nona suspected that in good weather they would have wrangled for days.

‘That looks bad!’ Darla raised an arm to the west. A dark bank of cloud had been advancing on them for a while but now they saw the white wall trailing beneath it.

‘Ice-storm.’ Zole scowled. ‘We should make for the woods.’ She turned to go, ignoring protests that they couldn’t all go that way.

‘That looks worse!’ Nona squinted. There were figures, perhaps a dozen of them, advancing along the banks further downstream, running ahead of the storm, chesting through bushes.

‘Durns?’ Ara joined Nona on the highest point of the bank. ‘Are those spears?’

‘Run!’ Jula wasn’t given to issuing commands but everyone obeyed this one. Even Tarkax.

Moments later the whole ranging party was sprinting towards the distant treeline. Nona kept her eyes forward, concentrating on the ground ahead. The squall took them all by surprise. One instant they were racing for the trees and the dark spaces between, the next instant the wind rose white about them, a howling swirl laden with sharp fragments of ice. Visibility reduced to arm’s length, the wind’s roar drowning out shouts and screams. Buffeted and blinded, Nona swiftly lost any sense of direction. When a tree loomed at her she barely avoided running straight into it.

What followed was a nightmare of running and hiding and falling ice. Within a hundred yards the blindness of the storm had been replaced by the blindness of the forest, the pines so tight-packed that Nona could hardly squeeze between them. Dry branches raked her as she forced a passage. The wind’s rage and the thrashing of tree-tops allowed only the edges of distant shouts to reach her. Imagination filled every shadowed space with Durnishmen, wild-eyed, knives and axes ready.

When the storm relented Nona found herself cold, exhausted, wet, and alone. She broke from the forest an hour later and tried to orient herself. Eventually she found a trail and followed it.

Nona trudged on, bowed against the wind, feet numb in damp and muddy shoes. Here and there the wheel-ruts lay full of brown water, rotten ice breaking beneath her tread if she put a foot wrong. Her eyes watched the road, her thoughts chased the others. Images rose of her friends skewered on Durnish spears. She shook them from her head. Ruli and Jula would run. Clera and Ara would feed a Durn his own spear. They’d be all right, and the best way to find them again was to head towards their goal. If they had fallen in the forest she could wander aimlessly among the trees for a month and still not stumble upon them.

Nona followed the tracks with most evidence of recent traffic. She knew at this distance it was sufficient to head for the Grey, and that would be hard to miss if she kept generally east and a little north. She checked her directions to the next town with an elderly charcoal burner, located by the thin stream of his smoke slanting through the trees, and later with a farmer bringing a score of ragged goats in off the moor. The farmer offered Nona a place by his hearth, but she mistrusted his eyes, fever-bright above high cheekbones. Neither man had word of her friends.

Nona watched for more raiders – in fact she watched for anyone at all. The charcoal man had wrung his soot-dark hands and warned of Durnish pirates marauding the fringes, killing the old and taking the young to sell in the flesh-markets in Durn. But Nona didn’t feel too unsafe. The raiders were at her back. With the ice-wind blowing, all but the most desperate among the peasantry had taken a break from their labours to hide inside their homes, waiting for the weather to break. The Corridor was never as empty as when the ice-wind blew, and whilst the wind might carry a killing edge, at least it delivered a clear view of any stranger approaching bearing killing edges of their own.

As the light failed and a new wildness infected the wind Nona found a drystone wall to shelter behind. It had been built as a windbreak for sheep and several of the beasts huddled there when she arrived. They watched her with goggling eyes, rectangular-pupiled and wholly lacking in comprehension, but they soon reached an accommodation: she would ignore them, they would ignore her, and all of them would crowd together out of the gale.

The wall was an ancient thing, perhaps older than the scraps of woodland close by, built in years when the wind blew too fierce for any tree to raise its head. Nona had considered making her camp in the copse that ran back along the stream, but the sheep preferred to keep clear of the trees and she mistrusted the closeness of them, the slow knowledge of their growing and their endless creaking.

Nona sat there in the gathering darkness, wrapped in coat and blanket with her back to the wall and the moan of the wind across the slopes and the singing of the wind among the trees and the sharp whisper of the wind between the stones. Around her the sheep shuffled their cloven feet to press themselves close.

The sky grew clear. She ate half of her remaining food – hard bread and a boiled egg – then went to sleep hungry.

The wind spoke through her dreams, sometimes pulling her from them, only to release her into the next. And although each dream was different from the one before, some dark, some wild, some full of disconnected joy, a thread ran through them all, marrying one to the next. A single twisting line, dividing and joining, running unbroken like the flowing script from Sister Kettle’s quill, spelling out word upon word until the words became a river and the river a story and the story her life.

The dream faded, so completely she could hardly be sure there had ever been a dream, but the thread remained, and the thread was the Path and the Path led her to the moment. Nona opened her eyes. The eastern sky held the very faintest hint of a glow. She had slept through the focus moon, through the shifting and grunting of the sheep, through the wind and the sleet. Somewhere in the night a bright sound had broken across the wind’s voice. Metal on metal. Nona moved slowly to her knees and peered through the gap between two stones at the top of the wall. To her left the ridge was a black suggestion against the darkest grey of the sky. To her right the field sloped down towards a thin stream and the straggling copse.

By the treeline a complication of shadow drew her attention. She watched, eyes narrowed. There’s nothing so good as a night-dark forest for taking your imagination and giving it form. Nothing. Just black shapes and silence. Even so, one by one the sheep left the wall’s shelter and trotted away along the slope, angling towards the ridge.

Nona didn’t follow. She had no reason to break cover, no reason to offer motion to any enemy who might be lurking.

The dawn’s light spread with agonizing slowness, touching one thing from black to grey, touching the next, making two branches from one threatening limb, making a half-fallen trunk from a silent and watchful monster. As the sun lit the ridge it brought with it the suggestion of green beneath the thin and patchy ice. And still, though it advanced moment upon moment, the light failed to make sense of the dark tangle where the first trees stepped from the field.