Grey Sister (Book of the Ancestor 2)

“I can’t. Appy and the abbess need me. The convent needs me.” Kettle bit her knuckle, hard. “I just can’t.”

Nona started to run into the night.

“I’ll delay them,” Kettle called in a low voice. “Stay safe, little sister. Be careful.”

Moments later Nona was jogging along a rough track towards the Verity Road, everything she owned in a sack bouncing on her back, everyone she knew, everything she cared about, retreating behind her.

An hour later, running through rough fields of rain-lashed mud, she came to the margins of a wood and halted among the trees. The cold wrapped her, her stomach growled, her feet ached. An emptiness gnawed inside her, a sense of loss, of failure. She set her back to the trunk of a pine and the tears came. Wracking sobs that hurt her chest.

She cried for an hour.

You should have killed her when I said.

Nona didn’t have to ask who. Joeli had played her from the start. The girl had pulled her strings, her threads too, perhaps, but Nona wasn’t sure of that. Joeli had goaded her into those caves, taunting her about Hessa, knowing the punishment, and knowing all the time that the moment Nona set foot in the place where her friend had died her intrusion would be known. Nona had been a fool.

You should have murdered her that first day.

Yes. Nona wiped her eyes and set her mouth in a grim line. I probably should have.

20

WHERE WILL YOU go?

I don’t know. Nona had no idea. Crouching in the margins of a damp forest wasn’t a good long-term plan. It wasn’t even a good short-term plan.

You’ll need to steal food.

Probably.

You’ll have to kill them.

Who?

The people you steal the food from. You don’t want any witnesses to lead your enemies after you. Keot sounded quite cheerful about the whole thing.

Just a line of corpses to lead them instead?

You should go to the city. Keot had enjoyed their trip to Verity.

That’s where the Tower of Inquiry is. I’m not difficult to spot. Sister Rose had tried to reverse the effect the black cure had on Nona’s eyes several times, but none of her potions had any noticeable effect. Nona had been disappointed at the time but now those failures were taking on more importance. There’s nowhere I won’t be discovered.

In the east dawn made a sullen approach, shading the black sky towards grey. Nona’s legs hurt, she was tired, cold despite her windbreak and range-coat, and her stomach had started to grumble even though she wouldn’t have had breakfast yet.

“I’m going to have to leave the empire. I could take a ship to Durn . . .” She wriggled her fingers in the pockets of her coat, remembering that such things cost and that she had no money. “Or cross over the border into Scithrowl.”

Or go back to kill Joeli, and then her friends, and the inquisitor, and his underlings.

Nona felt cold and tired rather than murderous. Joeli had been the architect of her downfall, but it was Nona’s own stupidity she had used to do it. Still, given the chance, Nona felt she would enjoy breaking Joeli’s other knee.

With the world revealing itself around her, Nona set off eastwards, cutting across country in case the Inquisition had guards on the roads. She dug a heel of bread from her coat pocket—she always kept some supplies against the possibility of night-time hunger pangs—and chewed as she walked. The world might have narrowed but it was still a big place and somewhere in it there would be a spot for her.

She looked back just once, towards the Rock where Ara and her other friends lay sleeping. “I will come back.”

* * *

• • •

FOR THE FIRST day Nona kept off any track larger than a deer trail. She walked due east beneath a grey sky with the Corridor wind at her shoulders. At one farm she stole eggs from the nest box, quieting a mean-eyed hound with the whispering trick that Ruli had taught her. Some work of marjal empathy no doubt, though Ruli never mentioned the blood, just saying that the power was in whispering the right kind of nonsense.

Later she took a whole hen from the yard of another farm, wringing its neck and running when a fieldhand came shouting from an outhouse. She sat in her bivouac that night beneath a roof of branches and heaped bracken, staring at the bird.

You don’t want it now?

I don’t want it raw.

You ate those eggs raw.

I didn’t want to. And this is different.

So cook it. Keot seemed disinterested but her hunger did appear to annoy him, as if he felt an echo of it.

Nona looked away from the heap of feathers, scanning the trees and the shadows gathering amid the undergrowth. All day she’d had the feeling she was being followed, but she was unused to such open spaces after years spent within the convent and it was likely just nerves that set the skin between her shoulderblades crawling, even when Keot was not sitting there.

Nona dropped her gaze to her open hand. The dark thread that now bound her, however tenuously, to her shadow lay in the groove that her life-line made across her palm. The old women in the village had read palms. All of them except Nana Even who said it was superstitious nonsense, and read the entrails of rabbits instead. Nona knew that such threads could be followed. Sherzal’s men had somehow followed the threads to discover Nona as a child, their thread-worker leading troops almost to her doorstep. But how someone pursued a thread Nona had no idea. Her shadow’s thread didn’t run through the forest like a trail of string unwound behind a cautious explorer. Instead, like every other thread, it led off at curious angles to the world, requiring steps that no feet of blood and bone could take if it was to be followed. If she were still at Sweet Mercy Nona would have asked Sister Pan and been taught the techniques required. But the convent lay miles behind and forbidden. The thread in her hand was less the solution to a problem, and more a reminder of what she had lost. Still, she would try to be open to whatever pull the thread might exert, to let it guide her. Perhaps it would steer her choices and take her by strange paths to where she wished to go.

* * *

• • •

SISTER TALLOW HAD taught the novices how to make fire with stick, twine and kindling, and Nona with her hunska speed had always been good at it in the convent. Out in the dampness of the forest though, with the wind complaining through the trees, it proved impossible to reproduce her success. Finally, with one of Clera’s favourite curses, she threw down the stick, one end steaming gently, and let the wind steal what leaves and moss she’d gathered.

Find a peasant and take their fire.

If the last hut she’d seen were any closer Nona might just have followed Keot’s advice. Instead she crouched and wondered what the others were doing back at Sweet Mercy. They would have eaten by now, stuffed themselves with stew and bread. In Grey dormitory Ara, Ruli and Jula might still be wondering about her. In Mystic dormitory Darla would be stomping around and Zole would be sitting silently as if nothing had changed. And Joeli . . . Joeli would be in her corner surrounded by her friends, laughing and joking about how she had got that stupid peasant run off the Rock. Anger flooded through Nona, sudden and unexpected in its ferocity, a red tide rising.

“I think I will have a fire.”