Denam squared up against Nona, his hatred for her obvious even as he tried to laugh at her efforts. Nona stood her ground and the crowd drew in its breath. Denam swung with an arm that looked as thick around as Markus’s chest. The fist he drove at Nona was the size of her skull.
She took the punch in the face, her head snapping to the right. The follow-up came from the left, snapping her head back the other way. Markus imagined those fists would shatter a skull, leave cheekbones in fragments, break a neck …
Nona looked up at the fighter towering above her and smiled, her teeth unbloodied. Denam seemed astonished, the crowd roared in wonder. Magic? But Markus had sensed no enchantment, not the slightest crackle of it. He could only imagine that she had moved her head at the same speed as the fists seeking it, allowing only a gentle contact.
Again Nona peppered the same spot below Denam’s ribs with half a dozen blows in the space of a heartbeat or two. She leapt back, rolling under a sweeping hand, rising in the same motion, kicking at her target, evading a second questing hand and spinning to land another kick in the same spot.
Denam came towards her, his own roar louder than the mob. As he advanced he favoured his left side. A small thing that could easily pass unnoticed. Nona twisted clear, bounced off two sets of ropes and landed a flying kick, just below his ribs.
For long minutes the fight continued, Denam’s attacks almost brushing Nona’s pale skin but never quite finding it. Nona landing a score of punches and kicks on her target, perhaps two score. Denam’s rage grew, his face crimson, spitting and foaming, howling threats and promises. But he crouched over the injured side now, the bruised lower ribs, covering them with his elbow. He leaned against the corner post, hitching in a breath.
‘Come on, big boy.’ Nona’s first words in the fight.
They worked like a spark to flash-powder. Denam threw himself forward with a scream. Nona dived beneath his outstretched arms, rolled head over heels between his legs, through the opening left as fury overcame caution, and drove her heel into his groin with all the speed and strength she possessed.
Denam made it two more strides before he realized that Nona was no longer in front of him, and a further stride before the pain hit home. The gerant’s legs forgot whatever orders they had and dropped him to the planks where he curled around his agony, blind to the world.
Nona sprang to her feet, the fight still in her face, teeth bared. With the awful gale of Denam’s hatred subsumed into his wordless agony, Markus could now feel Nona’s emotions and found himself rocked back upon his heels by the raw animal aggression bleeding off her. He had experienced something similar when a wrong turn had taken him to the dog-pits beyond the walls of Old Town. A bloodied mastiff with its jaws locked around the throat of another hound had given off the same explosive violence that the novice did. Markus fully expected Nona to fall upon her prey, gouging Denam’s eyes from their sockets or stamping his face to pulp. But instead, in the space of five deep breaths, she drew it all back in, every piece, until there was nothing he could read above the mixed sea of emotion all around him. Of all that he’d seen that night it was this quenching of fury that was the most remarkable to him.
Ignoring the cheers, and the fight-master coming to question or reward her, Nona vaulted the ropes and dropped into the crowd. Within moments she was at Markus’s side, vibrant, sweat-soaked, alive, the alien blackness of her eyes level with his.
‘You came,’ she said.
Markus shrugged. ‘You asked me to.’
1
Holy Class
Present Day
Markus had grown beyond Nona’s expectations. She remembered a fierce spiky-haired farm-boy who had welcomed her to Giljohn’s cage by demanding her age and had appeared to find comfort in establishing his seniority over her. A bad beginning, but his affection for the child-taker’s mule had softened her opinion of him by the end of their journey. Now he stood a solid six foot two, handsome in a friendly way, a face that would laugh with you. The black hair had been tamed with oil and lay flat to his skull in the way of monks. The only sign of the boy from the cage was a sharpness to his features and a quickness in the dark eyes that studied her.
Nona had wrapped her cloak around her once more. Sweat stuck the material to her back, making her uncomfortable, or perhaps that was just the frankness of Markus’s regard. She offered a smile in return for his and hugged her hands under her arms. Her knuckles ached from repeatedly punching Denam. Nona was sure she’d punched practice timbers that were softer than the gerant’s side. She felt good though, her body glowing, her step so light that with a little effort she might just shrug off gravity entirely.
She leaned in. ‘Let’s talk outside.’
Markus nodded. They pushed a path towards the main doors. Already the Caltess’s patrons were flocking back to the second ring. A couple of hulking apprentices were helping Denam over the ropes of the first.
‘I’m surprised the convent lets novices come down here to fight,’ Markus said behind her.
‘They don’t.’ Nona slipped between the doors as they opened to admit more thrill-seekers.
‘Why did you—’ Markus broke off to draw his robes around him, the black habit of a Holy Brother. He followed her out into rain-laced wind, a loud brrr escaping at the cold shock of it.
‘An old dispute that needed settling,’ Nona said. It was partly true. Mostly she had wanted to hit someone, hard, again and again. Markus probably knew that already; classified Church reports named him as one of the most effective marjal empaths currently in the Ancestor’s service.
Nona led Markus around the corner of the great hall where they would be sheltered from the gale. The walls loomed dark above them, the sky crossed with tatters of cloud beneath the crimson spread of a thousand dying stars.
‘Why did you want me? Send the message, I mean?’ Markus seemed less sure of himself than she had expected. Someone who could read her like a book should be more confident? She certainly wished her own empath skills would tell her more of his mood than she could glean from the intensity of his stare or the tight line of his lips.
‘That day at the Academy.’ The words blurted from her. ‘Did you make that girl attack me?’ Nona forced her mouth closed. She had had it all planned out, what she would say, how, when. And now her idiot tongue had cut through all of it.
‘She … she was already attacking you.’ Guilt came from him in waves.
‘She was using the darkness to scare me. Or trying to. But then she went mad.’ Nona remembered how an animal fury had risen across the girl’s face. ‘You did that!’
‘I did.’ A frown now, his brow pale and beaded with rain.
‘She tried to shadow-rend me. I could have been torn apart!’
Markus raised his hands. ‘I made her angry. I didn’t know she could do that.’
‘Well, she could!’ Nona felt her own anger rising from the well she thought emptied in the ring.
‘I’m sorry.’ He looked down.
‘But …’ It felt like honesty, but Nona supposed he could fake that better than anyone she’d ever known. ‘Why?’
‘Abbot Jacob told me to.’
‘Jacob?’ A chill ran through Nona. ‘High Priest Jacob? I mean the one who used to be?’