Holy Sister (Book of the Ancestor 3)

‘Done.’ Zole pushed Nona back, the base of her palm against Nona’s sternum.

Nona staggered and Ara kept her from falling with help from Kettle. The heart-light caught their faces, making something alien of them both.

‘Are you all right?’ Kettle asked.

‘I …’ Nona stood straight, stamped her leg. It still ached but the flesh had been made whole, a white line of scar tissue marking the passage of Yisht’s blade. ‘Yes.’ The voices that had filled her mind became jumbled together once more, fading back into the shadows.

‘Go on.’ Kettle sent Nona back towards the abbess and the rest of the group, giving her shoulder a small shove to get her going.

By the time Nona reached the ruins of the carriage that they had escaped the palace in she was calm again, her serenity intact.

‘How do you feel?’ The abbess watched Nona’s eyes with an uncomfortable intensity.

‘I don’t know,’ Nona said. ‘Tired. But full of energy. If that makes sense.’ She looked back down at her leg, the scar visible through the tattered smock. The cold no longer touched her. ‘I don’t know how Zole can stand it.’ Part of her wanted to tell the abbess about the devil she had seen at Zole’s wrist when she first arrived with the shipheart. She bit down on the impulse. She had lived with Keot for years and Zole hadn’t informed on her. Zole would have to deal with her own demons. The abbess probably couldn’t help in any case. And the inquisitors with her would want to burn the devil out of Zole.

Abbess Glass took Nona’s hand and led her back to the main group. ‘You’re mended? You can walk the distance now?’

‘I could run it!’ Ara caught them up, her hair rising around her head as if backcombed, a blonde confusion defying the wind. She had a wild look in her eye. Nona met her gaze and a grin broke across both their faces, a shared understanding, and something more complex that perhaps neither understood. Nona wanted to run with her, to chase her. Wanted her friend.

The three of them turned to see Kettle silhouetted against the shipheart’s glow, Zole on one knee, applying the heart to the nun’s inner thigh. Kettle broke away with a cry after just a moment’s contact. She came hurrying down the road, not glancing back. She moved quickly, though still with a slight limp.

‘Sister Kettle?’ The abbess stepped forward to meet her.

‘Mother …’ Kettle’s wide eyes sought the abbess as though she were night-blind.

‘Here.’ Abbess Glass took the nun’s hands. ‘You’re safe.’

Nona raised her brows at the enormity of that lie but said nothing.

‘I can’t go near it again. I can’t.’ Kettle shot a glance over her shoulder as if Zole might be approaching with the shipheart even now.

‘It’s all right, sister.’ The abbess led them further away. ‘I need you to protect us as we journey west. Even if all Sherzal’s forces follow the shipheart towards the ice the empire roads are no longer a safe place for the vulnerable. And unguarded Sis lords are likely to be a tempting prize to any bandits we might pass.’

‘But Zole …’

‘Zole will have her Shield.’

3

Holy Class

Present Day

After leaving Markus at the Caltess Nona ran to the city gates. She covered the five miles from Verity’s walls to the foot of the Rock of Faith at a near sprint. The burning of her muscles and the hot thrill of her blood battled the night wind’s chill.

Doubt dogged her footsteps, each mile and each yard. The voices of her suspicion were almost as real, almost as disembodied as Keot’s voice had been when he lived beneath her skin. Will he be true? Can he be trusted? Questions Nona had no answer for, just the feeling in her gut. Clera betrayed you, the voices whispered, and she was a friend.

‘She saved me too.’ Panted out between breaths as Nona picked up her pace, trying to outrun her doubts.

Nona shook her head, sweat flying in the wind. She was to be a nun. She would choose from the disciplines offered to her. Just a handful of final tests stood between her and the vows. She was to stand her life upon a foundation of faith. Faith that the branches of the Ancestor’s tree would hold her, and that those branches would carry all of humanity into a future less dark than they feared. If a nun could not have faith then who could? The bonds of friendship had always borne her more firmly than those of blood. Markus had ridden with her in the cage and that bond would suffice. She had faith that it would. Also she had a back-up plan. With a gasp of effort she ran faster still, until any that she might have passed on the road that night would have stood amazed and watched her fly.

At last she came to a halt, breathing heavily. The base of a great limestone cliff rose above her. From its heights the southern windows of Blade Hall offered a view of the city and, twenty miles beyond, the ice glimmering red beneath the moon. Those walls were closer now than they had been when Abbess Glass had first brought Nona to the convent. North and south the ice squeezed and all the nations of the Corridor bled.

The start of the Seren Way lay close at hand, just a few minutes’ walk around the Rock, but Wheel had taken to watching it of late. The old woman spent whole nights seated at the narrowest part, wrapped in a great blanket and staring at the night with watery eyes, just waiting to catch any errant novice. Why she didn’t just check the dormitories was unclear but Ruli claimed Wheel had been made to vow never to enter the building under the tenure of the previous abbess following an unspecified ‘incident’. Ruli claimed a novice had been killed, but when pressed she had to admit making that part up.

Nona craned her neck and looked up at the dark acreage of stone. Here and there moonlight picked out a line where it caught upon an edge of rock. She took a deep breath, swung her arms, and began to climb. She followed an old fault line, digging her leather-clad toes into the crack, reaching up for fingerholds. Her flaw-blades would make a quicker, easier job of it but Nona had learned the danger in relying too much on something that might not always be there. Besides, the pattern of regular slots driven into the rock might be spotted one day, and it would be hard to deny her own signature.

As she gained height Nona’s arms began to join her legs in complaint. Her hands ached from punching Denam over and over. The thought of him falling gave her fresh energy, though. She had wanted to fight him for years. She could say it was to take him down a peg or three, punishment for being a bully, or that it was payment for his attempt to break her in the ring on the instructions of Raymel Tacsis. The truth though was something less laudable, and came in two parts, both now settling into her mind as truths often do when a head is empty of all things save the demands of hard labour.

Nona had fought Denam because even with Keot gone a hunger for violence burned in her and if left unfed too long it would break out in dangerous ways. Much of what she had blamed on Raymel’s devil seemed instead to be some fundamental part of who she had grown into. Denam represented that rare someone, a person she could hit over and over without the danger of killing them, or any need for remorse over pain inflicted.

The other reasons for the contest had been Markus and Regol. She had asked Markus to break holy law. She owed it to him to show him who he was breaking those rules for. And Regol … Regol needed to see it too. Regol who spoke foolishness into the pillows when she joined him beneath the roof that Partnis Reeve put over his head. Regol who thought her something precious, as holy as the vows she broke. He needed to see what really lay behind the eyes he claimed to lose himself in. Something sharp-angled and vicious – not the princess he sometimes let himself pretend she was. Nona knew better than to allow him to build his hopes upon a lie. Regol fulfilled a need, as Denam had, one in the ring, one in the furs. She and Regol were friends whose bodies were pleasing to each other. She couldn’t let a friend build their hopes upon such a flawed foundation as her. She hadn’t saved Saida, or Hessa, or Darla. Even as an agent of vengeance she had failed. Sherzal, the architect behind so many deaths, still walked the world, as did others who had served her will.