Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor 1)

7

Nona resolved to make it to Blade on time. Over lunch in the refectory Clera explained the meaning of the various bells that sounded throughout the day.

‘There are three bells. That’s the iron bell, Ferra, which just rang. It’s got a hollow sound and dies off quickly. That’s for the sisters, to tell them about prayers mainly. It hangs in the little belfry up on the Dome of the Ancestor. The one that looks like a nipple.’

‘Clera!’ Jula scolded. She had taken the chair on Nona’s other side and now turned to join the conversation. ‘Bray is the brass bell that hangs in the Academia, at the top of the tower. It sounds the hours, and that’s what you have to listen to for class and meals.’

‘And lights out and getting up.’ Clera cut back in. ‘Bray has a deep voice that hangs.’ She made her own deep and sonorous, a singer’s voice, Nona thought. ‘Afternoon class is sixth bell, lunch is fifth, dinner is seventh.’

‘Blade this afternoon.’ Jula rolled her eyes. ‘I hate Blade.’

‘Holies always do.’ Clera smirked.

Nona considered Jula for a moment. The girl had a studious look about her, slender despite more than a year eating at the convent table. She had mousey hair, cut at neck length. Nothing about her suggested that hunska or gerant blood might show in years to come. Almost nobody showed up quantal or marjal, however good the signs, so Jula would almost certainly be a Holy Sister. Nona knew very little about the Church of the Ancestor but the idea of a life spent in prayer and contemplation held no appeal at all. If the life in question didn’t also include being well fed and having a warm safe place to live then Nona might have felt sorry for the girl.

‘After Blade you’ll think you’ve met the hardest mistress,’ Clera said. ‘But Mistress Shade makes her seem gentle. Everyone calls her the Poisoner or Mistress Poison because she always has us grinding up stuff for one poison or another. She’s supposed to teach us stealth, disguise, and climbing and traps … but it’s always poison. Anyway, don’t ever call her Mistress Poison.’ Clera shuddered.

Jula nodded, looking grim. She picked up her fork and got it halfway to her mouth before remembering the bells. ‘Bitel is the third bell. The steel bell.’ She returned the fork to her plate, perhaps still thinking of poisons. ‘That’s almost always bad news, and you won’t confuse it for the others – it’s sharp and very loud. The abbess will ring Bitel if there’s a fire, or an intruder, or something like that. Hope you never hear it. But if you do and if nobody tells you different, go to the abbess’s front door and wait.’

‘I heard …’ The girl across the table spoke up, loud enough for everyone to hear. ‘I heard the abbess herself brought you up from Verity.’ The rest of the class had been focused on Arabella who had been telling them some story about the emperor’s court. Nona had only caught the odd word and had imagined it a fairy tale of the sort told about princesses around the hearth in her village … but then she had remembered Clera calling Arabella royalty and it struck her that the fairy story might actually be true.

‘I heard Abbess Glass brought you up the Seren Way in the middle of the night.’ The speaker was the one Clera had called Ghena and had said was the youngest in the class, a girl with a tightly curled cap of short, black hair. In the village Grey Stephen had a staff that had been his father’s and his father’s: where so many hands had polished the dark wood for so long it was the colour of Ghena’s skin. ‘I heard you’re a peasant. Where are you from? How did your people even pay the confirmation fee?’

‘I—’ Nona found she had the whole table’s attention. Even Arabella broke off her tale to stare.

‘You hear too much, Ghena.’ Clera cupped both hands behind her ears and laughed. ‘You were at the window all night looking to see “the Chosen One” arrive.’ She tilted her head just a fraction in Arabella’s direction. ‘Did you see the abbess going by with dust on her skirts and know she’d come up by Seren Way?’

Ghena scowled and looked away.

After lunch, and before Bray spoke for the sixth time that day to let them know they must hurry to class, there was time to wander or to sit. Arabella left the refectory with most of the class at her heels.

‘They’ll take her to the novice cloisters,’ Clera said.

‘It’s where most of us spend time after lunch,’ Jula explained. ‘It’s not like the nuns’ cloisters – it’s full of chat – too loud to think.’ She looked disapproving where Clera looked wistful.

‘We’ll take you to the sinkhole,’ Clera said. ‘You missed it today—’

‘I’m not swimming!’ Ruli interrupted, the last of those who’d stayed.

‘Me neither.’ Jula crossed her arms and pretended to shiver.

‘We’ll just sit and throw stones,’ Clera declared. ‘And my new friend Nona can tell us why her parents gave her up.’

The Glasswater sinkhole awed Nona. It looked as if some giant had poked a finger into the plateau when it was soft and new, leaving a perfectly round depression whose vertical stone walls dropped forty feet to the surface of dark and unrippled waters. She wondered what lay beneath the surface – hiding in unknowable depths.

The pool was about forty foot across. On the far side an iron ladder, bolted to the stone, led down into it. Nona could see the layers that Sister Rule had mentioned, showing in the sinkhole’s walls, as if the whole plateau were made of one thin slice laid atop the next.

The four novices sat on the edge, legs dangling out over the drop. Nona’s shoes were the finest pair she had ever owned, the only ones made of leather. She was terrified she’d lose them and clenched her toes inside, even though they were laced on tight. For a while none of them spoke. Clera played a copper penny across the backs of her fingers with practised ease. Nona enjoyed the silence. She didn’t want to tell her story, not yet … not ever. She didn’t want to lie either.

‘Everyone tells,’ Clera said, as if reading her mind.

‘Mother died trying to give me a little brother,’ Jula spoke into the awkward gap. ‘Father got very sad after that. He’s a scribe, not a practical man, he said. He thought the nuns would look after me better than he could.’

‘My dad ships convent wine across the Sea of Marn but he wasn’t paying the duty.’ Ruli grinned. ‘My uncles are all smugglers too. The ones they haven’t hanged. The abbess came to the trial and said she’d take me in. Dad had to agree, and it saved his neck.’

They both looked at Nona, waiting.

Clera raised her eyebrows, inviting Nona to speak. When they could rise no further, she herself spoke. ‘On the first day you tell why your parents didn’t want you any more. It’s supposed to stop it hurting. Sharing does that. Later you hear everyone else’s stories and you know you’re not the only one. If you’d ever been to prison you’d know that’s the first thing people do there – they tell what they did.’

Nona didn’t like to say that she had been to prison and that she hadn’t needed to tell because the guards had shouted it out as they led her to her cell. Murderer. It was on her lips to ask what a merchant’s daughter knew about such places – but as she opened her mouth to speak she remembered the cruel things Arabella had said about Clera’s father. He put himself in prison. And instead she began to answer the question that she had been trying to avoid. Nona’s story should have begun, ‘A juggler once came to my village. He was my first friend.’ She didn’t start there though. She started with a question of her own.