Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor 1)

Four-Foot, the fur across his back and sides dark with blood, threw his weight against the rope, anchored to the immovable pillar, not braying now but heaving desperate breaths through a muzzle thick with crimson-specked foam.

Giljohn and the gardener pushed the cart. The boy unbarred the gates. All of them needing to be away from there.

Hessa, in the cage and paralysed with grief, found she couldn’t draw breath, couldn’t move. Her chest hurt. Her face contorted into a grimace so fierce it hurt. The priest’s cruelty had reached inside and twisted something vital, drawn it to breaking point, reducing her to snot and tears. Through half-blind eyes she watched Four-Foot strain, hard enough to burst his heart, uncomprehending beneath the blows, knowing only what his simple life had taught him: to pull.

With his own animal cry Markus got his teeth into the guardsman’s knuckle. Rain-soaked, he was hard to hold onto. He twisted free while the man whipped his hand away, cursing. Markus ran, not for the priest but for Four-Foot, throwing his arms about the mule’s neck, pressing his face to an ear. The priest’s next blow hit Markus’s hip, not with the same fury as those for Four-Foot, but loud and hard and agonizing. Even so, Markus hung in place.

Hessa didn’t see it, she didn’t hear it, it registered on none of her senses – but inside, in the core of her, she knew the moment that Markus found the edge of his power. Whether it was a word whispered into Four-Foot’s ear, or something that bled between them from hand to hide, Hessa couldn’t tell. What she saw was Four-Foot raise his head, unflinching as the next swing of the staff cracked more ribs. The mule snorted, the kind of snort he would give for a fresh meadow of long grass or a delicious bank of celembine, and pulled again …

The pillar shifted. The thick mass of stone, fifteen feet high and wider than a man, jolted forward. Amid the spilling rain terracotta tiles came flowing from the roof above, a waterfall in red. The priest went down beneath them. A heartbeat later the rope snapped and Four-Foot collapsed gently, his legs folding beneath him. Markus followed him down. The mule took one more shuddering breath. And died.

The scene narrowed. Narrowed again. The priest’s gates closed behind the cart.

‘No! No!’ Hessa shouted but the hands kept hold as she struggled. ‘No!’ She opened her eyes. Hessa was leaning over her, the moonlight bright behind her. ‘Hessa?’ And Nona knew herself again. ‘I thought … I was you.’ She reached up and they held each other as they had back in Giljohn’s cage, weeping together as if tears might somehow wash away the pain.

12

‘Tell us then.’ Clera put down her fork and stared pointedly at Jula.

‘What?’ Jula crammed in another mouthful of bread. ‘Wuff?’

‘You know,’ Ruli said.

‘Her story.’ Clera tilted her head ever so slightly towards the far end of the Red table. The four of them were huddled at one end, Arabella held court at the other, her group the larger.

‘Ara says—’

‘Ara? Who’s Ara?’ Clera’s face hardened.

‘Arabella,’ Jula replied. ‘Everybody calls her Ara. You know that.’

‘Her friends do.’

Jula shrugged. ‘She’s okay. It’s not her fault she was born so rich. Anyway, do you want to hear her story or don’t you?’

Clera tapped at her plate. ‘Go on.’

‘Well …’ Jula looked around, savouring the attention. ‘Well … the priests have been going on about the Argatha for years, right? But over the last few months they’ve really been building up excitement, sending assessors out to the provinces, even to the wild towns along the border.’

‘Argatha?’ Nona hunched in, waiting to be told how stupid she was.

‘It’s an old prophecy,’ Ruli said quickly. ‘A Holy Witch called Sister Argatha made it, back when the first emperor took the Ark from the Sarmarians. It says that the Ark will open when the four tribes demand it with one voice.’

‘Couldn’t you just get a gerant, a hunska, a marjal and a quantal to do it?’ asked Nona.

‘Right! That’s what I said.’ Jula nodded. ‘But they tried that ages ago and it didn’t work. So ever since then the priests have been saying “one voice” means one person exhibiting all the bloods.’

‘Everyone knows it’s just theatre to take people’s minds off the war that’s coming,’ Clera said. ‘Every time there’s a crisis, and the emperor wants to shut up dissent, all of a sudden there’s a big hue and cry over searching for the Chosen One. That’s what my father says …’ She trailed off, staring at the table.

‘So … the abbess thinks Arabella’s going to show up as both the mage-bloods?’ Nona asked.

‘Pan seems pretty sure she’s quantal, and more than a touch,’ Jula said. ‘A touch doesn’t count. You could have a touch of all four and nobody would get excited. Sister Kettle’s a hunska prime with a touch of marjal, and nobody’s calling her the Argatha’s Chosen One.’

‘She is?’ Nona asked. ‘How do you know?’

‘Kettle can shadow-weave. It’s the easiest marjal trick and even touches can do it near the shipheart.’

‘Does the abbess think Arabella will show up gerant too?’ Nona frowned. Arabella was far from the tallest in the class. ‘Unless she’s six and nobody told me then she’s not gerant.’

‘She’s close on eleven,’ Jula said. ‘But sometimes gerant doesn’t show till you’re grown and just don’t stop growing … Anyway.’ She pushed her hands together as if trying to steer the conversation back on track. ‘Anyway, Ara’s family saw how quick she was and because she didn’t look hunska that got them worried. So her father took her to the Academy.’

‘Stupid thing to do,’ said Clera. ‘Once the Academy knows, everybody knows. Too many fingers in that pie.’

‘Your father say that too?’ Ketti slid her chair noisily over to join them, wiping her mouth.

Clera turned on her, eyes fierce, and Ketti raised her hands. ‘My father collects taxes. He says if the emperor wasn’t standing behind him he’d be called a thief every day.’

‘Anyway!’ Jula raised her voice, then lowered it, glancing down the table at Arabella’s group, deep in their own conversation. Only Hessa and Ghena sat alone at the middle of the table now, opposite each other, focused on their plates. ‘The emperor called her whole family to court. So Malcan Jotsis, Arabella’s uncle who’s head of the family, gathers everyone at his estate out in Ledo and then leads them all to the palace, but on the way they’re intercepted by Sherzal’s house-troops, like a hundred of them … all the way from the Scithrowl border. And this was just days after the testing at the Academy!’

‘What did they do?’ Ruli asked.

‘Nothing,’ Ketti said, earning a scowl from Jula as she stole the story. ‘Because the Jotsis had already sent Ara on in secret with four trusted men to meet with the abbess so she could join the convent.’

‘Which,’ said Jula, pushing both hands back across her bristly scalp, ‘puts her out of the emperor’s control and even his sisters aren’t mad enough to try to steal a novice. And however much High Priest Jacob is pressed he can hardly give her up what with all the noise the priesthood have been making about the Argatha.’