Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor 1)

‘Thank you,’ Hessa gasped. She came forward on her crutch and put Nona in an awkward one-armed embrace.

‘Proceed!’ On the stands the high priest thumped his staff down. ‘I assume this gets more taxing as we go?’

‘The throwing star!’ Sister Wheel’s cracked voice silenced the last remnants of conversation. ‘Mistress Blade, if you will?’

‘Not her. Wheel, you do it.’ The high priest waved Sister Tallow back to her seat. ‘And put your damn arm into it.’

‘Sister Wheel?’ Nona snorted under her breath. She turned to Hessa. ‘Good. What can she do?’

‘Bad!’ Hessa shook her head. ‘You don’t know? She took her orders as a Red Sister. She passed all the trials. Then renounced it to be a Holy. She doesn’t think Red Sisters are proper nuns – not close enough to the Ancestor. She—’

‘The throwing star!’ Sister Wheel had taken the captain’s place and now held her hand overhead, a steel throwing star catching the light from the windows. The thing was almost unbroken blade: a small heavy centre, five broad, bright blades, gaps behind and between them where Sister Wheel held it. Quite how she would release it in the throw without slicing her own fingers off Nona didn’t know.

‘Ancestor witness this our trial of faith and swiftness.’ Sister Wheel narrowed her eyes at Nona, as if she were the target, not Hessa. She shook her long arm, twisting the over-flexible wrist. Her eyes, normally wide as if in permanent and vaguely comical surprise, became something else entirely when slitted: in those moments something baleful and other than human watched the world through them.

Nona brought her arms before her, hands crossed.

Without further warning Wheel shook her arm, cracking it like a whip to set the throwing star flying. The motion looked too casual to have imparted such speed but the star sliced through the air considerably more swiftly than Captain Rogan’s spear, revolving around its centre, blades cutting sparkles from the light. It came spinning around the vertical axis, the disc of it parallel to the floor, aimed at Nona’s chest. Even if she could deflect the weapon by pressing at the side of it she would need to push the thing off course by a large enough degree to send it over Hessa’s head or into the ground before her feet. A huge deflection. To move it the small amount to miss Hessa to the left or right Nona would have to press against the whirling blades … Even as she considered the matter the throwing star devoured a third of the distance between them, and for once in her life Nona found she could burrow no further into the space between her heartbeats.

She started to extend one arm towards the oncoming star. With the other she started to run her nails from the habit’s cuff towards her armpit. The tough cloth parted beneath her fingers without resistance. When she was tiny Billem Smithson had tried to hurt her. Nona had held her bloody hands out to her mother. This was what was inside him. The boy’s skin had sliced where she touched him, four parallel wounds, as if she had invisible blades reaching from her fingers. The same had happened when she struck Raymel Tacsis and again when she had reached to fend off his brother on the abbess’s steps. She’d tried to make it happen many times, in long boring hours, on dull days when the rain fell thick with ice … but only in Harriton prison had the sharpness come to her outside a moment of panic or rage. The ropes that had bound her hands behind her had given way beneath her touch.

Now her fingers sliced the sleeve of her habit into long ribbons. Perhaps they were shredding the skin and muscle beneath too – there hadn’t been time for any pain to reach her yet or for any blood to fall.

The throwing star approached Nona’s outstretched hand just as her other hand reached her armpit and continued, now with just one finger extended, to slice a line across her chest. The star passed within a breath of the veins in her wrist and whirred along just beneath her reaching arm where the ribbons of her sleeve had not yet had time to fall. It swept through them, cutting through whatever opposed it, but tangling other ribbons in the narrow spaces between the blades, winding them up about itself as it flew beneath Nona’s elbow.

When her finger reached her breastbone Nona stopped cutting and reversed the thrust of her arm, pushing against the momentum of blood and bone, fingers cupped to scoop up the flap of cloth sliced free before them.

The bundled throwing star travelled the length of her arm, reaching the point where it would start to pass beneath her shoulder. Nona’s other hand met it, the cloth of her habit balled into a palm angled down and to the side. The force of the impact rippled up through her arm. Nona had done everything she could. She let the moment go.

The thud of the cloth-wrapped star, the jolt of its impact up her arm, and the sharp pain in her hand, all reached Nona at the same time. The star fell to the sand, its energy spent. Looking down she saw her hand filling with blood and thought for a moment that her whole arm might be sliced open, but a darker spot among the crimson wash revealed the truth – one point of the throwing star had penetrated all the cloth layers to puncture her palm, a small hole but deep and bleeding freely.

The cheering rose around her as she tugged free a trailing strip of her sleeve and bound it tight about her hand.

‘Cover yourself, girl!’ Sister Wheel stalked towards her, scowling her disapproval, peering at the shredded sleeve and the broad flap torn loose across Nona’s chest. ‘What have you done?’

‘I protected Hessa.’ Nona bit down on the harsher words queuing behind her lips.

‘You’ve ruined your habit!’ Suspicious eyes ran over exposed flesh and the sharp upper edge of the rip across Nona’s chest. ‘How …’

Nona waved her sleeve, fixing Sister Wheel with her stare. ‘Your throwing star chewed this up.’ Would you rather it had been my flesh? Something in the glare the Holy Sister returned suggested she just might.

‘I hope the last round of this ordeal is rather more testing!’ The high priest broke the line that joined their eyes. Nona blinked and shook her head. She hadn’t thought enough time had passed for the old man to limp down all those steps. She looked up at him, his scowl as ugly as Sister Wheel’s, and found herself dizzy. The hand she raised to her face seemed to take an age – voices buzzed around her like angry flies.

‘—wrong with the girl?’ The high priest snorted. ‘She’s hardly a Shield if the sight of a few drops of blood has her reeling around.’

‘I’m all right.’ Nona didn’t feel it though. She felt weak in every limb, tired beyond endurance. A puppet with one string remaining, and if that would just let her go she would lie face down in the softness of the sand and sleep.

‘The last trial is the bow,’ Sister Wheel said, mouth pressed into an unreadable line. ‘Fetch me a bow!’

‘No!’ The high priest raised his hand. ‘You’ve had your chance, Wheel. I have just the man for this – and just the bow. Devid?’ He raised his voice, looking around. ‘Devid!’

A big man vaulted down from the first row of seating, one of the bearers for the high priest’s sedan chair, his arms roped with muscle.

‘Fetch the eagle-bow from my luggage train. Go! Quick about it!’

The man sped off, sand flying from his heels. Nona stepped away until her back was against the wall. Hessa took her shoulder and tried to turn her. ‘What’s the matter? You look awful.’