Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor 1)

‘—ona!’

Nona opened her eyes, slitted against the brightness of a grey sky.

‘Nona?’ A dark shape looming over her.

‘Where?’ Nona could feel hands on her arm, lifting her up.

‘I’m really sorry!’ Ara sounded it too, though she sounded like a really sorry princess. ‘I forgot about your shoulder!’

Nona got to her feet, snarling in pain, ready to fight. The girl had pulled her up by her bad arm and her wound felt as though the arrow were back in it and red-hot.

‘You didn’t—’ Nona bit off the words. She couldn’t see any mockery in Ara’s eyes, no hint of a smile, just concern … Ara hadn’t put her hand on the wounded shoulder. She couldn’t see the bandaging under Nona’s habit: she had just assumed she had because Nona collapsed, and so she had used the other arm to help her up, the wounded arm.

Nona brushed herself off. ‘I’ll use the door you do.’

Together they covered the remaining distance and went through the east door into the portrait room at the base of Path Tower. The painting directly facing the east door was of a woman’s face, half-black, half-white, the black half with a white eye, the white half with a black one. A strip of grey ran between the two halves, but coming nearer Nona saw it was just that the boundary between the halves wasn’t a straight line as she had first seen it, but infinitely convoluted, black fingering into white, white into black.

‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’ Ara came to stand beside Nona. ‘It’s Sister Cloud. She was a two-blood. Full-blood hunska and full-blood marjal.’

‘That sounds … pretty full!’ Nona smiled.

‘It just means she had the full talents of both tribes.’ Ara shrugged. ‘Sister Pan says there’s one born every generation or so.’

‘And this generation has you?’ Nona looked at Ara, harder than she had before. How deep did that confidence go? Was she frightened somewhere in there, beneath the face a noble’s life had taught her to wear?

‘We should go up.’

Ara let Nona set the pace on the steps, following behind. As Nona made her slow turns around the rising spiral she tried to think back to the grievances she had harboured against the girl behind her. Ara’s crimes appeared to be confined to being beautiful, being born rich and being the Chosen One. Everything else, Nona realized, was something given to her by Clera, or something assumed. She had assumed that the remainder of half-heard jokes were at her expense, that the laughter that faded as she entered a room had been at her.

‘Ready?’ Ara asked, her smile nervous.

Nona found that she had come to a halt just below the classroom. She also found in that moment a sudden realization. Arabella Jotsis was very easy to like.

‘Ready,’ Nona said, and they went up together.

Sister Pan was waiting for them, sitting without formality in a student’s chair, and gestured for them to pull up chairs of their own. She looked impossibly old, like the corpses men find in the ice tunnels, blackened skin on bones, folded in on themselves like flowers before an ice-wind. ‘It’s blowing out there!’ When Sister Pan smiled even that had something of a skull about it. ‘The Corridor will narrow tonight.’

‘And the moon will clear the path,’ Ara said, giving the proper reply.

‘And the moon will clear the path.’ Sister Pan nodded. ‘Did you know that the moon is falling?’

Nona glanced at Ara. ‘No …’

Again the skull-grin. ‘Not to worry. It’s been falling all your life, and mine.’ Sister Pan raised her hand, leathery but darker than any leather, cupped just a little as if shining moonlight down upon the world. ‘It’s been falling ever since they put it up there. The light presses against it, the sun’s wind too. And as it drifts close it starts to scrape the very edges of our air, touching the highest of Abeth’s winds. Then … then it will be swift.’ Sister Pan brought her hand down onto her knee.

‘Can we do anything?’ Ara asked, staring at the hand on Sister Pan’s knee.

‘No. At least, nothing good.’ The old nun shrugged. ‘So … I called you to this place to hear what you’re called.’

‘I’ve chosen,’ Ara said. She looked at Nona. ‘Shouldn’t we … do this in private?’

Sister Pan turned her head one way, then the other. ‘Nobody here but us.’

‘But …’ Ara frowned. ‘But we’re not supposed to tell anyone our names. It’s a secret until we take our orders …’

‘The Chosen One and The Shield don’t have secrets from each other.’

Nona kept her mouth closed. She didn’t care who knew her name – though she wouldn’t tell it. The abbess had wanted to know if she could keep a secret, and she could.

‘I’m not the Chosen One,’ Ara said. ‘I would know if I was. And besides, I can’t do anything a marjal can.’

‘Doesn’t matter one way or the other,’ Sister Pan said. ‘That prophecy is what’s put you in danger – what’s keeping you safe for now is this convent, not the walls, not the sisters, red or grey or otherwise. It’s that woman in the big house. Glass has a long reach, and a subtle one. Time was when I could have put a big enough hole in this rock we live on to swallow this tower whole. And even then I wasn’t half as deadly as that woman. Not half.’ She tilted her head as if listening to distant music. ‘The prophecy put you in danger because people half-believe it. Make them believe it wholly and it will start to look after you. Both of you.’

‘And we need it to look after us … because the abbess might … change her mind?’ Nona asked.

‘Because the wind will always blow and moon will keep on falling.’ Sister Pan dusted her palm against her thigh and looked to them, expectant. ‘Now, what are you to be called as sisters? Nona?’

Nona hadn’t thought about it, not in her days at the convent surrounded by Kettles, Apples, Glasses and Wheels, not on the walk to the tower or the climb up the stairs.

Pan smiled. ‘Often sisters choose a name that makes them think of home, of something safe, something they cherish.’

‘I …’ Nona tried to think of the village, of her house, her mother cutting the reeds, weaving one into the next. She thought of the Rellam Forest – of the savagery and the death – she thought of her mother’s face when they brought her child back from the wild, clothed in other people’s blood.

‘Choose carefully, Nona. Let the Path lead you to a name.’

Nona opened her mouth. ‘Cage,’ she said. ‘Let them call me Cage.’

Sister Pan pursed the wrinkled gristle of her lips. ‘Cage.’ She turned to Arabella Jotsis who watched them both with a serenity Nona envied. ‘And you, dear?’

‘Thorn,’ Ara said. ‘I will be Sister Thorn.’

Grey Class

It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient skill. For Sister Thorn of the Sweet Mercy Convent Lano Tacsis brought Pelarthi mercenaries, warriors drawn from the ice-margins east of the Grey, from a tribe considered savage by their savage neighbours. Brawlers, murderers, hard men and hard women who kill for coin. Heretics who set the worship of past warlords, not yet three centuries beneath the ground, above the veneration of the Ancestor on whose shoulders all humanity stands and who makes each man brother to the next.