Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor 1)

One sour note was that Jula no longer practised with them. Clera and Jula had some sudden and one-sided falling out after a seven-day on which both of them were allowed family visits in Verity. Clera wouldn’t speak about it but missed no opportunity to apply the sharp edge of her tongue to Jula, who simply looked miserable and confused.

‘Why are you such a bitch to everyone, Clera?’ Ara asked after one fierce exchange that sent Jula running off in tears.

‘Everyone?’

Nona blinked. ‘Everyone?’ She had been watching Jula turn the corner past the scriptorium at the far end of the courtyard and wondering how after two years of training to accept the fiercest of blows and strike back, mere words got past their defences so easily.

‘Everyone.’ Ara nodded, eyes narrowed at Clera.

Nona frowned. Perhaps it was true. If you weren’t Clera’s friend you weren’t anything to her.

Clera shrugged and flipped her silver crown, catching the coin to examine the emperor’s head on the upward side. ‘I don’t want anyone to be sad when I die.’

Ruli joined Grey Class on the day Sister Tallow introduced Nona and at least a third of the newer novices to the throwing star. Nona had held one only once before, and briefly, when it was thrown at her by Sister Wheel and punched a hole in her palm. She still had a white seam of scar there.

Throwing the things proved easier than catching them, but to hit a target with any accuracy proved harder than she had anticipated. Even so Nona did rather well with only Zole and, unexpectedly, Ruli doing better than her out of the girls new to the weapon. And both Clera and Ara were strongly of the opinion that Zole had previous experience. Clera proved to be something of a liability, Sister Tallow expressing doubt at one point as to whether she could even reliably hit the floor with a throwing star.

When Bray finally sounded everyone’s arms ached from the throwing action – Sister Tallow insisting that they learn with both left and right hand – and none of the new girls had a finger without at least some minor cuts.

‘Novices.’ Sister Tallow called the class to her. This was no surprise: Blade was not a class you could run from at the bell. ‘It is perhaps timely, given the difficulties presented to this class by Novice Zole’s use of combat styles unknown to you, that we are fast approaching the annual Caltess forging. We will be travelling into Verity each day for three days, starting after next seven-day. I expect Grey Class to acquit itself well against the Caltess apprentices. Two among Leeni, Darla, Alata, Sheelar and Croy will be entered into the sword ring; three among those not selected for sword will be entering the unarmed contest.’

The race to the bathhouse after Blade had become a particular point of pride since Zole’s arrival, and even burning news like the sudden closeness of the Caltess forging had to wait until the sprint was over. Each novice gathered their day-habit to change into after bathing and collected by the main doors, ready to run. Darla, whose toe was still healing and whose build made her a poor runner in any event, shoved open the doors and the girls streamed out around her.

Nona’s size put her at a disadvantage but she’d caught up a few inches on her friends over two years of good eating at the convent. Zole, Ketti, and Clera opened up a lead on the first clear stretch past Heart Hall, with Ara just behind them, but Nona knew she’d close down on them in the tight turns past the laundry and around the long low winery building. Where Zole and the others slowed to make the sharp turn amid the laundry steams Nona ran directly at the opposite wall, leaping up at it to drive off at an angle into the narrow gap between the buildings. By the time the others exited the steam-cloud Nona had the lead.

‘How the—’ Clera’s gasp of outrage lost her a needed breath and several more strides.

Nona and Ketti spun past a bewildered Sister Rock and crashed through the bathhouse doors to victory, with Ara, Zole, and then Clera hard upon their heels.

‘How will she choose?’ The question bounced around the changing room as habits were stripped with indecent haste. ‘How?’

‘I don’t care how, as long as she chooses me.’ Clera kicked off her remaining shoe. ‘I don’t see how she can’t.’ And with that she was running into the hot fog of the pool-room.

‘Sometimes it’s contests. Sometimes she picks her favourites.’ Alata stepped out of her underskirts. ‘Last year it was favourites.’

More opinions crossed back and forth, but Nona was pursuing Ara and they jumped into the pool’s enfolding warmth together. Nona surfaced and let herself hang in the water, boneless, drifting in the white blindness, letting the chatter mix with the sound of splashing and flow around her, detached from any meaning.

‘Well!’ Clera swam through the steaming water, dark hair fanned out across the surface behind her. ‘The Caltess. It’ll be like going home for you.’ All around them the shapes of novices in the mist, idle and floating in the middle of the pool or in murmured conversation in small groups around the edges.

‘What?’ Nona came to herself, shaking off the drowsiness. She backed before Clera’s advance, swishing her hands before her, feet a yard above the bottom. She had no idea how much time had passed, though her fingers were wrinkly so it must have been a while. The pool’s walls reached around her as she arrived in one of the corners furthest from the changing room.

‘The Caltess,’ Clera repeated. ‘Familiar ground for you.’

‘I was only there a couple of months.’ She had known the forging was coming – nobody passed through Grey Class without experiencing it – but the date was never given far in advance, depending on the fight schedule at the Caltess and any other commitments Partnis Reeve might have.

‘My father will bet on me,’ Clera said, swimming closer, trapping Nona in the corner, the currents of her approach reaching Nona’s legs and belly. ‘And win enough to buy his release.’

‘I thought the matches were private.’ Nona remembered the baying of the crowd beneath the Caltess attic, something living, an animal, greater than its many parts. She wondered what it would be like to fight in the middle of such a thing.

‘They are private, silly.’ Clera ducked beneath the surface and emerged closer still, squirting water at Nona from pursed lips. ‘But that doesn’t mean people don’t bet on them, or that rich men don’t pay to spy on the novices from hidden galleries.

‘But the blade-fist is secret …’ To be used if required, never to be displayed for mere show – that’s what Sister Tallow said.

Clera grinned and reached out to push a steam-damp lock from above Nona’s eye. ‘They’re more interested in us, silly.’ She bobbed up out of the water and thrust her chest forward before twisting away with a splash.

Ara took her place, her blonde hair dark with water. ‘Are you worried about the Tacsis? You know Raymel doesn’t fight any more, yes?’

‘I know.’ Nona shrugged. Thuran Tacsis had forgotten her. His son was alive. He had more to worry about than a peasant girl who fled to a nunnery. There had been nothing in two long years, not since the Noi-Guin assassins and the high priest’s trial. But Abbess Glass still wouldn’t let her leave the convent on seven-day, though half the novices went to Verity with a handful of nuns to chaperone them.