Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor 1)

In the darkness of the dormitory that night Nona imagined herself once again amid the barrels, crates and coiled ropes of the Caltess attic, surrounded by scores of purchased children, uneasy in their dreams. She wondered about the Tacsis brothers and their father whom she had never seen but who squandered a fortune to see her dead. Even if they still spared her a thought after two long years, a visit to the Caltess would hardly be a sensible time for them to take revenge. Nona would be surrounded by witnesses, not to mention Sister Tallow and several other Red Sisters.

Even so, she couldn’t sleep. Something tugged at her. Fingernails drawn across a chalkboard, unheard but still somehow setting that nauseating quiver in the marrow of her bones. Was it just worry?

She slipped from her blanket, and walked on slow feet between the double row of beds. The nightgown sliding across her legs had been a gift from Ara. Nona had nothing that had not been a gift: even her presence at the convent was a gift, her confirmation fee renewed each year by an ‘anonymous’ donor – though she was sure that was Abbess Glass’s doing.

Ignoring the night-lantern glowing beside Mally’s bed at the door, Nona slipped out into the communal hall and advanced to the main door. Her fingers found the handle cold. The wind’s threats came low and moaning through the door, the draught icy about her feet. Beneath the iron’s chill something else tingled at her senses, something darker than the night, colder than the wind, many-angled and strange. She opened the door, just a crack, and set her eye to the gap. The wind whistled in all around, as if mocking her attempts at stealth.

A figure stood so close before the door that the shock stole Nona’s breath. For a moment her heart held paralysed within her chest, but the figure’s raised hand didn’t reach for her, continuing instead to inscribe an invisible pattern upon the moving air between them. The eyes above the black scarf that wrapped the lower face were Yisht’s. Shark’s eyes, Ruli called them, flat and dead. The woman proved so intent on her work that Nona’s small movement of the door didn’t draw her attention from it. Nona watched as Yisht finished the pattern, her finger seeming to leave a lingering disturbance in the air, seen as water is seen on glass. She stepped to the right and began again. Was she searching for something?

A white finger, so pale it looked as if the frost had bitten into it, traced a new convolution into empty space. The pattern of it sank into Nona’s eye, pressing against her brain, the feeling unpleasant and familiar. Sigils!

Without pausing for thought, Nona hauled the door open. They stood for a moment, Nona in the teeth of the wind, shockingly cold, her nightdress moulded about her and giving no protection, Yisht immobile, hand on the hilt of her sword, a gleaming inch revealed. Without a word Yisht lowered her outstretched arm, turned, and walked away, the night seeming to thicken about her so that in five steps she had gone entirely.

‘Shut the damn door!’ A shout from the Grey dormitory.

Nona closed it, shivering, and hurried back to bed. She fell asleep quickly, almost against her will, her mind twisting around the shapes Yisht had left hanging in the air.

Cage.

Nona followed a single twisting thread of fire.

Cage.

The word scratched against her concentration. Nona tried to make the voice her own. I’m in a cage – the same cage that’s held me my whole life. I was in a cage before Giljohn took me and I’ve never left it. A cage made of my own bones.

The thread coiled into a spiral of three turns, just like the blade-path. It rose and fell in patterns part-familiar, part-new, flexing as she pursued it.

Cage. Wake up!

I’m not asleep.

The path before her writhed, a serpent in mortal pain, knotting in on itself, and still she followed it, down into the convolutions of the sigil—

CAGE!

Nona opened an eye.

‘I was worried.’ Ara was leaning over her, so close her hair fell all about Nona’s face, tickling her neck. She pulled back.

Nona turned her head. Ara was kneeling on the bed, fully dressed. All the other beds lay empty, the dormitory deserted and full of slanting sunlight.

‘W-where is everyone?’ The sigil still burned across her vision.

‘Breakfast then Blade.’ Ara got off the bed. ‘You need to get up and dressed right away.’ She paused, leaning forward. ‘Unless you need to go to Sister Rose? Jula thought we should fetch her. Most of them just thought it was funny when you wouldn’t get up, but Jula said you might be ill.’

‘She’s not gone to—’

‘No. I said I’d fetch Sister Rose if I couldn’t wake you up. Then Hessa said she thought you were ill too but that it was Sister Pan we should be sending for. She said there was something wrong with you but that it might be a Path-working. She said she would go to Sister Pan after breakfast if you didn’t show up.’

‘You spoke my name,’ Nona said, ‘my chosen one.’

Ara bit her lip. ‘I thought it might help. I’d tried everything else …’ She looked slightly guilty. ‘You’ll want to dry your face. And your pillow’s a bit wet.’

‘You threw water on me?’

‘Twice. And I pulled your hair. Oh, and you’ve got nail marks on your arm where I pinched you.’

Nona sat up, wiping her face on her blanket. ‘Lucky the name worked! Sounds like in another minute you’d be setting my hair on fire or trying a kiss like that prince in the old story.’

Ara looked quickly down at her feet.

‘You didn’t!’ Nona jumped out of bed, reaching for her skirts.

Ara flashed a grin. ‘It would have been the first thing Clera tried.’

Nona frowned, tugging off her nightdress and wriggling into her underskirts. ‘Where is Clera? Didn’t she have an opinion?’

‘She did.’ Ara handed Nona her habit. ‘Her opinion was that you were fine and if we were late for Blade Sister Tallow would skin us. Or worse, leave us behind when the Caltess forging came.’

‘She’s not wrong there!’ Nona jammed her feet into her shoes and started to run for the door. ‘Hurry up! I’m starved!’

Nona devoured her breakfast and ran to her first lesson still chewing over her night-time encounter. Yisht’s sigil had sent her to her bed and a slumber so deep she almost didn’t wake from it. But what could she tell the nuns? What evidence did she have? The emperor’s own sister had sent the woman and she seemed to have licence to do whatever she pleased. Even if Yisht admitted to sigil-work she’d just say it was to warn her of threats to Zole.

The remainder of the week was given over to Blade, much to the disgust of Mistresses Path, Academia and Spirit. Mistress Shade confessed herself relieved to have a break from the thick-wittedness of novices and vowed to spend the time brewing a new toxin that she would be requiring test subjects for on their return.

Sister Tallow drilled Grey Class without mercy, sending them aching to their beds each night. She used Zole and her repertoire of unfamiliar combat styles to wake the novices to the idea that the Caltess fighters would not come at them using forms they knew.

‘Nona and Zole.’ Sister Tallow waved them together. The meeting had been inevitable.

Zole straightened, wiping sweat-soaked hair from her eyes. Sand coated half her face from where Ara had at last managed to throw her to the ground. It had been Ara’s only victory.