Grey Sister (Book of the Ancestor 2)

“My price is higher.” Keot got into Nona’s tongue. “But holding your guts in my hands will cover it.”

Nona bit down on further threats and the air around her fingers shimmered as flaw-blades sprang into being. She wouldn’t cut a novice except to save her life—but the quarterstaffs would get no mercy and dicing them would put fear into Joeli’s friends. The convent knew her secret now, but knowing and seeing were different things. Nona let the planet spin to a near halt and stepped forward, offering no defence. She snapped out an arm at the nearest staff. The half-bloods were fast by normal standards but her speed made them seem slow. Her hand swung past the staff close to where the girl gripped it. The wood, that should have been sliced into sections, remained untouched.

Nona glanced down at her fingers. The flaw-shimmer had gone from them. Just the tingling in her bones remained as it so often did when she withdrew their sharpness from the world.

Nona stepped away quickly. A look up revealed both the older hunska novices coming at her around the sides of the other two. Joeli was falling back behind the staff-bearers, her hands still raised in a plucking motion.

She pulled your claws back in.

Why didn’t you stop her? You stopped the holothour drawing my threads!

Then she would know I exist. But if you want to kill her . . .

Nona snarled and twisted into the first of the empty-handed novices, a lean girl named Meera, a prime with several years’ advantage. Nona’s anger pushed her speed towards its limits. She hammered her forearm into Meera’s throat and caught the girl’s shoulder to vault over her reaching arm, bringing both feet into the middle of the staff held by Elani behind her. The half-blood stood mired in the moment, her face contorted in a roar. The staff splintered and Nona’s momentum carried her through Meera’s grasp, both heels thudding into Elani’s stomach, bringing her down.

Nona came out of her roll beside Joeli. Kicking the girl’s knee resulted in a satisfying crunch but she should have focused on Hellan, the other hunska, a full-blood, taller and more heavily built than Meera. Hellan thundered into Nona, barrelling her to the ground even as Joeli began to scream.

They fought as they fell, battling for holds. Hellan had the weight and strength advantage, Nona an edge on speed. Nona’s struggle to free her arms from where Hellan had pinned them to her sides only succeeded in moving the girl further up her body so they fell face to face. Unable to break free, Nona settled for bending her leg and turning her heel to the ground so the impact with the floor would power her knee into Hellan’s thigh. In addition, to prevent the back of her head crashing against the flagstones Nona drove forward at the last instant, hammering her forehead into Hellan’s nose.

The ground knocked the wind from Nona’s lungs and she lay for a moment, her vision full of strange lights, and Hellan’s blood. A large, fast something drove through the confusion of flashes. The heel of a quarterstaff hammering down towards her face. Nona turned her head and the wood grazed her ear before cracking against the stone beside her.

With a roar Nona forced Hellan off her and rolled clear, a slow and ungainly move with Hellan still clutching at her. The swing of the quarterstaff couldn’t be avoided. Nona took the blow on the triceps of her left arm. Better a bruise than a fracture. She swept Crocey’s legs from beneath her as she rose. Elani came at her now, swinging half her broken staff in each hand. Behind her Meera staggered towards the fray, clutching her throat, blood on her chin.

Nona caught one of the shortened staffs in her hand, using it as a lever to twist Elani’s arm while she blocked the other on her forearm. Without hesitation, and still holding the trapped staff, she threw her body weight down on Elani’s twisted elbow. It snapped beneath her.

On the ground Hellan caught at Nona’s ankle. Meera brought her to the floor with a grappling lunge and tried to pin her, and at the same time Crocey rose to her feet, swinging her quarterstaff with renewed fury at the parts of Nona still exposed.

Nona’s rage grew. She felt the blows of the staff as distant thuds against her legs and sides. Blinded with blood, she saw the Path coiling bright before her mind’s eye. With one hand Nona sought Hellan’s eyes, stiff-fingered. With the other she shielded her head while seeking to fasten her teeth in the flesh and standing tendons of Meera’s neck. She might go down but any she left standing would be insufficient to carry the dead away.

“No!”

Before her jaws could snap shut, before she touched the awful power of the Path, Meera was hauled away from her, her body sailing through the doorway into Grey dorm. Something big loomed over Nona and Hellan. Nona blinked the blood away. A hulking figure. A quarterstaff hammered into the figure’s shoulder, wood splintering.

“Really?” Darla’s voice.

Darla turned and flattened the surprised Crocey with a punch. She kicked Hellan away and scooped Nona up with one arm. “Come on, you.” She strode through the main door into the rain-laced wind, Nona over her shoulder. Behind them someone was screaming in pain. Joeli probably. Or Elani. Or both.

After two corners and a hundred yards Darla set Nona down against the back wall of the scriptorium. “Let’s have a look.”

“I’m all right.” Nona didn’t feel all right. Her arm wouldn’t talk to her and her mind was red with Keot howling for murder.

“You don’t look all right. You’re covered in blood.” Darla poked at Nona’s face, blunt-fingered. “I should take you to Rosie.”

“No.” Once in the sanatorium it took forever to get out. “It’s not my blood.”

“This stuff is.” Darla pulled splinters from Nona’s calf. “They jumped you, huh?”

Nona let her head flop to her chest. Her ribs hurt at each breath. “Don’t think any of them will be jumping anyone again in a hurry.”

“What should we do?” Darla glanced to the corners for approaching trouble.

“Nothing.” Nona tried to rise and failed. “Get me to the bathhouse. I’ll see what will wash off.”

“But . . . Joeli and the others? You made a mess in there.”

Nona laid her head back against the wall, smelling only blood rather than the usual sharpness of hides from the scriptorium’s back room where they cured them for book binding.

Darla tried again. “If I hadn’t—”

“If you hadn’t come back I’d have killed at least one of them.” Nona spoke the words slowly. “And they probably would have killed me to stop me getting a second.” She drew another painful breath and stood with the help of the wall. “They’ll go to the sanatorium with tales of falling down steps. Joeli doesn’t want to go up before the convent table again. She thought her lot would give me a beating—not so bad as this one—and escape without a scratch. She’s too used to people rolling over for her.”

With an arm over Darla’s shoulder Nona limped to the bathhouse.

Tonight we will slice their throats as they sleep.

We won’t.

You said you were born of war!

You said that with my tongue. And war is a longer game than battle. For now we wait.

Nona realized she was using “we” and shuddered. Keot might be under her skin but she wanted him no deeper than that.