Grey Sister (Book of the Ancestor 2)

She walked for half a day with an old woman who went from town to town sharpening edges—on knives, on ploughshares, on scythes, even on swords if such a thing were hung rusting above the elderman’s hearth. The woman, Gallabeth, hardly reached Nona’s shoulder, bent with age, all bones and uncomfortable angles. It took her three miles before she noticed Nona’s eyes.

“’Cestor’s Truth! Ain’t you got no eyes, sister?”

Nona suppressed a laugh. “They’re not holes, they’re just black. It was an illness. And I’m not a sister.” Not even a novice.

Gallabeth made the sign of the tree. “Thought you had the devil in you.”

Nona opened her mouth then closed it.

Gallabeth shuffled another ten yards before ceasing to suck at her few remaining teeth and offering another opinion. “It’s good you’re a nun, child.” Another shuffled yard. “Don’t have to worry about a husband.”

Nona had forgotten the uncompromising honesty of the ancient. Sister Pan had a touch of it but perhaps she still retained too many of her wits to let her tongue wander into unintentioned cruelty. But Gallabeth was right. Joeli and her friends had delighted in telling Nona how ugly her eyes made her. How no boy would ever want to gaze into them. The old woman knew it too. “I’m not a nun.” Nona made a mental note to cover up the sign of the Ancestor’s tree seared across the back of the coat she wore, branches spreading above, taproot reaching for the source below. “Not even a novice.”

Gallabeth waved the denial aside as if a convent range-coat and a glimpse of habit were impervious to dispute. “Husbands are overrated. I had one once. Oh yes. I was a pretty thing, long brown hair, good legs.” She slapped them for emphasis. “Was married for twenty years, till the flu took him. He was still a young man, not far past forty. Didn’t give me any children mind, or leave me much. Just a cottage too busy falling down to be much use, and this.” She rummaged in her skirts and produced a dull grey object, like a river stone, dark and specked with glints of crystal perhaps, longer than it was wide.

“What is it?”

“What is it? Best whetstone in the empire is what it is!” Gallabeth returned the object to its place. “My John didn’t leave me much, but this,” she patted her hip, “was how he made his living, and how an old woman like me is still welcomed up and down the Corridor. His grandfather found it under the ice. Harder than nails. Can put an edge on a diamond, he said, though I ain’t seen one of them . . .”

Kill her and take it. Keot flowed towards the hand nearest Gallabeth.

Why, what is it? Nona flexed the hand and kept Keot from passing her wrist.

Something old. A piece of the Missing.

A piece of them?

Ark-bone, not ship-bone, something older. Familiar. I can taste it.

“A useful thing to have,” Nona said.

“Keeps me fed, long as I can move my legs.” Gallabeth nodded. “And when I can’t walk the roads I’ll up and sell it to some youngster in Verity. Then I’ll see how long I can buy a place by a warm hearth. I won’t need long.” A grin. “My John always wanted a child so they could carry both his name and the stone. A son or daughter to have it and walk the Corridor. Keeping it sharp, he called it. Keeping us all sharp.”

Nona nodded. If it’s ship-bone or Ark-bone then it’s not from the Missing.

You don’t know anything: you’re too young to remember last year. Keot made a rush for her hand.

Nona held him back. And unless you start making sense I have to assume you’re too old to remember yesterday.

Keot sulked after that, only twisting her last farewell into a snarl when Nona finally managed to leave Gallabeth behind at a farm that needed her services, or at least needed her stone. Nona didn’t pursue the matter. She knew from experience that more than two questions in a row just set the devil talking nonsense. She’d come to think of him as a broken thing, part of a mind perhaps, filled with fragments of knowledge, occasionally useful as the shards of a pot can be, offering a sharp edge but no good for holding soup.

* * *

• • •

NONA’S RECOLLECTION OF the wider Grey, past the Rellam Forest to the west of the village and the bone-mire to the east was, like Keot’s memory, a fractured thing. Giljohn had taken them back and forth across the Grey and out beyond, chasing rumour when rumour showed its tail, then returning to some long-established if tortuous circuit when the well of gossip ran dry. What remained with Nona were slices. A town skirted here, a hillside there, a ruin, a lake.

Eventually, following directions from another village almost as small as hers though bearing a name, Nona found her way to the Rellam Forest. The old man who had known of the forest, apparently by its ill-repute, also knew of her village and, miraculously, had a name for it too.

“Rellam Village. Aye. Ain’t heard tell of that place for years though.” He gave Nona a peculiar look, as if she might be testing him. But then everyone Nona met gave her odd looks. Your eyes might occupy only a tiny fraction of what you present to the world but they are what each stranger seeks when they meet you, as if needing reassurance concerning the person that watches through them. When you present two wells of darkness to the world the world makes the sign of the Ancestor’s tree, or points a finger up across their heart to the Hope hidden above cloud-scattered skies, or makes the horns to summon the protection of the small gods who watch from between moments and under shadows.

Nona found that the unfamiliar track she had been directed along turned into a familiar one and led her through the arboreal gloom of the Rellam Forest where once she had run in the red mist of a focus moon. That time she had been chasing Amondo, her first friend and also a man who had betrayed her before they had even met. She paced the track with the woods whispering on both sides, remembering the juggler, the quick magic of his hands and the strangeness he’d brought with him into her life, a splash of colour, proof of a world beyond the boundaries of the Grey.

Nona had once told the girls at the convent a lie. On the first day she met them she had claimed that the bloodshed that saw her given to the child-taker was wrought by a wood-god upon the Pelarthi who captured her. There had been no Pelarthi. Nona had never seen a Pelarthi mercenary, only heard of them in Nana Even’s tales. There had been no wood-god either—though she had seen one of those, a year before, watching her from the Rellam, his face almost like those twisted into the bark of trees. Almost.

The shadows on the forest path lengthened while the distance to open ground shortened. Nona fought to keep her pace from quickening. Around her the wood grumbled at the wind, creaking, groaning, always in motion. Nona felt eyes watching her and wondered whose they might be. A wood-god perhaps, ragged, leaf-clad, crouched in the boughs of an oak. Or perhaps just an owl, shaking off sleep.

Somewhere along this path she had murdered half a dozen soldiers. The troop Sherzal had sent with her quantal thread-worker, to guard him as he sifted through the world’s threads in search of bodies in which more than one blood ran. The men who had hired Amondo to coax her from the village. How much had they paid? How much had it been worth to them to keep their business quiet? If Amondo had proved too expensive the soldiers would have just come in to take her. Their time was worth more to Sherzal than the lives of a few villagers.