Kettle pressed her lips together and hoped that details of her own private life had not been slipping back along the bond into Nona’s mind without her knowledge. She pointed to a shingle beach at the outer curve of the river. The Ganymede had been angling away from the route she needed to take for some miles now.
“Right you are, sister.” The fisherman and his girl set to grounding their craft.
“Ancestor’s blessings on your journey.” The girl brought a loaf and cheese bound with cloth out of a wooden box at the stern.
“And upon your family.” Kettle took the food with a smile and vaulted out onto the stones. “Safe return!” A wave and she was hurrying up towards the track that paralleled the river.
Kettle hunched her coat around her, not the range-coat of a nun, just the weathered garb of a traveller. As she walked, her fingers counted through the vials in their straps against the coat’s inner lining, poisons on one side, antidotes on the other. She checked her weapons from sword and throwing stars to the smallest knife and envenomed pin. Her eyes stayed on what lay ahead. She kept her mind empty of worry and of speculation. She had already considered who might have taken the girl and reached no firm conclusion. To dwell on things, to circle them over and over on the road as she might at the convent, was to invite death. The Grey Sister lives in the now. Thinking ahead was something to make space for, to do in as safe a space as possible, not something that would push you away from the moment. Whoever had taken Nona could easily have covered their back trail, left a friend or two watching from the boughs of a tree, or beside the road, or standing behind the counter of a pastry stall in some market town, just waiting for someone to kill.
* * *
• • •
KETTLE WALKED FROM before noon until late into the night, pushing her body to maintain a fierce pace.
“I’ll find you, Nona. I swear it to the Ancestor. I’ll find you and make an end of anyone who seeks to stop me.” Images of cut flesh swarmed forward from a score of memories, quickly pushed back into their places as Kettle focused on the road ahead. A moment’s lapse and she centred herself in the now once again, watchful, taut, ready.
The nun slept that night in a farmhouse not far from Honour. A clipped halfpenny proved adequate compensation for rousing the tenants and bought her a room, a bed with fresh linen, plus a meal with meat and mead into the bargain. With her body fuelled, Kettle took to her chamber and set her traps. Finally she arranged the bolster under the sheets, then curled beneath her grey cloak, settling to sleep in the corner the door would obscure if opened.
A little later when the focus moon turned the blackness of her shutters into narrow bars of blazing crimson Kettle felt Apple’s pulse along their shadow-bond. Kettle sent her own pulse beating back to Sweet Mercy, letting Mistress Shade know that she was safe.
Nona stayed watching, even when Kettle closed her eyes. She didn’t want to retreat into her own darkness, to the confusion and nausea, the blindness and the pain, and yet, as the stuff of Kettle’s dreams began to rise around her, Nona released her hold on the nun’s mind. For though we may share some dreams, others we don’t speak of, even to ourselves, and no one should look that deeply into another person without permission. Maybe not even then.
Kettle’s dream rose, red, curling around her, and Nona fell, loosening her grip, dropping away into the chaos of her own mind.
27
NONA ROLLED ACROSS rough planks and fetched up against a wooden wall. Everything swayed, everything heaved.
A box. I’m in a box.
The darkness stank of her own waste; her mouth tasted vomit-sour. Light leaked in between the planks, razors against her eyes. Without instruction her body rolled the other way, one rotation before another wall stopped her. Someone had bound her hands behind her back.
I’m at sea.
You’re being carried. Keot sounded deeply annoyed.
“What?” Nona tried to sit up and banged her forehead against the planking just inches above her face.
You’re being carried in a small box. You’ve been in it for two days.
Nona screwed her eyes shut and tried to see the Path. Nothing. She flexed her arms and gasped at the agony flooding up them. She couldn’t feel her hands, though everything else from her shoulders down screamed in protest. Her wrists seemed to be chained together. She tried to will her flaw-blades into existence, but whether anything happened she couldn’t tell.
The light dimmed and Nona heard footsteps on stone, the sound of the people carrying her box, several of them. The noise had an echoing quality. Nona felt herself slipping away into the darkness again. She ground her teeth against the drugs, their poison rising through her like nausea. “I’ll kill them. Every last one.”
That’s the first reasonable thing you’ve said. Keot’s voice followed her into the muffling blackness. Perhaps ever.
* * *
• • •
NONA CRACKED OPEN her eyes an unknown length of time later. They had her on her belly, two of them at least, in a dimly lit room. One was clasping some kind of collar around her neck, the other putting restraints on her ankles. Nona twisted her head as fast as she could, lunging to take a bite of the nearest wrist, but her teeth snapped shut on nothing, the hand withdrawn too swiftly. Another hand pressed her head to the hard floor with awful pressure and the first person returned to fixing the collar.
“It is done.” A soft voice without urgency.
Someone knelt on Nona’s back, struggling with something. A sudden snap and a rattle of chain. Nona’s arms slid to her sides, lifeless but no longer bound together at the wrists.
The three of them retreated a few paces. Nona tried to rise but her arms hung limp, the pain of returning circulation just beginning as pins and needles, running down her veins.
The first bucket of water took her by surprise, ice-cold and sudden. She hauled breath back into her near-paralysed lungs and had begun to curse when the second bucket hit her with the third a fraction behind it. Somewhere in the middle of it all it occurred to her that she was naked.
“Roll over.” The same soft voice, empty of mockery or compassion.
Nona lay where she was, shivering around her pain. She didn’t think she could roll even if she wanted to.
One of the shadowy figures approached, bending low. Nona willed her blades into being to lash at the person’s leg, but all that happened was that her arm flopped out from her side. Her captor stepped over it and, seizing her opposite shoulder, rolled Nona onto her back.
The figure stepped away again and several more buckets of icy water followed. When the last one had been thrown and Nona’s spluttering had calmed she could hear the water gurgling away down a nearby drain.
“Stand.”
Nona tried. With minimal help from her arms and unbalanced by waves of nausea and confusion she ended up pitching to one side whilst still on her knees and lay there shivering uncontrollably. Two of her captors pulled her to her feet. Both were dressed in grey robes with long sleeves, their hair shaved to a finger’s width. Nona found it hard to guess their age or sex. Perhaps the one to the left was a woman, perhaps the one to the right a man, neither of them young, but neither old yet.