“Surely that would set entirely the wrong example. And besides, Zole—” Abbess Glass had more to say but the high priest overrode her.
“It would be unusual in the context of our convents, honoured Sherzal, though I quite understand that these practices are common among the highest families. Arabella herself may well have been raised with a whipping girl to receive her punishments for her.”
“I know I was.” Sherzal smiled. “How my tutors used to beat poor Susi. I never did seem to learn my lesson though.”
“It would perhaps be inappropriate here, honoured Sherzal.” High Priest Nevis almost cringed, as if it hurt his mouth to utter any form of contradiction aimed at the emperor’s sister. “Even when the novice is of royal ancestry. Our recruits leave worldly attachments behind them when they join us.”
“I’ll do it.” Nona raised her voice and took a step forward.
“What?” The high priest turned from Sherzal, blinking.
“I will do it,” Nona said.
“See.” Sherzal gestured with an open hand. “The girl is ready to be punished for her mistakes.” Her smile broadened. “If only all peasants were so obliging.”
“Well . . .” Nevis frowned. “If the novice is willing . . .” He glanced towards Abbess Glass but too quickly to allow her a response.
Sister Wheel advanced from the steps, producing a long cane from the folds of her habit, a black strip of wire-willow, thin enough to cut with each blow.
“I told you.” Zole spoke quietly behind Nona. “That I would make you bleed.”
26
“BITE ON THIS.”
Sister Tallow offered Nona a leather strap.
“Why?” Nona asked.
“It will give you something to do.”
Nona shook her head, keeping her eyes on Sister Tallow’s. The old woman returned her gaze. She had the kind of face that was hard to imagine showing any emotion, a mask of leathery skin, small, tight wrinkles, seams of old scars, cheekbones making sharp angles, her mouth a short and bitter line. Nona always thought of Mistress Blade as old, though no age showed in the way she moved. Sister Rose had said hunskas race through their days; perhaps Mistress Blade and the Poisoner had shared a class once, Sister Apple still sweet, ambling through a long life, while Sister Tallow’s candle burned at both ends and lighted her way to dusty death.
Nona’s thoughts occupied her as Sister Tallow checked the straps securing her wrists above her head. The leather bound her to the lowest of five iron rings set into the wall. Sister Tallow stepped away, leaving Nona facing the stonework, naked. Her habit had been removed to let the lash land; her skirts and smalls taken to save them from the blood. Many of her classmates had gasped as she stripped and they saw for the first time the dark and mottled patchwork of bruising all across her back, ribs, and thighs. Not Zole’s work—though that would show soon enough—but Darla’s from the day before.
“Ready?” Sister Tallow asked.
“Yes.” Nona hadn’t forgotten the Grey; two years of convent living hadn’t taken it from her. Sister Wheel called her a peasant still, and if peasants knew anything, it was how to suffer and how to endure.
The wire-willow struck. Left shoulder to right hip, not a crushing blow like the ones High Priest Jacob had struck against Four-Foot, but a cutting one, a shockingly painful line, like acid, burned in and bleeding out into muscle and bone. Nona screamed. She hadn’t set her mind to silence—she put no stock in sullen defiance. She screamed out the agony as a wordless curse, a promise of violent retribution, a vow that if Zole or any other came against her outside the rules of the hall she would cut their heart out.
The next lash struck across the first, and Nona roared her defiance, not a girl’s shriek but something deep and guttural, a noise she hadn’t known herself capable of. Another lash and another. Nona saw all four blows as bright and intersecting lines across the backs of her eyes. A fifth. She roared again, pure threat, animal and free of complication. A hesitation before the sixth, as if she’d given even Mistress Blade pause.
A seventh. Nona’s hands tore at the stone, jolting the straps about her wrists and the iron ring above. Eight. The bright lines wove tight into a single writhing cord of light burning crimson and gold across her vision. Nine. Ten. Nona could no longer tell if she were shouting: each new line the wire-willow scored into her flowed into the blazing path before her, becoming a single rope twisted from the whole. It hung before her mind’s eye, wrapping about itself, twisting, loops of bright thread seen here and there as when wool is woven into yarn. Eleven. Twelve. Nona’s back felt molten: she could feel the blood trickle across her buttocks, down her thighs, feel each drop as if it were burning metal, liquid from the inhuman heat of furnace and forge. But what burned more were the eyes of her enemies upon her: Zole and Sherzal. Nothing else mattered, not novice, or nun, not the high priest, or Mistress Blade striking the blows . . . just the eyes of her enemies, heavy upon her with the weight of their satisfaction.
More blows, the count lost between them, one so sharp it threw her head back and her eyes open. The wall before her hands lay scored, dark lines against the pale stone, deep and shadow-filled slots in the limestone where the claws of her rage had cut in. Her secret released. Nona’s body jolted against the wall, and her fury reached a new incandescence, chasing away all trace of pain. The single path spun from the threads of a dozen and more blows suddenly snapped into a new configuration, a pattern that filled her sight, a single line chasing through hard angles, a corner, a corner, another corner, a surface filled with rectangles, a space filled with blocks, sketched in place with one bright line. A wall.
Another blow hit home and, howling, Nona reached for the Path. She set foot upon it . . . and was filled. In just one moment the Path poured through her. An awful, wondrous potential ran in her veins, filled every void, pressed against the insides of her eyes, sang in every bone, bursting, consuming, bleeding from her pores. The fear of destruction didn’t scare Nona from the Path—she would have chased so marvellous a doom to the world’s end. Rather it was the Path that slipped from beneath her, live and coiling, twisting away even as she tried for her next step. In some complex space with a dozen ups and a hundred swinging downs, Nona lost her balance and stumbled back into the world.
The wire-willow hit her. She heard it crack. The crack ran through her, through her hands flat against the wall, deep amid the pattern of corners, rectangles, and blocks. For one heartbeat a new silence held the hall and in that silence the walls trembled. In the next heartbeat the stone before her began to fracture with a noise like the world ending and everything fell.
• • •
“UP.” A STRONG hand closed around Nona’s wrist drawing her up and to the side. Her other arm, still bound to the first, rose too. Pieces of broken limestone fell from her as she came upright. Her feet found the ground and she stumbled against Sister Tallow, hurting her instep on jagged rubble. The surface of the wall had shattered outward to a depth of four or five inches in an area some yards across. The iron ring dangled by the straps still binding Nona’s wrists, its pin lodged in a lump of broken stone no bigger than her hand.
Sisters Tallow and Rose wrapped Nona in a sheet. The novices looked on, pale with the dust now sifting down across the hall.
“I’ll carry her.” Sister Rose reached for Nona as she had when she lay arrow-struck that second week.
“No.” Nona spat blood onto the sand. Her back hurt as if a thousand scalding hooks were lodged in it, each on strings being pulled in different directions. “I’ll walk.”
She left the hall, head down and eyes on the sand, taking the steps that old women take, with Sister Rose following close behind. She stopped only once, just as she passed Zole in the line of novices. With head still down she turned her face to watch the girl from the one eye not yet swollen closed. She didn’t speak, only showed her teeth in a crimson grin, then mov
ed on. Zole had a face on which it seemed nothing could be read but, however deep the girl’s faith in herself ran, when Nona smiled she had seen in those dark eyes a moment of doubt.
Nona made it through the main doors and turned from sight. The ice-wind caught her a second later and Sister Rose proved quicker than she looked, snatching her up before she hit the ground.
27
WHATEVER HERBS SISTER Rose ground up, whatever unsavoury pieces of unsavoury animals she extracted and refined, none seemed to numb the pain of Nona’s lacerations quite so well as distraction. It seemed a shame then that the sanatorium was perhaps the most uniformly dull part of the convent, offering nothing more by way of entertainment than a window onto its small garden.
Nona would have given a lot for some company. The other four beds remained empty and she soon reached the point where pushing someone down the stairs in order to fill one of them seemed quite a reasonable solution.
The first visitor Nona received turned out to be Sister Wheel and even this proved a welcome diversion from the business of lying on her side staring out the window until that side became too numb and Sister Rose rolled her to stare at the wall.
“Don’t stay long, Wheel,” Sister Rose said to Sister Wheel’s back as the smaller woman elbowed past her bulk. “And don’t upset her.”
Sister Wheel reached the side of Nona’s bed then turned to stare at Sister Rose until she coloured, looked away, and finally backed through the doorway, pulling the door shut behind her.
“Couldn’t keep me out.” Sister Wheel reached up to tap her headdress. “Only the abbess herself could—and even she can’t overrule both of us. That’s why it’s me and Rose. Chose us because we never agree on anything.” She pulled a chair close to the bed, the scraping of its feet loud and unpleasant. “I suppose you feel pretty full of yourself, don’t you?” She sat, hands clasped in her lap. “Because you’ve got a touch of quantal in you, you think you’re a two-blood.”
If Sister Wheel had a better example of a two-blood than someone with quantal and hunska flowing in their veins then Nona would have been interested to hear it. You needed more than a touch of quantal to reach the Path. But she swallowed any reply and kept her lips pressed in a tight line watching the wide and watery hostility of the nun’s eyes.
“You’re thinking it might be you who’s the Argatha. Well, it’s not. Nothing good ever came out of the Grey: only broken things. Peasants and lies. The Argatha is sent to save us! Will she be a golden princess of the emperor’s own bloodline? Or an urchin taken from under the shadow of the noose? Which do you think? Really?” Flecks of spittle marked the nun’s chin.
“The abbess said that prophecy was just made up,” Nona said.
Sister Wheel waved the idea away. “That’s what prophecy is! It’s something that’s made up and that we have faith is true.”
Nona returned her lips to their line. She wasn’t going to argue faith with Mistress Spirit, even if Mistress Spirit was about as sane as a naked stroll in the ice-wind.
“In any event,” Sister Wheel narrowed her eyes, “it’s not you. It’s possible that you’re the Shield. I’ll entertain that unlikely thought now. But don’t go getting ideas above your station.” She stood to go, took three paces towards the door, stopped and knitted her bony fists in the material of her habit just above her hips. For a moment she paused, caught on the point of indecision, then looked back over her shoulder. “By rights you’re due two more strokes of the cane. That may not be necessary. Just take my words to heart. The Ancestor has a plan for you, girl.”
As Sister Wheel stalked out, Sister Rose bustled in, her hands full of linen strips. “I’ll change your dressings now, dear.”
Nona sighed and eased herself onto her front as Sister Rose fussed over her, tutting. “This wasn’t right. Not right at all.” The nun peeled off the soiled wrappings with deft fingers. “It’s a cruel enough punishment even when you’re guilty . . .”
Nona didn’t want to hear Ara being criticized. “Why does she hate me?”
“Who?” Sister Rose’s innocence didn’t so much as approach the foothills of convincing. Nona said nothing more and a moment later the nun broke the silence. “She doesn’t hate you, Nona. Well . . . she’s . . . that’s just Wheel.” She peeled back another linen strip, sticky with blood, and Nona winced. “She came from the Grey, you know?”
“Who? Sister Wheel?”
“From a tiny village called . . . I forget, but it sounded like a hard place to survive. We were novices together, you know?”
“Sister Wheel from the Grey?” Nona found that hard to imagine. “You were in the same classes?” That seemed scarcely easier to believe. “But she’s old!”
Sister Rose laughed at that. “Wheel’s got more than a touch of hunska. The years haven’t been kind. And wrinkles don’t show on us . . . well-filled . . . individuals.”
“She doesn’t have the accent.” Nona remained unconvinced.
“You’ve lost half of yours in two years. Stay here a few more and nobody will know Nona Grey unless you let her out.” Sister Rose began to wash the cuts.
The fresh pain saved Nona from thinking of a reply to that. She gritted her teeth and buried her face in the pillow with a snarl.
• • •
SISTER PAN CAME to visit Nona that evening—using her rank to overcome the barriers still keeping the novices at bay. She sat down with one hand in her lap, cradled over the stump of the other. “Well,” she said.
Nona offered the nun a small smile. Since Nona’s first day in Path this was perhaps the only time Pan had looked at her with any particular interest. Nona liked Sister Pan; the old woman had a sharp wit but was never unkind, she entertained and guided, rather than directing or dictating. Even so, she seemed almost blind to those without at least a touch of quantal, as if the novices were interchangeable, save for Hessa and Ara, and she only became truly animated with those two.
“You seem to have reached the Path via a route I didn’t teach you,” Sister Pan said.
“Why didn’t you teach it?” Nona asked. Perhaps, even with all her years, Pan hadn’t known the way.
The nun smiled, ancient in her wrinkles, displaying the worn columns of her remaining teeth. “Abbess Glass might object if I chained each novice to a wall and beat them bloody on the off-chance they might run from the whip and reach the Path.” She rubbed her chin. “Also, even on quantals it almost never works. And when it does, it’s of limited use. Serenity allows a person to approach the Path in a slow and measured way. To stay on the Path is incredibly difficult. It requires years of training and rare innate skill. Taking more than a few steps on the Path is hard even when a person edges carefully onto it. When rage or pain take you there . . . Consider the blade-path game that Sister Tallow keeps in her hall. Serenity is a novice edging out from the platform, feet placed with care, arms spread for balance, considering what lies ahead. Rage is a novice bursting from the door at full pelt and racing out over the drop. She may touch the blade-path on her way down, but she’s not truly walking it.”
“That was just a touch?” Even as she spoke Nona knew it to be true. She had fallen from the Path as soon as she “set foot” upon it—not that feet were involved, but the image helped her to make sense of the experience.
“We will examine this matter in class, Nona. There may be exciting times ahead! For now though, practise your serenity. It will help with the pain. That should be motivation enough by itself, even without the Path waiting for you.” Sister Pan stood with an audible creak. “Seek the Path, but do not touch it!” She glanced around. “Sister Rose would not forgive you for damaging the sanatorium! Sister Tallow is far from pleased with the damage wrought in Blade Hall. Also, you would likely die. You were very lucky to have been able to shape and push the Path’s energies into the wall.” A speculative look. “We will talk about how you managed that. Later.”
Sister Pan turned to go, shuffling towards the door with the speed of an old lady twenty years her junior.
“Thank you, sister.” Nona spoke the words quietly to Sister Pan’s back, but the nun, overturning Clera’s insistence that she was deaf, spun around as she said them. “Thank you, novice. When you get to my age you need things like this to keep you alive. Take it from me. I have been too young to know, and I have been too old to care. It’s in that oh-so-narrow slice between that memories are made. So enjoy it.” And with that she was gone, the door swinging shut behind her. “Exciting times. Exciting times.”
Nona lay staring at the door. The animation in Sister Pan’s face when she spoke of the Path returned her to that moment of contact, the awful energy that had filled her like a fire under her skin. The memory pushed aside the pain from her wounds, leaving it a mere tickle at the edge of things. There had been an instant of release as she had driven her talons into the wall and emptied the Path’s power into the stone. She wanted that feeling again. She hadn’t felt anything like it before. Shelter and a fire’s warmth after the ice-wind didn’t come close, not even food offered to a stomach left empty for too many days. She wanted it again.
• • •
CLERA, RULI, AND Jula came the next day, bustling in behind Sister Rose, Ruli leaning out to the side to grin at Nona past the nun’s rotundity. They descended on her bed, making her wince as the mattress shifted under their weight.
“I’m in Grey Class!” Jula crossed her legs at the far end of the bed. “The Poisoner finally gave me my Shade stamp!”
“That’s great!” Nona would have missed Jula, especially her help in Academia. They grinned at each other. More than for her ability to guide Nona’s hand to make perfect letters on the slate in place of her wobbly attempts, Nona liked Jula for the way her bookishness fell away on the sands of Blade Hall. If you didn’t keep your wits about you the scribe’s daughter would set you on your backside, hard, and all without a drop of hunska in her veins.