Grey Sister

  “You. Take us to convent.” The man advanced another two paces gesturing with his spear for her to move.

  “I won’t!” Apple tried to sound scared rather than impatient. She thought of Kettle in danger, injured maybe, and fear entered her voice. “I can’t. It’s forbidden.” She had to get them close. She couldn’t do much if they prodded her ahead of them at the point of a spear. She let her gaze flit between the faces of the men, offering a wavering defiance. A defiance that they might enjoy breaking.

  The leader motioned and two of his men advanced to grab Apple’s arms. A third kept his bow ready, half-drawn, arrow pointing her way, daring her to run. The last leaned on his spear, grinning vacantly.

  Apple feigned panic, raising her hands to intercept those that reached for her, but offering too little resistance to invite blows. One of the pair seemed to need no excuse and slapped her anyway, a hard, callused hand across the face. She spat blood and cried out for mercy. Both men were smeared with the clear boneless syrup now, sticky on their fingers.

  The slapper twisted one arm behind her while the other made to open her coat, perhaps forgetting that the Ancestor’s brides take a vow of poverty. Knowing he would find her array of poisons and cures rather than any gold or silver Apple wailed piteously, raising her clenched fist to remind them she had something more obviously hidden.

  Slapper grunted incomprehensible syllables to Robber and the man abandoned the coat-ties to pry Apple’s hand open. In taking hold of it he got a second dose of boneless wiped across the palm of his hand. With the bitterwill to counter the poison Apple felt only a numbness where the syrup coated her, the strength in her arms untouched.

  Apple began crying out, keeping her fist clenched against Robber’s weakening efforts. Slapper tried to twist her into submission and it hurt like fire but she managed enough resistance to stop him breaking the arm behind her. At the same time Apple threw herself left then right, her progress always towards the leader and the archer though she never once glanced their way. The Durns’ hobnails slid on the mud. The remaining subordinates laughed uproariously at their comrades’ efforts, making no move to help. The leader, snorting in disgust, motioned the archer forward then jammed his spear-butt into the mud and followed to intercept the group as they made a weaving approach.

  Neither Slapper nor Robber yet seemed to understand that they had been poisoned, presumably believing instead that Apple was an abnormally strong woman, perhaps drawing some animal strength from the depths of her terror. Apple wrenched her fist to her face as the officer reached them. She blew through her closed hand, a short sharp puff, and a cloud of powder from the crushed wrap bloomed around the man’s head. The edge of the cloud caught the archer just behind him.

  True terror loaned Apple the strength to throw herself backwards, falling from the Durns’ clutches to the rutted mud. She had seen what grey mustard could do and nothing in her array of antidotes would reduce the pain and disfigurement of it to an acceptable level.

  The officer’s screams shattered the air, the breath for his second cry sucking mustard spores into his lungs. The archer fell back, scratching at his eyes. Slapper and Robber staggered away, tripping and stumbling. Which left Apple empty-handed, on the ground, with one able-bodied foe just yards away, spear in hand.

  Another person’s distress exerts a certain fascination; the man stood in slack-jawed horror watching the officer claw his face to ruin. Apple glanced at the shadows between the trees. So close: a quick scramble could see her safe in their embrace. The need to be speeding towards Kettle drew at her even more strongly than the desire to escape. But Sisters of Discretion swear more than just vows of piety and poverty. Suppressing an impatient snarl, Apple drew her knife. She rose slowly from the mud amid the officer’s bubbling screams, the archer’s curses, and the struggles of the other two Durnishmen trying and failing to get to their feet. Her headdress had come loose and red hair spilled around her shoulders. The last of her coat-ties gave and her range-coat opened about her like the dark wings of a raptor. She held her knife ready to throw, a pouch of ground deadruff in the other hand in case she got the chance to take the spearman alive.

  The raider saw her at the last moment, dragging his gaze from the frothing officer, now fallen into the ditch. As he lowered his spear Apple’s hand rose in an underarm throw and an instant later the hilt of her knife jutted beneath his chin. He sat down, clutching his throat in confusion.

  The archer stumbled close by, blinded with tears and blood. Apple took up a dropped spear and ran it through the man’s chest. Next she went to offer mercy to the officer, now a twisting thing of mud and grass in the icy ditch water. She left him in a crimson bath and considered the two fallen Durns, Slapper and Robber. One had his face towards her and tracked the bloody tip of her spear with his eyes. Apple frowned, her gaze wandering to the treeline again, eager to be off. She had no stomach for killing helpless foes. In truth she had no stomach for killing. She had always been a better teacher than a doer.

  Apple crouched. “Sisters of Discretion are supposed to pass unseen and be impossible to take unawares.” She took two purple pills from her habit, brilliant groundwort. She had cured and prepared the roots herself, pressed the pills and sealed them in wax. “It’s all very embarrassing. I won’t tell if you don’t.” She peeled the pills quickly and popped one into the mouth of each man then rolled them so they wouldn’t choke. “If nobody finds and kills you before you can move again—and believe me you deserve to be found and killed—then my advice is to run all the way back to your boat.”

  She wiped her hand on Slapper’s cloak. The groundwort would make them sick for a week. A month if they swallowed too much. She considered leaving her dagger in the spearman’s neck, but went to retrieve it, pulling the blade free with a shudder of revulsion. In the next moment she was moving, running for the trees, red blade in hand.

  * * *

  • • •

  APPLE HAD ALWAYS been a teacher first, lacking the iron for the darkest shades of grey-work. Kettle though, she would never fail to do what was required, without relish or complaint. A perfect weapon. When duty called her she had the capacity to put her sweet nature in a box, ready for collection when the mission was complete. The thought of what it would take to get her to call for help made Apple shudder. Kettle would never willingly make Apple abandon the abbess’s orders. Arabella Jotsis stood alone in the wild now, unwatched.

  Apple pressed on, using all her resolve to pace herself rather than to sprint. Miles lay ahead. She dodged around trees, following a deer track for a while then leaving it to pursue a stream, rotten with ice.

  Kettle had been watching Nona. Had something happened to the child? She was fearless, fierce, and quicker than thinking, but there were more dangerous things out in the Corridor than Nona Grey. Perhaps it was Nona that needed help . . . Apple shook the thought away: the pain had been Kettle’s, and the fear.

  A swirling fog came in, lifted somewhere by the moon’s focus and carried perhaps for days in the ice-wind. The forest clutched at her, sought to trip her at every step, tried to lure her from her path with easier tracks. In the blind whiteness Apple found her way, following the faint echo of Kettle’s cry through the shadow.

  Many miles became few miles and, as the fog cleared, became a singular remaining mile. The land had opened up into heath where the soil stood too thin and too sour for crops. Farmsteads lay scattered, raising sheep and goats; few houses stood close enough to see one from the next. Apple picked up speed, running now as she crossed rough ground, divided here and there by grassed-over lanes and collapsed walls of dry stone. Ahead the land dipped. In the broad valley a stream threaded its path between stands of trees before losing itself in a thicker extent of woodland. Kettle waited among those woods, Apple could feel it; her nearness tugged at the scar her shadow-cry had left.

  Apple slowed as she approached the first trees. She had been careless before: her haste had delivered her into the hands of men she could h
ave stepped around unnoticed if she had kept her focus. She moved between two elms and the shadows flowed around her, raised with both hands. Shade-work had always come easy to her. Darkness pooled in her palms. When the shadows answered her will it felt as if she had remembered some name that had long escaped her, or recognized the solution to a puzzle, a sort of mental relief, joy almost. Other shadow-magic had been worked within the woods. The empty spaces shivered with the echoes of it. Kettle’s cry lay there, sharp and deep, but other traces too, the sour workings of Noi-Guin. Apple had tasted their like before, back at Sweet Mercy on the night Thuran Tacsis had sent two of them to kill Nona. Quite how they had failed in that task was beyond her.

  Apple wrapped herself in darkness and sought the patience of the Grey Sister. Mistress Path had taught her the mantras twenty years ago and Apple had made them part of her own foundation, woven through her core. Today though, with Kettle’s distress throbbing through the shadow, patience came hard.

  The undergrowth scratched and tore and rustled with each step Apple took. She felt as raw as any novice, her woodcraft rusty with disuse, certain that her advance would be heard by any foe within a thousand yards. Bait the trap. A tactic as old as killing. Leave a comrade, a friend, a lover wounded, then wait and watch. A Noi-Guin could be resting among the branches of any tree, crossbow ready, bolt envenomed.

  Kettle wouldn’t have called me if that were true. Apple advanced, leaving patience behind her but bringing the shadows.

  All that drew her eyes to Kettle was the bond between them. The nun lay at the base of a great frost-oak, the length of her body fitting around the rise and fall of roots. Leaves covered her range-coat, leaves and mud, her headdress gone, the spread of raven hair showing the paleness of her face only in thin slices. She lay sprawled like a dead thing, a part of the forest floor, a work of camouflage of which any Grey Sister would be proud.

  “Kettle!” Apple came to her side, the fear of an assassin’s bow crushed beneath the certainty that Kettle lay dead and that no purpose remained to her in the world. She took Kettle’s muddy fingers in her own, shocked by the coldness of them. “Kettle . . . it’s me.” She choked on the words, overwhelmed, while her other hand, still calm, sought the nun’s pulse with practised ease. Nothing. No . . . not nothing, a whisper.

  Apple reached to pull Kettle to her, to lift her from the cold ground, but saw the hilt of the knife, jutting from her side just above the hip. She touched a finger to the pommel, an iron ball. Leather binding wound the grip. She recognized the dagger. Kettle had shown one like it to her after it was confiscated from Nona. Noi-Guin for certain then. The one that got away. Apple eased her lover onto her lap and sat for a moment, hugging her, eyes squeezed tight against the tears. Seconds later she drew a deep shuddering breath and strove for calm.

  Think.

  Apple set Kettle back upon the ground and stripped her own range-coat to lie her on. With Kettle arranged on the coat she examined her for other injuries, checking the colour of her skin, lifting an eyelid, listening to her breath, watching the speed with which circulation returned to her extremities when pinched. She took a thin leather tube from the collection within her habit and broke the seal. Already the cold was making her shiver. She tipped the liquid into Kettle’s mouth, sat back, and watched. The knife was the only wound. It must have been coated with blade-venom but there were no strong indications to narrow down the type.

  For the longest minute in Apple’s life nothing happened. All about her the trees groaned against the wind, their leaves seething. Then Kettle twitched, spluttered and started to choke. Apple seized her head. “Easy! Just breathe.”

  “W-where?” Any further question became lost in coughing and choking. One hand clutched at the range-coat just above the knife. “Hurts.”

  “I told you to breathe, idiot.”

  “A-Appy?” Kettle rolled her head to see, eyes squinting as if the light were too bright. Her skin was bone-white, lips almost blue. “Sister.” The faintest smile.

  “I’ve given you adrene, it won’t last long. Tell me what you’ve taken. Quick!”

  “Nona. She made me call.” Kettle slurred the words, staring past Apple at the leaves, black against a white sky. “Gone now.”

  Apple shook her. “What did you take? It’s important!”

  “B—” Kettle blinked, trying to focus. “Black cure.” Her breath came shallow and fast. “And . . . kalewort.”

  “Kalewort?”

  “I—was cold. Thought it . . . might be nightweed on—”

  “Who puts nightweed in blade-venom?” Apple shook her head. “Where’s the assassin?”

  “Gone.” Kettle’s eyes closed and her head flopped back.

  Apple bit her lip. The black cure should have had more effect whatever the Noi-Guin had used. She tasted blood and frowned. Her mind lay blank. Nothing in her great store of lore suggested a cause or cure.

  Despair closed about Apple. Her lips moved, reciting venoms, none of which fitted the symptoms. Tendrils of shadow caught around Kettle, moving across her in wisps. Apple stared, her brow furrowed, mind racing. On the white inch of wrist exposed before Kettle’s range-coat swallowed her arm, a line of shadow followed the path of the largest vein.

  “No?” Apple motioned the shadows around her forward and like a dark sea they washed over Kettle. As they drew back traces of shadow remained, held by her veins as a lodestone will hold powdered iron, revealing the invisible lines of its influence. “Yes!”

  She grabbed Kettle’s face in both hands. “Wake up! Kettle, wake up!” Kettle lay, as boneless as the Durns in the road. Apple slapped her. “Wake up! It was dark-venom.”

  “I’m dead then.” Kettle rolled her eyes open. “I’m so sorry.” A glistening tear pooled in the corner of her eye. She lifted a hand, as if it were the heaviest thing in the world, to Apple’s cheek. “You’re bleeding.”

  Apple took the fingers and kissed them. “You are my blood.”

  The darkness began to thicken around them, shadows streaming towards Apple, clotting about her.

  “What are . . . you doing?” The smoothness of Kettle’s brow furrowed and her hand dropped back to her side.

  “Saving you,” Apple said. The effort of drawing so much shadow so fast tightened her voice. She felt a coldness in her bones, an ache behind her eyes.

  “H-how?” Kettle sought her eyes. “There’s no way.”

  “There is a way.” Apple saw Kettle only because the darkness ran so deep in her. Night enfolded them both now, a fist of darkness within the depths of a forest grown lighter as its shadows were stolen. “I have to push you into shadow.”

  “No.” Kettle managed to shake her head. “The Ancestor—”

  “I have to. It’s the only way.” Apple gathered the darkness around her hands until even to her night-born sight they were holes cut in the shape of her body, without depth or contrast. The Noi-Guin pushed the best of their killers into the shadow, as far as their minds could bear it. It broke some of them. Others were lost in the dark places behind the world. But the price Kettle feared to pay was her soul. The Church taught that those who walked too far into the shadow would never join the Ancestor in unity.

  “Don’t.” Kettle lacked the strength to raise her hands again. “Sister Wheel . . . says the Ancestor—”

  “Fuck Wheel, and fuck the Ancestor.” Apple set one hand to Kettle’s chest, kneeling above her, ready to push. She took the hilt of the knife in her other hand. “You’re mine and I won’t lose you.” She bent her head and tears fell. “Let me do it.” Her mouth twitched and the words came out broken. “Please.”

  “Poisoner.” Kettle found the strength to raise a hand, running white fingers into the flame of Apple’s hair. She held her a moment. “Poison me.”

  And with a cry Apple pressed down with one black palm, all her strength behind it, and with the other drew the assassin’s knife from the wound, pulling with the steel and blood an inky venom born of the darkness that dwells between
stars.

  2

  Two Years Later

  “HAVE YOU COME for the laundry?” The tall girl, a willowy blonde with a narrow beauty to her, stood away from her bed and bent to pull the linens from it. A titter ran among the other novices getting undressed around the room. Mystic Class had the whole of the dormitory’s second floor and the beds were well spaced around the walls, with desks between them.

  Nona had been warned about Joeli Namsis. Her family held lands to the west and kept a close alliance with Thuran Tacsis. “Yes,” she said, and stepped forward quickly, taking the bundled sheets with hunska swiftness. She returned to the doorway and threw the bedding down the stairs. Across the skin of her back Keot trembled with laughter.

  “Now, which bed is mine? Or must I take one?” Nona looked around at their faces, a dozen of them, variously astonished or horrified, a couple even amused. Of all the novices from Nona’s time in Red Class she was the first to join Mystic. Three of the girls from her time in Grey Class had reached Mystic ahead of her: Mally, a hunska prime who had been head-girl, had a bed close to the door; Alata watched her, dark-eyed, from the far side of the room, the ritual patterning of her scars a black web across arms and cheeks; and Darla who had joined the week before, grinning beneath the brown mop of her hair, the hugeness of her contriving to make the larger Mystic beds look small.

  “Well that was a mistake, peasant.” Joeli came to stand before Nona.

  “Mistakes are how we learn.” Nona looked expectantly past Joeli’s shoulder towards an empty bed.

  “Perhaps I should teach you another lesson.” Joeli raised a hand, fingers spread. A white haze of lines filled Nona’s Path-sight. Some said Joeli was the best thread-worker in the convent, and since Hessa’s death Nona supposed it could be true. Using any kind of Path-power outside a lesson however was a surefire way to get your back shredded with a wire-willow cane, no matter which family name you bore.