“So, you cheated and then you fell.” Joeli put herself between Nona and the doorway.
Kill her!
Nona ignored Keot, slipping between Joeli and the tall girl from Holy.
At least cut an ear off . . .
Nona had her hand on the door before Joeli spoke again. “Did you cheat when you murdered Raymel Tacsis?”
Nona turned around.
“I can see it doesn’t take thread-work to pull your strings.” Joeli’s smile was an ugly thing.
Better. Make sure you scar her face.
“Raymel Tacsis sought to kill me out in the wilds. I killed him first.”
“There were half a dozen of you, including Tarkax Ice-spear. Raymel came alone.” Joeli managed to sound disgusted at the injustice of it.
“I heard she had some gerant helping her.” The girl from Holy Class wrinkled her nose at the thought of it, somehow ignoring the fact that Raymel stood close on nine foot tall and had sent his soldiers in first. “That girl . . .” She snapped her fingers, trying to recall a name. “You know the one . . . The fat—”
“Sorry.” Darla rubbed her elbow where it had struck the Holy Class novice in the face. She peered down at her, sprawled on the floor, moaning. “Didn’t see you there.”
Nona didn’t try to hide her grin. “I killed Raymel Tacsis. He was a murderer and I doubt many worse men have drawn breath. If that damaged your family connections at court or inconvenienced the Namsis in any way . . . I don’t care.” She turned to go. “You’ll have to work harder than that to provoke me, Joeli.”
“Of course the person who really pulled your strings was back here while you were murdering your betters out in the Corridor.”
Nona found herself facing Joeli again without remembering turning around.
“A pity she was killed in the cave-in while her conspirator escaped with the shipheart,” Joeli said. “I would have liked to have seen the peasant bitch drowned for her crimes against this convent. What did they call her? Hop-along! That was—”
“Hessa.” Nona found herself pinning Joeli to the floor. Her hand scarlet around the girl’s throat where Keot burned across her skin. “Her name was Hessa.”
Finish her! Tear her neck open! Keot fought Nona as she struggled to draw her hand back. Shouts of alarm rang out all around her, novices seized her shoulders, and still she couldn’t withdraw her hand though the trembling fingers, caught in a war between her and Keot, exerted no pressure.
As Darla lifted her clear Nona managed to force Keot into the shadows of her habit sleeve. Joeli’s throat slipped undamaged from her grip, just the faint white impression of fingers left to record the event. The girl’s eyes narrowed and she started to choke, clutching at her neck. Darla carried Nona out through the door, and the wave of Joeli’s concerned friends closed in around her. Their voices followed Nona, raised in such outrage that you might think Joeli lay disembowelled in a pool of her own gore. The last thing Nona saw through the ring of backs were Joeli’s eyes seeking hers, a small but triumphant smile on her lips.
4
“I HEAR YOU’VE been making friends in your new class.” Ara sat herself down beside Nona, golden hair frothing around her shoulders.
“How—”
“Ruli told me. You know there’s nothing happens at Sweet Mercy without Ruli knowing minutes later. I think it’s her secret marjal talent. You have your claws, Ruli has gossip-magic.” Ara nodded at Ruli, crossing the novice cloister to join them.
“I heard you put Joeli in the sanatorium!” Ruli sat heavily on Nona’s other side, habit billowing around her, cheeks red with excitement.
“I hardly touched her.” Nona frowned. Joeli had come to the Academia Tower with a shawl around her neck. In the corridor outside the lesson she came up to Nona and held her gaze for a long moment, pale green eyes fixed upon Nona’s black orbs without a flicker of fear. “Hessa’s name is so important to you? And yet you’ve never even visited the spot where she died. If you really thought Yisht killed Hessa . . . wouldn’t you want to find her murderer?” She turned away then with just a hint of a smile, her words echoing in Nona’s head.
A minute later Sister Rail had called the novices into the classroom. Inevitably she spotted Joeli’s neck scarf and asked about this departure from the novice uniform. Joeli had, in a croaking whisper wholly absent in the corridor, related a lurid tale of being throttled. Sister Rail had sent her to the sanatorium to be checked over and had fixed Nona with a steely eye. Sister Rule had been huge, straining every seam of her habit. Her replacement, Rail, was a short, painfully thin woman whose habit flapped around her. Both nuns controlled their class with a very firm hand, but Rule’s had at least been fair and she had welcomed questions, valuing cleverness of any kind. Although she’d endured just a handful of lessons so far it seemed clear to Nona that Sister Rail most valued the ability to recite what the mistress said. She appeared to consider questions to be a form of stupidity and contrary ideas tantamount to mutiny.
Nona looked around at her friends on the cloister bench. “Really. I had a hand on Joeli’s neck but I held back. I didn’t choke her.”
The pause, just a beat of silence, reminded Nona that even friends needed a moment to swallow unlikely statements, true or not.
“Rosie won’t be taken in by a pretend croak,” Ruli said. “She’ll send Joeli on her way soon enough.”
But Joeli hadn’t returned to class. She wasn’t in the cloister either, and Joeli loved to hold court beneath the centre oak during breaks. Nona glanced at her friends. They had seen her rages, back before she started to master Keot, and those hadn’t been pretty scenes. Fortunately Zole had suffered the worst of them, mostly out on the sands of Blade Hall, and had never complained . . . probably because she usually won the fight. And even when Keot had his hooks set deep into the meat of her emotions Nona had never used her flaw-blades or raised her hand against a novice not training for the Red.
“So, senior novice!” Jula hailed. She bent over Nona’s shoulder, lowering her voice. “Are you too grand to come ‘below’ with us now?” She cropped her mousey hair short these days. It tickled Nona’s ear.
“Try to stop me.” Nona grinned. Jula had always been the most bookish and law-abiding of novices but since her discovery, close by the Seren Way, of a hidden entrance into the caves there had been no end to her enthusiasm for clandestine exploration.
Darla came to join them, shouldering her way through the building crowd. “Oh Ancestor, that Sister Rail will kill me with those lessons. I don’t care which emperor annexed what territory.”
“You should!” Ruli said. “Your father’s promotion is any day now, and generals are always annexing something.”
Darla scowled, sitting heavily on the bench. “And I don’t care which tax caused what revolt. The only good thing to happen in that lesson was Joeli leaving.”
“Seriously, though.” Ruli pushed aside the long pale fall of her hair and turned back to Nona. “Keep a lid on that temper. Sister Wheel would happily push you off the cliff and have Ara as Shield. And what would you do out there in the world if the abbess had to throw you out?”
Ara nodded. “Joeli’s trouble. She’s got half the mistresses on her side and a lot more friends inside the convent than you do. Then you have to think about how many friends she has outside. Just because they like her family’s money rather than her doesn’t stop them being dangerous. The Namsis are as well placed as my family, plus if you’re discharged from the order they’d happily murder you just to earn favour with the Tacsis.”
“Sometimes I think I’d like to go out there and let them try.”
“Nona!” Ruli looked shocked.
“What? It’s the only way I’m ever going to find Yisht. She’s not going to come back here and let me kill her.” Nona scowled up at the grey sky, which was darkening by the moment. The cloister roofs opposite lay white, plastered by the ice-wind. The centre oak’s branches tossed randomly as the wind sought its direction, t
he Corridor wind trying to reassert itself. The tree’s leaves were wrapped so tightly against the cold that the branches seemed bare. “Joeli said bad things about Hessa. That’s what got to me.”
“That’s how she is. Pulling strings, even if it’s not thread-work,” Ara said. “She’s even got on the Poisoner’s good side because she’s so good at brewing up nastiness in a pot. So watch what you touch around her! And she poisons minds just as easily. The girl’s got a tongue on her. It wasn’t bad luck you fell foul of her straight off. She made it happen. Perhaps she even had it hot for Raymel Tacsis. She wouldn’t be the first Namsis matched to a Tacsis.”
Nona stared at the novices out on the gravelled yard, jaw clenched. Ara was right and the truth of it burned her. She’d been manipulated, moulded to the Namsis girl’s desire. Her eyes found Zole, alone as usual, sitting with her back to the centre oak, knees drawn up. Joeli could never sway Zole. The ice-triber gave out nothing for anyone to take a hold of. Since the bloodshed at the Devil’s Spine all those years ago Zole had perhaps spoken a hundred words to Nona. Most of them singular and days apart.
“So, are we cave hunting tonight?” Ruli asked.
“Don’t you ever sleep?” Darla was distinctly less keen than the rest of them when it came to exploring the tunnels riddling the Rock of Faith.
Ruli stuck her tongue out. “So, are we?”
“It’s dangerous.” Ara closed her fingers, signing that Ruli should lower her voice.
Ara didn’t just mean the chance of getting lost or injured. After the theft of the shipheart Abbess Glass had made clear that any novices exploring the convent’s undercaves would find themselves stripped of the habit, too untrustworthy to marry the Ancestor. And it seemed that all the rules were being more strictly enforced these days, Sister Wheel’s determination to root out wrongdoing more zealous from one day to the next.
“It’s the only exciting thing we do outside Blade class.” Ruli pouted. Jula had discovered the fissure hidden just past one of the many turns of the Seren Way, but it had been Ruli who convinced the novices that the caves it led to were just caves, not directly under the convent and so not the convent’s undercaves. On that basis they had begun their explorations. Discovery would undoubtedly bring punishment, but wouldn’t see them turned out into the world. Besides . . . they weren’t going to be discovered!
“I . . .” An uneasiness ran through Nona—having no world outside Sweet Mercy to return to she had always been the one of them with most to lose. “Perhaps we shouldn’t . . .” Across the cloister she saw a face at a window, above the galleried walkway. Joeli? Watching her? Smiling with the mouth that had sullied Hessa’s name. Nona knew she wouldn’t find any clues to Yisht’s whereabouts on top of the Rock. And Joeli had been right. Nona had failed her friend. For three long years Nona’s struggles with mastering Keot and the enormity of the challenge in finding justice for Hessa had kept her from action. Perhaps there really was something in the caves that might help. Maybe they could find a passage to the convent undercaves. She owed it to her friend to visit the place where she had died. Maybe Hessa had left some clue for Nona that might lead to her killer. Even at twelve Hessa had had few equals when it came to thread-work and bathed in the power of the shipheart she might have accomplished miracles. “Oh hells, let’s do it!”
A raindrop hit the back of Nona’s hand. A fat raindrop, close to freezing. A heartbeat later a salvo scattered down around them. As one the novices joined the rush for the shelter of the galleries, and behind them the black sky opened, hurling down the rain as if each drop were intended to be fatal. By the time Nona looked again for the window where Joeli had been the rain had drawn a curtain across it.
Sister Pail found Nona with her friends as they huddled together watching the downpour. “You’re to appear before the convent table tonight at eighth bell, that’s Ferra, not Bray.” She stood regarding Nona with mild distaste, her habit beaded with water.
“Why? What’s she done?” Ghenna, small and dark, working her way out of a clump of Red Class novices.
Sister Pail kept her gaze on Nona. “The abbess doesn’t approve of novices trying to murder other novices.”
5
ABBESS GLASS
“ANY OTHER BUSINESS before we invite the judge to make his petition?” Abbess Glass looked up from her notes. Along both sides of the long table nuns returned her gaze. All except Sister Kettle, still recording the minutes of the last item in the ledger of record. A chamber beneath the scriptorium held piles of such ledgers, filled with minutes, stacked to the ceiling in columns that marched off into the mildewed gloom. Enough minutes to constitute hours, weeks, decades. Never to be read. But authority must leave a trail or how else will it be held to account, and without checks, or at least the potential for them, authority, like any power, corrupts. “Other business?”
“Nona Grey.” Sister Rail laid a hand upon the table. It was, like the rest of her, little more than skin and bones, the long nails jagged at the ends.
“Again?” Abbess Glass sighed and flexed her own hand. The burn scar across her palm had remained stiff despite all of Sister Rose’s oils and unguents, allowing only limited movement. At times like these she let the echo of that old pain remind her that it had been Nona who saved her from the fire.
“Again.” Sister Rail inclined her head. On the table her nails dug at the wood.
“Really?” Abbess Glass had disliked Sister Rail within moments of her arrival from the Convent of Silent Devotion, but by that point Sister Rule had already departed on her sabbatical and nobody else could teach Academia to all four classes. Besides, Rail had other qualifications Glass required, and one did not have to like one’s pieces in order to play them. “Tell me.”
“She attacked and very nearly maimed Novice Joeli within hours of joining Mystic Class.” The bony hand on the table became a bony fist. The candle flames jumped as if Sister Rail had struck the wood and set the candlesticks shuddering.
“I wonder that Sister Spire hasn’t brought this to my attention.” Abbess Glass looked to the nun in question. Nona’s new class mistress was another recent addition to the convent, a young Holy Sister returned from three years’ ministering to the sick on the far borders of Archon Anasta’s see.
“Sister Spire didn’t know anything about it.” Sister Spire raised an eyebrow and turned her gaze on Sister Rail.
“The girl came to me in confidence.” Sister Rail made a sour pucker of her mouth. Rail’s family were a very minor branch of the Namsis tree and she had petitioned the abbess before on Novice Joeli’s behalf.
The abbess frowned, wondering what “almost maiming” the novice had entailed. “And what do you propose we do?” She could see her breath before her. White hands pulled her robes tighter. The cold never left the hall; the heating pipes lay freezing since the shipheart had been taken. “Do you have a punishment in mind, sister?”
“Reduce the girl to convent helper,” Sister Rail replied without hesitation. “That’s what she deserves. At the very least she must be returned to Grey Class and whipped before the Ancestor’s dome.”
“I vote she be whipped and then reduced to helper.” Sister Wheel leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Or banished.”
“Perhaps we could hear some evidence first, sister? Before moving to sentencing.” The abbess raised her hand to forestall Wheel’s reply. “Did someone think to summon the girls?” She drank from the cup beside her, wishing the water were wine.
“I saw them waiting in the corridor.” Sister Apple had arrived late and sat at the far end of the table.
Abbess Glass gestured towards the door. The ice had been surging for three years straight, all the nations of the Corridor squeezed tight against their borders, bursting for war, and here she sat arbitrating the disputes of children.
Sister Apple’s footsteps echoed in the bare hall. She spoke a word to the junior nun outside and moments later Joeli Namsis limped in, one hand at her throat, blonde hair in disarray.
Nona Grey stalked in behind her. She looked twice the size of the painfully thin stray the abbess had brought from Verity more than five years earlier. Her unnerving all-black eyes seemed to challenge each nun in turn. She stood as tall as several at the table now, still slim, but Abbess Glass knew the body beneath that habit was corded with muscle. The abbess frowned at the state of Nona’s hair, a short and spiky shock as consumingly black as her eyes. Efforts to tame it over the years had singularly failed.
Abbess Glass nodded to Sister Spire.
“If you could outline your grievance, Novice Joeli?”
Joeli looked as if nothing but determination kept her upright, sagging around her unspecified injuries. She dragged her bad leg a step closer to the table and spoke in a cracked whisper, holding her neck. “I was watching the class at blade-path. The new girl fell and seemed to think it was my fault. She beat me to the ground and tried to kill me.”
“Novice Nona?” Sister Spire gave her an inquiring look.
“I did knock her down. If I had tried to kill her she would be dead.”
Sister Spire frowned. She had blunt features, not unkindly arranged, marred by a burn that ran across her forehead and down the side of her face. “Novice Joeli, how did Novice Nona try to kill you?”
“She . . .” Joeli stifled a sob. “She strangled me. She said she would kill me. She said it before she even chose her bed! And . . . and then she wrapped her hands around my throat and . . .” Another sob. “They had to pull her off me.”
“Is this true, Novice Nona?” Sister Spire asked.
“It was one hand. And for a few seconds. But yes.” Nona furrowed her brow, looking furiously at the ground.
“And how long would you say you were throttled for, Novice Joeli?”