Red Sister Read online

  “Ready?” Ghena asked. She hadn’t taken the advantage of surprise like Jula had, but looking at her Nona knew pride lay behind the restraint, not kindness. Ghena wanted to own her victory whole.

  Nona gave a slight nod and Ghena snapped a punch at her, a straight jab, not Arabella’s clumsy swing announced by her whole body before she even started. This came sudden and direct. Nona blocked the fist with both hands, palms crossed before her face. The smack of flesh on flesh echoed in the space of the hall and the impact hurt far more than Nona had imagined.

  She lowered her hands to see a look of surprise on Ghena’s face.

  “You’re fast.” Ghena tilted her neck left, then right, stretching.

  Without warning the novice launched a flurry of punches, advancing a step with each, a furious attack with no quarter granted. Nona let the world slow around her, the split seconds crystallizing into that clarity she had always been able to call upon. She stepped back, swaying out of the path of one punch, knocking the next aside so it passed within a hair’s breadth of her cheek. Ghena was quick. Very quick. Hunska-fast. Nona pushed aside another punch, another, sidestepped a third. Ghena’s mask cracked and her fury showed. Anger made her blows more wild but only seemed to increase her speed. Nona found herself having to work harder, saving herself only by the narrowest of margins. She gritted her teeth and dug deeper into the moment until her brain buzzed inside her skull like a trapped bee and even Ghena’s whip-crack blows became lazy things that she could step around.

  Nona saw, even in the fractions their fight occupied, awareness start to enter Ghena’s eyes, a widening, a dilation of pupils. She knew the look—she had seen it before in the eyes of her first friend when he had tossed her a fourth ball and she added it to her juggling thinking to please him . . . She let Ghena’s fist catch her on the left shoulder, and spun with the impact, allowing it to carry her to the floor. A great spray of sand marked her arrival and she stayed there, panting.

  A long moment passed and Nona let the world run at its own pace again, feeling the sand grains between her lips, the ache in her shoulder, the sting still in her palms. At last Mistress Blade’s clap broke the silence. Nona sat up, climbed slowly to her feet, and went to rejoin the line. The novices nodded their approval. Clera and Ruli looked impressed, Arabella sour. Of all of them only Ghena’s gaze held a measure of confusion, and in Sister Tallow’s there was a quiet speculation.

  8

  NONA LIKED THE dormitories better than the nun’s cell of the night before. The building had three storeys, Red and Grey classes dividing the ground floor between them in two long, low rooms, Mystic and Holy each having their own floor, with study rooms for the Holies at the top. The beds were larger and more comfortable too, being raised on legs, each with a mattress of folded blankets over boards. Nona lay on hers while the class moved about her, chatting and getting ready for sleep. In the bed to Nona’s left Ghena had already crawled beneath her covers and lay dead to the world.

  Nona stretched, yawning. The exercises in Blade, one punch and one throw repeated over and over, never quite to Sister Tallow’s satisfaction, had left her sore and sweat-soaked. The bathhouse afterwards took away the ache and stink of exercise and left in its place a warm and bone-deep weariness. If Clera hadn’t reached down a hand to help her out of the pool Nona suspected that she might still be there, floating helpless amid the steam.

  Ruli came to sit at the end of Nona’s bed, her long hair pushed up into a nightcap bulging comically atop her head. “I’m surprised you can keep your eyes open after that.” She nodded towards Ghena’s bed.

  “Did I do all right?” Nona asked.

  “You were great! You’re fast, Nona! Ghena doesn’t have a lot of technique because she’s only been here three months, but she’s really, really quick, a prime for sure. Only Clera’s quicker than Ghena and some say—”

  “They say I’m the fastest the convent has seen in years.” Clera sat on the next bed along and favoured Nona with a dangerous smile. “Hunska full-blood.”

  “Are there other convents?” Nona remained flat on her back, the blanket pulled to her neck, gaze returning to the dance of shadows on the ceiling.

  “Six.” Ruli began to count them off on her fingers. “Silent Patience, Chaste Devotion, Gerran’s Crag—”

  “Sweet Mercy is the only one to teach Blade, Path, or Shade. The rest just train Holy Sisters.”

  “Just?” Jula from a nearby bed, still sounding sour about her lost hair.

  “Holy Sisters are as important to the Ancestor as any other sister,” Ruli chipped in with a conciliatory tone. “The abbess is a Holy Sister and she’s in charge of us all.”

  Nona let them talk and watched the shadows play. She didn’t want to see Arabella, strangely alien now with her pink scalp and patchy blonde stubble. She didn’t want to catch the girl’s eye and start another round of accusations. Jula had taken her shaving with poor grace but her reaction was as nothing compared to Arabella’s outburst. Nona had wondered for a moment if Sister Tallow would have to hold her down . . .

  Abbess Glass had said Nona was free to leave at any time, but when Arabella had demanded to go home in the tone of someone used to being obeyed, Sister Tallow had said no.

  “I’m not letting a novice hack at me with a razor because some wild-land peasant stole my belt!” And with that Arabella had started to stride towards the main doors.

  What followed had been ugly to watch, but no matter how Arabella raged or how dire her threats the nun had shown no hint of backing down, and eventually a tearful Arabella Jotsis sat in the chair provided while Jula removed her golden hair with a long razor and a trembling hand.

  By the time it was Arabella’s turn to shave Jula’s head she did so with a steady grip on the blade, her eyes red-rimmed and full of cold accusation aimed in Nona’s direction.

  Nona opened her eyes with a start. Sleep had nearly taken her. She rolled her head to the left. Clera sat on the edge of the bed in her long white nightgown, the copper penny she so often played with in her hand. The other girls were settling into their beds. “We’re friends then?” she asked without preamble, watching Nona’s eyes.

  “‘Friend’ can be a dangerous word,” Nona said.

  Clera laughed. “Friend? Really?”

  “It is if you mean it.” Nona didn’t smile. She thought of Amondo and of Saida. “Friend” was a bond. Much of what people did, how they acted, confused Nona. But “friend” she understood. A friend you would die for. Or kill for.

  “Well, I mean it.” Clera let her own smile slip.

  “Then we are.”

  It seemed enough for Clera. She rose from Nona’s bed and went to her own, flipping the penny once and humming some tune, low and sweet.

  Nona let exhaustion close her eyes. The dormitories were heated by the same pipes that ran in the bathhouse and cells. She hadn’t imagined that commoners ever wholly escaped the cold, perhaps the emperor before his ever-blazing fires, but not girls like her, not like this. One of the high windows was even a quarter open to stop it being too muggy, as if heat were something that could be given to the wind rather than something precious to be hoarded.

  In the village mothers cut their children’s hair to a fuzz whenever the weather turned. When the ice-wind surrendered to the Corridor wind and the cold grew less bitter the knives came out. They did it to reduce lice, fleas, and nits to a manageable level, but Nona had always felt it marked the start of something new: new growth, new possibilities. Her last thoughts before dreams stole her were that if a shaved head were the worst thing to have happened to Arabella Jotsis so far then she had lived a charmed life. Also, Nona thought, annoyingly the loss of that golden mane had done nothing to mar the girl’s beauty. If anything she looked somehow more perfect.

  • • •

  FOLDED IN THE soft hubbub of voices and with the warmth of her bed drawing her down in
to sleep Nona let the contest with Ghena play across the backs of her eyelids. The whole thing had lasted only moments, moments in which Ghena had thrown a dozen or more punches, a well-practised dance on her part, instinct and reflex on Nona’s. Memory of one fight slipped into memory of another, returning Nona to the sawdust and sweat of the Caltess, watching the apprentices spar. Partnis Reeve’s fight-masters taught discipline but left room for aggression.

  A week or two after Nona’s arrival Raymel Tacsis had strolled into the great hall where the apprentices were training. Nona, Saida and two other attic children engaged in sweeping the floor paused their labours and leaned on their brooms to watch the fighter. Up close his size was intimidating. Nona realized that her head wouldn’t even reach the man’s hip and that with the strength of one arm he would be able to toss her, Saida, and the other two sweepers across the room, not separately but together.

  “I’ve a better lesson for these puppies.” Raymel climbed over the ropes into the ring where two gerant apprentices had been wrestling, both of them enormous but lacking more than a foot on the older man. He stood huge, blond, and glorious between them, somehow wearing his wealth though all that covered him was a loincloth and a sheen of oil.

  The fight-master stepped forward, an objection on his lips, but Raymel boomed across him, “And the rest of you.” He beckoned another three apprentices from across the hall: two hunskas holding nets and a gerant girl with a ponderous brow that looked as if it would break the fist of anyone foolish enough to punch her in the head.

  As the girl clambered in behind the two swifter apprentices Raymel drove an elbow into the throat of the gerant behind him. “Don’t ever wait to attack.” The apprentice fell, clutching his neck. The rest stood, too stunned or nervous to act. Raymel slapped the girl, his huge hand covering half her face and sending her back into the ropes, spitting blood. His grin was an ugly thing, corrupting the good looks he’d been born with.

  Beside Nona, Saida covered her eyes, turning to reach for her broom.

  “Aren’t you going to watch?” Nona couldn’t look away. The hunska apprentices had launched themselves at Raymel, two blurs of fists and feet.

  “I hate it.” Saida resumed her sweeping. “It makes my stomach feel bad, seeing people hurt.”

  “But . . .” Nona winced as Raymel trapped one hunska against the ropes and snatched him up by the leg. “Partnis bought you to fight. You’re going to have to.”

  She sensed rather than saw Saida’s broad shoulders shrug. “I’d rather mend people than break them. Is that a thing in the city? Mending people?”

  “I don’t know.” Nona watched Raymel swing the hunska apprentice against the ring post. Part of her wanted to be unleashed within the roped enclosure. Another part wanted Saida’s hope to be true, wanted there to be people who put as much passion into healing as Raymel did into hurting.

  “Raymel!” the fight-master barked. “Ease up.”

  Raymel continued to choke the apprentice in his hands, still seemingly impervious to the attacks of the last hunska remaining on her feet.

  Nona found herself turning away too, the undirected anger that built in her whenever she saw a fight now dissipating. “You won’t have to fight, Saida. They’ll see you’re no good at it and give you a different job. Regol said the old man who comes to the horses can sew up wounds like a seamstress. Perhaps he’ll need an apprentice soon. He is very old.”

  Saida managed a shy smile. “I’d like to help. I don’t want Partnis to give me away. I would miss you.”

  “I’d miss you too.” Nona found her chest aching at the thought. “So I won’t let it happen!” She said it with such fierce confidence that Saida’s smile had widened into something that made her blunt face suddenly beautiful.

  The dream turned darker, colder, shadows invading the Caltess hall. They were alone now, Saida and Nona, a sense of profound unease stalking between them.

  “Don’t hurt me!” Saida was suddenly backing away from Nona, terrified.

  “Saida! I won’t let anyone—”

  “Don’t hurt me!” Saida pointed at Nona, cowering.

  Nona tried to reassure her but found instead that she towered over Saida, holding her friend’s arm in a massive fist. The grey hall around her became the walls of Raymel’s apartment, Saida dangling above the thick luxury of a bearskin rug.

  Nona tried to let Saida go. “It’s not me. I’m not like him. I’m not!”

  “No, please! I didn’t mean to.”

  Anger flared somewhere deep in Nona’s chest. She was trying to help the silly girl. Why was she scared? Did she think Nona had anything in common with a creature like Raymel Tacsis? “I’m not going to hurt you.” She found to her horror though that she was shaking Saida, the fist on her friend’s arm emphasizing her points as she spoke.

  “Let go!”

  “I am letting go . . .” But the fist gripped tighter, twisted, and Saida’s screaming began.

  • • •

  NONA DREW A sharp breath and opened her eyes. The colours of her nightmare vanished leaving only black. It took a moment to realize where she was. The soft sounds of sleeping surrounded her on each side. At the back of her mind the dream carried on as if it neither wanted her attention nor required her permission to proceed. She had been following something, a line that ran its narrow path with danger to either side, on one flank a dark and consuming hunger, on the other a blindness, fierce as staring at the sun. And somehow she had been following someone else at the same time, black-clad, swift, certain, moving through a starless night, plotting a sure path between high buildings. The figure had found what it sought, looked up, reached out to find cold stone walls, and had started to climb.

  Nona strained her ears, hunting beneath the novices’ gentle snores and sighs, the soft turning of a body in sleep, the whisper of the wind . . . a scrape, a sudden movement . . . hard to judge at what distance in the unbroken night. Without warning, surprising herself, Nona jolted upright, as swift a motion as she had ever made, the blanket pulled from her. Perhaps some new sound had sat her up, perhaps nothing, just one of those twitches that comes out of nowhere and jerks your body as if by a string. Somewhere else in the dark a muffled impact, the sound of air leaving lungs fast and without orders . . .

  “Wuh-what?” At the end of the row Ketti, the eldest of them, unhooded the lantern that sat beside her bed for anyone needing to make the trip to the Necessary in the dead of night.

  Just below the rolled blanket where Nona’s head had lain a small black object stood proud of the bed. She blinked, trying to focus—the hilt of something? Close by, Clera rose groggily from her own bed. “Can’t be morning already?” Her voice thick with sleep. A figure stood between them, revealed in the light of the unhooded lantern—Arabella Jotsis, her face a mask.

  Nona took hold of the hilt—leather-bound, the pommel a ball of iron the size of an eye—and tugged. It took most of her strength to free the point from the boards, and when she saw the gleaming blade start to slide out from the slot it had put in her blankets she quickly covered it. Only Arabella noticed, her eyes moving from Nona’s hand on the hilt to Nona’s face as their eyes met.

  “Get back in bed! It’s the middle of the night.” Ketti closed the lantern’s cowl until just a glow remained.

  Arabella hurried towards Ketti and moments later left the room holding the lantern.

  “Shut the window. It’s cold in here.” Clera from her bed, the words all running together. Nobody replied.

  Nona lay back, pulling the blankets over her. It had grown cooler—the wind must have caught the window and pulled it wide—even so, if Clera called this cold then she had never known what it was to face the ice-wind, hungry and with only wattle walls for shelter.

  She drew out the knife from under the covers. The blade reached for about two widths of her hand, narrow as two fingers, all of it cold steel. Nona co
uld only think that Arabella must have stolen it from the stores at the training hall. The real question, though, was had she meant to stab Nona to death or just to leave her a pointed warning? At the core of her something red and primal snarled at the blade’s challenge, demanding blood, demanding the weapon be returned with a hard lesson. Nona fought the impulse to go after Arabella. She could catch her before she reached the Necessary hunkering on the edge of the cliff. How would that encounter end? Nona with a sharp knife in her hand and blunt accusations in her mouth? Anger had its place, it was a weapon not to be neglected, but so did patience, and Nona decided that control lay in deciding which to use and when.

  She stayed in her bed. It was cold outside and dangerous in all manner of ways. The knife must have been meant to scare her. Even someone as high-born as Arabella Jotsis couldn’t expect to murder people in their sleep in a crowded dormitory and get away with it . . . Unless she really did think a village girl was no more than a cow or pig compared to someone who had been invited to the emperor’s palace?

  At some point, with one thought chasing the next in endless circles, Nona fell asleep and though she tossed and turned she didn’t wake until Bray spoke the waking hour and all across the dormitory grey shapes started to move beneath their covers, grumbling at the day.

  • • •

  “PATH AND SPIRIT today,” Clera groaned. “Worst of the lot.”

  “Breakfast first!” Ruli with a grin, pulling off her nightcap and shaking down her hair.

  “Spirit is what we’re all here for.” Jula gave a sniff, patting her head and finding her hair hadn’t returned overnight.

  “I’m here because I was sent here,” Clera said. “When I’m a Red Sister if anyone asks me to repeat the catechism I’ll stab them in the eye.”

  “If you paid closer attention in Spirit, you would know that stabbing people in the eye is frowned upon.” Jula straightened her habit and started to make her bed. “Anyway, it’s Path first.”