Red Sister Page 18

  “That I was cheeking her? Eyes in the back of her head!” Clera snorted.

  “How did she know that she would need Sister Kettle to trick me?”

  Jula leaned in from the next bed. “If the sweets or pins had got you both she would have ignored the door and Kettle would have gone away. If Arabella wasn’t poisoned when Kettle came in then she would have taken out something for her—a message from her father or something . . . The Poisoner always wins!”

  “I hate that woman,” Clera said.

  • • •

  MORNING CAME AND Nona, first out of bed, had to be reminded by a sleepy Clera that there were no classes on seven-day.

  “The older novices are allowed to go down into the city on supervised excursions.” Clera sat up, yawning and stretching. Her nightdress was thin and grey with a number of tears but better than nothing, which was all Nona had. “I’m going down to see my father. With Sister Flint, worse luck. She is no fun at all. The abbess gave me special permission even though I’m still in Red.”

  Nona said nothing. She knew enough about prisons to say that she would not want her father in one. However, if being in a prison meant that her father was there to visit one day in seven rather than lost beneath the ice, she would step into Clera’s shoes.

  Hessa poked her head from beneath her blankets, yawning hugely. “I had an awful dream.” She sat up, shuddering. “About a wolf—”

  “—in a trap,” Nona said.

  “Yes . . .” Hessa frowned. “Did I talk in my sleep?”

  Nona didn’t answer. A dream of a wolf with its leg in an iron trap had woken her in the night. She hadn’t remembered it on waking until Hessa spoke.

  “We’re going to swim in the sinkhole.” Jula tugged her underskirts on and promptly tripped over her bed into an undignified fall, face first, bottom up. She rolled to the side, bucking to get the skirts up. “Coming, Nona?”

  “I have extra lessons with Sister Kettle.” Also, Nona couldn’t swim.

  “Be careful she doesn’t poison you again.” Clera grinned.

  • • •

  NONA MET WITH Sister Kettle after breakfast in the Academia Tower. The classroom seemed very large with just two of them there, their chairs side by side at the table where Sister Rule’s mysteries were normally on display. The slate and chalks that Sister Apple had taken charge of during Shade were set on the polished wood before them.

  “You poisoned me,” Nona said.

  “I did.”

  “Don’t do it again.”

  Sister Kettle sucked her lower lip, studying Nona. “I don’t believe I shall. That’s a very fierce stare for a little girl.”

  “I made both Tacsis brothers bleed, and they didn’t even try to poison me.” Nona took out her quill.

  “They underestimated you, Nona. I’ve seen you on the blade-path. I wouldn’t underestimate you.” Kettle took a flat case from her habit and opened it to reveal her own quill, the feather black and stiff, perhaps a raven’s. “I told Sister Tallow about your jumping between the tops of the spiral.”

  Nona said nothing, but took out her scroll, watching Kettle’s dark eyes.

  “Sister Tallow said you took the warrior’s route. She said most take nothing with them on the path except the fear of that fall. Even when they no longer care about the height of the drop they fear the possibility of failure—just as the fear of death weighs so many down when they fight. The warrior, though, hates the fear: it’s an attack like any other and must be fought. She throws herself at it, all or nothing, she dares it and disdains it. Death claims us all in the end, but the warrior chooses the ground on which she meets it, and the manner; she makes death run to catch up.” Kettle smoothed out her own scroll. “So there!”

  “How did Mistress Blade get hurt?” Nona asked.

  Sister Kettle dipped her quill and wrote a letter on her scroll. “This is the letter A. I brought the slate and chalks so you can practise copying it.”

  Nona peered at the glistening letter. Hessa had told her the basics. A is for apple, and so on. The wet ink reminded her of blood in the dark. “A is for assassin,” Nona said. “They say the emperor’s sisters, Sherzal and Vel . . . Vel . . .”

  “Velera.”

  “Velera. They say they would rather see Arabella dead than in the emperor’s hands.”

  “Well, she’s neither, is she?” Kettle said.

  “I know stories about the Noi-Guin.” In Giljohn’s cage Hessa had told about Noi-Guin, singular hunters of men, invisible in the night, insinuating themselves past any defence and taking lives with impunity. Markus had always asked for tales of the assassins, the bloodier the better. “Did Sister Tallow fight one of them?”

  Sister Kettle gave Nona a measured stare. “It would take more than one Noi-Guin to injure Mistress Blade.” She sniffed. “Now. B is for blade.” Her quill flowed across the parchment leaving a glistening black trail.

  “It looks like a P,” Nona said, squinting, trying to remember the shapes Hessa had drawn for her over and over. She drew one on her slate and turned it upside-down. “There.”

  Sister Kettle grinned. “B is for blade, P is for path. It’s a little-known thing but blade and path are two sides of the same coin. The blade-path isn’t just a game to occupy the pathless: one really does help the other. Also, what you have there is a Q if it’s anything . . .”

  “You’re the best at blade-path,” Nona said. “Does that mean you’re quantal too?”

  Sister Kettle’s grin became a laugh. “Ancestor, no! But I am very good at the Path-drawn mindsets Sister Pan teaches. I can be as serene as all hell! And nobody does quiet like me! Except Appy of course. I mean Mistress Shade.”

  Nona tried to imagine Sister Kettle serene . . . or even quiet. She failed. “I thought the Path-trances were clarity, serenity, and patience?”

  Kettle shrugged. “Patience, quiet, another coin with two sides. And you need to know all the sides of a coin before you can earn it and spend it. Sister Pan will teach you that.”

  “The novices say that Sister Pan’s just an old woman who talks a lot. They say she hasn’t got any magic left.” Actually, when she thought about it, Nona found it easier to picture Sister Pan working magic than Sister Kettle’s chat and humour replaced by quantal-serenity. Sister Pan at least looked the part: as ancient and haggard as any tree-witch in the stories whispered around the village fireside.

  “This is a C. I want you to write A, B, C. Over and over, until your hand remembers them.” Sister Kettle gestured to Nona’s slate.

  Nona drew the letters out, following the line of each in her mind.

  “Good. Do it again.”

  Nona did it seven more times before filling the slate.

  “Good. And no, I don’t know if Sister Pan can touch the Path any more. She was old when the abbess was a novice. But what I can tell you is that she was once one of the great Holy Witches and she followed the Path that runs through all things. High priests came to see her. Emperor Xtal, the third of his name, and his son, the fourth, summoned her to court. And when the Durnish sailed against us more than fifty years ago, so many of them in their sick-wood barges that they almost made a bridge across the Corridor, it was Sister Pan and Sister Rain of Gerran’s Crag that met their storm-weavers and swept them from the sea . . . So don’t bury the old girl yet. And don’t call her ‘old girl.’ Or tell her I told you that story . . . Let’s draw some Ds, shall we?”

  • • •

  THE BEST PART of the day passed before Nona escaped the horrors of the alphabet and hurried from the Academia Tower too exhausted to go in search of her friends. Overhead a rook fluttered, black against the sky, descending towards the many-windowed spire of the convent rookery. They came and went together normally, a clamour of them raucous and wheeling. A single bird meant a message. Nona wondered what words those dark wings brought an
d from how far. She also wondered if they’d been as much of a pain to write as her endless letters.

  • • •

  NONA LAY RELAXING in the dormitory, nursing a cramped hand, when Clera returned. The sun had already started to sink, its red light painted in bars across the ceiling now.

  “You’re supposed to put the ink on the parchment.” Clera nodded towards Nona’s fingers before slinging herself down on her bed.

  Nona spread the ink-stained digits of her right hand before her. At Nona’s insistence Sister Kettle had let her try with quill and lowest grade paper after hours with chalk and slate. It had been more difficult than Nona expected, the result a scratchy mess of jerky lines and ink pools.

  “How was your father?” Nona asked.

  Clera rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling. “Where is everyone? Did they all drown while swimming?”

  Nona shrugged. “I don’t know. I saw Ruli going into Blade Hall. Some of them must be practising blade-path.” Clera looked worn out. Sad too, flipping her penny up high, catching it, flipping it. “How was—”

  “He’s fine. He has an appeal hearing in a month. It looks promising.”

  “That’s good?” Nona wasn’t sure what an appeal hearing was.

  “Yes.” Clera caught her penny in her palm and closed her hand about it. In the dying light it looked silver. “Did you ever consider just running away, Nona? Just running and running and losing yourself somewhere?”

  “Where?” Nona had considered it, but running to was better than running from.

  “Just anywhere. Making a new life.”

  “It’s hard out there.” Nona gazed towards the windows. “Running’s all right, but when you stop there’s the freezing and the starving and the dying. If you had money then—”

  “Yes.” Clera sat up suddenly. “Yes, money makes it better. Money fixes everything.” She stood. “Let’s go find them. Have some fun, make trouble, make a noise. Classes tomorrow. Classes forever. Let’s—”

  “That’s a silver crown!” Nona pointed to it in Clera’s fingers.

  “I made one become many.” Clera tucked the coin into her pocket. It dropped with a faint chink. “I had some luck.” She smiled but she looked sad.

  “How—” But the door flew open and Ruli raced in shrieking and wrapped in towels, Jula and Ketti hard on her heels.

  “Catch her!”

  “Get her!”

  And Clera leapt into the chase, her grin both wide and wild.

  14

  NONA’S FIRST FULL week in the convent passed in a blur, exhausting herself in Blade’s endless repetition of punches, throws, and holds; straining her brain in Academia against topics like glaciation, erosion, and the formation of rocks; gorging herself at meals, still unable to truly believe they would keep coming three times a day.

  In the dormitory, Nona shared two more dreams with Hessa, both nightmares. Hessa said they must be echoing down the remnants of the connection through which she had shared her memory. The phenomenon would fade away, she said. Also, Ketti had a fight with Ghena and both were put on laundry for a week. And, to Clera’s delight, the abbess’s cat urinated on Arabella’s habit on three-day night.

  In Shade they brewed two more poisons, one to cause blindness, another confusion, learning the nature of the ingredients, the antidotes, where such existed, and the means by which the resulting pastes might be introduced to victims or avoided by novices. Sister Apple proved as unpleasant within her cave as she was sweet while outside it. Ketti spent a day without sight after failing to prevent the Poisoner from duping her with the same trick she had just described on the chalkboard. Ruli spent a day in the Necessary after whispering too loudly with Ghena at the back of the class. Nobody knew how the Poisoner got to her, but she was vomiting by the time she reached the top of the stairs on the way out. And Jula caught the sharp edge of Apple’s tongue for a moment’s daydreaming—reduced to tears by a critique of her alchemical failings that had the rest of the class laughing despite themselves.

  Path proved to be Nona’s least favourite class, worse even than the tedium of Spirit, where Wheel led them through the endless small ceremonies that seemed to occupy every Holy Sister’s day. She soon came to dread Sister Pan’s room, alight with colour and harmony. She stared at the patterns until she thought her eyes would bleed but nothing the old woman said to do made the mystic Path open up before her. There was none of the strange and alarming energy that Arabella had spoken of during her first Path class, just a boredom so profound it made her want to scratch her eyes out. The visualizations for serenity made Nona angry; the ones for quiet filled her head with clamouring for something different.

  By the time the seven-day came around again Nona was starting to consider the convent her home. Memories of the Caltess seemed distant, those of Giljohn and his cart a dream, and recollections of the village a story told about someone else.

  On the walk to Academia Tower Nona paused to make a slow turn on the spot, taking in the buildings that had so quickly grown familiar: Heart Hall and Blade Hall, with the Dome of the Ancestor looming behind them, the dormitories and the refectory, the nuns’ cloisters and the wide courtyard before the bathhouse. A lone chicken strutted in the shadow of the scriptorium, pausing to scrape and peck as if looking for any dropped punctuation. Between the laundry and the sanatorium Nona could see a wagon parked outside the winery, loaded with barrels of the latest vintage to be released. The novices in Holy Class were allowed a glass of the convent wine with their evening meal on any seven-day that happened to also be a holy holiday, which most of them seemed to be. Ruli claimed the convent earned far more of its income from shipping barrels of Sweet Mercy around the Corridor than from educating and training novices.

  “Of course, if any of them had met the Poisoner they’d all be emptying their wine jugs down the sewer.”

  • • •

  CLERA WAS WAITING in the dormitory when Nona returned from her next lesson with Sister Kettle, hand cramped, white with chalk, and ink-stained about the fingers. Sister Kettle’s parting words had been about Clera and Nona had crossed the windswept courtyards frowning under the weight of them.

  “A word to the wise.” Kettle had set her hand over Nona’s as she reached for her slate. “The hardest lesson I ever learned was that every bad thing you see a friend do to someone else they will some day do to you. Some people in this world are users and some givers. When two such form a bond it often ends poorly. Find more friends, Nona. Clera Ghomal spends enough time thinking about herself without you to help her do it. Don’t—”

  Nona had pulled free and hurried from the tower, but she could still feel the sister’s fingers on the back of her hand, still hear her speaking. She rubbed hand against habit and tried to shake off the foul mood that had risen in her. She had had few friends in her life and the bonds that bound her to them were more sacred to her than the Ancestor was to any nun. Friendship wasn’t something you gave up on or let slip: it wasn’t something to be done in small measure or cut in half.

  She had still been angry when she thrust the dormitory door open.

  Most of the novices had yet to return from their various diversions but Jula lay across her own bed, head hanging over the edge as she studied a scroll, and Ghena lay sleeping—the girl always seemed to be rushing about or sleeping, with no real pause between one and the other. Ketti raged past in her smallclothes holding her habit before her, nose wrinkling. “Someone let that damned cat in here! He’s peed on my underskirts! Sister Rule should drown the thing!”

  “Malkin’s nice,” Jula said, not looking up. “Just a bit old and confused.”

  “Needs drowning!” Shouted back through the door as Ketti vanished in the direction of the laundry.

  “The only male in the convent and he spends his time pissing on everything.” Clera from her bed.

  “There’s the roosters too.
” Jula still not looking up.

  “Who spend their time crowing and strutting about,” Clera said.

  “And the pigs.”

  “Who eat and shit,” Clera said. “I rest my case.”

  Nona crossed to her bed.

  “Is Sister Kettle getting those letters to stick in your head, Nona?” Clera looked up from the silver crown she’d been walking across her knuckles. Her tone held something distant in it: perhaps her day at the prison had given her bad news this time.

  “She’s having more luck with it than Sister Pan is with her stupid Path.” Nona flumped down on her bed, stretching her hand out and sighing. “We need to get her to let us off to practise blade-path next time.”

  “We do.” Clera nodded. She studied Nona as if she were something new to her. “Anyway, hurry up and learn to read. You don’t want to take up too many of Kettle’s seven-days or the Poisoner will not be a happy little Poisoner.”

  “Why?” Nona frowned.

  “You don’t know? Really? Oh come on—”

  The ringing of a bell cut across Clera. A bell Nona hadn’t heard before, sharp and very loud. Three rings, a pause, three more. A steel bell.

  “Ancestor bleed me!” Clera looked shocked. “That’s Bitel! We have to get out, now!”

  Moments later the Red Class girls were crowding out through the dormitories’ main door, along with a dozen or so older novices. Outside in the growing gloom nuns and novices were on the move, streaming from all directions, some running, others striding briskly, all headed towards the abbess’s house.

  Bitel found its tongue again. Clang. Rooks broke for the sky from behind Heart Hall. Clang. Clera and Nona broke into a run. Clang. Somewhere in the distance a woman started to shout.

  • • •

  THE ENTIRE CONVENT gathered before Abbess Glass’s doors. Nona and Clera pushed in among the novices, some still wet and steaming from bathhouse. The senior nuns arranged themselves around the perimeter of the crowd, several carrying lanterns.