Grey Sister Read online

“Come with me!” Nona heard the pleading in her voice and hated herself for it.

  “I can’t. Appy and the abbess need me. The convent needs me.” Kettle bit her knuckle, hard. “I just can’t.”

  Nona started to run into the night.

  “I’ll delay them,” Kettle called in a low voice. “Stay safe, little sister. Be careful.”

  Moments later Nona was jogging along a rough track towards the Verity Road, everything she owned in a sack bouncing on her back, everyone she knew, everything she cared about, retreating behind her.

  An hour later, running through rough fields of rain-lashed mud, she came to the margins of a wood and halted among the trees. The cold wrapped her, her stomach growled, her feet ached. An emptiness gnawed inside her, a sense of loss, of failure. She set her back to the trunk of a pine and the tears came. Wracking sobs that hurt her chest.

  She cried for an hour.

  You should have killed her when I said.

  Nona didn’t have to ask who. Joeli had played her from the start. The girl had pulled her strings, her threads too, perhaps, but Nona wasn’t sure of that. Joeli had goaded her into those caves, taunting her about Hessa, knowing the punishment, and knowing all the time that the moment Nona set foot in the place where her friend had died her intrusion would be known. Nona had been a fool.

  You should have murdered her that first day.

  Yes. Nona wiped her eyes and set her mouth in a grim line. I probably should have.

  20

  WHERE WILL YOU go?

  I don’t know. Nona had no idea. Crouching in the margins of a damp forest wasn’t a good long-term plan. It wasn’t even a good short-term plan.

  You’ll need to steal food.

  Probably.

  You’ll have to kill them.

  Who?

  The people you steal the food from. You don’t want any witnesses to lead your enemies after you. Keot sounded quite cheerful about the whole thing.

  Just a line of corpses to lead them instead?

  You should go to the city. Keot had enjoyed their trip to Verity.

  That’s where the Tower of Inquiry is. I’m not difficult to spot. Sister Rose had tried to reverse the effect the black cure had on Nona’s eyes several times, but none of her potions had any noticeable effect. Nona had been disappointed at the time but now those failures were taking on more importance. There’s nowhere I won’t be discovered.

  In the east dawn made a sullen approach, shading the black sky towards grey. Nona’s legs hurt, she was tired, cold despite her windbreak and range-coat, and her stomach had started to grumble even though she wouldn’t have had breakfast yet.

  “I’m going to have to leave the empire. I could take a ship to Durn . . .” She wriggled her fingers in the pockets of her coat, remembering that such things cost and that she had no money. “Or cross over the border into Scithrowl.”

  Or go back to kill Joeli, and then her friends, and the inquisitor, and his underlings.

  Nona felt cold and tired rather than murderous. Joeli had been the architect of her downfall, but it was Nona’s own stupidity she had used to do it. Still, given the chance, Nona felt she would enjoy breaking Joeli’s other knee.

  With the world revealing itself around her, Nona set off eastwards, cutting across country in case the Inquisition had guards on the roads. She dug a heel of bread from her coat pocket—she always kept some supplies against the possibility of night-time hunger pangs—and chewed as she walked. The world might have narrowed but it was still a big place and somewhere in it there would be a spot for her.

  She looked back just once, towards the Rock where Ara and her other friends lay sleeping. “I will come back.”

  * * *

  • • •

  FOR THE FIRST day Nona kept off any track larger than a deer trail. She walked due east beneath a grey sky with the Corridor wind at her shoulders. At one farm she stole eggs from the nest box, quieting a mean-eyed hound with the whispering trick that Ruli had taught her. Some work of marjal empathy no doubt, though Ruli never mentioned the blood, just saying that the power was in whispering the right kind of nonsense.

  Later she took a whole hen from the yard of another farm, wringing its neck and running when a fieldhand came shouting from an outhouse. She sat in her bivouac that night beneath a roof of branches and heaped bracken, staring at the bird.

  You don’t want it now?

  I don’t want it raw.

  You ate those eggs raw.

  I didn’t want to. And this is different.

  So cook it. Keot seemed disinterested but her hunger did appear to annoy him, as if he felt an echo of it.

  Nona looked away from the heap of feathers, scanning the trees and the shadows gathering amid the undergrowth. All day she’d had the feeling she was being followed, but she was unused to such open spaces after years spent within the convent and it was likely just nerves that set the skin between her shoulderblades crawling, even when Keot was not sitting there.

  Nona dropped her gaze to her open hand. The dark thread that now bound her, however tenuously, to her shadow lay in the groove that her life-line made across her palm. The old women in the village had read palms. All of them except Nana Even who said it was superstitious nonsense, and read the entrails of rabbits instead. Nona knew that such threads could be followed. Sherzal’s men had somehow followed the threads to discover Nona as a child, their thread-worker leading troops almost to her doorstep. But how someone pursued a thread Nona had no idea. Her shadow’s thread didn’t run through the forest like a trail of string unwound behind a cautious explorer. Instead, like every other thread, it led off at curious angles to the world, requiring steps that no feet of blood and bone could take if it was to be followed. If she were still at Sweet Mercy Nona would have asked Sister Pan and been taught the techniques required. But the convent lay miles behind and forbidden. The thread in her hand was less the solution to a problem, and more a reminder of what she had lost. Still, she would try to be open to whatever pull the thread might exert, to let it guide her. Perhaps it would steer her choices and take her by strange paths to where she wished to go.

  * * *

  • • •

  SISTER TALLOW HAD taught the novices how to make fire with stick, twine and kindling, and Nona with her hunska speed had always been good at it in the convent. Out in the dampness of the forest though, with the wind complaining through the trees, it proved impossible to reproduce her success. Finally, with one of Clera’s favourite curses, she threw down the stick, one end steaming gently, and let the wind steal what leaves and moss she’d gathered.

  Find a peasant and take their fire.

  If the last hut she’d seen were any closer Nona might just have followed Keot’s advice. Instead she crouched and wondered what the others were doing back at Sweet Mercy. They would have eaten by now, stuffed themselves with stew and bread. In Grey dormitory Ara, Ruli and Jula might still be wondering about her. In Mystic dormitory Darla would be stomping around and Zole would be sitting silently as if nothing had changed. And Joeli . . . Joeli would be in her corner surrounded by her friends, laughing and joking about how she had got that stupid peasant run off the Rock. Anger flooded through Nona, sudden and unexpected in its ferocity, a red tide rising.

  “I think I will have a fire.”

  Nona narrowed her eyes in a stare that looked past the world. The Path blazed before her as broad and clear as she had ever seen it and before her heart took another beat she threw herself at it. She struck the Path and ran its course as she had run once before when Tacsis soldiers had her trapped in a cave. The shock of the first contact rang through her as if she were steel, and on every side the glowing skeletons of trees lit within her mind, the entire forest caught in a flash, every twig and bough and branch, every angle, every tight-wrapped leaf. Before she knew it she had taken half a dozen strides and Keot howled across her back as if he were set upon the coals of a fire.

  The sudden fear of what might come
after sent Nona stumbling from the Path. You must own what you take, Sister Pan always said, and Nona had taken far more than she needed to light a fire, far more than she had ever taken save for that one day in the shadow of the Devil’s Spine when she painted the rocks red.

  Nona found herself sprawled upon the forest floor, the cold mud bubbling beneath her outstretched hands, her skin bleeding light and every bone in her body vibrating as if it desired nothing more than to shake free of the flesh restraining it. She thought of heat rather than strength, the same way they warmed the training room at the Path Tower, pushing the energy into the form she needed.

  “Uh.” Too small a sound for too large an amount of pain. Nona felt a heartbeat away from rupture, from having her insides very quickly become her outsides. In a sudden ugly gesture that Sister Pan would have roundly scolded her for, she wrenched the Path-given power from herself, ejecting it towards the nearest tree, a large screw-pine.

  Something bright passed between them. The tree shuddered, a ripple ran along its length, shredding bark, and then in one moment of heat and light the forest giant exploded. The blast knocked Nona flat despite the shield of residual power around her. She might have lain there for a heartbeat or five minutes: time passed strangely and she couldn’t tell. Keot was howling but her ears rang and, even though she didn’t need them to hear him, his words passed through without her comprehension.

  When Nona raised her head nothing remained of the tree and none of those closest were anything more than blackened trunks studded with the shattered stumps of branches. Further back, in the area into which Nona had been thrown, the forest burned in dozens of spots where blazing fragments had peppered both branches and undergrowth.

  Don’t. Keot sounded as if he were wheezing. Do that again. Ever.

  Nothing of Nona’s bivouac appeared to have survived. She glanced around for her chicken.

  What are you going to do now? Keot demanded.

  Nona spotted the bird’s carcass, hanging in a tangle of briar, feathers smouldering.

  She narrowed her eyes. “Pluck it.”

  21

  NONA ROSE WITH the light and left her shelter licking chicken grease from her fingers. She’d made a breakfast of the remains, taking the last of the meat from the bones. The Corridor wind fought its way through the trees, and on the boughs of frost-oak and elm leaves started to unfurl, eager to snatch up what the red sun had to offer.

  The forest stank of char. In some places the wind had carried the fire a score of yards before the damp finally defeated it. Nona rubbed the cold from her bones and stretched her stiff back. In time she came to a woodsman’s trail and followed it, bound east.

  So you’re still running away?

  “I’m going home.” Nona didn’t know it until she said the words but at some point in the restless night her subconscious must have decided the issue for her and had set to waiting for her lips to part to let her know. “Back to the village where I grew up.”

  You’re not grown up yet.

  “Where I lived until I came to the convent.” Nona strode on, unruffled by Keot now that she had a purpose once more.

  * * *

  • • •

  BEFORE SHE HAD walked far enough even to lose sight of the forest Nona’s thoughts returned to the fire she had made. Walking the Path had not come so easily to her since the day she killed Raymel Tacsis and Keot came to live beneath her skin, not since Sweet Mercy held the shipheart. She could have put it down to the depth of the anger that propelled her onto the Path this time, but there was more to it. She felt it in her bones.

  Immediately before Nona walked the Path back in the cave where Raymel’s men had them trapped she had been with Hessa, drawn along the bond threaded between them. And Hessa had been in the undercaves back at the convent, just yards from the shipheart. Somehow Nona had shared in that proximity and her quantal skills had been boosted by the stone’s power. And now, once again, since she’d taken up her shadow’s thread from the undercaves, Nona felt that connection to the shipheart’s power. Just a trickle of it, but enough so that left untapped the potential would build and could be spent to magnify whatever strength lay in her blood.

  Nona mused on the connection as she trudged between the cart ruts on the narrow lane she’d found. Somewhere out there the shipheart rested. Wherever Yisht, or more likely Sherzal, had placed it. To the east, she felt, not the west. And somewhere close by her shadow waited, trapped in some way, for unattended shadows are apt to wander.

  * * *

  • • •

  IT TOOK DAYS for the land to grow familiar. Days travelling by back-roads, crossing fields and patches of woodland, but always she kept her back to Verity, to the Rock, and to the Tower of Inquiry. Whether there might be a search for her and how large it might be Nona had no real idea but she imagined they would likely be satisfied with simply having her gone, no longer polluting the faith or antagonizing the daughters of the Sis. She told herself that being forced to leave the convent now for breaking some silly rule was far preferable to being exposed as devil-tainted a year or two later, shamed in front of her friends, with all hands turned against her. She told herself it was a good thing, and tried to believe it as she walked the lonely tracks that would take her back to the village where her story began.

  A dozen times every mile thoughts of the convent would slip into Nona’s mind. What lessons the others might be taking now, what the nuns would say about her, how her friends would remember her when they came in sweaty and tired from the sands of Blade Hall. Each time the invaders came she drove them out with thoughts of the here and now, of the muddy ruts before her, the rustling hedges, the quick-wheat springing up even before the last ice-drift had fully melted. She watched the lone farmhouses, poor things huddled on slopes or in front of the treelines, as if expecting disaster at any moment. Twice she came to towns and skirted them.

  The traffic Nona met consisted mainly of tinkers and farmers, the former carrying their skills in their hands and on their backs, the tools of their trade, the latter bearing the produce of their fields, be it on four legs following along behind, or stacked as bales on a cart.

  Few of them passed a word with her and most of those few words were warnings. Warnings of Durnish fleets, their sickwood barges packed so tight in the Marn that a man might walk across the sea from the southern ice to the northern without ever getting a foot wet. Warnings of the heretic hordes of the Scithrowl gathering behind their borders, whipped to a frenzy by their battle-queen. Nona nodded her thanks each time but robbers on the road and lack of food seemed more pressing concerns than distant armies.

  She walked for half a day with an old woman who went from town to town sharpening edges—on knives, on ploughshares, on scythes, even on swords if such a thing were hung rusting above the elderman’s hearth. The woman, Gallabeth, hardly reached Nona’s shoulder, bent with age, all bones and uncomfortable angles. It took her three miles before she noticed Nona’s eyes.

  “’Cestor’s Truth! Ain’t you got no eyes, sister?”

  Nona suppressed a laugh. “They’re not holes, they’re just black. It was an illness. And I’m not a sister.” Not even a novice.

  Gallabeth made the sign of the tree. “Thought you had the devil in you.”

  Nona opened her mouth then closed it.

  Gallabeth shuffled another ten yards before ceasing to suck at her few remaining teeth and offering another opinion. “It’s good you’re a nun, child.” Another shuffled yard. “Don’t have to worry about a husband.”

  Nona had forgotten the uncompromising honesty of the ancient. Sister Pan had a touch of it but perhaps she still retained too many of her wits to let her tongue wander into unintentioned cruelty. But Gallabeth was right. Joeli and her friends had delighted in telling Nona how ugly her eyes made her. How no boy would ever want to gaze into them. The old woman knew it too. “I’m not a nun.” Nona made a mental note to cover up the sign of the Ancestor’s tree seared across the back of the coat s
he wore, branches spreading above, taproot reaching for the source below. “Not even a novice.”

  Gallabeth waved the denial aside as if a convent range-coat and a glimpse of habit were impervious to dispute. “Husbands are overrated. I had one once. Oh yes. I was a pretty thing, long brown hair, good legs.” She slapped them for emphasis. “Was married for twenty years, till the flu took him. He was still a young man, not far past forty. Didn’t give me any children mind, or leave me much. Just a cottage too busy falling down to be much use, and this.” She rummaged in her skirts and produced a dull grey object, like a river stone, dark and specked with glints of crystal perhaps, longer than it was wide.

  “What is it?”

  “What is it? Best whetstone in the empire is what it is!” Gallabeth returned the object to its place. “My John didn’t leave me much, but this,” she patted her hip, “was how he made his living, and how an old woman like me is still welcomed up and down the Corridor. His grandfather found it under the ice. Harder than nails. Can put an edge on a diamond, he said, though I ain’t seen one of them . . .”

  Kill her and take it. Keot flowed towards the hand nearest Gallabeth.

  Why, what is it? Nona flexed the hand and kept Keot from passing her wrist.

  Something old. A piece of the Missing.

  A piece of them?

  Ark-bone, not ship-bone, something older. Familiar. I can taste it.

  “A useful thing to have,” Nona said.

  “Keeps me fed, long as I can move my legs.” Gallabeth nodded. “And when I can’t walk the roads I’ll up and sell it to some youngster in Verity. Then I’ll see how long I can buy a place by a warm hearth. I won’t need long.” A grin. “My John always wanted a child so they could carry both his name and the stone. A son or daughter to have it and walk the Corridor. Keeping it sharp, he called it. Keeping us all sharp.”

  Nona nodded. If it’s ship-bone or Ark-bone then it’s not from the Missing.