Red Sister Read online

  “Explain yourselves, novices.” The nun fixed them with dark and beady eyes.

  “We were . . .” Clera searched for an explanation . . . and could find nothing better than the truth, which she settled on with a sigh of defeat. “Nona was very hungry!”

  A scatter of laughter went up at that, cut off sharply as Sister Rule’s yardstick cracked across a desktop. She reached the table, looming over both girls. “Well, Nona does appear to need some feeding up. Do not be late to my class again, Nona. Today you missed a quick observation of the layered structure of this plateau where the Glasswater sinkhole exposes it. Next time you could miss considerably more than that—dinner included.”

  Clera slipped away to her desk near the door. Nona stayed by the table. She looked up at Sister Rule’s face, which was at once both fleshy and severe, then let her eyes slip to the globe again.

  “You can take either of those two desks at the back, Nona.” Mistress Academia laid her yardstick against her table and let out a sigh. “I do hope you’re not going to slow us down too much, child. The abbess casts her nets very wide sometimes . . .”

  Nona dropped her gaze to the floor and took a step in the direction the nun had waved at. A mixture of anger and defiance boiled behind her eyes but stronger than that, more than that, was the desire to know. Besides, she was too full to be properly angry.

  “I . . . don’t know what geography is.”

  Sister Rule’s yardstick killed the laughter before it started. “Good. You’re clever enough to ask questions. That’s better than many I’ve had through these doors.” She took her seat behind the desk, straightened her habit, then looked up. “Geography is like history. History is the story of mankind since we first started to record it. The story and the understanding of that story. Geography is the history of the world beneath our feet. The mountains and the ice, rivers, oceans, land, all of it recorded in the very rocks themselves for those with the wit to read what’s set there. Consider this slab of rock our convent rests upon, for example. The history of this plateau is written in the limestone layers that can be seen in the sinkhole two hundred yards west of this tower.” She sent Nona on towards her desk with a gentle poke of her stick. “Our history is wide and we are narrow, so perhaps its lessons no longer fit. Cut your cloth to your measure, some say. But the history of the land has lessons more important than those of kings and dynasties. The history of the ice is written there. The tale of our dying sun, etched into rock and glacier. These are the lessons we all live by. And when the moon fails we will die by them too.”

  7

  NONA RESOLVED TO make it to Blade on time. Over lunch in the refectory Clera explained the meaning of the various bells that sounded throughout the day.

  “There are three bells. That’s the iron bell, Ferra, which just rang. It’s got a hollow sound and dies off quickly. That’s for the sisters, to tell them about prayers mainly. It hangs in the little belfry up on the Dome of the Ancestor. The one that looks like a nipple.”

  “Clera!” Jula scolded. She had taken the chair on Nona’s other side and now turned to join the conversation. “Bray is the brass bell that hangs in the Academia, at the top of the tower. It sounds the hours, and that’s what you have to listen to for class and meals.”

  “And lights out and getting up.” Clera cut back in. “Bray has a deep voice that hangs.” She made her own deep and sonorous, a singer’s voice, Nona thought. “Afternoon class is sixth bell, lunch is fifth, dinner is seventh.”

  “Blade this afternoon.” Jula rolled her eyes. “I hate Blade.”

  “Holies always do.” Clera smirked.

  Nona considered Jula for a moment. The girl had a studious look about her, slender despite more than a year eating at the convent table. She had mousey hair, cut at neck length. Nothing about her suggested that hunska or gerant blood might show in years to come. Almost nobody showed up quantal or marjal, however good the signs, so Jula would almost certainly be a Holy Sister. Nona knew very little about the Church of the Ancestor but the idea of a life spent in prayer and contemplation held no appeal at all. If the life in question didn’t also include being well fed and having a warm safe place to live then Nona might have felt sorry for the girl.

  “After Blade you’ll think you’ve met the hardest mistress,” Clera said. “But Mistress Shade makes her seem gentle. Everyone calls her the Poisoner or Mistress Poison because she always has us grinding up stuff for one poison or another. She’s supposed to teach us stealth, disguise, and climbing and traps . . . but it’s always poison. Anyway, don’t ever call her Mistress Poison.” Clera shuddered.

  Jula nodded, looking grim. She picked up her fork and got it halfway to her mouth before remembering the bells. “Bitel is the third bell. The steel bell.” She returned the fork to her plate, perhaps still thinking of poisons. “That’s almost always bad news, and you won’t confuse it for the others—it’s sharp and very loud. The abbess will ring Bitel if there’s a fire, or an intruder, or something like that. Hope you never hear it. But if you do and if nobody tells you different, go to the abbess’s front door and wait.”

  “I heard . . .” The girl across the table spoke up, loud enough for everyone to hear. “I heard the abbess herself brought you up from Verity.” The rest of the class had been focused on Arabella, who had been telling them some story about the emperor’s court. Nona had only caught the odd word and had imagined it a fairy tale of the sort told about princesses around the hearth in her village . . . but then she had remembered Clera calling Arabella royalty and it struck her that the fairy story might actually be true.

  “I heard Abbess Glass brought you up the Seren Way in the middle of the night.” The speaker was the one Clera had called Ghena and had said was the youngest in the class, a girl with a tightly curled cap of short black hair. In the village Grey Stephen had a staff that had been his father’s and his father’s; where so many hands had polished the dark wood for so long it was the colour of Ghena’s skin. “I heard you’re a peasant. Where are you from? How did your people even pay the confirmation fee?”

  “I—” Nona found she had the whole table’s attention. Even Arabella broke off her tale to stare.

  “You hear too much, Ghena.” Clera cupped both hands behind her ears and laughed. “You were at the window all night looking to see ‘the Chosen One’ arrive.” She tilted her head just a fraction in Arabella’s direction. “Did you see the abbess going by with dust on her skirts and know she’d come up by Seren Way?”

  Ghena scowled and looked away.

  • • •

  AFTER LUNCH, AND before Bray spoke for the sixth time that day to let them know they must hurry to class, there was time to wander or to sit. Arabella left the refectory with most of the class at her heels.

  “They’ll take her to the novice cloisters,” Clera said.

  “It’s where most of us spend time after lunch,” Jula explained. “It’s not like the nuns’ cloisters—it’s full of chat—too loud to think.” She looked disapproving where Clera looked wistful.

  “We’ll take you to the sinkhole,” Clera said. “You missed it today—”

  “I’m not swimming!” Ruli interrupted, the last of those who’d stayed.

  “Me neither.” Jula crossed her arms and pretended to shiver.

  “We’ll just sit and throw stones,” Clera declared. “And my new friend Nona can tell us why her parents gave her up.”

  • • •

  THE GLASSWATER SINKHOLE awed Nona. It looked as if some giant had poked a finger into the plateau when it was soft and new, leaving a perfectly round depression whose vertical stone walls dropped forty feet to the surface of dark and unrippled waters. She wondered what lay beneath the surface—hiding in unknowable depths.

  The pool was about forty feet across. On the far side an iron ladder, bolted to the stone, led down into it. Nona could see the layers that Sister Rule
had mentioned, showing in the sinkhole’s walls, as if the whole plateau were made of one thin slice laid atop the next.

  The four novices sat on the edge, legs dangling out over the drop. Nona’s shoes were the finest pair she had ever owned, the only ones made of leather. She was terrified she’d lose them and clenched her toes inside, even though they were laced on tight. For a while none of them spoke. Clera played a copper penny across the backs of her fingers with practised ease. Nona enjoyed the silence. She didn’t want to tell her story, not yet . . . not ever. She didn’t want to lie either.

  “Everyone tells,” Clera said, as if reading her mind.

  “Mother died trying to give me a little brother,” Jula spoke into the awkward gap. “Father got very sad after that. He’s a scribe, not a practical man, he said. He thought the nuns would look after me better than he could.”

  “My dad ships convent wine across the Sea of Marn but he wasn’t paying the duty.” Ruli grinned. “My uncles are all smugglers too. The ones they haven’t hanged. The abbess came to the trial and said she’d take me in. Dad had to agree, and it saved his neck.”

  They both looked at Nona, waiting.

  Clera raised her eyebrows, inviting Nona to speak. When they could rise no further, she herself spoke. “On the first day you tell why your parents didn’t want you any more. It’s supposed to stop it hurting. Sharing does that. Later you hear everyone else’s stories and you know you’re not the only one. If you’d ever been to prison you’d know that’s the first thing people do there—they tell what they did.”

  Nona didn’t like to say that she had been to prison and that she hadn’t needed to tell because the guards had shouted it out as they led her to her cell. Murderer. It was on her lips to ask what a merchant’s daughter knew about such places—but as she opened her mouth to speak she remembered the cruel things Arabella had said about Clera’s father. He put himself in prison. And instead she began to answer the question that she had been trying to avoid. Nona’s story should have begun, “A juggler once came to my village. He was my first friend.” She didn’t start there though. She started with a question of her own.

  “Did you ever have a dream that they were coming for you, in the night?” she said, staring at her feet and the black water far below them.

  “Who?” asked Clera.

  “Yes.” Ruli lifted her head, shedding long pale hair to either side to reveal her long pale face.

  “They?” Jula frowned.

  “They. Them. Bad people who want to hurt you,” Nona said, and she told the girls a story. And though at first her words stumbled and she spoke as a peasant girl from the wild Grey lands of the west, out where the emperor’s name is rarely spoken and his enemies are closer than his palaces, she found her tongue and painted in the girls’ minds a picture that took hold of them all and wrapped them in a life they had never tasted or imagined.

  “I dreamed I was asleep in my mother’s house in the village where I had always lived. We weren’t like them, Mother and me. The villages along the Blue River are like clans, each one a family, one blood, the same looks, held by the same thinking. My father brought us there, me in my mother’s belly, but he left and we didn’t.

  “I dreamed of the focus moon, burning its way down the Corridor, and the boys and girls rising from their beds to play in the heat of it. The children joined hands around my mother’s hut, singing that old song:

  She’s falling down, she’s falling down,

  The moon, the moon,

  She’s falling down, she’s falling down,

  Soon, soon,

  The ice will come, the ice will close,

  No moon, no moon,

  We’ll all fall down, we’ll all fall down,

  Soon, too soon.

  “In the focus the boys and girls look so red they could be covered in blood. They’re coming. The bad ones. I know they’re coming. I see their path in my mind, a line that runs through everything, zig-zagging, curving left, right, coiling, trying to throw them off, but they’re following it—and it leads to me.

  “Outside the hut the children fall down. All at once. Without a scream.

  “I wake. All at once. Without a scream. It’s dark, the focus has passed and the fields lie restless beneath the wind. I sit up and the darkness moves around me like black water, deep enough to drown. For the longest time I sit there, shivering, my blanket wrapped tight around me, eyes on the door that I can’t see. I’m waiting for it to open.”

  • • •

  DOGS BARKING. A distant scream. Then a crash close at hand. The door-bar breaks at the first kick and a warrior fills the doorway, a lantern in one hand, sword in the other. He’s tall as any man in the village and muscle cords the length of him.

  “Take her!” He steps in and others follow. The lantern finds dull glints among the iron plates on his leather shirt. He moves towards the workshop door, the other room where Mother sleeps on the reeds piled for her weaving.

  Strong hands seize me, iron-hard and pinching. The men have braided beards. A woman slips a loop of rope around my wrists and draws it tight. Her face is marked with vertical bars of paint. Wooden charms hang in her tangle of dreadlocks. A Pelarthi. Raiders from the ice-margins.

  Mother breaks from the workshop as the first raider reaches it. She’s very fast. Her reed-knife makes a bright sound as the blade skitters across the iron plates over his stomach. He swings his heavy sword but she’s not there. Her hand is at the neck of the woman holding me—the knife buried in the woman’s throat. My mother hauls me towards the main door. We nearly get there, but the man in leather and iron turns and swings again. The point of his sword finds the back of her neck. She falls. I fall beneath her. And the night goes dark again, and quiet.

  • • •

  “THE RAIDERS SOLD you?” Jula asked, horrified.

  Nona had fallen silent, staring down at the water far below. “No. My village did.” Nona looked up and saw the three girls staring at her as if she was something altogether new to them. “The raiders took me, but they didn’t get far. When dawn broke they camped in the Rellam Forest. The village hunters don’t go there. They say there are spirits in those woods, and not kind ones.

  “The Pelarthi broke into small groups. There weren’t more than twenty to start with. Five stayed with me: four men and the sister of the woman my mother stabbed. I found I had blood on me.” Nona looked at her hands, turning them over as if the story might be written there. “While the Pelarthi were settling to sleep the forest fell silent. They didn’t seem to notice but I felt it watching us, the whole place—the trees, the ground, the darkness—all of it watching. A warrior came out from the shadow where the trees grew thick. He had bramble in his beard and a shock of wild hair. He didn’t speak, just raised his sword and came on barefoot. None of the Pelarthi even looked up—just me, lying on my side with my hands tied behind my back. I thought he might be one of them, only he looked too . . . wild, as though he hadn’t ever lived anywhere but right there in the Rellam. And his sword was polished wood, black, or very deep brown.

  “First the wildman slew the warrior who had killed Mother. He just swung his sword overhead and brought it down on the Pelarthi’s neck. The man’s head came right off. The others jumped up then and they weren’t slow, but he moved among them as though it were a dance—didn’t say a word, didn’t make a sound . . . none of them met his blade with theirs . . . and every time he changed direction there was a wound behind him spraying blood, and someone falling.

  “The woman fell over me, stumbling away from a swing of the wildman’s sword. By the time I’d struggled out from underneath her it was all over. The Pelarthi lay dead and the man had gone. Just me and the corpses and the forest moving all around us.

  “A party of hunters that had tracked the raiders out from the village found me an hour after sunrise, covered in blood and with bodies all around me
. . . in the haunted wood. They brought me back but the old women were already washing Mother for the pyre and Mari Streams had run off to White Lake to get Preacher Mickel to stop them. Preacher Mickel says when the Hope arrives then all the dead will step from their graves and be made whole . . . so they must be buried and not given to the fire, because even the Hope can’t make live men and women from smoke and ash.

  “It didn’t take long for the whispering to start: . . . came out of the Rellam covered in blood—not a scratch on her . . . who killed the Pelarthi? . . . bodies . . . blood . . . spirits . . .

  “I don’t know who said witch first, but the first to hiss it at me was the smith’s wife, Matha. She’d hated me since her little Billem tried to beat me with a stick and I hurt him back. It didn’t take long before they were all saying it, as if the Pelarthi hadn’t even come, as if the bodies in the forest hadn’t belonged to men who killed my mother and dragged me off. I think they were angry that of all those stolen by the Pelarthi I was the only one they got back. The one they hadn’t wanted in the first place.

  “The smith and Grettle Eavis wanted to tie me in a bag and drown me in the Blue River. They said that’s the way to kill a witch so she doesn’t come back—wrap her in iron chain, put her in a bag and drown her. Grey Stephen said no—he’s the one who gets to say how things will be in the village on account of he fought the Pelarthi way back when there was an empress, and he killed some too. Grey Stephen said no and that the tinker had seen a child-taker on the road and if the village wouldn’t have me the ‘taker would.’

  “I—” The voice of a bell spoke over her, deep and throbbing in the sinkhole’s void. “Bray! That’s for the lesson!” Nona leapt to her feet, unconcerned that she stood on the very brink of a high fall.

  The other girls were slower to get up, pushing themselves back from the sinkhole’s lip.