Red Sister

by Mark Lawrence

  The smell bothered Argus when he first joined the guard. They say that after a while your mind steps around any smell without noticing. It’s true, but it’s also true of pretty much every other bad thing in life. After ten years Argus’s mind stepped around the business of stretching people’s necks just as easily as it had acclimatized to Harriton’s stink.

  “When you leaving?” Dava’s obsession with everyone else’s schedule used to annoy Argus, but now he just answered without thought or memory. “Seventh bell.”

  “Seventh!” The little woman rattled out her usual outrage at the inequities of the work rota. They ambled towards the main holding block, the private scaffold at their back. Behind them Jame Lender dangled out of sight beneath the trapdoor, still twitching. Jame was the graveman’s problem now. Old Man Herber would be along soon enough with his cart and donkey for the day’s take. The short distance to Winscon Hill might prove a long trip for Old Herber, his five passengers, and the donkey, near as geriatric as its master. The fact that Jame had no meat on him to speak of would lighten the load. That, and the fact two of the other four were small girls.

  Herber would wind his way through the Cutter Streets and up to the Academy first, selling off whatever body parts might have a value today. What he added to the grave-ditch up on the Hill would likely be much diminished—a collection of wet ruins if the day’s business had been good.

  “. . . sixth bell yesterday, fifth the day before.” Dava paused the rant that had sustained her for years, an enduring sense of injustice that gave her the backbone to handle condemned men twice her size.

  “Who’s that?” A tall figure was knocking at the door to the new arrivals’ block with a heavy cane.

  “Fellow from the Caltess? You know.” Dava snapped her fingers before her face as if trying to surprise the answer out. “Runs fighters.”

  “Partnis Reeve!” Argus called the name as he remembered it and the big man turned. “Been a while.”

  Partnis visited the day-gaol often enough to get his fighters out of trouble. You don’t run a stable of angry and violent men without them breaking a few faces off the payroll from time to time, but generally they didn’t end up at Harriton. Professional fighters usually keep a calm enough head to stop short of killing during their bar fights. It’s the amateurs who lose their minds and keep stamping on a fallen opponent until there’s nothing left but mush.

  “My friend!” Partnis turned with arms wide, a broad smile, and no attempt at Argus’s name. “I’m here for my girl.”

  “Your girl?” Argus frowned. “Didn’t know you were a family man.”

  “Indentured. A worker.” Partnis waved the matter aside. “Open the door, will you, good fellow. She’s down to drop today and I’m late enough as it is.” He frowned, as if remembering some sequence of irritating delays.

  Argus lifted the key from his pocket, a heavy piece of ironwork. “Probably missed her already, Partnis. Sun’s a-setting. Old Herber and his cart will be creaking down the alleys, ready for his take.”

  “Both of them creaking, eh? Herber and his cart,” Dava put in. Always quick with a joke, never funny.

  “I sent a runner,” Partnis said, “with instructions that the Caltess girls shouldn’t be dropped before—”

  “Instructions?” Argus paused, key in the lock.

  “Suggestions, then. Suggestions wrapped around a silver coin.”

  “Ah.” Argus turned the key and led him inside. He took his visitor by the quickest route, through the guard station, along the short corridor where the day’s arrivals watched from the narrow windows in their cell doors, and out into the courtyard where the public scaffold sat below the warden’s window.

  The main gates had already opened, ready to admit the graveman’s cart. A small figure waited close to the scaffold steps, a single guardsman beside her, John Fallon by the look of it.

  “Just in time!” Argus said.

  “Good.” Partnis started forward, then faltered. “Isn’t that . . .” he trailed off, lips curling into a snarl of frustration.

  Following the tall man’s gaze, Argus spotted the source of his distress. The Abbess of Sweet Mercy came striding through the small crowd of onlookers before the warden’s steps. At this distance she could be anyone’s mother, a shortish, plumpish figure swathed in black cloth, but her crozier announced her.

  “Dear heavens, that awful old witch has come to steal from me yet again.” Partnis both lengthened and quickened his stride, forcing Argus into an undignified jog to keep pace. Dava, on the man’s other side, had to run.

  Despite Partnis’s haste, he beat the abbess to the girl by only a fraction. “Where’s the other one?” He looked around as if the guardsman might be hiding another prisoner behind him.

  “Other what?” John Fallon’s gaze flickered past Partnis to the advancing nun, her habit swirling as she marched.

  “Girl! There were two. I gave orders to— I sent a request that they be held back.”

  “Over with the dropped.” Fallon tilted his head towards a mound beside the main gates, several feet high. Stones pinned a stained grey sheet across the heap. The graveman’s cart came into view as they watched.

  “Damnation!” The word burst from Partnis loud enough to turn heads all across the yard. He raised both hands, fingers spread, then trembling with effort, lowered them to his sides. “I wanted them both.”

  “Have to argue with the graveman over the big one,” Fallon observed. “This’un.” He reached for the girl at his side. “You’ll have to argue with me over. Then those two.” He nodded at Dava and Argus. “Then the warden.”

  “There’ll be no arguing.” The abbess stepped between Fallon and Partnis, dwarfed by both, her crozier reaching up to break their eye contact. “I shall be taking the child.”

  “No you won’t!” Partnis looked down at her, brow furrowed. “All due respect to the Ancestor and all that, but she’s mine, bought and paid for.” He glanced back at the gates where Herber had now halted his cart beside the covered mound. “Besides . . . how do you know she’s the one you want?”

  The abbess snorted and favoured Partnis with a motherly smile. “Of course she is. You can tell by looking at her, Partnis Reeve. This child has the fire in her eyes.” She frowned. “I saw the other. Scared. Lost. She should never have been here.”

  “Saida’s back in the cells . . .” the girl said. “They told me I would go first.”

  Argus peered at the child. A small thing in shapeless linen—not street rags, covered in rusty stains, but a serf’s wear none the less. She might be nine. Argus had lost the knack for telling. His older two were long grown, and little Sali would always be five. This girl was a fierce creature, a scowl on her thin, dirty face. Eyes black below a short shock of ebony hair.

  “Might have been the other,” Partnis said. “She was the big one.” He lacked conviction. A fight-master knows the fire when he sees it.

  “Where’s Saida?” the girl asked.

  The abbess’s eyes widened a fraction. It almost looked like hurt. Gone, quicker than the shadow of a bird’s wing. Argus decided he imagined it. The Abbess of Sweet Mercy was called many things, few of them to her face, and “soft” wasn’t one of them.

  “Where’s my friend?” the girl repeated.

  “Is that why you stayed?” the abbess asked. She pulled a hoare-apple from her habit, so dark a red it could almost be black, a bitter and woody thing. A mule might eat one—few men would.

  “Stayed?” Dava asked, though the question hadn’t been pointed her way. “She stayed ’cos this is a bloody prison and she’s tied and under guard!”

  “Did you stay to help your friend?”

  The girl didn’t answer, only glared up at the woman as if at any moment she might leap upon her.

  “Catch.” The abbess tossed the apple towards the girl.

  Quick a
s quick a small hand intercepted it. Apple smacking into palm. Behind the girl a length of rope dropped to the ground.

  “Catch.” The abbess had another apple in hand and threw it, hard.

  The girl caught it in her other hand.

  “Catch.”

  Quite where the abbess had hidden her fruit supply Argus couldn’t tell, but he stopped caring a heartbeat later, staring at the third apple, trapped between two hands, each full of the previous two.

  “Catch.” The abbess tossed yet another hoare-apple, but the girl dropped her three and let the fourth sail over her shoulder.

  “Where’s Saida?”

  “You come with me, Nona Grey,” the abbess said, her expression kindly. “We will discuss Saida at the convent.”

  “I’m keeping her.” Partnis stepped towards the girl. “A treasured daughter! Besides, she damn near killed Raymel Tacsis. The family will never let her go free. But if I can show she has value they might let me put her into a few fights first.”

  “Raymel’s dead. I killed him. I—”

  “Treasured? I’m surprised you let her go, Mr. Reeve,” the abbess cut across the girl’s protests.

  “I wouldn’t have if I’d been there!” Partnis clenched his hand as if trying to recapture the opportunity. “I was halfway across the city when I heard. Got back to find the place in chaos . . . blood everywhere . . . Tacsis men waiting . . . If the city guard hadn’t hauled her up here she’d be in Thuran’s private dungeon by now. He’s not a man to lose a son and sit idle.”

  “Which is why you will give her to me.” The abbess’s smile reminded Argus of his mother’s. The one she’d use when she was right and they both knew it. “Your pockets aren’t deep enough to get young Nona out of here should the Tacsis boy die, and if you did obtain her release neither you nor your establishment are sufficiently robust to withstand Thuran Tacsis’s demands for retribution.”

  The girl tried to interrupt. “How do you know my name? I didn’t—”

  “Whereas I have been friends with Warden James longer than you have been alive, Mr. Reeve.” The abbess cut across the girl again. “And no sane man would mount an attack on a convent of the faith.”

  “You shouldn’t take her for a Red Sister.” Partnis had that sullen tone men get when they know they’ve lost. “It’s not right. She’s got no Ancestor faith . . . and she’s all but a murderer. Vicious, it was, the way they tell it . . .”

  “Faith I can give her. What she’s got already is what the Red Sisters need.” The abbess reached out a plump hand towards the girl. “Come, Nona.”

  Nona glanced up at John Fallon, at Partnis Reeve, at the hangman and the noose swaying beside him. “Saida is my friend. If you’ve hurt her I’ll kill you all.”

  In silence she walked forward, placing her feet so as not to step on the fallen apples, and took the abbess’s hand.

  Argus and the others watched them leave. At the gates, they paused, black against the red sun. The child released the abbess’s hand and took three paces towards the covered mound. Old Herber and his mule stood, watching, as bound by the moment as the rest of them. Nona stopped, staring at the mound. She looked towards the men at the gallows—a long, slow look—then returned to the abbess. Seconds later the pair had vanished around the corner.

  “Marking us for death she was,” Dava said.

  Still joking. Still not funny.

  3

  A JUGGLER ONCE came to Nona’s village, a place so small it had neither a name nor a market square. The juggler came dressed in mud and faded motley, a lean look about him. He came alone, a young man, dark eyes, quick hands. In a sackcloth bag he carried balls of coloured leather, batons with white and black ribbons, and crudely made knives.

  “Come, watch, the great Amondo will delight and amaze.” It sounded like a phrase he didn’t own. He introduced himself to the handful of villagers not labouring in field or hut and yet brave enough to face a Corridor wind laced with icy rain. Laying his hat between them, broad-brimmed and yawning for appreciation, he reached for four striped batons and set them dancing in the air.

  Amondo stayed three days, though his audience dried up after the first hour of the first evening. The sad fact is that there’s only so much entertainment to be had from one man juggling, however impressive he might be.

  Nona stayed by him though, watching every move, each deft tuck and curl and switch. She stayed even after the light failed and the last of the children drifted away. Silent and staring she watched as the juggler started to pack his props into their bag.

  “You’re a quiet one.” Amondo threw her a wizened apple that sat in his hat along with several better examples, two bread rolls, a piece of Kennal’s hard goat’s cheese, and somewhere amongst them a copper halfpenny clipped back to a quarter.

  Nona held the apple close to her ear, listening to the sound of her fingers against its wrinkles. “The children don’t like me.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  Amondo waited, juggling invisible balls with his hands.

  “They say I’m evil.”

  Amondo dropped an invisible ball. He left the others to fall and raised a brow.

  “Mother says they say it because my hair is so black and my skin is so pale. She says I get my skin from her and my hair from my da.” The other children had the tan skin and sandy hair of their parents, but Nona’s mother had come from the ice fringes and her father’s clan hunted up on the glaciers, strangers both of them. “Mother says they just don’t like different.”

  “Those are ugly ideas for children to have in their heads.” The juggler picked up his bag.

  Nona stood, watching the apple in her hand but not seeing it. The memory held her. Her mother, in the dimness of their hut, noticing the blood on her hands for the first time. What’s that? Did they hurt you? Nona had hung her head and shook it. Billem Smithson tried to hurt me. This was inside him.

  “Best get along home to your ma and pa.” Amondo turned slowly, scanning the huts, the trees, the barns.

  “My da’s dead. The ice took him.”

  “Well then.” A smile, only half-sad. “I’d best take you home.” He pushed back the length of his hair and offered his hand. “We’re friends, aren’t we?”

  • • •

  NONA’S MOTHER LET Amondo sleep in their barn, though it wasn’t really more than a shed for the sheep to hide in when the snows came. She said people would talk but that she didn’t care. Nona didn’t understand why anyone would care about talk. It was just noise.

  On the night Amondo left, Nona went to see him in the barn. He had spread the contents of his bag before him on the dirt floor, where the red light of the moon spilled in through the doorway.

  “Show me how to juggle,” she said.

  He looked up from his knives and grinned, dark hair swept down across his face, dark eyes behind. “It’s difficult. How old are you?”

  Nona shrugged. “Little.” They didn’t count years in the village. You were a baby, then little, then big, then old, then dead.

  “Little is quite small.” He pursed his lips. “I’ve two years and twenty. I guess I’m supposed to be big.” He smiled but with more worry in it than joy, as if the world made no more sense and offered no more comfort to bigs than littles. “Let’s have a go.”

  Amondo picked up three of the leather balls. The moonlight made it difficult to see their colours but with focus approaching it was bright enough to throw and catch. He yawned and rolled his shoulders. A quick flurry of hands and the three balls were dancing in their interlaced arcs. “There.” He caught them. “You try.”

  Nona took the balls from the juggler’s hands. Few of the other children had managed with two. Three balls was a dismissal. Amondo watched her turning them in her hands, understanding their weight and feel.

  She had studied the juggler since his ar
rival. Now she visualized the pattern the balls had made in the air, the rhythm of his hands. She tossed the first ball up on the necessary curve and slowed the world around her. Then the second ball, lazily departing her hand. A moment later all three were dancing to her tune.

  “Impressive!” Amondo got to his feet. “Who taught you?”

  Nona frowned and almost missed her catch. “You did.”

  “Don’t lie to me, girl.” He threw her a fourth ball, brown leather with a blue band.

  Nona caught it, tossed it, struggled to adjust her pattern, and within a heartbeat she had all four in motion, arcing above her in long and lazy loops.

  The anger on Amondo’s face took her by surprise. She had thought he would be pleased—that it would make him like her. He had said they were friends but she had never had a friend and he said it so lightly . . . She had thought that sharing this might make him say the words again and seal the matter into the world. Friend. She fumbled a ball to the floor on purpose then made a clumsy swing at the next.

  “A circus man taught me,” she lied. The balls rolled away from her into the dark corners where the rats live. “I practise. Every day! With . . . stones . . . smooth ones from the stream.”

  Amondo closed off his anger, putting a brittle smile on his face. “Nobody likes to be made a fool of, Nona. Even fools don’t like it.”

  “How many can you juggle?” she asked. Men like to talk about themselves and their achievements. Nona knew that much about men even if she was little.

  “Goodnight, Nona.”

  And, dismissed, Nona had hurried back to the two-room hut she shared with her mother, with the light of the moon’s focus blazing all about her, warmer than the noon-day sun.

  • • •

  “FASTER, GIRL!” THE abbess jerked Nona’s arm, pulling her out of her memories. The hoare-apples had put Amondo back into her mind. The woman glanced over her shoulder. A moment later she did it again. “Quickly!”

  “Why?” Nona asked, quickening her pace.

  “Because Warden James will have his men out after us soon enough. Me they’ll scold—you they’ll hang. So pick those feet up!”