That was a bigger fear than the shadows between the trees.
I let the path lead me, not stopping for it’s when you stop that things catch up with you. And not quickening my pace, for in a haunted forest any increase in the speed with which you walk is a slippery slope to blind panic and the mad dash that sees you lost in the deep wood with a broken ankle.
I walked until it grew too dark to see the trail and then I sat with my back to an oak and watched the dark. Rain came, thick with sleet, pattering down among the leaves, gathering and dripping, sliding to the forest floor with the soft wet sounds imagination can fashion into nightmare.
When the focus came it woke me, first patterning the world in glowing red and black shadow, the undergrowth writhing beneath the sharp relief of branches. As the ground began to steam I thought I heard a shout, far off, and I took to the trail, running hard, knowing it would be Amondo.
I met him on the path, rushing towards me out of the fog as fast as I was running towards him. He nearly flattened me but I’m quick and I slipped aside at the last second. It happened so swiftly that he didn’t even see me. I shouted after him, but he was lost in the pink blanket of the fog.
I thought he was gone, but the sound of his feet pounding the track stopped in one sudden moment.
“Nona?”
“It’s me! I followed you.”
“Dear Ancestor! Hide! Hide in the trees!”
I heard the sounds of his pursuit, more pounding feet, more shouts and cries.
“Bleed me!” And Amondo came running back, the hot mist swirling as it released him. He grabbed my arm and dragged me off the track, out into the forest. The thorns tore my skirt and cut my legs.
“Shhhh.” Amondo pulled me behind a tree, one hand over my mouth.
The band chasing him thundered by, clinking metal, rasping breaths, heavy boots.
A minute later Amondo drew his hand away and unclenched the other from around my arm.
“Why were they chasing you?”
“I owe them something.”
“Why did you leave?”
“I wore out my welcome on the first day, Nona. The real question is why would anyone stay?”
The focus was passing and already the fog lay in streamers being trailed through the tree trunks by the wind. The moon’s light, no longer fierce, showed Amondo’s face, worried and watchful.
“I want to know—”
“People always want to know things . . . until they hear them, and then it’s too late. Knowledge is a rug of a certain size, and the world is larger. It’s not what remains uncovered at the edges that should worry you, rather what is swept beneath.”
“I don’t understand.” He didn’t look like the juggler who had thrown and caught for a heel of bread. He looked older and sadder and wiser.
“There’s a line, Nona, a burning line that runs through the world. It runs through dreams and beneath roots and across the sky . . . and it leads to you.”
“Me?” I asked. It didn’t seem likely. “Why?”
He managed a smile. “We’re back to knowledge again. The important thing is that those men who were chasing me—one of them can follow that line. He calls it a thread. A clever man with clever fingers . . . He can tie three knots in an eyelash, that one. And he’ll keep on following that thread. He didn’t want to go into the village to get you . . . so he sent me . . .”
“You were there to get me out?” I felt a numbness prickling across my cheekbones and a hollowness in my stomach. “But you said we were fr—”
“And a fine job you’ve done of it, Amondo.” A deep voice rolled out from the direction of the track. Figures moved from shadow to moonlight to shadow. Tall men in uniform, swords at their hips, the soft metal whisper of mailshirts. “Just when I was starting to doubt you!” A laugh. “Nobody took her. Not even an itinerant juggler. She ran away by herself. Brilliant.”
The soldiers closed on us from all sides. Two seized Amondo’s arms, another took me by the scruff of my neck.
The leader, the one Amondo said could follow my thread, moved out into the moonlight. He wasn’t old, not much older than Amondo, but he didn’t look like us, not like a real person. He didn’t look hungry. His beard came rolling down to the bottom of his neck and there wasn’t a spot of dirt in it. His cloak was scarlet even in the moonlight and the silver bands across his shoulders shone bloody with it.
“We still have to hurt you, of course,” he said. “For the running.” He motioned to the two soldiers and they began to twist Amondo’s arms. He cried out immediately.
“And then of course we have to kill you,” the man added when Amondo paused his scream to gasp in a breath. “To keep this secret.”
That’s when I did it. I reached around to where the man had hold of my neck and I cut him, skin, muscle, tendons, arteries—Sister Tallow is right, men are just like pigs inside—and his blood shot out so fast that it drenched my shoulders even though I was already moving as fast as I knew how to.
I knew I had to reach the man with the beard, the man with the clever fingers, without giving him the chance to show any of his cleverness. I slashed him across the stomach before he even noticed I was loose. I cut him and the bright rings of his mail made bright little sounds as they broke open. He noticed then and folded up, hugging his belly. I cut that beard of his with another slash and left him torrenting blood from an open throat.
Then it was all running and slicing and screaming. I climbed up one man who tried to chase me round a tree with his knife. I dug my blades into his back and hauled myself up him. A foot on his belt—thrust my blades into his neck—heaved up. I jumped from his shoulders onto the last of them. She still had a hand on Amondo’s arm, her other one on her sword hilt, half-drawn.
And when it was done and they were sprawled among the bushes and the trees were splashed with gore and cut here and there where the soldiers had swung their swords I stood in the middle of it all wearing their blood and screaming. And I was screaming for more. And Amondo ran . . . although he was my friend and I had saved him . . . he ran.
• • •
“AND THAT’S HOW they found me the next morning, and that’s my secret, and that’s why my mother let them give me away. I’m a monster.”
Nona started to walk towards the cave mouth and the day that was dying on the slopes just beyond. “That’s my secret and my shame. I’m Nona Grey, war is in my veins, and the screams of my enemies are music to me.”
“Wait!” Darla shouted. “That’s nonsense. Where did you get your knives from . . . how did you know how to use them? How did you kill six warriors?”
Nona turned and slashed a hand across the wall. A shower of fragments scattered out across the cave floor and where she had struck four gouges remained in the stone, deep and dark.
“But . . . they had swords.” Darla waved hers for good measure.
“Never try to swing one in a forest,” Nona said. “And never underestimate a wild animal, however small it might be.”
Darla had no reply. She set her fingers to the cuts Nona had left in the rock, and stared in wonder.
“Scarlet and silver?” Ruli spoke from the back of the cave where she had crouched, listening to Nona’s story.
“What?” With the truth out Nona ached to leave, before they properly understood what she had told them.
“The man was in scarlet and silver? Were the others in uniform?”
“I . . .” Nona tried to see it. She saw blood mostly, and wounds. “Perhaps.” Yes.
“Those are Sherzal’s colours,” Ruli said. “The headman at your village would have known that. He would have known that they couldn’t keep you—not with the emperor’s own sister after you. Your mother would have understood too. The child-taker was your best chance. Hiding in plain sight. A girl with a price on her head, sold for nothing, there in a cage ready for
sale . . . It was all they could do to keep you safe.”
“No.” Nona waved the idea away, as if her blades could slice it into a lie. “It wasn’t like that. They would have told me . . .”
“Really?” Ruli stood up, staring at Nona with concern. It was more than she could take. “Not telling you was more likely to stop you coming back . . .”
“I’m going out there.” Nona started back towards the cave mouth. “Once it starts you—”
“Nona, there are twelve of them!” Jula stepped after her, though stopping short, as if she saw something new in Nona’s place. Some wild beast perhaps, with eyes like holes into the night and hands thick with old blood.
“You might have . . .” Ruli frowned, staring at Nona’s hands, “invisible daggers . . . But they have swords, as long as you are tall! And we’re not in a dark, misty forest! Don’t go!”
“I have the Path, Ruli.” Nona offered a faint smile.
“You have the Path at the convent,” Ruli said. “But let’s be honest . . . you’re not very good with it there. Ara is much better. And Hessa—she knows more about threads than Sister Pan does already! But isn’t that the whole point of Sherzal wanting the shipheart? This far from it even a Holy Witch finds it hard to touch the Path. And your serenity . . . well . . . it’s rubbish.” Ruli looked down. “Sorry.”
“I’ve given up on serenity.” Nona smiled. “It wasn’t me. But I do have a new record on blade-path . . .”
“Blade-path?” Darla asked. “What the hell has blade-path got to do with anything?”
“New record?” Ruli asked. “You completed it? Well . . .” She looked around the cave, Tarkax lying in a pool of his own blood, Ara and Zole paralysed, Clera bound and staring dazed over her gag. “. . . congratulations?”
“I used the grease,” Nona said.
“What?”
“The grease you gave me. I’d been doing it all wrong. I kept going slower and slower and falling off sooner and sooner. It felt wrong. It didn’t fit. So I did what I do to reach the Path. I ran at it. I cleaned the resin from my feet and greased my soles. Blade-path’s all downhill, except the bits that aren’t, and by the time you reach them you’re going fast enough to carry through.”
“But the corkscrew?” Ruli looked up at her, blinking.
“If you’re going fast enough you can slide around the inside.” Nona grinned. “It’s wonderful. Everything fits together. All the choices, all the balancing, they happen at fight-speed, they make sense. I did it in thirty counts!”
“THIRTY counts?” Ruli gasped. “That’s impossible.”
“It’s not as fast as Sister Owl,” Nona said. “But I was pleased with it.”
“I still don’t care,” Darla said. “How is that silly game going to help against what’s out there?” She waved her sword towards the slope.
“But it’s not just a game,” Nona said. “We do it for a reason.”
“Balance and timing,” Jula said.
“The hunska do it for that. But the quantal do it because it trains the mind for the Path. I had a . . . I suddenly saw everything in a new way.” Nona turned back towards the daylight.
“An epiphany,” Jula breathed.
“An epiphany.” Sister Kettle had taught Nona the word but she hadn’t found it on her lips when she wanted it. An epiphany. Seeing the world anew with new understanding. Like when Sister Pan’s trick pictures suddenly made sense and you saw the bump as a hole, the young woman as an old lady. The same thing had happened with Clera. Nona had taken a step back and in an instant seen her treachery whole and clear. The new picture didn’t erase the old—the bump was still a hole, but now it was a bump as well; the old lady was still a young one, but now she was old too. Clera was still her friend, and now an enemy also.
Nona saw too that the truth had been hers for the taking. Sister Apple’s bitter pill . . . All that had stopped her asking Clera about the throwing star and unravelling the whole tale was her own desire not to speak of Amondo and the forest where she had stood, clothed in blood, revealed to the world as a monster, hungry for the kill. One truth for another and they wouldn’t be standing in this cave. But that itself, like most truths, had proved too bitter for the mouth to speak.
Epiphany? She saw herself. A child of nine, the dried blood of six royal soldiers still in her hair. She saw the child-taker, Giljohn, with one hand on Four-Foot’s reins, the cart and cage behind him, rattling up the lane. She saw Grey Stephen bent in conversation. Her mother weeping. She had stared at the memory so long, so many times . . . Could it be possible? To see it another way?
“So you think you can walk the Path now?” Ruli asked. “Even here?”
“I think so,” Nona said. “I just need to get angry enough.” Rage could throw her at the Path back in the convent, close to the shipheart. Rage would throw her at it now—enough of it would. And this time she wouldn’t try to slow herself, wouldn’t try to stutter to a halt and gain her balance. She would take the speed and aim it down the Path and take all the power it would give her. And own it. All she needed was the rage. She reached for it . . . but where a fire had once blazed only an ember remained. Had her mother truly saved her?
“Stay here,” Darla said, looking down. “You don’t have to go out there. Or . . . we could scatter and run.”
“No,” Nona said. If they ran Darla would be the first caught.
“We can wait,” Jula said. “The poison will wear off and Tarkax can fight and . . .”
“And Sister Tallow will come with the others,” Ruli finished.
“Go.” Zole managed to put some heat into the word. She understood. If you wanted to win against the odds you had to carry the fight to the enemy. You had to take them unprepared.
“I have to—” But something dark and vast reached up to grab her and before Nona’s mouth closed on the last word she was gone.
• • •
NONA HAD BEEN yanked from her body so swiftly she hardly had time to feel it begin to fall. She saw nothing, not even darkness, felt nothing save the pull and a sense of rushing. Then in one moment she slammed back into herself. She saw a paved yard, Heart Hall on her right, the Ancestor’s dome rising above the dormitory block to her left . . . Nona had been poured into someone’s skull, but not into her own. She leaned onto her crutch and took another limping step. Hessa!
Hessa’s thoughts rose around Nona, a tide that threatened to drown her. Nona shouted that she had to go, screamed to be released back to the cave, but Hessa just took another step as if she’d heard nothing.
• • •
HESSA HAD KNOWN it would be Yisht. Even so, finding the gate to the under-tunnels unlocked put a cold terror in her. She had shared every excruciating moment that Nona endured when Yisht had held her hands tight about her neck. It might have been Nona’s throat that was closed, but Hessa’s lungs had burned too, striving for a breath that wouldn’t come.
“Why would you think you could come back?” Hessa whispered. It made no sense. Did the woman want to die?
“What are we doing here?” Ghena hugged herself against the ice-wind, weaker now than it was, at the end of its reign, but still able to carry a sting.
“You need to go to the abbess. Tell her Yisht has broken into the under-tunnels again.” Hessa had been put in Red dormitory while Grey Class ranged.
“The abbess? You’re mad! She’ll kill me. It’s the middle of the night.” Ghena’s habitual temper hadn’t been improved by Hessa waking her with a pinch and cajoling her to come out into the night despite her protests.
“Tell her Yisht is back. If you don’t she really will kill you! This is serious, Ghena. Deadly serious.”
“Ancestor’s tits!” Ghena spat on the ground and took off running in the direction of the abbess’s house. “You better be right about this, Hop-along!”
Hessa turned back to the gate and
sighed. She had taken threads from everything of Yisht’s that Nona had brought her. Blood, hair, clothes, a boot-knife. And each bright and coiling thread she had pulled taut across her mind, feeling the woman’s impotent rage as she jolted westward in her barrel. What had scared her wasn’t the depth of that rage but how cold it ran.
Hessa pushed the gate and it swung open, the tunnel beyond yawning darkly and swallowing the light from her lantern. She sighed again and began her long and painful descent of the stairs.
None of them had imagined for a moment that Yisht would dare return after her efforts had been discovered. Quite how she had evaded the Grey Sisters watching over the convent’s approaches Hessa couldn’t say, but now the woman would find herself up against Red Sisters. She must be insane to think she could reach the shipheart, let alone escape with it.
The threads had started to tremble as Hessa sought sleep that night. A vibration so slight that she hadn’t been able to unravel it from her own nerves. Nona had seen something terrible two mornings before. Death and dead men. Sister Kettle was involved somehow but Nona had become so hardened to fear that whatever had happened wasn’t enough to make the full link between them. Even so, it had left Hessa shaken and unable to sleep that night.
This night, despite the trembling of threads, exhaustion had taken Hessa to her dreams. And the threads had jerked her from a nightmare, yanking so hard that the pain filled her sight with sparks for several moments.
At the door to the Shade chamber Hessa stopped and leaned on her crutch. “What’s she doing here? Why this passage?” Hessa knew that Yisht’s efforts had been discovered. There had been nuns in and out of the guest chambers all through the evening of the day that Grey Class left to go ranging. They had to have discovered the shaft and set guards while measures were taken to protect the shipheart and to challenge Sherzal about the matter.
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