Grey Sister

Apple crouched. ‘Sisters of Discretion are supposed to pass unseen and be impossible to take unawares.’ She took two purple pills from her habit, brilliant groundwort. She had cured and prepared the roots herself, pressed the pills and sealed them in wax. ‘It’s all very embarrassing. I won’t tell if you don’t.’ She peeled the pills quickly and popped one into the mouth of each man then rolled them so they wouldn’t choke. ‘If nobody finds and kills you before you can move again – and believe me you deserve to be found and killed, then my advice is to run all the way back to your boat.’

She wiped her hand on Slapper’s cloak. The groundwort would make them sick for a week. A month if they swallowed too much. She considered leaving her dagger in the spearman’s neck, but went to retrieve it, pulling the blade free with a shudder of revulsion. In the next moment she was moving, running for the trees, red blade in hand.

Apple had always been a teacher first, lacking the iron for the darkest shades of grey-work. Kettle though, she would never fail to do what was required, without relish or complaint. A perfect weapon. When duty called her she had the capacity to put her sweet nature in a box, ready for collection when the mission was complete. The thought of what it would take to get her to call for help made Apple shudder. Kettle would never willingly make Apple abandon the abbess’s orders. Arabella Jotsis stood alone in the wild now, unwatched.

Apple pressed on, using all her resolve to pace herself rather than to sprint. Miles lay ahead. She dodged around trees, following a deer track for a while then leaving it to pursue a stream, rotten with ice.

Kettle had been watching Nona. Had something happened to the child? She was fearless, fierce, and quicker than thinking, but there were more dangerous things out in the Corridor than Nona Grey. Perhaps it was Nona that needed help … Apple shook the thought away: the pain had been Kettle’s, and the fear.

A swirling fog came in, lifted somewhere by the moon’s focus and carried perhaps for days in the ice-wind. The forest clutched at her, sought to trip her at every step, tried to lure her from her path with easier tracks. In the blind whiteness Apple found her way, following the faint echo of Kettle’s cry through the shadow.

Many miles became few miles and, as the fog cleared, became a singular remaining mile. The land had opened up into heath where the soil stood too thin and too sour for crops. Farmsteads lay scattered, raising sheep and goats, few houses stood close enough to see one from the next. Apple picked up speed, running now as she crossed rough ground, divided here and there by grassed-over lanes and collapsed walls of dry stone. Ahead the land dipped. In the broad valley a stream threaded its path between stands of trees before losing itself in a thicker extent of woodland. Kettle waited among those woods, Apple could feel it; her nearness tugged at the scar her shadow-cry had left.

Apple slowed as she approached the first trees. She had been careless before: her haste had delivered her into the hands of men she could have stepped around unnoticed if she had kept her focus. She moved between two elms and the shadows flowed around her, raised with both hands. Shade-work had always come easy to her. Darkness pooled in her palms. When the shadows answered her will it felt as if she had remembered some name that had long escaped her, or recognized the solution to a puzzle, a sort of mental relief, joy almost. Other shadow-magic had been worked within the woods. The empty spaces shivered with the echoes of it. Kettle’s cry lay there, sharp and deep, but other traces too, the sour workings of Noi-Guin. Apple had tasted their like before, back at Sweet Mercy on the night Thuran Tacsis had sent two of them to kill Nona. Quite how they had failed in that task was beyond her.

Apple wrapped herself in darkness and sought the patience of the Grey Sister. Mistress Path had taught her the mantras twenty years ago and Apple had made them part of her own foundation, woven through her core. Today though, with Kettle’s distress throbbing through the shadow, patience came hard.

The undergrowth scratched and tore and rustled with each step Apple took. She felt as raw as any novice, her woodcraft rusty with disuse, certain that her advance would be heard by any foe within a thousand yards. Bait the trap. A tactic as old as killing. Leave a comrade, a friend, a lover wounded, then wait and watch. A Noi-Guin could be resting among the branches of any tree, crossbow ready, bolt envenomed.

Kettle wouldn’t have called me if that were true. Apple advanced, leaving patience behind her but bringing the shadows.

All that drew her eyes to Kettle was the bond between them. The nun lay at the base of a great frost-oak, the length of her body fitting around the rise and fall of roots. Leaves and mud covered her range-coat, her headdress gone, the spread of raven hair showing the paleness of her face only in thin slices. She lay sprawled like a dead thing, a part of the forest floor, a work of camouflage of which any Grey Sister would be proud.

‘Kettle!’ Apple came to her side, the fear of an assassin’s bow crushed beneath the certainty that Kettle lay dead and that no purpose remained to her in the world. She took Kettle’s muddy fingers in her own, shocked by the coldness of them. ‘Kettle … it’s me.’ She choked on the words, overwhelmed, while her other hand, still calm, sought the nun’s pulse with practised ease. Nothing. No … not nothing, a whisper.

Apple reached to pull Kettle to her, to lift her from the cold ground, but saw the hilt of the knife, jutting from her side just above the hip. She touched a finger to the pommel, an iron ball. Leather binding wound the grip. She recognized the dagger. Kettle had shown one like it to her after it was confiscated from Nona. Noi-Guin for certain then. The one that got away. Apple eased her lover onto her lap and sat for a moment, hugging her, eyes squeezed tight against the tears. Seconds later she drew a deep shuddering breath and strove for calm.

Think.

Apple set Kettle back upon the ground and stripped her own range-coat to lie her on. With Kettle arranged on the coat she examined her for other injuries, checking the colour of her skin, lifting an eyelid, listening to her breath, watching the speed with which circulation returned to her extremities when pinched. She took a thin leather tube from the collection within her habit and broke the seal. Already the cold was making her shiver. She tipped the liquid into Kettle’s mouth, sat back, and watched. The knife was the only wound. It must have been coated with blade-venom but there were no strong indications to narrow down the type.

For the longest minute in Apple’s life nothing happened. All about her the trees groaned against the wind, their leaves seething. Then Kettle twitched, spluttered and started to choke. Apple seized her head. ‘Easy! Just breathe.’

‘W-where?’ Any further question became lost in coughing and choking. One hand clutched at the range-coat just above the knife. ‘Hurts.’

‘I told you to breathe, idiot.’

‘A-Appy?’ Kettle rolled her head to see, eyes squinting as if the light were too bright. Her skin was bone-white, lips almost blue. ‘Sister.’ The faintest smile.

‘I’ve given you adrene, it won’t last long. Tell me what you’ve taken. Quick!’

‘Nona. She made me call.’ Kettle slurred the words, staring past Apple at the leaves, black against a white sky. ‘Gone now.’

Apple shook her. ‘What did you take? It’s important!’

‘B—’ Kettle blinked, trying to focus. ‘Black cure.’ Her breath came shallow and fast. ‘And … kalewort.’

‘Kalewort?’

‘I … was cold. Thought it … might be nightweed on—’

‘Who puts nightweed in blade-venom?’ Apple shook her head. ‘Where’s the assassin?’

‘Gone.’ Kettle’s eyes closed and her head flopped back.

Apple bit her lip. The black cure should have had more effect whatever the Noi-Guin had used. She tasted blood and frowned. Her mind lay blank. Nothing in her great store of lore suggested a cause or cure.

Despair closed about Apple. Her lips moved, reciting venoms, none of which fitted the symptoms. Tendrils of shadow caught around Kettle, moving across her in wisps. Apple stared, her brow furrowed, mind racing. On the white inch of wrist exposed before Kettle’s range-coat swallowed her arm, a line of shadow followed the path of the largest vein.

‘No?’ Apple motioned the shadows around her forward and like a dark sea they washed over Kettle. As they drew back traces of shadow remained, held by her veins as a lodestone will hold powdered iron, revealing the invisible lines of its influence. ‘Yes!’

She grabbed Kettle’s face in both hands. ‘Wake up! Kettle, wake up!’ Kettle lay, as boneless as the Durns in the road. Apple slapped her. ‘Wake up! It was dark-venom.’

‘I’m dead then.’ Kettle rolled her eyes open. ‘I’m so sorry.’ A glistening tear pooled in the corner of her eye. She lifted a hand, as if it were the heaviest thing in the world, to Apple’s cheek. ‘You’re bleeding.’

Apple took the fingers and kissed them. ‘You are my blood.’

The darkness began to thicken around them, shadows streaming towards Apple, clotting about her.

‘What are … you doing?’ The smoothness of Kettle’s brow furrowed and her hand dropped back to her side.

‘Saving you,’ Apple said. The effort of drawing so much shadow so fast tightened her voice. She felt a coldness in her bones, an ache behind her eyes.

‘H-how?’ Kettle sought her eyes. ‘There’s no way.’

‘There is a way.’ Apple saw Kettle only because the darkness ran so deep in her. Night enfolded them both now, a fist of darkness within the depths of a forest grown lighter as its shadows were stolen. ‘I have to push you into shadow.’

‘No.’ Kettle managed to shake her head. ‘The Ancestor—’

‘I have to. It’s the only way.’ Apple gathered the darkness around her hands until even to her night-born sight they were holes cut in the shape of her body, without depth or contrast. The Noi-Guin pushed the best of their killers into the shadow, as far as their minds could bear it. It broke some of them. Others were lost in the dark places behind the world. But the price Kettle feared to pay was her soul. The Church taught that those who walked too far into the shadow would never join the Ancestor in unity.

‘Don’t.’ Kettle lacked the strength to raise her hand again. ‘Sister Wheel … says the Ancestor—’

‘Fuck Wheel, and fuck the Ancestor.’ Apple set one hand to Kettle’s chest, kneeling above her, ready to push. She took the hilt of the knife in her other hand. ‘You’re mine and I won’t lose you.’ She bent her head and tears fell. ‘Let me do it.’ Her mouth twitched and the words came out broken. ‘Please.’

‘Poisoner.’ Kettle found the strength to raise a hand, running white fingers into the flame of Apple’s hair. She held her a moment. ‘Poison me.’

And with a cry Apple pressed down with one black palm, all her strength behind it, and with the other drew the assassin’s knife from the wound, pulling with the steel and blood an inky venom born of the darkness that dwells between stars.

2

Two Years Later

‘Have you come for the laundry?’ The tall girl, a willowy blonde with a narrow beauty to her, stood away from her bed and bent to pull the linens from it. A titter ran among the other novices getting undressed around the room. Mystic Class had the whole of the dormitory’s second floor and the beds were well spaced around the walls, with desks between them.

Nona had been warned about Joeli Namsis. Her family held lands to the west and kept a close alliance with Thuran Tacsis. ‘Yes,’ she said, and stepped forward quickly, taking the bundled sheets with hunska swiftness. She returned to the doorway and threw the bedding down the stairs. Across the skin of her back Keot trembled with laughter.

‘Now, which bed is mine? Or must I take one?’ Nona looked around at their faces, a dozen of them, variously astonished or horrified, a couple even amused. Of all the novices from Nona’s time in Red Class she was the first to join Mystic. Three of the girls from her time in Grey Class had reached Mystic ahead of her: Mally, a hunska prime who had been head girl, had a bed close to the door; Alata watched her, dark-eyed, from the far side of the room, the ritual patterning of her scars a black web across arms and cheeks; and Darla who had joined the week before, grinning beneath the brown mop of her hair, the hugeness of her contriving to make the larger Mystic beds look small.

‘Well that was a mistake, peasant.’ Joeli came to stand before Nona.

‘Mistakes are how we learn.’ Nona looked expectantly past Joeli’s shoulder towards an empty bed.

‘Perhaps I should teach you another lesson.’ Joeli raised a hand, fingers spread. A white haze of lines filled Nona’s Path-sight. Some said Joeli was the best thread-worker in the convent, and since Hessa’s death Nona supposed it could be true. Using any kind of Path-power outside a lesson, however, was a sure-fire way to get your back shredded with a wire-willow cane, no matter which family name you bore.

Nona looked up, meeting the green slits of Joeli’s stare, and spoke with all the sincerity she could muster. ‘I love you as a sister, and when we die we will be together in the Ancestor, our bloods mixed.’ A warmth spread across her back as Keot sank into her flesh. A moment later he had wrapped himself around her tongue. ‘But I must warn you, sister, that a sickness runs in me, and if you fashion yourself my enemy I will make a ruin of your life, for I am born of war.’

Joeli stared at Nona, eyes widening as if recognizing a promise rather than a threat. Then laughter burst from her in a clean, controlled peal, confidence pushing aside sensible fear. ‘What dramatics! “I am born of war”.’ Joeli mimicked Keot’s words accented heavily towards the peasants’ dialect. ‘You were born of a mud hut in the wilds.’ She glanced at her friends. ‘What a strange creature this novice is. I can see why Sister Hearth was keen to get her out of her class.’ She turned away.

Nona resisted the urge as Keot tried to make her arm rise to seize the girl’s neck. Instead she turned towards an empty bed with a snarl, angry at the lapse of concentration that had let Keot speak for her.

I will make a ruin of your life, Keot?

You should let me. That bitch means trouble for you.

Nona sat on the bed she had chosen, one of a pair too neat to belong to anyone. She pushed her small bag of possessions under the desk, spare clothes mainly. Joeli was already in animated conversation with three novices across the room, laughter and glances in her direction punctuating their conversation. A fourth girl returned from the stairwell with the sheets Nona had thrown.

If you kill one of them the others will respect you.

Shut up.

The door opened again and Zole walked in, arms folded across the bag she had brought from the Grey dormitory. When Nona had left the classroom where Sister Hearth had examined her merit certificates Zole had been waiting outside the door. They had both nodded acknowledgment but it wasn’t in the ice-triber’s nature to volunteer information.

‘Another one?’ Joeli raised her voice in complaint.

Zole’s face registered no expression as she scanned the room, eyes dark above broad cheekbones. She wore her face like a mask. Nona could count on one hand the times she had seen her smile or scowl.

‘I—’ Joeli seemed about to expand upon her displeasure but for once her supposedly forgotten aristocracy fell short, eclipsed by Zole’s celebrity. Novices rose on all sides along with an excited babble of voices as they moved to welcome the Argatha. Nona decided against shielding her, though she was sure Zole would rather see the novices knocked down than endure their attentions.

Zole made slow but sure progress towards the bed beside Nona, answering questions and flattery with curt nods. On the few occasions she did reply she offered only single words. Most of them ‘no’. Outside the convent it was far worse. Her secret had been uncovered just months after they had returned from the ranging. Some said Sherzal herself had spread the news, but whatever the truth all of Verity soon whispered that Zole was the four-blood spoken of in the Argatha prophecy, the Chosen One come to drive back the ice and bring salvation! And the rest of the empire knew within another month. Pilgrims came to sit in vigil beyond the pillars even on days when the abbess stationed a sister at the base of the Vinery Stair to tell them there was no chance of an audience with Novice Zole.

Zole reached the bed and drove the last couple of novices away with a glower. The Argatha prophecy had been a constant in Sister Wheel’s Spirit classes for almost three years now, and she had managed to infect a fair proportion of the convent with her zeal, including most of the novices. At least the ones who didn’t know Zole.

‘You’re making friends almost as quickly as I am.’ Nona stood and stripped off her habit.

Zole shrugged. ‘None of them are bleeding.’

Nona knelt to dig in her bag for her nightdress. Keot could sink from view for a few moments and knew enough not to be seen. Nona had explained to him that the nuns would seek to burn him out before throwing her from the convent – over a cliff if she were unlucky. Nobody tainted by a devil could stay in service to the Ancestor, even after the taint had been driven from them with hot irons. Sister Wheel’s lessons had left no room for doubt on that account.

‘Welcome to Mystic, shrimp.’ Darla came to the foot of Nona’s bed, somewhat comical in her tent of a nightdress, her arms, thick with muscle, straining out of short frilly sleeves. ‘Nice entrance.’

‘I do my best.’ Nona stepped out of her underskirts and pulled her own nightdress over her head as fast as possible. In Grey dorm they mocked her for being shy, but it was Keot who prompted the haste. Also she was shy.

‘She threatened to kill Joeli before she’d even reached her bed,’ Darla said to Zole. ‘And she didn’t even have a crowd trying to get in her way.’

Zole looked up from her bag, one hand wrapped around the carved tooth of some sea-monster. ‘Good. I do not like that Joeli.’

‘You don’t like anyone,’ Nona said.

Zole shrugged.

‘And besides, I didn’t threaten to kill her.’

‘“I will make a ruin of your life”,’ Darla quoted through a broad grin.

‘That’s maiming at best,’ Nona said. ‘And I seem to remember my welcome to Grey wasn’t too warm either.’

Darla kept her grin. ‘That was just a kicking. Joeli’s a whole lot more dangerous. A thread-worker can mess you up. And she doesn’t even need to do that. She has lots of friends. Too many novices in this class are thinking they might not take their vows, just go back to their families. And when you start to think like that you also start to think how helpful it is to have friends like the Namsis.’

‘A devil got my tongue,’ Nona said. ‘I should have held it more tightly.’

I spoke truth. The fortress of you is built of such moments, they are stones dropped into the well of your tomorrow.

Shut up.

Nona checked the bed for spiders and other welcome gifts then slipped under the blanket, yawning. Darla laughed. ‘Get your beauty sleep, Shield.’ She slapped the bed. ‘Long day tomorrow. You’re with the big girls now.’

All around the room novices were climbing beneath thick blankets, Alata sleeping alone until Leeni got her merit certificate in Spirit. Something Sister Wheel seemed to be taking particular pleasure in denying her. Joeli Namsis wore only her tawny skin to her bed, perhaps proud of her woman’s body. Nona looked away. She would miss Ara’s presence in the bed beside hers, close enough to reach out and touch. She yawned again and stared at the shadow-dance across the beams above her. At heart she was still a child of the Grey and no matter how warm a room might be she would never be at ease with nakedness, even in the bathhouse. Ruli had taught Nona the steam-weaving trick that she had first shown them at the sink-hole in the focus moon, and when possible Nona wore a robe of steam around the bath-pool. Keot hid across the sole of her left foot at such times.

Shadows are nothing. Talk to me instead.

Shut up.

You should thank me. Your enemies make you what you are. Your foes shape your life more than friends ever could. This Joeli is good practice.

Nona ignored Keot and watched the shadows. Most novices with marjal blood could make them dance to their own tune, but such tricks were put beyond her reach the day she cut her own shadow loose. The day she launched it at Yisht to try to save Hessa. She had failed. She had lost both her friend and her shadow, and Yisht had escaped with the shipheart. Sleep came slowly as it always did, fighting to overcome the anger. She finally fell asleep wondering where her shadow might be now, and dreamed of being lost in dark places.

3

‘In Mystic we use edged steel.’ Sister Tallow spoke to Zole and Nona above the clash of swordplay as the other novices sparred in widely spaced pairs across the sand of Blade Hall. She held two naked blades, forge-iron rather than the Ark-steel of a Red Sister’s weapon, but visibly sharp. Each had the same curve as a sister-blade and each was the same length, about as long as a man’s arm from shoulder to fingertips. ‘There are some lessons that must be written in scars.’

Sister Tallow offered the hilts. Nona took hers, clumsy in her new gauntlets. Like her new blade-habit the gloves were reinforced with strips of iron sewn into the padding. They wouldn’t stop every hit but they would lessen the chances of blood being spilled.

‘It’s a good sword.’ Zole swung hers then circled the point in front of her.

Nona lifted her own, finding it heavier than the blunted Grey Class blades. She felt awkward in her blade-habit, as if she were wading in the bath-pool. Red Sisters wore black-skin but that had been scavenged from the hulls of the ships that carried the four tribes to Abeth and was worth more than its weight in gold. Far more. An experienced Red Sister had to die or become a Holy Sister before a new one could get her armour.

‘You two spar. I’ll watch.’ Sister Tallow pointed to a clear patch of sand. ‘No showing off. We have serious and dangerous work ahead of us, and I would rather send you on to Holy Class with the same number of fingers and eyes you had when you arrived in Mystic.’

Nona squared up to Zole. The ice-triber stood as tall as Sister Tallow now, her gerant blood perhaps starting to show. Nona remained a head shorter. She supposed she was around fifteen but when she came from the village she had scarcely realized there were dates and certainly hadn’t known on which one she had been born.

‘What are the rules?’ Nona asked. Behind her thoughts Keot yammered for blood and made his opinions on rules quite clear.

‘No killing thrusts.’ Sister Tallow stepped back.

‘That’s it?’ Nona had no more time for inquiry. Zole pulled the mesh-mask over her face and moved to attack. Nona pulled her own down and lifted her sword.

Zole came in fast as she always did, offering no quarter. Sister Tallow never had to lecture the girl on controlling her temper. Nona wasn’t sure Zole had one. Ara said if they cut the Chosen One open they’d find ice at her core.

Nona’s world narrowed to the flickering of blades and the clash of iron. With her speed matched Nona had to rely on training, on the memory that Sister Tallow had imprinted on her muscles. Deeper than that even – on her bones. She mounted a desperate defence against the stronger girl, acutely aware that the edge she met with her own could open ruinous wounds, even slice a limb off, gone in the blink of an eye, beyond repair. Zole would hardly care if she took all four fingers from Nona’s sword hand at the knuckle.