Читать книгу Red Sister - Mark Lawrence - Страница 15

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 foot 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.

‘That’s horrible,’ Jula said, brushing the grit from the seat of her habit.

‘It’s incredible!’ Ruli said. ‘Weren’t you terrified when—’

‘Is it true?’ Clera frowned, weighing Nona with a speculative gaze.

‘We have to get to Blade.’ Nona was already hurrying towards the Academia tower. ‘I can’t be late twice!’ She hesitated and looked back. ‘Where’s the lesson?’

Clera laughed at that. ‘Come on. She’s right – Sister Tallow will have us running up and down the Seren Way, you know what she’s like!’

A moment later the three novices were walking briskly towards a building at the far edge of the plateau, with Nona jogging to catch up.

‘That’s the Blade Hall.’ Clera pointed to a tall building with high arched windows. Walls of huge limestone blocks supported a peaked roof with stone gargoyles roaring beneath the eaves. To the south a row of carved buttresses reinforced the wall that faced out over the plateau’s edge. ‘And that’s the Heart Hall.’ Clera nodded to the building on their left as they passed its many-pillared portico.

‘The Persus Hall.’ Jula finished tying her hair back with a black cord. ‘After Emperor Persus, third of his name, whose line ended when the current—’

‘Everyone calls it the Heart Hall because it was built for the shipheart.’ Clera led up the steps of Blade Hall, almost running but not quite.

‘What’s the ship—’

But Clera had already pushed open the heavy door and slipped inside. Ruli followed.

‘I still don’t understand who paid your confirmation fee.’ Jula came up behind Nona.

Nona didn’t understand either. She worried that perhaps it had been overlooked and this evening or maybe tomorrow a sister would come with ledger and quill and a demand for ten gold sovereigns. Talking about it with the others seemed like tempting fate.

‘Nona!’ Sister Tallow called her name the moment Nona stuck her head around the door. ‘Come here beside me.’

Nona, saved from answering Jula, hurried across. The old woman shot her a narrow look then returned her gaze to the rest of Red Class, the last few of them lining up in a second rank. Arabella, now in a habit, stood at Mistress Blade’s other side, golden and perfect, her hair looking as if a trio of handmaids had spent an hour combing and pinning it.

The hall extended about half the length of the building, ending in galleried seating around a short tunnel that led to the remaining chambers. The ceiling vaulted above them high enough for an oak tree to grow to maturity at the centre. Apart from a collection of a dozen or so man-height leather-wrapped wooden posts on stands in a far corner the hall lay echoingly empty, the floor an inch of sand over flagstones.

‘I need partners for these two.’ Sister Tallow had enough steel in her voice that even simple observations became life or death ultimatums. She cast a dark eye across the girls lined before her. ‘Novice Ghena, you will be with Nona. Novice Jula, with Arabella.’

Ghena fixed her gaze on Nona and allowed herself a thin smile. Jula looked surprised.

‘Time to change.’ Sister Tallow clapped her hands. ‘Anyone dawdling gets their head shaved.’ She directed her attention to Ghena who, now that Nona considered it, looked as if she might have suffered just such a fate only a few weeks ago. ‘Make sure the new girls get habits that fit.’ Another clap of the hands. ‘Go!’ And the dozen novices were off, running towards the tunnel beneath the tiered seating, sand spraying out beneath their heels.

Ghena moved swiftly and Nona had to sprint to catch up. The gloom of the tunnel stole Nona’s sight after the brightness of the hall. As she slowed to let her eyes adjust Ghena pulled away while others came pounding up behind. At the end of the passage most of the girls bundled to the left, but Jula led Arabella to the right, and Nona followed.

Ghena was waiting for them in a long and narrow storeroom. She pulled back the shutters and light from the window at the far end revealed both walls lined with shelves. Further back all manner of goods were stacked: earthenware jars, rolled mats, heavy leather balls, staves, sticks, canes, even the hilts of what might be daggers or swords. Closer at hand shelves boasted piles of neatly folded tunics and shoes of thick black cloth.

‘The smallest are by the door. Make sure you get one that fits well,’ Jula said. ‘Too tight and if someone wants to get a hold they’ll have to grab a handful of you as well. Too loose and you’ll be tripping up or have it pulled off.’

Nona and Arabella pulled out fighting tunics, each top paired with ankle-length trousers, holding them against themselves under the critical eye of their partner.

‘Too small, even for you,’ Ghena barked. Jula had already led Arabella off to the changing room, the new girl seemingly more anxious to keep her golden curls than worry overmuch about the fit of her tunic.

‘It looks about right …’ Nona hadn’t ever chosen clothes before, but it did look about right.

‘When someone grabs you.’ Ghena lunged forward and seized a fistful of the tunic. ‘Do you want them to have a handful of this or a handful of your skin?’

‘I don’t want them to grab me,’ Nona said. ‘A loose tunic makes it easier.’

Ghena snarled and ripped the tunic top from Nona’s hands. ‘You’re partnered with me, farm-girl. Every mistake you make makes me look bad. Mistress Blade will test you and if you fail I get punished. And if that happens I’ll take it out on you.’

Nona snatched the top back. ‘Winning is never a mistake.’ She met Ghena’s dark and furious eyes, feeling her own snarl begin to twist her face, remembering how she had screamed out her fury as she ran towards Raymel Tacsis. A second later the heat blew from her, as if a cold wind had rattled through the room. She saw the hangman’s sheet again, Saida just a shape beneath it. Anger hadn’t saved her. Winning hadn’t saved her. Nona took the tunic two places along from the one she’d tried last and held it up against her. ‘Good enough?’

‘Good enough.’

They reached the changing room to find the first novice already leaving. ‘You two will make a lovely couple with your shiny heads.’ Ketti ran her hands over her brow as she passed them, grinning, her own thick cascade of black hair tied back tightly with a white cord.

‘… pigs and cows.’ Arabella broke off, aiming a bright smile at the door as Nona and Ghena entered. All the novices laughed, a couple trying to hide it behind their hands.

Nona set her teeth, and finding a space on the long bench began to struggle out of her unfamiliar clothing, throwing it up on the pegs above as the other girls had. The room smelled of old sweat, of bodies packed close – you could smell it out in the main hall, faint but pervasive. It reminded her of the village.

‘Hurry up!’ Clera offered the advice apologetically as she left, ready in her fighting habit, belt tight about her waist, hair scraped back with not so much as a single curl escaping.

‘Come on! Come on!’ Jula stood at the door frantically looking down the corridor. ‘Arabella!’

Arabella ran for the door and both of them sprinted away. Nona and Ghena were last to leave the changing room.

‘Come on!’ Ghena started running.

Nona made to give chase but at the doorway she spotted one of the dark linen belts, abandoned on the floor. Without thinking, she scooped it up and took it with her to return to its owner, tucking it down the front of her tunic to keep her hands free. Moments later she was sprinting down the tunnel towards the bright hall beyond. Dazzled by the sunshine as she emerged Nona couldn’t see who ran past her in the opposite direction.

‘Cutting things fine, novice.’ Sister Tallow turned to watch Nona’s breathless arrival hard on the heels of Ghena’s.

Nona bowed her head and went to join Ghena at the end of the second row. She looked about … one person missing. She opened her mouth to comment but Ghena deployed a swift, sharp elbow to her ribs.

A moment of silence passed. Another. A whole minute where eleven novices watched the sandy floor beneath their feet and tension rose around them.

‘And here she comes.’ Sister Tallow dropped the words with the same weight the judge had spoken Nona’s death sentence.

Arabella came running from the tunnel, clutching her fight tunic closed across her chest. ‘I couldn’t find it! It wasn’t anywhere!’ She pulled up breathless and close to tears.

‘An inventive child would have taken a replacement from the stores and claimed it as hers. An attentive child would not have lost her belt within moments of receiving it in the first place.’ Sister Tallow returned her gaze to the class. ‘At convent the rules apply to king and commoner alike. Once the class is finished Novice Jula will shave Novice Arabella’s head and then Arabella will perform the same duty for her.’

Nona realized her mistake. She hesitated, then reached beneath her own tunic to draw out Arabella’s belt. ‘Sister—’

‘Ah!’ Mistress Blade proved to have quick eyes. ‘I see that Nona has demonstrated an enduring and valuable truth. We may fight here in this hall and think that because our battles are unconstrained by rules that we truly understand what it is to make war.’ Sister Tallow strode the length of the first line. ‘Do not be deceived. No real fight is bound by four walls. No real fight ends at a particular doorway or when we wash off the sweat and the blood. Fights end with defeat. And death is the only defeat a warrior understands. While we draw breath we are at war with our enemies and they with us.’ The nun turned at the end of the line and approached Nona, taking the belt from her hand. ‘In future, Nona, save such demonstrations of the secret war for Mistress Shade’s class where they will be better appreciated. Though try not to irk her. Our sister of the shadow is far less … kind … than I am.’ She tossed the belt to Arabella. ‘Laps! Sharlot, lead off.’

The tallest girl in Red Class, a willowy redhead, took off running, the rest falling in behind her.

Nona was used to laps from the Caltess and she fell into an easy rhythm. She could sense Arabella behind her, last in the running order, and doubtless staring daggers at the back of her neck. At each corner Clera glanced back, offering a grin. After the first few circuits of the hall Nona let her mind empty of everything except the pattern of her feet hitting the sandy floor. She let go of the story she had told at the sinkhole, let the worry over her confirmation fee slip away, let Arabella Jotsis and her revenge fade, even thoughts of Raymel Tacsis and his revenge becoming lost beneath the placing of one foot before the other. Only the line remained, bright and burning, as it had been in her dream.

‘I will repeat myself for the new girls,’ Sister Tallow said when she had them in two rows once more, sweating and labouring over their breath. ‘It’s a message many of you could do with hearing again. Perhaps you’ll take more meaning from it after so many lessons in this hall.

‘We are not built for war. We are not fast – most every animal can outrun or evade us, be it hound, cat, rat, or sparrow. We are not strong – a mule, a hoola, a bear, all of them are pound for pound three, maybe five times as strong as man. And you are not men.

‘What we are is clever and precise. These are our tools. Wit and precision. I am teaching you to fight without weapons for two reasons. First, because there are times when you will be without a weapon. Second, because in training for such conflict you will learn about pain without getting broken, and you will learn about rage without killing.’ She held up her hands. ‘These are poor weapons. When we fight we fight to win. This—’ From nowhere six inches of gleaming steel appeared in her hand. ‘This is a better weapon. However, I can punch you with my fist and you will learn a lesson. The knife’s lesson is short and terminal.’

Sister Tallow flexed her wrist and the blade vanished into her sleeve. ‘The stories tell us that battles are about right and wrong. That winning requires heart and passion. That the Ancestor will reach out to those who believe and lend strength to their arm. The truth is that the Ancestor will gather your essence to the whole when you die. I’m sure you’re told more about that in Spirit, but in Blade just know that until you die the Ancestor will only watch.

‘Fighting is about control. Control of your fear, your pain, and your anger. Control of your weapon. Control of your opponent. Fighting is about mechanics, levers, breaking points, and speed. Your body is a mechanism. It is time to learn how it works, how far you can push it or allow it to be pushed, not before it hurts, but before it breaks. Unarmed combat requires the application of force to disable the opponent’s machine before they disable yours.

‘In Blade we value quickness. Sufficient speed makes every other aspect of combat irrelevant. If your opponent is a statue it doesn’t matter how strong or skilled they might be – find their throat or an eye and make an end of them. Speed is the way of the sisterhood.

‘You will have heard the old stories of Red Sisters, of Sister Cloud and the Western King, or Sister Owl maybe, when she tamed the Black Castle. The wordsmiths in Verity will spin such tales out for you for a quarter penny and tell you about the fist storm, about a dozen of the king’s close-guard left lying in Cloud’s wake.’ Sister Tallow spat into the sand. ‘Stories are just words. Words have no place in a fight. The truth is that almost every time two people raise their empty hands against each other they will both end up on the floor long before one of them dies or is otherwise broken.

‘On the ground strength tells, and very often you will not be the strongest. I will teach you about joints. How they will and won’t move. In which direction they tear most easily. In which place the force you apply will find the longest levers to stress those joints. How to twist yourself out of similar holds. How to bite and gouge. How to win where winning is an option.

‘More importantly you will learn about pain, fear, rage, and control. You will learn how to balance the first three to achieve the fourth. And you will carry those lessons into Grey Class where I will put weapons in your hands and teach you what it is to be a Red Sister. In Grey Class I will teach you how to make the fuckers bleed.

‘Arabella, Nona, Jula, Ghena, to the front.’

Nona followed the others to the spot Sister Tallow indicated.

‘You two over there—’ Sister Tallow waved Arabella and Jula off to the side. ‘Both of our new arrivals come with reports of great potential. Let’s see how far potential gets them. Jula and Arabella first. Don’t hurt her, Jula.’ She stepped back and clapped once more. ‘Fight.’

Jula snapped into a fighting stance, body turned sideways to Arabella, fists raised at chest height, one a few inches behind the other, legs wide and braced. Arabella ignored her, looking instead at Sister Tallow. ‘Fight, Mistress Blade? How should—’

‘Fight!’ Sister Tallow spread her hands. ‘Kick her, punch her, bite her if you must. Put her down.’

‘But …’

Sister Tallow nodded to Jula. She exploded forward into a flying kick that hit Arabella on the shoulder and sent her sprawling to the floor.

‘The leg is stronger than the arm. The foot less delicate than the hand. Though to strike with them sacrifices balance.’ Sister Tallow motioned upward with fingers. ‘Get up, girl.’

The attack surprised Nona. Jula looked so bookish … she found herself smiling at the contrast, then noticed Arabella scowling at her from the ground.

Arabella rubbed her shoulder and got slowly to her feet.

‘Fight!’ Another clap.

Jula repeated the kick. Arabella stepped to the side, her speed remarkable. Jula kicked again, missed again. The two girls squared up, fists raised. Arabella threw the first punch, a swing, blindingly fast. Somehow Jula stepped into it and caught the blonde girl’s wrist, twisting her own body under Arabella’s to throw her over her shoulder. Arabella landed heavily on her back and, along with all the air in her lungs, spat out a word that Nona wouldn’t have thought ever got used in the emperor’s court.

Nona looked up at Sister Tallow for her reaction to the display and found her, together with the whole class, staring at Arabella, wide-eyed. The nun’s surprise was mixed with some emotion that Nona couldn’t identify but it was strong enough to make the lines of old scars stand out against her paling skin.

Jula said it first, even as she stood there in her victory. ‘She moves like a hunska.’

As a child in the ignorance of her village Nona had barely known about the four tribes of men or how their blood might show, but her months with Giljohn and then at the Caltess had taught her how deep one simple truth ran. Hunska-born were dark of eye and hair. She knew then why Arabella might be so special that the Church of the Ancestor would have negotiated to take her from a noble house. She knew it even before the first of the novices whispered ‘mixed’. Two-bloods were rare as a sheet-thaw. There hadn’t been a three-blood in the three centuries since Aran the Founder who carved out the realm from the chaos of wildmen and petty kingdoms. At least that’s what they said at the Caltess. If Arabella Jotsis showed the signs of the gerant line too she would be stepping into history. If she showed up quantal or marjal she could be stepping into legend.

‘Enough.’ Another of those claps that hurt the ears. ‘Nona, our ring-fighter from the Caltess …’ The novices laughed at the joke. ‘It’s your turn. Ghena? Are you ready?’

Nona turned to face Ghena and found her already in the fighting stance, eyes narrow with concentration, no smile, no snarl. The girl was perhaps an inch taller than her, making them the two smallest in the class. Her dark limbs were nearly as lean as Nona’s, every part of them muscle and bone.

The common sense behind the blade-stance was obvious: it presented a smaller area for attack while keeping a wide, stable base. Nona stood as she always stood though. She would learn and use the blade methods but it felt foolish to ape the stance immediately and face her first fight in a position she wasn’t used to.

‘Ready?’ Ghena asked. She hadn’t taken the advantage of surprise like Jula had, but looking at her Nona knew pride lay behind the restraint, not kindness. Ghena wanted to own her victory whole.

Nona gave a slight nod and Ghena snapped a punch at her, a straight jab, not Arabella’s clumsy swing announced by her whole body before she even started. This came sudden and direct. Nona blocked the fist with both hands, palms crossed before her face. The smack of flesh on flesh echoed in the space of the hall and the impact hurt far more than Nona had imagined.

She lowered her hands to see a look of surprise on Ghena’s face.

‘You’re fast.’ Ghena tilted her neck left, then right, stretching.

Without warning the novice launched a flurry of punches, advancing a step with each, a furious attack with no quarter granted. Nona let the world slow around her, the split seconds crystallizing into that clarity she had always been able to call upon. She stepped back, swaying out of the path of one punch, knocking the next aside so it passed within a hair’s breadth of her cheek. Ghena was quick. Very quick. Hunska-fast. Nona pushed aside another punch, another, sidestepped a third. Ghena’s mask cracked and her fury showed. Anger made her blows more wild but only seemed to increase her speed. Nona found herself having to work harder, saving herself only by the narrowest of margins. She gritted her teeth and dug deeper into the moment until her brain buzzed inside her skull like a trapped bee and even Ghena’s whip-crack blows became lazy things that she could step around.

Nona saw, even in the fractions their fight occupied, awareness start to enter Ghena’s eyes, a widening, a dilation of pupils. She knew the look – she had seen it before in the eyes of her first friend when he had tossed her a fourth ball and she added it to her juggling thinking to please him … She let Ghena’s fist catch her on the left shoulder, and spun with the impact, allowing it to carry her to the floor. A great spray of sand marked her arrival and she stayed there, panting.

A long moment passed and Nona let the world run at its own pace again, feeling the sand grains between her lips, the ache in her shoulder, the sting still in her palms. At last Mistress Blade’s clap broke the silence. Nona sat up, climbed slowly to her feet, and went to rejoin the line. The novices nodded their approval. Clera and Ruli looked impressed, Arabella sour. Of all of them only Ghena’s gaze held a measure of confusion, and in Sister Tallow’s there was a quiet speculation.