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Ara nodded. “Joeli’s trouble. She’s got half the mistresses on her side and a lot more friends inside the convent than you do. Then you have to think about how many friends she has outside. Just because they like her family’s money rather than her doesn’t stop them being dangerous. The Namsis are as well placed as my family, plus if you’re discharged from the order they’d happily murder you just to earn favour with the Tacsis.”
“Sometimes I think I’d like to go out there and let them try.”
“Nona!” Ruli looked shocked.
“What? It’s the only way I’m ever going to find Yisht. She’s not going to come back here and let me kill her.” Nona scowled up at the grey sky, which was darkening by the moment. The cloister roofs opposite lay white, plastered by the ice-wind. The centre oak’s branches tossed randomly as the wind sought its direction, the Corridor wind trying to reassert itself. The tree’s leaves were wrapped so tightly against the cold that the branches seemed bare. “Joeli said bad things about Hessa. That’s what got to me.”
“That’s how she is. Pulling strings, even if it’s not thread-work,” Ara said. “She’s even got on the Poisoner’s good side because she’s so good at brewing up nastiness in a pot. So watch what you touch around her! And she poisons minds just as easily. The girl’s got a tongue on her. It wasn’t bad luck you fell foul of her straight off. She made it happen. Perhaps she even had it hot for Raymel Tacsis. She wouldn’t be the first Namsis matched to a Tacsis.”
Nona stared at the novices out on the gravelled yard, jaw clenched. Ara was right and the truth of it burned her. She’d been manipulated, moulded to the Namsis girl’s desire. Her eyes found Zole, alone as usual, sitting with her back to the centre oak, knees drawn up. Joeli could never sway Zole. The ice-triber gave out nothing for anyone to take a hold of. Since the bloodshed at the Devil’s Spine all those years ago Zole had perhaps spoken a hundred words to Nona. Most of them singular and days apart.
“So, are we cave hunting tonight?” Ruli asked.
“Don’t you ever sleep?” Darla was distinctly less keen than the rest of them when it came to exploring the tunnels riddling the Rock of Faith.
Ruli stuck her tongue out. “So, are we?”
“It’s dangerous.” Ara closed her fingers, signing that Ruli should lower her voice.
Ara didn’t just mean the chance of getting lost or injured. After the theft of the shipheart Abbess Glass had made clear that any novices exploring the convent’s undercaves would find themselves stripped of the habit, too untrustworthy to marry the Ancestor. And it seemed that all the rules were being more strictly enforced these days, Sister Wheel’s determination to root out wrongdoing more zealous from one day to the next.
“It’s the only exciting thing we do outside Blade class.” Ruli pouted. Jula had discovered the fissure hidden just past one of the many turns of the Seren Way, but it had been Ruli who convinced the novices that the caves it led to were just caves, not directly under the convent and so not the convent’s undercaves. On that basis they had begun their explorations. Discovery would undoubtedly bring punishment, but wouldn’t see them turned out into the world. Besides . . . they weren’t going to be discovered!
“I . . .” An uneasiness ran through Nona—having no world outside Sweet Mercy to return to she had always been the one of them with most to lose. “Perhaps we shouldn’t . . .” Across the cloister she saw a face at a window, above the galleried walkway. Joeli? Watching her? Smiling with the mouth that had sullied Hessa’s name. Nona knew she wouldn’t find any clues to Yisht’s whereabouts on top of the Rock. And Joeli had been right. Nona had failed her friend. For three long years Nona’s struggles with mastering Keot and the enormity of the challenge in finding justice for Hessa had kept her from action. Perhaps there really was something in the caves that might help. Maybe they could find a passage to the convent undercaves. She owed it to her friend to visit the place where she had died. Maybe Hessa had left some clue for Nona that might lead to her killer. Even at twelve Hessa had had few equals when it came to thread-work and bathed in the power of the shipheart she might have accomplished miracles. “Oh hells, let’s do it!”
A raindrop hit the back of Nona’s hand. A fat raindrop, close to freezing. A heartbeat later a salvo scattered down around them. As one the novices joined the rush for the shelter of the galleries, and behind them the black sky opened, hurling down the rain as if each drop were intended to be fatal. By the time Nona looked again for the window where Joeli had been the rain had drawn a curtain across it.
Sister Pail found Nona with her friends as they huddled together watching the downpour. “You’re to appear before the convent table tonight at eighth bell, that’s Ferra, not Bray.” She stood regarding Nona with mild distaste, her habit beaded with water.
“Why? What’s she done?” Ghenna, small and dark, working her way out of a clump of Red Class novices.
Sister Pail kept her gaze on Nona. “The abbess doesn’t approve of novices trying to murder other novices.”
5
ABBESS GLASS
“ANY OTHER BUSINESS before we invite the judge to make his petition?” Abbess Glass looked up from her notes. Along both sides of the long table nuns returned her gaze. All except Sister Kettle, still recording the minutes of the last item in the ledger of record. A chamber beneath the scriptorium held piles of such ledgers, filled with minutes, stacked to the ceiling in columns that marched off into the mildewed gloom. Enough minutes to constitute hours, weeks, decades. Never to be read. But authority must leave a trail or how else will it be held to account, and without checks, or at least the potential for them, authority, like any power, corrupts. “Other business?”
“Nona Grey.” Sister Rail laid a hand upon the table. It was, like the rest of her, little more than skin and bones, the long nails jagged at the ends.
“Again?” Abbess Glass sighed and flexed her own hand. The burn scar across her palm had remained stiff despite all of Sister Rose’s oils and unguents, allowing only limited movement. At times like these she let the echo of that old pain remind her that it had been Nona who saved her from the fire.
“Again.” Sister Rail inclined her head. On the table her nails dug at the wood.
“Really?” Abbess Glass had disliked Sister Rail within moments of her arrival from the Convent of Silent Devotion, but by that point Sister Rule had already departed on her sabbatical and nobody else could teach Academia to all four classes. Besides, Rail had other qualifications Glass required, and one did not have to like one’s pieces in order to play them. “Tell me.”
“She attacked and very nearly maimed Novice Joeli within hours of joining Mystic Class.” The bony hand on the table became a bony fist. The candle flames jumped as if Sister Rail had struck the wood and set the candlesticks shuddering.
“I wonder that Sister Spire hasn’t brought this to my attention.” Abbess Glass looked to the nun in question. Nona’s new class mistress was another recent addition to the convent, a young Holy Sister returned from three years’ ministering to the sick on the far borders of Archon Anasta’s see.
