Nona sat back. She needed a friend, and who was there who wasn’t sitting before her? Only Amondo, and that had been the foolishness of a lonely child. Zole could help but Nona had no clue where her loyalties lay.
Jula had returned to her stitching. Nona watched her, letting her eyes defocus and reaching for her serenity. The lines of the old song ran through her: She’s falling down, she’s falling down, the moon, the moon. She reached for her clarity. Mistress Path had never spoken of entering more than one trance at a time, as if it made no more sense than riding more than one horse at a time, but to Nona it seemed akin to juggling. The slow and certain motion of Amondo’s hands filled her mind. She had watched them with a child’s eyes so many years ago that it seemed little more than a dream, and yet those days and the moments of them were written into her and no part of them had ever left. To reach clarity Nona watched a flame then turned to the shadow and watched the memory of the flame’s dance. Lacking a flame she drew only on memory. And now she ran the song and the dance together without one tainting the other.
The ice will come, the ice will close,
(the memory of flame dancing on the darkness to a music all its own)
No moon, no moon,
(two hands making their own pattern, catch and throw, exchanging speed and potential)
We’ll all fall down, we’ll all fall down,
(a single petal of flame dancing on a dark ocean)
Soon, too soon.
The song, the dance, the sure hands of a juggler keeping it all in the air.
Nona saw the world with new eyes and through each part of it the Path ran, burning and binding. She looked away as Sister Pan had taught her, to the halo, the pale nimbus of threads about each of her friends.
“We should go back to the caves.” Her voice sounded impossibly distant, as if she spoke from the bottom of a deep well. But they heard her. She saw it in the aura of threads shrouding each girl. “Something chased us out. We don’t run. Not here.”
Nona saw how her words pulled on the vast web that connected them all, each to the other, and to everything else too, saw the vibrations spread, transmit, cross the space between them . . . and die. She focused her clarity on the place where her words failed to reach Jula. “We should go back.” A tremor. Something knotted . . . Nona raised her hands, struggling to see the minute detail where the harm had been done. She pulled on a darker thread. “To the caves, Jula.” She pulled again and the knot unravelled, momentarily too bright to look upon.
Nona understood the holothour’s work now. It had tied a knot in each girl’s threads, linking the caves to the very worst and oldest of their fears so that their minds would step around the memory of the holothour and everything associated with it, denying it space in their thoughts. “We should go back,” she repeated.
“We should!” Jula looked up, her face eager. “What in the Ancestor’s name was that thing? We should take knives. Swords if we can.”
Jula seemed perhaps a little too enthusiastic: Nona worried she might have erased rather too much of the fear, or imposed her own desires on her friend. She resolved to use a lighter touch on the others. “Ara? We should go back to the caves. Don’t you think so?” Nona struggled to maintain her twin-trance, feeling the edges of her serenity slip away as a sense of triumph pushed in.
“We’ll have to be careful.” Ara was easier to free, the knot more obvious and less tight.
“Ruli? Don’t you think?” Now Nona’s clarity was escaping her: the threads fuzzed before her eyes. A headache knifed its way in past her forehead, trying to make a reality of the splitting of her brain in two. Even so, she found the damage done to Ruli’s threads and unwound it, not needing such sharp focus now that she had effected the repair twice before.
“I don’t know.” Ruli hugged herself and shivered. “That thing that chased us! I nearly wet myself when Darla got stuck in front of me at the exit.”
“Well think about it.” Nona pressed a hand to her brow and staggered towards the doorway, teeth gritted. The pain made her want to throw up.
“Are you all right, Nona?” Ara made to follow her.
“Fine.” Nona stumbled out into the hall. “Tired.”
By the time she reached the top of the stairs she was crawling. She managed to get to her feet again for the passage across Mystic dorm to her bed. She glimpsed Joeli at her bed, knee splinted and bandaged, a walking stick across her lap, then collapsed into her own.
Darla looked up from her desk, quill in hand, fingers inky. She said something but Nona had fallen too far into the black agony of her headache to separate the words. She buried her face into her pillow and vowed never to try thread-work again.
* * *
? ? ?
THE WAKING BELL brought Nona from the confusion of a dream, something to do with spiders and with webs. The first thing she realized as she rolled from beneath her blankets was that her head no longer hurt. The second thing she realized was that the morning would be spent in Spirit class with Sister Wheel, and immediately a twinge of the previous night’s ache returned.
“You’re all the colours of the rainbow,” Darla observed as her head re-emerged from the habit she’d pulled over it.
Nona craned her neck to look down over her shoulder and side. The bruising was still deep purple in some places, yellowish green over her hip, faded mauve on her thigh. Across the dormitory Joeli leaned on her stick, swinging her stiff leg to advance on her desk where against convent rules she kept a mirror. She spent several minutes each morning brushing her hair in it and Nona always felt less jealous of how good the girl looked when she remembered the effort Joeli had to put in.
“We’re going below tomorrow. You in?” Nona looked away from Joeli, now busy with her brush.
“Ancestor! I hate Spirit class.” Darla shook her head. “Couldn’t we just spend the morning working in the laundry instead? Shovelling manure at the vineyard stables would be better.”
The holothour’s mark is still on her. Keot rested across her collarbones.
Nona pursed her lips. She wasn’t in any hurry to try to untangle the mess Keot’s monster had made of Darla’s threads. A twinge of the previous night’s headache echoed behind Nona’s eyes and in that moment she decided that she would rather face the caves without Darla than undo the holothour’s knot and suffer like that again.
* * *
? ? ?
SISTER WHEEL HELD that novices of Mystic Class should be awarded the honour of having their Spirit lessons before the statue of the Ancestor. In practice this meant standing in the cold and draughty space beneath the dome rather than sitting in the snug classroom off the foyer. Sister Wheel got to ease the ache in her legs by striding around as she read scripture from her scrolls. The novices had to remain still, their attention on the Ancestor’s golden face.
Today’s lesson was different only in two regards. Firstly, Joeli managed to get herself a chair, claiming that Sister Rose had forbidden her from standing until her knee had healed. Secondly, Inquisitor Pelter came to watch, standing at the base of the Ancestor statue as still as the stone behind him and showing no more expression. Only his eyes moved, studying one novice then the next.
“The bonds of family are holy.” Sister Wheel stalked before them. “The links that bind you to your father and mother are repeated time and again, back through the years. These links form the chains that meet in the Ancestor. Each part of that unbroken chain is forged from the divine. A direct connection between you and the origin of all humanity. As the Path joins all things, the bonds of family join all people.”