The sudden fear of what might come after sent Nona stumbling from the Path. You must own what you take, Sister Pan always said, and Nona had taken far more than she needed to light a fire, far more than she had ever taken save for that one day in the shadow of the Devil’s Spine when she painted the rocks red.
Nona found herself sprawled upon the forest floor, the cold mud bubbling beneath her outstretched hands, her skin bleeding light and every bone in her body vibrating as if it desired nothing more than to shake free of the flesh restraining it. She thought of heat rather than strength, the same way they warmed the training room at the Path Tower, pushing the energy into the form she needed.
“Uh.” Too small a sound for too large an amount of pain. Nona felt a heartbeat away from rupture, from having her insides very quickly become her outsides. In a sudden ugly gesture that Sister Pan would have roundly scolded her for, she wrenched the Path-given power from herself, ejecting it towards the nearest tree, a large screw-pine.
Something bright passed between them. The tree shuddered, a ripple ran along its length, shredding bark, and then in one moment of heat and light the forest giant exploded. The blast knocked Nona flat despite the shield of residual power around her. She might have lain there for a heartbeat or five minutes: time passed strangely and she couldn’t tell. Keot was howling but her ears rang and, even though she didn’t need them to hear him, his words passed through without her comprehension.
When Nona raised her head nothing remained of the tree and none of those closest were anything more than blackened trunks studded with the shattered stumps of branches. Further back, in the area into which Nona had been thrown, the forest burned in dozens of spots where blazing fragments had peppered both branches and undergrowth.
Don’t. Keot sounded as if he were wheezing. Do that again. Ever.
Nothing of Nona’s bivouac appeared to have survived. She glanced around for her chicken.
What are you going to do now? Keot demanded.
Nona spotted the bird’s carcass, hanging in a tangle of briar, feathers smouldering.
She narrowed her eyes. “Pluck it.”
21
NONA ROSE WITH the light and left her shelter licking chicken grease from her fingers. She’d made a breakfast of the remains, taking the last of the meat from the bones. The Corridor wind fought its way through the trees, and on the boughs of frost-oak and elm leaves started to unfurl, eager to snatch up what the red sun had to offer.
The forest stank of char. In some places the wind had carried the fire a score of yards before the damp finally defeated it. Nona rubbed the cold from her bones and stretched her stiff back. In time she came to a woodsman’s trail and followed it, bound east.
So you’re still running away?
“I’m going home.” Nona didn’t know it until she said the words but at some point in the restless night her subconscious must have decided the issue for her and had set to waiting for her lips to part to let her know. “Back to the village where I grew up.”
You’re not grown up yet.
“Where I lived until I came to the convent.” Nona strode on, unruffled by Keot now that she had a purpose once more.
* * *
? ? ?
BEFORE SHE HAD walked far enough even to lose sight of the forest Nona’s thoughts returned to the fire she had made. Walking the Path had not come so easily to her since the day she killed Raymel Tacsis and Keot came to live beneath her skin, not since Sweet Mercy held the shipheart. She could have put it down to the depth of the anger that propelled her onto the Path this time, but there was more to it. She felt it in her bones.
Immediately before Nona walked the Path back in the cave where Raymel’s men had them trapped she had been with Hessa, drawn along the bond threaded between them. And Hessa had been in the undercaves back at the convent, just yards from the shipheart. Somehow Nona had shared in that proximity and her quantal skills had been boosted by the stone’s power. And now, once again, since she’d taken up her shadow’s thread from the undercaves, Nona felt that connection to the shipheart’s power. Just a trickle of it, but enough so that left untapped the potential would build and could be spent to magnify whatever strength lay in her blood.
Nona mused on the connection as she trudged between the cart ruts on the narrow lane she’d found. Somewhere out there the shipheart rested. Wherever Yisht, or more likely Sherzal, had placed it. To the east, she felt, not the west. And somewhere close by her shadow waited, trapped in some way, for unattended shadows are apt to wander.
* * *
? ? ?
IT TOOK DAYS for the land to grow familiar. Days travelling by back-roads, crossing fields and patches of woodland, but always she kept her back to Verity, to the Rock, and to the Tower of Inquiry. Whether there might be a search for her and how large it might be Nona had no real idea but she imagined they would likely be satisfied with simply having her gone, no longer polluting the faith or antagonizing the daughters of the Sis. She told herself that being forced to leave the convent now for breaking some silly rule was far preferable to being exposed as devil-tainted a year or two later, shamed in front of her friends, with all hands turned against her. She told herself it was a good thing, and tried to believe it as she walked the lonely tracks that would take her back to the village where her story began.
A dozen times every mile thoughts of the convent would slip into Nona’s mind. What lessons the others might be taking now, what the nuns would say about her, how her friends would remember her when they came in sweaty and tired from the sands of Blade Hall. Each time the invaders came she drove them out with thoughts of the here and now, of the muddy ruts before her, the rustling hedges, the quick-wheat springing up even before the last ice-drift had fully melted. She watched the lone farmhouses, poor things huddled on slopes or in front of the treelines, as if expecting disaster at any moment. Twice she came to towns and skirted them.
The traffic Nona met consisted mainly of tinkers and farmers, the former carrying their skills in their hands and on their backs, the tools of their trade, the latter bearing the produce of their fields, be it on four legs following along behind, or stacked as bales on a cart.
Few of them passed a word with her and most of those few words were warnings. Warnings of Durnish fleets, their sickwood barges packed so tight in the Marn that a man might walk across the sea from the southern ice to the northern without ever getting a foot wet. Warnings of the heretic hordes of the Scithrowl gathering behind their borders, whipped to a frenzy by their battle-queen. Nona nodded her thanks each time but robbers on the road and lack of food seemed more pressing concerns than distant armies.
She walked for half a day with an old woman who went from town to town sharpening edges—on knives, on ploughshares, on scythes, even on swords if such a thing were hung rusting above the elderman’s hearth. The woman, Gallabeth, hardly reached Nona’s shoulder, bent with age, all bones and uncomfortable angles. It took her three miles before she noticed Nona’s eyes.
“’Cestor’s Truth! Ain’t you got no eyes, sister?”
Nona suppressed a laugh. “They’re not holes, they’re just black. It was an illness. And I’m not a sister.” Not even a novice.
Gallabeth made the sign of the tree. “Thought you had the devil in you.”
Nona opened her mouth then closed it.