? ? ?
NONA LEFT KETTLE’S memories alone, feeling guilty for trespassing, both nervous and intrigued about what she might accidentally happen upon. Instead she concentrated on what the nun was looking at now. Concentrating inside Kettle’s mind was easy, as if somehow Nona had left behind the poisons that kept her prisoner wherever her body was.
A boat. Kettle was on a boat, watching the bank pass by, bushes, stunted trees, fields beyond, low hills rising, the line of the ice in the distance, a white underscore beneath the clouds, so faint it could be imagination and nothing more.
“Nona?” Kettle’s voice but Nona could “hear” the thought too, directed at her where she lurked in the darkness behind Kettle’s eyes.
Nona tried to answer but found herself mute, perhaps not as free of the poisons as she thought, allowed to watch through Kettle, a passive passenger, but unable to take any action, or speak with a voice of her own.
Kettle frowned. She knew something had changed. The bond that Nona had made between them was not something she understood but it was something she could follow. Kettle had been trying to shadow-bond when Nona had taken over and thread-bound them. Some element of the shadow-bond had become woven in and shadow-bonds were something Kettle could follow. She had shadow-bonds with Apple, with Bhetna—whom she must learn to call Sister Needle—and with Sister Frost. Kettle’s bond with Safira had been cut years ago, the severing more painful than the knife that Safira had stuck her with. But no shadow-bond is ever truly broken. Since Apple had pushed her into the dark Kettle had started to hear whispers along that old bond with her former bedmate, hints of emotion, tugs of wanting.
“Nona?” she asked again. Nothing. But she felt the girl’s presence. “Be strong, Nona. I’m coming for you.”
Kettle glanced upstream. The river had been narrowing all morning and the first hint of rapids foamed white in the distance. The boat she’d hired wouldn’t get much further. Part of her regretted not disembarking at Feverton that morning, but with the Corridor wind filling the sail the skiff could eat up the miles faster than the alternatives, even heading upstream.
“Here! Stop here.” The River Ganymede fed the Swirl which in turn emptied into White Lake. Kettle had learned nothing in the town that she had not already seen when the sharpness of Nona’s fear had torn open the bond between them, channelling her experience into Kettle’s mind. It had been a revelation, far more intimate a connection than the shadow-bond.
Kettle pressed her lips together and hoped that details of her own private life had not been slipping back along the bond into Nona’s mind without her knowledge. She pointed to a shingle beach at the outer curve of the river. The Ganymede had been angling away from the route she needed to take for some miles now.
“Right you are, sister.” The fisherman and his girl set to grounding their craft.
“Ancestor’s blessings on your journey.” The girl brought a loaf and cheese bound with cloth out of a wooden box at the stern.
“And upon your family.” Kettle took the food with a smile and vaulted out onto the stones. “Safe return!” A wave and she was hurrying up towards the track that paralleled the river.
Kettle hunched her coat around her, not the range-coat of a nun, just the weathered garb of a traveller. As she walked, her fingers counted through the vials in their straps against the coat’s inner lining, poisons on one side, antidotes on the other. She checked her weapons from sword and throwing stars to the smallest knife and envenomed pin. Her eyes stayed on what lay ahead. She kept her mind empty of worry and of speculation. She had already considered who might have taken the girl and reached no firm conclusion. To dwell on things, to circle them over and over on the road as she might at the convent, was to invite death. The Grey Sister lives in the now. Thinking ahead was something to make space for, to do in as safe a space as possible, not something that would push you away from the moment. Whoever had taken Nona could easily have covered their back trail, left a friend or two watching from the boughs of a tree, or beside the road, or standing behind the counter of a pastry stall in some market town, just waiting for someone to kill.
* * *
? ? ?
KETTLE WALKED FROM before noon until late into the night, pushing her body to maintain a fierce pace.
“I’ll find you, Nona. I swear it to the Ancestor. I’ll find you and make an end of anyone who seeks to stop me.” Images of cut flesh swarmed forward from a score of memories, quickly pushed back into their places as Kettle focused on the road ahead. A moment’s lapse and she centred herself in the now once again, watchful, taut, ready.
The nun slept that night in a farmhouse not far from Honour. A clipped halfpenny proved adequate compensation for rousing the tenants and bought her a room, a bed with fresh linen, plus a meal with meat and mead into the bargain. With her body fuelled, Kettle took to her chamber and set her traps. Finally she arranged the bolster under the sheets, then curled beneath her grey cloak, settling to sleep in the corner the door would obscure if opened.
A little later when the focus moon turned the blackness of her shutters into narrow bars of blazing crimson Kettle felt Apple’s pulse along their shadow-bond. Kettle sent her own pulse beating back to Sweet Mercy, letting Mistress Shade know that she was safe.
Nona stayed watching, even when Kettle closed her eyes. She didn’t want to retreat into her own darkness, to the confusion and nausea, the blindness and the pain, and yet, as the stuff of Kettle’s dreams began to rise around her, Nona released her hold on the nun’s mind. For though we may share some dreams, others we don’t speak of, even to ourselves, and no one should look that deeply into another person without permission. Maybe not even then.
Kettle’s dream rose, red, curling around her, and Nona fell, loosening her grip, dropping away into the chaos of her own mind.
27
NONA ROLLED ACROSS rough planks and fetched up against a wooden wall. Everything swayed, everything heaved.
A box. I’m in a box.
The darkness stank of her own waste; her mouth tasted vomit-sour. Light leaked in between the planks, razors against her eyes. Without instruction her body rolled the other way, one rotation before another wall stopped her. Someone had bound her hands behind her back.
I’m at sea.
You’re being carried. Keot sounded deeply annoyed.
“What?” Nona tried to sit up and banged her forehead against the planking just inches above her face.
You’re being carried in a small box. You’ve been in it for two days.
Nona screwed her eyes shut and tried to see the Path. Nothing. She flexed her arms and gasped at the agony flooding up them. She couldn’t feel her hands, though everything else from her shoulders down screamed in protest. Her wrists seemed to be chained together. She tried to will her flaw-blades into existence, but whether anything happened she couldn’t tell.
The light dimmed and Nona heard footsteps on stone, the sound of the people carrying her box, several of them. The noise had an echoing quality. Nona felt herself slipping away into the darkness again. She ground her teeth against the drugs, their poison rising through her like nausea. “I’ll kill them. Every last one.”
That’s the first reasonable thing you’ve said. Keot’s voice followed her into the muffling blackness. Perhaps ever.
* * *