‘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?’