What followed had been ugly to watch, but no matter how Arabella raged or how dire her threats the nun had shown no hint of backing down, and eventually a tearful Arabella Jotsis sat in the chair provided while Jula removed her golden hair with a long razor and a trembling hand.
By the time it was Arabella’s turn to shave Jula’s head she did so with a steady grip on the blade, her eyes red-rimmed and full of cold accusation aimed in Nona’s direction.
Nona opened her eyes with a start. Sleep had nearly taken her. She rolled her head to the left. Clera sat on the edge of the bed in her long white nightgown, the copper penny she so often played with in her hand. The other girls were settling into their beds. ‘We’re friends then?’ she asked without preamble, watching Nona’s eyes.
‘“Friend” can be a dangerous word,’ Nona said.
Clera laughed. ‘Friend? Really?’
‘It is if you mean it.’ Nona didn’t smile. She thought of Amondo and of Saida. ‘Friend’ was a bond. Much of what people did, how they acted, confused Nona. But ‘friend’ she understood. A friend you would die for. Or kill for.
‘Well I mean it.’ Clera let her own smile slip.
‘Then we are.’
It seemed enough for Clera. She rose from Nona’s bed and went to her own, flipping the penny once and humming some tune, low and sweet.
Nona let exhaustion close her eyes. The dormitories were heated by the same pipes that ran in the bathhouse and cells. She hadn’t imagined that commoners ever wholly escaped the cold, perhaps the emperor before his ever-blazing fires, but not girls like her, not like this. One of the high windows was even a quarter open to stop it being too muggy, as if heat were something that could be given to the wind rather than something precious to be hoarded.
In the village mothers cut their children’s hair to a fuzz whenever the weather turned. When the ice-wind surrendered to the Corridor wind and the cold grew less bitter the knives came out. They did it to reduce lice, fleas, and nits to a manageable level, but Nona had always felt it marked the start of something new: new growth, new possibilities. Her last thoughts before dreams stole her were that if a shaved head were the worst thing to have happened to Arabella Jotsis so far then she had lived a charmed life. Also, Nona thought, annoyingly the loss of that golden mane had done nothing to mar the girl’s beauty. If anything she looked somehow more perfect.
Folded in the soft hubbub of voices and with the warmth of her bed drawing her down into sleep Nona let the contest with Ghena play across the back of her eyelids. The whole thing had lasted only moments, moments in which Ghena had thrown a dozen or more punches, a well-practised dance on her part, instinct and reflex on Nona’s. Memory of one fight slipped into memory of another, returning Nona to the sawdust and sweat of the Caltess, watching the apprentices spar. Partnis Reeve’s fight-masters taught discipline but left room for aggression.
A week or two after Nona’s arrival Raymel Tacsis had strolled into the great hall where the apprentices were training. Nona, Saida and two other attic children engaged in sweeping the floor paused their labours and leaned on their brooms to watch the fighter. Up close his size was intimidating. Nona realized that her head wouldn’t even reach the man’s hip and that with the strength of one arm he would be able to toss her, Saida, and the other two sweepers across the room, not separately but together.
‘I’ve a better lesson for these puppies.’ Raymel climbed over the ropes into the ring where two gerant apprentices had been wrestling, both of them enormous but lacking more than a foot on the older man. He stood huge, blond, and glorious between them, somehow wearing his wealth though all that covered him was a loincloth and a sheen of oil.
The fight-master stepped forward, an objection on his lips, but Raymel boomed across him, ‘And the rest of you.’ He beckoned another three apprentices from across the hall. Two hunskas holding nets and a gerant girl with a ponderous brow that looked as if it would break the fist of anyone foolish enough to punch her in the head.
As the girl clambered in behind the two swifter apprentices Raymel drove an elbow into the throat of the gerant behind him. ‘Don’t ever wait to attack.’ The apprentice fell, clutching his neck. The rest stood, too stunned or nervous to act. Raymel slapped the girl, his huge hand covering half her face and sending her back into the ropes, spitting blood. His grin was an ugly thing, corrupting the good looks he’d been born with.
Beside Nona, Saida covered her eyes, turning to reach for her broom.
‘Aren’t you going to watch?’ Nona couldn’t look away. The hunska apprentices had launched themselves at Raymel, two blurs of fists and feet.
‘I hate it.’ Saida resumed her sweeping. ‘It makes my stomach feel bad, seeing people hurt.’
‘But …’ Nona winced as Raymel trapped one hunska against the ropes and snatched him up by the leg. ‘Partnis bought you to fight. You’re going to have to.’
She sensed rather than saw Saida’s broad shoulders shrug. ‘I’d rather mend people than break them. Is that a thing in the city? Mending people?’
‘I don’t know.’ Nona watched Raymel swing the hunska apprentice against the ring post. Part of her wanted to be unleashed within the roped enclosure. Another part wanted Saida’s hope to be true, wanted there to be people who put as much passion into healing as Raymel did into hurting.
‘Raymel!’ the fight-master barked. ‘Ease up.’
Raymel continued to choke the apprentice in his hands, still seemingly impervious to the attacks of the last hunska remaining on her feet.
Nona found herself turning away too, the undirected anger that built in her whenever she saw a fight now dissipating. ‘You won’t have to fight, Saida. They’ll see you’re no good at it and give you a different job. Regol said the old man who comes to the horses can sew up wounds like a seamstress. Perhaps he’ll need an apprentice soon. He is very old.’
Saida managed a shy smile. ‘I’d like to help. I don’t want Partnis to give me away. I would miss you.’
‘I’d miss you too.’ Nona found her chest aching at the thought. ‘So I won’t let it happen!’ She said it with such fierce confidence that Saida’s smile had widened into something that made her blunt face suddenly beautiful.
The dream turned darker, colder, shadows invading the Caltess hall. They were alone now, Saida and Nona, a sense of profound unease stalking between them.
‘Don’t hurt me!’ Saida was suddenly backing away from Nona, terrified.
‘Saida! I won’t let anyone—’
‘Don’t hurt me!’ Saida pointed at Nona, cowering.
Nona tried to reassure her but found instead that she towered over Saida, holding her friend’s arm in a massive fist. The grey hall around her became the walls of Raymel’s apartment, Saida dangling above the thick luxury of a bearskin rug.
Nona tried to let Saida go. ‘It’s not me. I’m not like him. I’m not!’
‘No, please! I didn’t mean to.’
Anger flared somewhere deep in Nona’s chest. She was trying to help the silly girl. Why was she scared? Did she think Nona had anything in common with a creature like Raymel Tacsis? ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’ She found to her horror though that she was shaking Saida, the fist on her friend’s arm emphasizing her points as she spoke.
‘Let go!’
‘I am letting go …’ But the fist gripped tighter, twisted, and Saida’s screaming began.