The archon’s request passed via a chain of assistants and guards to the sisters waiting outside and a silence followed as presumably nuns scattered in search of a votive candle.
‘How will burning your hand change his mind?’ Nona asked. Her wrists had started to hurt and some sensation had returned to her fingers, though the yoke was no less tight. ‘He won’t care: he likes to hurt things.’
‘The high priest will see the depth of my conviction. Every second he delays will shame him before the archons against whom he has set his opinion. He will know that a woman who can stand the flame is capable of anything, and it will sway him.’ The abbess spoke with a calm serenity, her eyes fixed on High Priest Jacob in his chair across the chamber.
Nona wondered how Abbess Glass could be so calm. She had burned her fingers in the embers of a fire when she could barely walk and the heat had seared those hot moments of agony into her mind ever since. ‘If a woman like that is capable of anything, then she’s capable of lying too?’
‘Would he care about that? This has never been about truth.’ The abbess kept her eyes on High Priest Jacob. ‘If he decides to hurt me he will also at the end of it have to set me loose in the world. You think he has the balls for that?’
Nona knew she would be sweating in the abbess’s position. Looking for an escape. Ready to fight. But the woman looked so … serene. ‘You’re doing it, aren’t you? That mind game Sister Pan teaches.’ Shadowing the Path the novices called it. Not following it like a quantal could, but coming close enough to alter the way their minds worked.
‘Serenity.’ The abbess made a slow nod.
Nona frowned. Serene or not the abbess would still burn.
A young church guard bustled in, cloak rain-spattered, helm askew. She approached the archons, clutching a votive candle as if it were a holy artefact.
‘Remove the prisoner’s yoke and bring her before us,’ the high priest called. ‘Set a table … there. And a rope, to keep her from raising her hand too high above the flame.’
‘That hardly seems necessary. I—’
‘She’s proving herself to me, not to you Archon Kratton, and I deem it necessary!’ He wiped at his mouth. ‘Bring the girl too.’
Beside Nona a guard was working with a heavy key, rotating a screw that allowed the slow separation of the yoke that held Abbess Glass’s hands up to either side of her head. The device made a painful sound, sometimes a squeal, sometimes a deeper scraping.
‘It would be best if you looked away for this, Nona dear,’ the abbess said, easing one hand out from the yoke as the guard moved to release the other. ‘Don’t interrupt – you won’t be helping. I’ll need to concentrate.’
Nona watched as the yoke was lifted from around Abbess Glass’s neck and, flexing her wrists, she walked out to where the candle had been set upon a table. Nona wondered if the abbess had saved her from the noose as she first said on some point of principle, outraged at the corruption and failure of the empire law? Or because she valued the skills Nona had shown? Or had she truly been led by a vision? Or was that claim made in desperation? None of it made sense. The abbess had said words are steps along a path: the important thing is to get where you’re going. Nona wondered if the abbess knew where she was going now or if the game had got away from her the day she walked out of Harriton prison holding Nona’s hand.
The church-guard who led Nona after the abbess reminded her of the man who had led her to the gallows: tall, greying, probably someone’s grandfather. If the abbess failed her trial then he might be the man who pushed Nona from the edge of the sinkhole and sent her sailing down towards the water.
‘She’s secure?’ The high priest descended from his dais to stand over the table till he was almost face to face with Abbess Glass, as if concerned that there might be trickery. Two ropes bound around the abbess’s sore wrist led to opposite legs of the table where they had been secured. She could move the hand from side to side, but not raise it.
The votive candle, fat but short, sat close by, its flame flickering as guards moved around the table checking the abbess’s restraints.
‘Abbess?’ The high priest gestured to the flame. ‘I wait to be convinced.’
Four archons leaned forward in their chairs and the room held its breath. Nona could hear the rain drumming on the roof above them, splashing from high gutters. Abbess Glass moved her open palm above the flame, a single inch between the tip of its tongue and her skin. The trial hardly looked dramatic. To prove themselves Nona knew the wildmen in Durn hung from trees by ropes attached to iron hooks set beneath the muscle of their chests. But despite the blood and groaning of such theatrics the abbess’s trial held its own fascination. Every person in the hall had their own memory of fire’s kiss. The one that taught them the lesson you need learn only once. Hot, don’t touch.
Abbess Glass kept her gaze upon the high priest, upon the cold grey of his eyes and the smirk twitching across his lips – amusement? Embarrassment? Her face remained serene and Nona imagined that in her mind the abbess must be following the broad strokes of some path that led to peace, gentle turns finding their way to the quiet places of the world where the wind holds its tongue and the light of the dying sun rests gentle upon the ground.
Long moments passed.
‘Ah.’ A quick intake of breath. Tension in the abbess’s cheeks, a distant pain in her eyes.
‘You should give up this foolishness now, Shella.’ High Priest Jacob leaned in, his voice falling to a murmur. ‘You could burn your whole hand to blackened bones and I’d still know you were lying. This time you’re out. You’ve played your game and lost.’
Abbess Glass clenched her teeth, eyes wide and locked on the high priest’s, her breath tight in her throat. ‘Glass. I am Glass.’ A faint sizzling noise came from beneath her palm. Nona sniffed. It could have been bacon, hot from the pan and heaped in the refectory bowls. Her stomach growled even as she retched.
The abbess’s breath, gasped in in tight little bursts, counted out the duration of her ordeal. Nona’s shortness made her the sole witness to the flame’s damage, first turning a circle of the abbess’s palm red, then raising white blisters upon it, then setting them to bubble and blacken.
Tears filled the abbess’s eyes and rolled across her cheeks, sweat beaded on her brow, gathered in the folds beneath her chin. The scream that broke from her came so sudden and so loud that Nona jerked backwards and half the guards reached for their swords. The abbess fell to gasping and groaning, deep guttural noises that hurt to hear. She strained to raise her hand, but the ropes held. Her arm shook with effort but moved neither left nor right to escape the heat.
‘This is pointless!’ The high priest threw up his hands, looking around at the archons. ‘Give it up, Shella, you’re embarrassing yourself.’ If anything it was the high priest who looked embarrassed, almost as red in the face as the abbess. She was beyond any shame, deep in some place where nothing existed but her and her pain.
‘Arrrrrrggggghhh!’ A roar of agony this time. Nona could see fats dripping down from the puckered ruin above the candle’s flame. It seemed to reach higher now, as if trying to lick her. ‘Arrrrrgggghhhh!’ A cry so awful that Nona would have put her hands to her ears if they were free.
Nona saw again the fluid motion with which the abbess’s clever hand had caught her image on her work scroll back in Sister Wheel’s class. How would those fingers function now? Could they ever draw again?
‘Move your hand!’ Nona found it was her saying it. She wasn’t alone though – all around the room men and women were muttering it. ‘Move your hand!’ Archon Philo’s assistant lost his composure and shouted at the abbess, his own hands clenched together, white-knuckled.