‘Crucical doesn’t trust either of them further than he could spit them.’ Ara snuggled beneath her blanket, only her hair showing. ‘Titles would just encourage them. The lack of them reminds everyone where the emperor’s favour lies, and where it doesn’t. It’s like that in high families.’
Nona closed her eyes. Treachery and deceit weren’t confined to high families. Blood bonds were neither chosen nor hard to break, whatever the Ancestor might have to say on the subject. She lay still, ignoring her pain, knowing sleep would be hard to find. She thought of her fight with Darla, not that it had been a fight from her side, but Darla at least showed some anger, some brutality. That to Nona was a fight. The arts that Mistress Blade taught, while deadly, were without passion. The contests felt to Nona more like dances. Dances that would end in pain and blood if you missed a step, but dances even so, devoid of rage or hatred. Sister Pan told them the serenity trance would help their blade-fist and their blade-path too. It married well to the science of combat that Sister tallow instructed them in. Nona saw the logic of it. But there was a piece missing.
Back in the village the children had always chased Nona for being dark where they were light, for being silent and watchful, outside the circle. They seldom caught her, but sometimes the bigs would come upon her unawares. Those were fights. Snarling, desperate, savage, and full of rage.
Control. How many times had Mistress Blade used that word in the class today?
In the Caltess Nona had been caught only once, by Denam, the red-haired gerant who ruled the attic, at least when Regol, swift and dark, wasn’t there to keep him in order. She had been in the narrow corridor leading to the exit that looked out over the rear of the stables block. Denam had come up behind her while she gazed at the two stallions being exercised. He had taken her forearms, one in each meaty fist. ‘What’ve we got here?’
Nona had kicked back hard and twisted for all she was worth. The contact hurt her foot more than it seemed to hurt the boy. He stood shy of six foot but his strength was iron: she couldn’t slip his grasp any more than she could lift the building. Snarling, she bent to bite his hand, managing to draw blood before he stretched out her arms painfully, putting his fists beyond reach.
‘You’ll pay for that.’ Denam had seemed on the point of saying more but a dull thud interrupted him. The vise-like grip on Nona’s arms relaxed and in a moment she’d torn free. She had turned to see Denam clutching his lower back with both hands, and behind him another figure, a touch shorter.
‘Go.’
The newcomer hadn’t raised his voice but Denam ran for it, still clutching his back, pushing past Nona and out into the yard beyond. Nona kicked him in the back of the knee as he passed, but he hadn’t seemed to notice.
‘Kidney punch. Be pissing blood for a week.’ The man had had the flat eyes and facial scars of one of the ice-tribes, two lines slanting down across each cheek. He had worn a leather jerkin, sealskin trousers, an iron chain loose about his neck, and at his side the flat sword known as a tular. Nona had seen one amid the huge variety in the Caltess weapon store: the blade was all straight lines, wider at the end than at the hilt, requiring a scabbard open all along its length. In the village they told worse tales about the ice tribes than they did about the Pelarthi. Nobody knew what they ate up there on the sheet. The consensus being that it was each other. ‘You’re very small. Smallest Partnis has?’
The man was bald, not overly tall, but solid, and he had spoken slowly and with so deep a voice that each word had been like the rolling out of a heavy stone, both measured and considered. Nona had got the feeling that he might never rush a sentence, whether his firstborn lay dead in his arms or he had woken to find his house ablaze all around him.
She had rubbed her forearms where Denam had gripped her. ‘You’re a ring-fighter?’ She hadn’t seen him before, she would have known if she had. His eyes were the faint cloudy blue of an ice-lake, his skin a dark red.
He nodded. ‘I fight in the ring – I fight outside it. They call me Tarkax.’ He watched her.
Nona had found the man’s scrutiny uncomfortable. He had something of the wolf about him, but Nona knew wolves.
‘Had trouble before.’ The man set his hand to the side of his face, indicating the bruising from where Nona had let Giljohn slap her on the day he sold her. ‘Got first blood today though. That’s good.’ He had looked past her to the yard beyond. ‘They going to be teaching you soon enough. Like that.’ Outside the horses still cantered around the grooms on their training ropes. ‘Partnis’s fight-masters will tell you it’s a science, this business of fists and knives. They’ll tell you, keep a cool head, detached, control.’ The man had given a quick shrug of his shoulders and spat. ‘He’ll tell you the professional calculates, watches, plans.’
‘Don’t they?’ Nona had turned back towards him.
‘Nature shaped us, little girl. Shaped the animals. Predators. Prey. Millions of years. Fighting, making children, dying. A cycle that hones each to its purpose. And what have we in common, wolf, eagle, man, under-killers, bears, all of us?’ His eyebrows had shaped the question.
Nona had waited for him to answer, wondering what exactly under-killers were.
‘Rage. We’ve got hate and anger and red fury, child. Saw it in you too. Got your teeth into that idiot boy. Didn’t care that he might snap your arms off.’ The man had gone down on one knee, face close to hers. ‘Here in the Corridor they teach you to put that anger aside. They got their reasons. Keep a calm head and you’ll see more. But on the ice we know better than to let go of the weapons so many hard years have forged for us.’ He had jabbed a blunt finger at Nona’s chest. ‘Keep that fire. Use it. We’re wild things us men, and when we remember it we’re at our most dangerous.’
Nona hadn’t seen the man after that, but his words had struck her like hammers to a bell, and she rang with them, even now in the quiet dark, and she held on to her anger.
‘Get up! They’re coming!’
Nona opened eyes she felt sure had just that minute closed, and saw only night.
‘Quickly!’
She groaned, stiff in every limb, and rolled in time to see a tall figure retreating from the doorway, lantern in hand. All around her novices were spilling from their beds, some grumbling, some anxious.
‘Sherzal wasn’t supposed to be here until noon!’
‘Royals do what they want.’ Clera, still a lump in her bed.
‘Everyone up! Everyone dressed.’ Mally, Grey Class’s head-girl, turned up the wick in her night-lantern.
Nona groaned, shrugged off her blanket and started to wriggle into her skirts. Fingers busied themselves with laces and ties, not needing instruction from her sleep-fuddled mind. She hadn’t lied about being too sore to share a bed with Clera. Sleep had only stiffened her: she hoped Darla’s finger and toes hurt as much as the bruises she gave in exchange.
The novices stumbled out into a freezing pre-dawn, the sun a red promise to the east. The scattered ice melted by the focus moon had frozen into a continuous film, treacherous and hard to see. Clera skated out across the courtyard with a dancer’s grace, disdaining the threat of a sudden fall, just as she did on the blade-path.
‘Novice Clera! Get in line!’ Sister Flint rounded the corner, a thin dark line that the sun could not yet muster the courage to unwrap. ‘We’re required at the abbess’s house. Quickly, quietly, and with decorum.’