‘All you have to do is get taken by someone who wants to sell you,’ Hessa said. ‘And Nona hasn’t been, she’s just remembering my memory.’
Nona blinked and looked up. ‘But …’ She frowned, knuckling her forehead. Hessa was right – it was the memory they had shared that night she and Hessa had left the dormitory together, all thanks to Hessa’s thread-work, something else Nona had yet to have any success in, requiring as it did the ability to move very close to the Path without actually touching it. ‘I guess you’re right.’ She looked across to where Ruli sat staring into the steam rising from her bowl. ‘Ruli? What are …’ The steam coiled into a pale serpent and a sick agony coiled through Nona. She found herself falling, wordless, pulling plates and bread with her. It took an age to hit the ground.
‘Nona! Nona!’ Ara on her knees, holding Nona’s face between two hands.
‘… matter with her?’
‘Sister Rose …’
‘No!’ Nona’s hand snapped out to catch Jula’s ankle as she made to leave.
‘She doesn’t need Rose.’ Clera – more to contradict Jula than out of reason.
‘What are you talking about?’ Ara released Nona’s head and sat back on her heels. ‘You’re ill.’
‘She’s fine. Just slipped.’ Clera, standing, waving novices from the other tables back to their seats.
‘I’m not ill. I was poisoned,’ Nona hissed.
‘Well that’s even better reason for us to take you to the sanatorium,’ Ruli said, squatting down next to Ara, her brow furrowed with concern.
‘I’ll get thrown out if the nuns find out what I did.’ Nona curled around her pain, which was easing now but still cramping through her. Right now being thrown out didn’t seem an unreasonable price to pay to feel better.
‘We can’t leave you poisoned.’ Ara exchanged glances with Ruli. ‘It could kill you. And who did it? You really think this is something to do with Raymel Tacsis?’
‘I don’t have to stay poisoned.’ Nona tried to get up and with Clera’s help regained her chair. ‘We know how to make antidotes.’ Two years of the Poisoner’s classes ensured that.
‘You need to know what poisoned you. We know thirteen different antidotes. We can’t make all those, and half of them aren’t even safe to take with the others.’ Hessa reached for her crutch and struggled out of her chair.
‘There’s the black cure,’ Nona said.
‘Which we haven’t been taught,’ Hessa replied. ‘And can kill the patient or leave them blind.’
‘Besides, Sister Apple has all the ingredients.’ Ruli, back on her side of the table, leaned in, keeping her voice to a loud whisper.
‘We don’t even know where she keeps them.’ Clera went back to eating.
‘In a cave,’ Nona said.
‘Well, duh.’ Clera spoke around her mouthful.
‘We can search. I’ve been further in than you have – I saw a few places where she might store them.’ Nona rocked to distract herself from the pain, still sharp but easing.
‘You’ve been further?’ Ara frowned.
‘When she was held for trial,’ Hessa said, frowning too, though she’d been frowning all the while.
‘Oh.’
‘There’s the lock,’ Jula said.
Clera snorted.
‘Well there is,’ Jula persisted. ‘That gate’s always locked. We wouldn’t even be able to get to the Shade chamber without Sister Apple or Bhenta to let us in.’
‘We?’ Clera looked up from her bowl, wiping her mouth with the back of a hand. ‘You’re going sneaking in the undercaves, Jula? You’ve never broken a rule in your holy little life.’
‘Nona needs us.’ Jula looked down.
‘She needs me,’ Clera said. ‘I can open that lock.’
‘How?’ Ara asked.
Clera pursed her lips and paused, glowering beneath the black shock of her hair. ‘I’ll steal the key from Bhenta.’
The novices shushed Clera, whose voice had grown quite loud, but nobody seemed to have noticed amid the hubbub of the four classes all eating and talking and clattering.
‘I’ll open the lock,’ Hessa said, voice low. ‘I can do it. That doesn’t change the fact we don’t even know what antidote we need to make.’ She stumped off towards the main doors.
The others watched her go, paused for a moment to glance at each other, then nodded. Hessa wasn’t given to boasts. If she said she could do it, then she could.
Zole arrived, pushing through the novices standing to leave from the next table. Grey Class shot her sideways glances and the conversation ran short.
‘Tonight,’ Nona said, then turned her attention to the stew.
Nona stopped at the scriptorium that evening on the way to the dormitory. She knocked and waited. A light rain laced the wind, on the edge of freezing. She huddled in the doorway and had raised her hand to knock again when the heavy door shuddered open.
‘Nona!’ Sister Kettle smiled down at her, though not from such a height as she used to. ‘Get in.’
Nona slipped through the gap and looked around the room as Kettle shut the door behind her. Four large, sloping desks took up most of the space, each with open scrolls secured across them, quills and inks to hand. Sister Scar sat at the only occupied one, a heavy book in a lectern before her, lanterns on stands to either side. She spared Nona the briefest of glances before returning her gaze to her scroll. Clera said the nun had named herself for the scar that divided her cheek, skipped a blind white eye, and ran through her short grey hair. Jula said that Scar had taken the wound on a mission long after she took holy orders and the name related to some other scar or secret.
‘What can we do for you, Nona?’ Kettle’s eyes held their usual mischief. ‘You have a book you want transcribed?’
‘I wanted to use the library.’
Kettle clapped her hands, delighted, earning a reproving glance from Sister Scar. ‘I taught you to read and now you want to tackle a book! This must be what it’s like when your baby takes a first step! Come on! Come on!’ She hurried towards the door at the rear of the room.
Nona followed Kettle into the convent library, a chamber of similar size to the first but lacking any window, its walls hidden by floor to ceiling with bookshelves. Another door stood open to a long gallery lined with deep box-shelves on which hundreds of scrolls rested.
‘So, we have holy texts, spiritual writings, the lives of saints and of revered sisters of our order.’ Kettle swung an arm to encompass the whole of the opposite wall. ‘Over there we have treatises on fight styles throughout the Corridor and beyond. Here are the histories and genealogies of the Sis. Over there works on the mysteries of the Path – don’t expect to find any sense in them.’ She pointed out sections on the wall to the right. ‘The grey books are up there on the highest shelf. And here …’ Kettle spread her fingers over the leather spines of a dozen or so books behind a locked rail, ‘… we have fiction!’
‘Why are they locked in?’ Nona asked. She had thought the poisons books might be. But these …
Kettle grinned and lifted her hands from the books with some reluctance. ‘“Tell me a story” began every seduction ever.’
‘The abbess doesn’t keep those sorts of books!’ Nona felt herself colouring.
Kettle shook her head. ‘Well, not here at least.’ Again the grin. ‘But be warned, young Nona: a book is as dangerous as any journey you might take. The person who closes the back cover may not be the same one that opened the front one. Treat books with respect.’
‘I can just … read them?’ Nona asked.
‘Any time you want. Just make sure to put them back when you leave. And don’t damage them. They’re my babies. My old leathery babies. And I have a very unpleasant poison from Sister Apple for anyone who so much as folds a page.’
‘How do I reach the ones on the high shelves?’ Nona scanned the highest shelf that ran the circuit of the room just below the ceiling.
‘Grow!’ Kettle gave her an amused stare. ‘You won’t want to read any of those books, little Nona. Not until you’re taller.’ With that she returned to the door. ‘I’ll be in here with Sister Scar if you want me.’