She watched the class with eyes that saw nothing except dark, glistening tunnels worming their way ever deeper, filled with old night and new possibility. When Bray sounded and shook her from her adventures Nona was startled to find that the whole session had passed and all around her girls were rising from their chairs.
In Blade after lunch they practised with throwing stars. The novices spent the best part of two hours aiming at target boards. Sister Tallow had set up a dozen of the seven-foot boards on which man-shapes had been drawn in sufficient anatomical detail to amuse girls. The first four boards she placed just three yards in front of the throwing line, the next four six yards further back, the last another six yards out.
‘If you wish to hit an opponent further away than that you really should have brought a bow with you. Throwing stars are less encumbering and less obvious, ideal for urban situations and use inside buildings. The price paid is that they are less accurate and do less harm.’ Sister Tallow paced behind the ranks of novices lined for their turn to throw.
They threw until their arms grew tired and their hands bled from a dozen small nicks. Then they threw some more.
‘You think this is difficult?’ Sister Tallow continued her pacing, pausing here and there to correct the position or action of a novice. ‘You’ll be lucky if you ever get a real target standing still and facing you. Aim for the eyes. Anywhere on the head gives you a decent chance of a hit that will take the fight out of someone, but the eye – now that’s a guaranteed stop for anyone.’
Next to Nona, Ruli, who had proved annoyingly good with the throwing star since their first lesson, cracked her arm out and with a flip of her wrist put one into the eye of the nearest target, the point bedded in the black pupil.
‘Show-off,’ Clera said to her right. The target before Clera had three of her stars studding it, one in the forehead, one near the ribs and a third hanging about a foot from the man’s neck, having missed completely. ‘Do it again.’
Ruli sent another star spinning from her fingers, putting a point into the pupil of her target’s other eye.
‘That’s not even fair! You can’t judge where the point will land!’ Clera flung her next star and nearly missed the board entirely.
Ruli shrugged. ‘If the target were any closer and I had a spear I could practically lean forward and poke it.’
Nona threw her four stars in quick succession. All four thunked home in the head, two into the eyes.
At the end of the line Darla took her last throw and all four of them moved up to retrieve their stars before the next rank had their turn.
‘You didn’t get the pupils,’ Clera said, still raging over Ruli’s feat.
‘When a sharp piece of metal hits you in the eye you’re going to have a really bad day whichever part it strikes.’ Nona shrugged.
‘Keep telling yourself that.’ Ruli grinned. ‘One day you’ll meet an enemy with really tiny eyes and you’ll wish you had me with you!’
In the bathhouse after Blade Nona hung in the hot water while the class splashed and chattered around her or sat on the pool’s edge recovering in the steams. She put her head back, floating, embraced by heat, nothing but whiteness above her, the steam’s slow swirl echoing in her mind. Tomorrow the Academy would show off its students before Sister Pan and some grand audience. Hessa would show them the subtleties of thread-work in return, and Ara the channelled power of the Path gathered over as many as three or even four steps and released in controlled bursts of destruction. And Nona … the peasant girl from the Grey … the would-be murderer spirited from beneath a descending death sentence … what had she got to show them that they wouldn’t smirk behind their hands at?
And when she came back she would still be poisoned, still face the dilemma of whether to confess her attack on Raymel or risk the black cure in an attempt to solve her own problems. And on top of all that. Or rather, beneath it, there was Yisht, burrowing into something secret like a worm at the convent’s heart.
Nona signed and realized that sometimes even a hot bath couldn’t help.
The convent hired a cart to take Sister Pan and the three novices to the Academy. The rest of the class saw them off outside Path Tower. The girls, with the exception of Zole, clustered around, variously slapping shoulders or swapping hugs, dependent on their nature.
‘Make us proud!’ Darla sent Nona staggering with a semi-affectionate shove.
‘Show those Academy brats something new!’ Clera mimed an explosion.
‘Ancestor watch over you.’ Jula smiled and held Nona’s hands in a brief clasp.
‘Be careful!’ Ruli hugged her.
‘Don’t lose.’ Alata with a warning look.
Ara and Nona helped Hessa up into the cart.
‘You’re lucky,’ Clera said, leaning in as Sister Pan took her place beside the driver. ‘The church seems to think nuns should walk everywhere. Seriously. Even Sister Cloud didn’t get a horse! If Hessa wasn’t a hop-along and Pan wasn’t a hundred and nine you’d be walking to the Academy.’
The driver twitched his whip over the two horses and the cart lurched into motion. Nona clutched the side and remembered Giljohn’s cart. Another journey beginning …
The cart rattled on along the track that led around the back of the piggeries and ‘the chicken house’ a long hall far too grand for its current purpose. To the track’s left the cliff edge lay just yards away over bare rock. Clera claimed a novice’s prank had once startled the supply wagon horse and sent it back down to the plains below by the most direct route, along with the supply wagon and the driver. Fortunately on this occasion no such prankster came forward and the cart survived to thread a path through the stone forest. Nona lay back to watch the pillars reaching for the sky as the driver wove his way around them. Even Sister Rule had no idea who had set them there. No book in the library spoke of it. As they broke clear Nona wondered how long the ripples she left behind would last before they faded and Abeth forgot her. Even if she built a thousand stone pillars taller and thicker than the biggest trees, the world would roll on and remember her no better than it did the mysterious founders of the stone forest.
‘I know what you’re thinking.’ Hessa shifted across to join Nona watching the pillars retreat into the distance.
‘You do not.’
‘I don’t think there’s enough time left for us to be forgotten. Not if we do extraordinary things. If we burn bright enough we’ll be remembered until the moon falls and the Corridor closes.’
‘That’s not so bad then.’
‘It will be if we’re still alive to see it!’
Sister Pan eyed them darkly. ‘It is never a good idea for two novices to become thread-bound. That experiment of yours was ill-advised, Novice Hessa, even if you didn’t know that Novice Nona had the blood.’ She rubbed absently at her stump. ‘And now you share idle thoughts as well as dreams and pain … The lives of any so closely bound tend to become mirrors of each other, their rhythms coming into time until there are no coincidences, only a sharing in the patterns of crisis and peace.’
Hessa looked down, ashamed. Nona reached out a hand to her shoulder, tentative. ‘It doesn’t sound so bad. If we stick together it just means we’ll share our troubles.’
The cart took the Vinery Stair, a longer descent to the plains but less treacherous than the Seren Way, and despite its name, stairless. Once clear of the plateau they curved back past the convent vineyards nestled in the arms of the cliffs, and took the Rutland Road into Verity.
The grand gates of the city stood open, with as many people seeming to have urgent business inside as had urgent business in the world beyond, leading to a great press of humanity, many employing elbows and whips to forge a path, and all of them shouting.
Nona sat hunched about her knees as the cart inched through.
‘I’d forgotten the smell,’ Hessa said. She’d been the only member of Grey Class not to come to watch the forging at the Caltess.