Red Sister

by Mark Lawrence

  “I’ve come for the girl, abbess. I don’t plan to stay long.”

  “Girl? We have lots of those here, Irvone. I’m charged to look after them, body and soul.”

  “The convicted murderer that you helped abscond from Harriton prison two days ago.”

  “Convicted?” The abbess rubbed her chin. “There was a trial? Or was a rope merely purchased for her?”

  Judge Irvone snapped his fingers and the young man hefted up his book, opening it to a page marked with a silk ribbon. He read from it, his voice precisely measured. “In the ruling of Judge Maker, esteemed of the high court: Within the sound of the palace bells a stateless person may be convicted by any prison official of more than three years’ service on the evidence of five or more eyewitnesses of good standing. YoM 3417.”

  The golden head of the abbess’s staff made slow revolutions. “Such a new cover for such an old book, judge. Year of the Moon 3417? Your law predates this convent. It predates most of Verity! And I doubt if it has been used in the time these buildings have stood here.”

  “Even so, Warden James passed sentence upon the girl when she arrived at Harriton.” The judge looked towards the convent. “If you would be so good as to have the child brought out—that would be preferable to a search of the premises.”

  Nona realized with a start that none of the men knew that she was the one they were looking for.

  “Of course.” The abbess nodded. “Of course, I would be glad to help. But it seems to me that even in these modern times, and even with a law so old . . . would one not require someone to have been murdered in order to hang another person for murder? Or has poor Raymel gone to his accounting with the Ancestor?”

  The judge waved a bored hand at his assistant who turned to another page marked with a length of silk. “YoM 3702, Judge Arc Leensis rules that in cases of attempted murder the perpetrator may hang for murder if the original conviction were based upon the reasonable belief that the victim would die.”

  “Thuran Tacsis must have paid out a considerable weight of gold to have your clerks scouring the law books with such diligence, Irvone.”

  “What man would not want justice for his son?” The judge inclined his head, apparently solemn and thoughtful. Nona wondered if he had ever met Raymel Tacsis. “Lord Tacsis is prepared to overlook your interference with the due execution of the law, Abbess Glass, and out of respect for the church I do not propose to press the case on behalf of the city. However, you would be well advised to place the murderer known as Nona Reeve into my custody without delay.”

  Nona ground her teeth tight against the urge to spit. Partnis Reeve had given her nothing she wanted to keep, his name least of all.

  “I would never disobey the high court, Irvone.” Abbess Glass stopped turning her crozier. The judge snorted. Abbess Glass waited a moment then continued. “But—”

  “Ha!” The judge shook his head.

  “But Nona is now a novice at the convent and as such any and all misdemeanours, past and present, fall under the jurisdiction of church law. As do mine. I’m sorry that you’ve had a wasted trip. You really should stay for dinner, the girls would be delighted—”

  The big black book of laws hit the ground with a resounding thump. “That’s her, isn’t it?” The young assistant advanced towards the steps, finger pointing at Nona. “That’s the little bitch who did it!”

  “Lano . . .” The judge shook his head, more in resignation than anger. “I told you you should not have come.”

  Nona stared at him, seeing the man for the first time and finding something familiar in the narrow cast of his features, perhaps the pale fury in his eyes or the slant of his lips.

  “He would have killed Saida!” The anger of that moment in the Caltess returned to Nona in an instant, as if it had never left. “He deser—”

  Lano Tacsis moved faster than anyone Nona had ever seen, a blur of dark robes, twisting past Sister Flint even as she reached for him with reflexes to shame a cave viper. Nona barely had time to throw up her hands in front of the fingers reaching to seize her by the throat. A moment later Lano was being hauled backward, a scream of anger choked off by Sister Flint’s slim arm fastened about his neck.

  “What?” Abbess Glass, locked into the moment of the attack, now found her voice, only realizing there had been an assault as the perpetrator was pulled away. “Nona! Are you hurt?”

  Nona stared up at the abbess’s concern. “No.”

  “Your hands!”

  Nona raised them, both dripping crimson. There was no pain.

  “The bitch cut me! That little gutterling actually cut me!” Lano, thrown back into the arms of the closest guardsmen, clutched one hand with the other, blood pulsing between his fingers. “Arrest her!”

  Other nuns now stood between the judge’s men and the abbess, Sisters Kettle and Apple flanking Sister Flint along with two Nona didn’t know.

  “Lano Tacsis?” Abbess Glass took a step forward. “Does your father know that you’re here, young man?”

  Lano snarled and took a step forward, but slowly enough to allow the guardsmen to hold him back.

  “I see your time at the Tetragode has been well spent. Your disguise and turn of speed were both admirable.” The abbess looked to Judge Irvone, sighed, and returned her gaze to the young man before her. “It seems that both of Thuran Tacsis’s sons have yet to learn that beating little girls is not a pastime that can be pursued entirely without consequence . . . I do have a number of older girls here who would be happy to teach you that lesson if you care to make a challenge within the Blade Hall?”

  “You don’t scare me, Shella Yammal!” Lano spat the words, white-faced in fury, hectic patches of red around his eyes. “Yes, I know your line and your family, old woman. My father could buy this rock from under your miserable collection of old hags and rejects.”

  “What Lano means,” Judge Irvone raised his voice, a deep and impressive instrument full of gravitas and authority, “is that we will return to Verity and pursue this matter through the appropriate channels.” He motioned to a guard to retrieve the dropped legal tome then used another man for support as he mounted his horse.

  “High Priest Jacob dines at my father’s table, you miserable sack of blubber!” Lano roared. The judge waved for the men holding him to start back towards the pillars. “I’ll sink you for this!” Lano let them drag him as he shouted. “I’ll have that girl roasted! I’ll serve her to my brother on a dinner plate! The high priest will have you beaten from this place, old woman. You’ll beg on the streets before I’m done!”

  Now about twenty yards off, heels dragging, Lano Tacsis shook off the men holding him and stalked to the front of their party to remonstrate with the judge. The nuns watched in silence. The harsh edges of Lano’s outrage stretched back across the plateau even as the men reached the pillars.

  “Well.” Abbess Glass sat down heavily on the steps once more. She didn’t seem inclined to say more. Sister Apple turned towards her but the abbess waved her away. “You heard the man—we can expect a visit from the high priest soon enough. A good time to clean the place up a bit and make sure everything is in order. I’ll leave you in charge of that, Apple dear.”

  Sister Apple pursed her lips, glanced at Nona’s hands, then nodded and led the others away. Sister Wheel lingered, but a gesture with the crozier sent her hurrying after the others.

  “So,” the abbess said, patting the step beside her. “You have a knife?”

  Nona nodded and took her place on the cold stone.

  “Understandable, I suppose.” Abbess Glass kept her eyes on the distant pillars. “But I must ask you to return it to the Blade stores.”

  “Yes, abbess.” Nona looked down at her hands, conflicted. The abbess had done more to protect her than her own mother had: she might lose everything just for some peasant girl she barely knew. Nona hadn’t told a lie
, but even so it felt wrong to deceive her. “I will.”

  “Are you sure none of that blood is yours?” the abbess asked.

  Nona flexed her hands, the fingers already sticking to each other. “I’m sure.”

  “Run along then. Put that knife back and we won’t speak of it again. It’s my duty and the duty of all your sisters here to protect you. You don’t need a blade.”

  “Yes, abbess.” Nona got quickly to her feet. “I will.” She wanted to thank the abbess, but nothing she thought to say sounded right. And whatever had happened Abbess Glass had still watched Saida hang.

  Nona ran off, the Corridor wind trying to steer her. She would put the knife into Blade Hall’s stores straight away . . . but first she would run to the dormitories and retrieve it from her bed.

  10

  NONA CAME LATE to the dormitory, having slipped into the bathhouse on her way back from contemplation at the sinkhole to avoid Sister Wheel, only to have the woman hold an endless conversation right outside the door with some unknown party. Nona thought she heard her name mentioned but maddeningly the thickness of the door, the splashing of two or more older novices in the pool, and the soft but constant gurgling of the pipes kept the actual words just beyond hearing. At one point Wheel raised her voice enough for Nona to catch, “Assassin!” and a moment later, “Blood!” but after that only muttering.

  Eventually Sister Wheel ran out of opinions, or at least time to deliver them in, and left, allowing Nona to escape. She stepped out from the steams and instantly discovered the misery of mixing a warm damp habit with a cold and invasive wind.

  Rain started to splatter about her as she passed the laundry. Despite her haste to reach the dormitories Nona paused at the laundry side door. A nun held it open a hand’s-width, having stopped to finish her conversation with someone further inside.

  “. . . Ancestor! We don’t want him here again.”

  “. . .”

  “You weren’t even here back then to see it, girl. Abbess Shard hadn’t the guts to keep him out. He’d have the novices over to Heart Hall for ‘special testing.’ And not just the older ones.”

  “. . .”

  “Just an archon. And if he was like that as an archon what do you think he’s like as high priest? No wonder he hates Glass! They say—” The door shut again as the conversation drew the sister back into the laundry.

  Nona waited a minute, then another, then moved on, as wet with the rain as if she’d swum from the bathhouse. On opening the door to the Red sleeping hall she found the class chatting in various groups around the beds, a few of the girls starting to undress but nobody in any particular hurry. Arabella’s voice carried through the mix, though she was hidden by the three or four novices around her. “—could say those things to Sister Wheel!”

  “And we got shaved just because she took your belt, Ara!”

  Nona saw that Jula was one of those in Arabella’s circle. It stung to see her there, but what she’d said was true. And the attention of a noble, an almost princess, must be very flattering to a scribe’s daughter. Head down, Nona walked to her bed.

  “Heard the law came looking for you.” Clera, lying on top of her blankets, put down her class scroll at Nona’s approach. “I hate those judges.” She set her penny spinning on the writing slate beside her, spattering the lamplight.

  Nona offered up a weak smile and turned to her bed. Clera patted her own. “You look half-drowned. Use this.” She tossed over a rough grey towel. “What did you do, Nona? Did they come to arrest you for cheeking the abbess? Or for being a tunnel-worshipper?” She grinned, pushing aside her hair, and patted again. “Come, tell Clera everything.”

  Nona pulled her wet habit off, wiped her face, rubbed at her hair, then despite her mood sat where Clera indicated.

  Clera leaned in close. “A judge? A damned judge rode all the way up here to get you? What the hell did you do, Nona?” She took hold of Nona’s arm. “And how are you still here? I don’t want them to take you away!”

  Nona sighed. Sooner or later the whole convent would know about Raymel Tacsis. She was surprised the story wasn’t circulating among the novices already. Sooner or later. She would rather it was later though . . . “You’re my friend?” she asked.

  “I am.” The grip on her arm strengthened.

  “I lied.” Nona looked up. Ruli sat on the next bed now, nightcap in place, one pale strand of hair escaping. “I wasn’t taken from the village by raiders . . .”

  Clera and Ruli shuffled closer, saying nothing, and Nona started her story anew.

  • • •

  “A JUGGLER ONCE came to my village. He was my first friend—” Nona backtracked. “In my whole life I’d had one friend. It’s a hard thing to live as a stranger in a small village. There’s nowhere to hide, nowhere you’re not known. I used to think there was something wrong with me to make the other children turn me away. Something more than being dark . . . I’ve never understood people—not truly—not how to be at ease with them and make them be at ease with me. Sometimes I feel as though I’m playing a part like those mummers who travel the roads, only I don’t know the words properly, or how I’m supposed to act.

  “I had one friend. I don’t know if he was a proper friend, but he said he was, and nobody had told me that before, so it was something special.”

  “The juggler? How old was he?” Clera asked, leaning in with Ruli. Jula sat nearby now, watching, her expression unreadable.

  “Twenty-two,” Nona said, remembering Amondo’s face, light and shadow in the brilliance of the focus moon.

  “Twenty-two!” Clera gasped and exchanged glances with Ruli. “That’s a grown man.”

  “What was he called?” Jula from the next bed.

  “Amondo. He only stayed three days. He said he had to keep travelling to find new people who would pay to see his show. But on the morning that she found him gone my mother was very angry. I hadn’t seen her like that before, at least not so bad, throwing around her baskets and cursing him. Then she saw me standing in the corner, trying to be out of the way, and she said it was my fault, all of it was my fault, and that I’d driven Amondo away and that she hated me.”

  “Did he touch you?” Clera demanded.

  “Yes.” Nona frowned. It seemed like a stupid question.

  Ruli drew in a sharp breath.

  “I mean . . . in a bad way?” Clera said.

  “He didn’t hit me . . .” Nona’s frown deepened. “He showed me how to juggle.” She pursed her lips and shrugged. “And when he left I went after him. I told myself I was going to get him to come back so my mother wouldn’t be so angry with me. She was cross most of the time, as though something was wrong with everything. I don’t remember her laughing. Ever. But I thought if Amondo came back that might change and we could be happy. I told myself I was going to get him to come back—but really part of me hoped he would ask me to come with him, and another part of me knew I would say yes.

  “My father told me stories and they were different from the ones Grey Stephen would tell the village on fire-nights. They were different because I knew he had been to the places he was describing, and they made me want to go too. Da’s stories made me feel that the world went on so much further than I could see, and that the Corridor was a road that could take me anywhere. I could reach the Marn Sea and sail on a fishing boat, or dig emeralds from the ground in Tecras, or hunt whiters on the ice, or explore the tunnels and discover the Missing. Anything.

  “Old Mother Sible saw Amondo leave along the Rellam trail. She told him the forest was a haunted place but he just laughed and said everywhere had its ghosts.”

  Nona fell into her own story as she had before, not hearing the words as she spoke them, only seeing events play out before the eye of her mind.

  • • •

  MOTHER SIBLE CALLED after me to stop. “You won’t catch him ’fore h
e gets to the woods.”

  I kept running, foot-wrappings soaked and muddy, flapping as I dodged the wheel ruts.

  “You won’t catch him . . .” The old woman’s voice lost itself in the distance.

  I’d been as far as the Rellam Forest before. I’d gathered sticks in the margins, hunted for hedgehogs among the dry leaves, peered into the dark spaces between the boles of the trees, looking for the faerie lights that folk in the village spoke about. Seen nothing, found nothing, except for sticks, and back at the hut they’d burned the same as any others. I’d been to the Rellam Forest before—but not as the sun was falling. And I’d never ventured in.

  Still, Amondo and I both stood on the same road. We both stood beneath the same clouds, hung with sun-bright edges and rain-dark hearts—rain comes from a dark heart. I would catch up with him before it fell.

  Amondo had more than an hour’s head start on me and Mother Sible proved right in her prediction. I found myself panting, sore-footed and sweaty, the trail now just a band of beaten green, winding its way into the first trees as if it too had heard the woods’ reputation and was trying to delay entering.

  Everywhere has its ghosts, Amondo had said, but in most places those ghosts are at least hidden in the corners, or tucked away at right angles to the world, waiting their moment. In the Rellam Forest you could see the ghosts, patterned on the gloom beneath the canopy, the distortion of their faces frozen into the bark of ancient trunks. And you could hear them too, screaming into the silence, not quite breaking it but making it tremble.

  I was scared. More scared than I’d ever been of the bigs who chased me, or of Black Will’s hound that took Jenna’s fingers the year before. What made me follow that trail with the sun falling, and the cold wind speaking through the branches, was a larger fear, one that had been with me ever since I had words to put around it: the fear that I wouldn’t ever leave that village, that I would stay and grow old and bent and be put in the ground there, wasting all the years of my life as an outsider, inside.