You don’t know anything: you’re too young to remember last year. Keot made a rush for her hand.
Nona held him back. And unless you start making sense I have to assume you’re too old to remember yesterday.
Keot sulked after that, only twisting her last farewell into a snarl when Nona finally managed to leave Gallabeth behind at a farm that needed her services, or at least needed her stone. Nona didn’t pursue the matter. She knew from experience that more than two questions in a row just set the devil talking nonsense. She’d come to think of him as a broken thing, part of a mind perhaps, filled with fragments of knowledge, occasionally useful as the shards of a pot can be, offering a sharp edge but no good for holding soup.
* * *
• • •
NONA’S RECOLLECTION OF the wider Grey, past the Rellam Forest to the west of the village and the bone-mire to the east was, like Keot’s memory, a fractured thing. Giljohn had taken them back and forth across the Grey and out beyond, chasing rumour when rumour showed its tail, then returning to some long-established if tortuous circuit when the well of gossip ran dry. What remained with Nona were slices. A town skirted here, a hillside there, a ruin, a lake.
Eventually, following directions from another village almost as small as hers though bearing a name, Nona found her way to the Rellam Forest. The old man who had known of the forest, apparently by its ill-repute, also knew of her village and, miraculously, had a name for it too.
“Rellam Village. Aye. Ain’t heard tell of that place for years though.” He gave Nona a peculiar look, as if she might be testing him. But then everyone Nona met gave her odd looks. Your eyes might occupy only a tiny fraction of what you present to the world but they are what each stranger seeks when they meet you, as if needing reassurance concerning the person that watches through them. When you present two wells of darkness to the world the world makes the sign of the Ancestor’s tree, or points a finger up across their heart to the Hope hidden above cloud-scattered skies, or makes the horns to summon the protection of the small gods who watch from between moments and under shadows.
Nona found that the unfamiliar track she had been directed along turned into a familiar one and led her through the arboreal gloom of the Rellam Forest where once she had run in the red mist of a focus moon. That time she had been chasing Amondo, her first friend and also a man who had betrayed her before they had even met. She paced the track with the woods whispering on both sides, remembering the juggler, the quick magic of his hands and the strangeness he’d brought with him into her life, a splash of colour, proof of a world beyond the boundaries of the Grey.
Nona had once told the girls at the convent a lie. On the first day she met them she had claimed that the bloodshed that saw her given to the child-taker was wrought by a wood-god upon the Pelarthi who captured her. There had been no Pelarthi. Nona had never seen a Pelarthi mercenary, only heard of them in Nana Even’s tales. There had been no wood-god either—though she had seen one of those, a year before, watching her from the Rellam, his face almost like those twisted into the bark of trees. Almost.
The shadows on the forest path lengthened while the distance to open ground shortened. Nona fought to keep her pace from quickening. Around her the wood grumbled at the wind, creaking, groaning, always in motion. Nona felt eyes watching her and wondered whose they might be. A wood-god perhaps, ragged, leaf-clad, crouched in the boughs of an oak. Or perhaps just an owl, shaking off sleep.
Somewhere along this path she had murdered half a dozen soldiers. The troop Sherzal had sent with her quantal thread-worker, to guard him as he sifted through the world’s threads in search of bodies in which more than one blood ran. The men who had hired Amondo to coax her from the village. How much had they paid? How much had it been worth to them to keep their business quiet? If Amondo had proved too expensive the soldiers would have just come in to take her. Their time was worth more to Sherzal than the lives of a few villagers.
Ahead, with the shadows of the trees slanting across the trail like cage bars, the green arch opened and the land lay exposed to the sky. Nona left the Rellam, still feeling the eyes upon her back, and followed the path up through the moor towards the fields and huts of her village.
* * *
• • •
IT’S BEEN TOO easy. Keot burned across the back of her neck and she lowered her hood to let the Corridor wind cool him.
It wasn’t easy. Though as she said it Nona realized that it had been. A walk through the empire’s garden lands and into the Grey.
She said they meant to kill you. The dark one said it.
Nona shrugged. Kettle was probably just trying to scare me into leaving more quickly and not coming back. They would certainly have whipped me and sent me from the Rock. She frowned. Perhaps the inquisitors might even have thrown her into the Glasswater to add her bones to the bottom. But why would they pursue her once she’d gone?
Only as she closed the last mile did Nona’s thoughts wander to the kind of reception she might find waiting. In her head the village had been an indivisible object, a ball of memories tight-bound, all or nothing. Now long-banished thoughts of her mother intruded for the first time in an age. Would she recognize her daughter? Would she be angry? Would she pull back from the blackness of her eyes, or open her arms with the mother’s love that haunted Nona’s most vague and distant recollections, soft, encompassing, safe, and forgiving?
You’ll see it now. My village. Nona crested the low rise that the village knew as Heddod’s Ridge. Her heart suddenly took to pounding as the land opened out before her. Her eyes tried to make sense of a scene that should have been familiar. At first it looked as if she had been mistaken and the village must lie over the next rise. The houses were gone. But here a spar stood, black and alone, there a scattering of tumbled stones, and everywhere the ghosts of pathways, covered now with grass and bushes, but clear enough if you knew where to look.
TURN AROUND! Keot’s voice exploded into her skull.
Nona found herself obeying without question, but sluggishly, as if her mind were an anchor her muscles had to drag, still mired in the scene before her. With hunska speed Nona’s body wrenched itself through the degrees, fighting inertia. Her head led the turn and out of the corner of her eye she saw the projectile’s glimmer as it sped towards her back. Confused, shocked, Nona felt her grip on the moment slipping. She drove her flaw-blades out from the fingers of the hand she was reaching over her shoulder. The missile held her focus, thin as a nail, long as a hand, flighted, spinning, some kind of disk around the shaft an inch back from the tip, as if the bolt had pierced a copper penny on its way through the air. Somewhere back behind it a blurred figure stood in the roadway.
Nona reached for her speed. Even if she got her fingers to the spike she doubted she could slow it enough to stop it skewering her shoulder. It became a race, a yard left for the bolt, ten inches for her fingertips to intercept its path. Only her hand and the bolt moved. No heartbeat, no breath, no sound, no chance. The bolt came too fast for her to grasp it. Instead Nona turned the tip of the flaw-blade extending from her index finger, presenting the flat and angled side of the invisible blade to the bolt. Deflected, the bolt carried on, its path slanting upwards. It tore into the material of her range-coat a thumb’s width above her skin, and came to a jolting halt there, stopped by the ridge set an inch behind the point.
Nona’s eyes adjusted, bringing the figure on the road into sharp focus as she completed her turn. He stood twenty yards back, having emerged from the thicket of dendron bushes that flanked the lane. A tall man, grey-haired, gaunt in his heavy coat, a crossbow raised and bolstered against his shoulder, one eye staring down its length at her. He didn’t need to close the other: the socket gaped empty, divided by a scar that travelled to his cheek.
“Damn.” Giljohn lowered his crossbow. “I always knew you’d be fast.”
22
NONA TUGGED GILJOHN’S bolt from her range-coat and glanced at it. The disk was to
stop the shaft penetrating too deep, angled so as to allow it to fly straight though. She wondered what venom it had been smeared with.
She looked back at the man. “Not going to run?”
Giljohn shrugged. He looked older than she remembered. “I had one chance. It should have worked. Now I have none.” He frowned. “How did you know?”
Nona’s turn to shrug. “Magic.” She hadn’t heard of any magic that would give you eyes in the back of your neck, but marjals had been known to manifest all manner of odd powers. She walked towards the child-taker.
Kill him!
“Are you going to kill me?” Giljohn shared Keot’s interest. He looked resigned rather than worried. He made no attempt at a defence. The child-taker knew enough about hunskas to understand it would do him no good. “Well?”
“Honestly?” Nona closed the gap between them. “I don’t know.”
She stabbed him with the bolt, punching it into the meat of his pectoral muscle as far as the collar would allow. She had to reach up—the man was still a head taller than her.
“Ahhh!” Giljohn slapped a hand to the puncture wound. “Not like that you won’t.”
“No?”
Giljohn wobbled and sat down. “Groton paste. Fast acting.”
“Where were you going to take me?”
Giljohn waved an uncoordinated arm to the west, shook his head, and collapsed. He lay with eyes open, pupils dilated, watching nothing in particular.
Nona knelt to check the child-taker’s breathing and pulse. It looked odd to see the man who had ruled over her, Hessa, and the others, lying there like that, hair in disarray, cheek to the cold ground. For so many miles his rule had been absolute as he sat, his back to the cageful of children, Four-Foot plodding ahead of him. She relieved him of his pack and coin purse, then tied him hand and foot with the rope he had on him.
“That was foolish,” she muttered, standing.
Yes. You should have cut him open!
I should have asked my questions before testing his own venom on him.
“Well.” She looked down at Giljohn. “If you weren’t going to kill me, then you must have a horse nearby. Probably a cart too. You weren’t going to carry me over your shoulder.”
Nona hefted Giljohn’s pack then shook his purse. It hung limp with hardly a jingle of coins. She remembered it as ever-full, Giljohn emptying it with maddening sloth as he purchased a child here, a child there, for a scatter of copper pennies.
* * *
• • •
NONA SET OFF back along the path looking for any sign of tracks just as Sister Tallow had taught her. But in the end she saw not so much as a single hoofprint and found both horse and cart by exercising common sense and checking in the places she would have hidden a cart if she’d arrived ahead of a target she wished to waylay.
Giljohn had left his transport along the last of a dozen old charcoal burners’ trails that led from the main track through the Rellam Forest. He’d made no attempt to disguise it, just taken it far enough to be hidden from the track. She stopped as she sighted the mule, grey and unkempt, and behind it the cage in which she had travelled, huddled between Saida and Hessa. Her friends. Now dead.
Nona untied the mule, pulling her hand away swiftly as it tried to bite her, and led it on, dragging the cart through the unwilling undergrowth. In time she found one of the charcoal burners’ clearings and turned the cart before returning to the track.
Hefting Giljohn into the cage nearly broke Nona’s back, but she’d gained a lot of muscle since they had parted company at the Caltess almost six years before, and the years had pared the child-taker closer to the bone. Nona pushed his feet through the gate and closed it on him, knotting the rope to hold it in place. The mule snorted once then fell silent. She leaned back and stared at the ruins of the village with no thoughts, just the open fields around her, overgrown and turning wild, tugged by the damp wind. Above, the grey sky racing eastward, far to the south the smokes of Morltown smudging the air. The idea that her old home no longer existed wouldn’t seem to fit in her skull no matter how she turned it. She might not have liked the place, but it was her foundation, the roots of her. She straightened and walked down the slope towards the spot where her mother’s house had stood.
To call the remains of the village “ruins” was over-generous. “Traces” would be more accurate. In another five years it would be hard to tell the site where the people had lived from the spaces where they had grown their crops. Grey Stephen’s house was a pile of rubble, soon to be swallowed by the rising turf. The stones of James Baker’s home still showed; the lintel beneath which his wife, Martha, used to scowl at the world lay half-buried.
Little more than a stain amid the nettles marked where Nona’s own home had stood. The wattle-and-daub walls had gone to nothing and the thicker timbers lay in ashes and rot among the grass, falling apart at a nudge of her boot.
It took another hour before Giljohn cracked open an eye. The Grey Sisters brewed groton venom from the gallbladder of a rare fish that seldom emerged from beneath the ice. It wouldn’t have been cheap, or easy to obtain. As well as a rapid descent into unconsciousness the victim could look forward to a period of disorientation followed by days in which concentration would prove impossible. The Sisters used it if they needed to capture a quantal or marjal. No drug would safely render a victim unconscious for a week, but a dose of groton could deny an Academic the use of most of their magics for nearly that long, or keep a quantal from the Path.
“Where’s my mother?”
“I . . . don’t know.” Giljohn blinked, spat, and tried to sit up.
“What happened here?” Nona waved an arm at the place where the village had stood.
Giljohn was too occupied with the rope around his wrists to reply, staring at it in fascination as if it might be made of gold and braided with gemstones. Nona repeated the question and he spat again, as if the venom had left his mouth sour, and laughed. “You happened, child.”
“Me?”
“She probably would have done it just for the soldiers.”
“Soldiers?”
“You killed five of Sherzal’s household guard!”
Nona said nothing. The hunters had brought her back to the village wearing blood, almost enough to drown in.
“It was Onastos Hadmar that she did this for though.”
“Who?”
Giljohn looked vague as if forgetting where he was.
“Onastos who?”
He shook his head. “Hadmar! Up in that convent of yours you forget how rare any sign of the tribes is. Quantal’s the hardest of all to find. Not one in a thousand, girl. Onastos was a prime, wearing Sherzal’s scarlet and silver. And you cut him up like meat. Sherzal’s guard must have destroyed this place while we were on the road. That’s all I know. It’s the first time I’ve been back. I got here last night.”
“So why didn’t they come after me? Catch us on the road?” Nona’s fists tightened at the thought, nails biting palm. Let them come now.
“I’m sure they . . .” Giljohn rolled over, trying to free his hands. “I’m in my own damn cage?”
Nona banged the bars. “Why didn’t they chase us?”
“Damn!” Giljohn hit his head against the cart deck. “It’s good stuff, this groton. Feels like I’m swimming through the world.”
Nona banged again.
“They did chase us! I’m sure they did. But Sherzal got wind of a better prospect. Something Onastos had pointed her at, I’ll bet. And she set all her guard on that instead.”
Zole. That was Nona’s guess. The Chosen One, saving her life before they’d even met.
“Who sent you, and how did you find me?”
“A number sent me.”
Nona shook her head. The groton had his tongue.
“One hundred sent me. A hundred golden sovereigns.”
“They posted a reward?” The size of it staggered her. Giljohn had filled his cage for less than one sovereign.
<
br /> “Too big a number for me to ignore, girl. Old Giljohn’s fallen on hard times. Yes he has. You and your little friends were the richest lot I ever hauled. Never found another like it.” He rolled to his back, staring at the sky with his single eye. “And who better to hunt you? I knew where you came from. Knew you’d go back. The runners always do. Spent my last coin on something to keep you quiet, came here, waited. Thought my best chance would be when you saw what had happened. That moment of shock. Thought I’d be enough. One shot. One captive. One hundred divided by one. I gambled . . . I lost.”
Kill him.
Nona frowned. Giljohn had rolled to her side of the cart and had the bars in his hands. “Where am I?” Confusion in his voice, the drug taking hold again. “I’m in my own cage?”
“We all are,” Nona said.
“If you let me go I won’t say that I saw you.” Giljohn met her eyes. His clarity seemed to come and go in waves.
“You will if there’s money in it,” Nona said. A sadness rose through her. The village and the child-taker weren’t things she had placed value in, or even liked, but they were her things, part of her own story, and you couldn’t choose those, not when you were a child. Now they both lay ruined, each in their own way. Something had gone out of Giljohn. Perhaps it had left the day the high priest humbled him and beat Four-Foot to death. Perhaps it had left a little each year starting before he came into her life, maybe it had begun the day the Scithrowl took his eye.
Giljohn clutched the bars and stared at her, less than a yard separating them now.
Kill him! Even you should be able to see this one needs killing. He’ll betray you without a thought. He was going to give you to your enemies!
You’re right.
Nona focused and four flaw-blades shimmered momentarily as they sprung from her fingers. “You would have seen me killed, child-taker, just to put coin in your pocket.”
With a snarl Nona lashed out. The bars before Giljohn’s face fell away in sections.
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