Think.
Apple set Kettle back upon the ground and stripped her own range-coat to lie her on. With Kettle arranged on the coat she examined her for other injuries, checking the colour of her skin, lifting an eyelid, listening to her breath, watching the speed with which circulation returned to her extremities when pinched. She took a thin leather tube from the collection within her habit and broke the seal. Already the cold was making her shiver. She tipped the liquid into Kettle’s mouth, sat back, and watched. The knife was the only wound. It must have been coated with blade-venom but there were no strong indications to narrow down the type.
For the longest minute in Apple’s life nothing happened. All about her the trees groaned against the wind, their leaves seething. Then Kettle twitched, spluttered and started to choke. Apple seized her head. ‘Easy! Just breathe.’
‘W-where?’ Any further question became lost in coughing and choking. One hand clutched at the range-coat just above the knife. ‘Hurts.’
‘I told you to breathe, idiot.’
‘A-Appy?’ Kettle rolled her head to see, eyes squinting as if the light were too bright. Her skin was bone-white, lips almost blue. ‘Sister.’ The faintest smile.
‘I’ve given you adrene, it won’t last long. Tell me what you’ve taken. Quick!’
‘Nona. She made me call.’ Kettle slurred the words, staring past Apple at the leaves, black against a white sky. ‘Gone now.’
Apple shook her. ‘What did you take? It’s important!’
‘B—’ Kettle blinked, trying to focus. ‘Black cure.’ Her breath came shallow and fast. ‘And … kalewort.’
‘Kalewort?’
‘I … was cold. Thought it … might be nightweed on—’
‘Who puts nightweed in blade-venom?’ Apple shook her head. ‘Where’s the assassin?’
‘Gone.’ Kettle’s eyes closed and her head flopped back.
Apple bit her lip. The black cure should have had more effect whatever the Noi-Guin had used. She tasted blood and frowned. Her mind lay blank. Nothing in her great store of lore suggested a cause or cure.
Despair closed about Apple. Her lips moved, reciting venoms, none of which fitted the symptoms. Tendrils of shadow caught around Kettle, moving across her in wisps. Apple stared, her brow furrowed, mind racing. On the white inch of wrist exposed before Kettle’s range-coat swallowed her arm, a line of shadow followed the path of the largest vein.
‘No?’ Apple motioned the shadows around her forward and like a dark sea they washed over Kettle. As they drew back traces of shadow remained, held by her veins as a lodestone will hold powdered iron, revealing the invisible lines of its influence. ‘Yes!’
She grabbed Kettle’s face in both hands. ‘Wake up! Kettle, wake up!’ Kettle lay, as boneless as the Durns in the road. Apple slapped her. ‘Wake up! It was dark-venom.’
‘I’m dead then.’ Kettle rolled her eyes open. ‘I’m so sorry.’ A glistening tear pooled in the corner of her eye. She lifted a hand, as if it were the heaviest thing in the world, to Apple’s cheek. ‘You’re bleeding.’
Apple took the fingers and kissed them. ‘You are my blood.’
The darkness began to thicken around them, shadows streaming towards Apple, clotting about her.
‘What are … you doing?’ The smoothness of Kettle’s brow furrowed and her hand dropped back to her side.
‘Saving you,’ Apple said. The effort of drawing so much shadow so fast tightened her voice. She felt a coldness in her bones, an ache behind her eyes.
‘H-how?’ Kettle sought her eyes. ‘There’s no way.’
‘There is a way.’ Apple saw Kettle only because the darkness ran so deep in her. Night enfolded them both now, a fist of darkness within the depths of a forest grown lighter as its shadows were stolen. ‘I have to push you into shadow.’
‘No.’ Kettle managed to shake her head. ‘The Ancestor—’
‘I have to. It’s the only way.’ Apple gathered the darkness around her hands until even to her night-born sight they were holes cut in the shape of her body, without depth or contrast. The Noi-Guin pushed the best of their killers into the shadow, as far as their minds could bear it. It broke some of them. Others were lost in the dark places behind the world. But the price Kettle feared to pay was her soul. The Church taught that those who walked too far into the shadow would never join the Ancestor in unity.
‘Don’t.’ Kettle lacked the strength to raise her hand again. ‘Sister Wheel … says the Ancestor—’
‘Fuck Wheel, and fuck the Ancestor.’ Apple set one hand to Kettle’s chest, kneeling above her, ready to push. She took the hilt of the knife in her other hand. ‘You’re mine and I won’t lose you.’ She bent her head and tears fell. ‘Let me do it.’ Her mouth twitched and the words came out broken. ‘Please.’
‘Poisoner.’ Kettle found the strength to raise a hand, running white fingers into the flame of Apple’s hair. She held her a moment. ‘Poison me.’
And with a cry Apple pressed down with one black palm, all her strength behind it, and with the other drew the assassin’s knife from the wound, pulling with the steel and blood an inky venom born of the darkness that dwells between stars.
Two Years Later
‘Have you come for the laundry?’ The tall girl, a willowy blonde with a narrow beauty to her, stood away from her bed and bent to pull the linens from it. A titter ran among the other novices getting undressed around the room. Mystic Class had the whole of the dormitory’s second floor and the beds were well spaced around the walls, with desks between them.
Nona had been warned about Joeli Namsis. Her family held lands to the west and kept a close alliance with Thuran Tacsis. ‘Yes,’ she said, and stepped forward quickly, taking the bundled sheets with hunska swiftness. She returned to the doorway and threw the bedding down the stairs. Across the skin of her back Keot trembled with laughter.
‘Now, which bed is mine? Or must I take one?’ Nona looked around at their faces, a dozen of them, variously astonished or horrified, a couple even amused. Of all the novices from Nona’s time in Red Class she was the first to join Mystic. Three of the girls from her time in Grey Class had reached Mystic ahead of her: Mally, a hunska prime who had been head girl, had a bed close to the door; Alata watched her, dark-eyed, from the far side of the room, the ritual patterning of her scars a black web across arms and cheeks; and Darla who had joined the week before, grinning beneath the brown mop of her hair, the hugeness of her contriving to make the larger Mystic beds look small.
‘Well that was a mistake, peasant.’ Joeli came to stand before Nona.
‘Mistakes are how we learn.’ Nona looked expectantly past Joeli’s shoulder towards
