hands seize me, iron-hard and pinching. The men have braided beards. A woman slips a loop of rope around my wrists and draws it tight. Her face is marked with vertical bars of paint. Wooden charms hang in her tangle of dreadlocks. A Pelarthi. Raiders from the ice-margins.
Mother breaks from the workshop as the first raider reaches it. She’s very fast. Her reed-knife makes a bright sound as the blade skitters across the iron plates over his stomach. He swings his heavy sword but she’s not there. Her hand is at the neck of the woman holding me – the knife buried in the woman’s throat. My mother hauls me towards the main door. We nearly get there, but the man in leather and iron turns and swings again. The point of his sword finds the back of her neck. She falls. I fall beneath her. And the night goes dark again, and quiet.
‘The raiders sold you?’ Jula asked, horrified.
Nona had fallen silent, staring down at the water far below. ‘No. My village did.’ Nona looked up and saw the three girls staring at her as if she was something altogether new to them. ‘The raiders took me, but they didn’t get far. When dawn broke they camped in the Rellam Forest. The village hunters don’t go there. They say there are spirits in those woods, and not kind ones.
‘The Pelarthi broke into small groups. There weren’t more than twenty to start with. Five stayed with me: four men and the sister of the woman my mother stabbed. I found I had blood on me.’ Nona looked at her hands, turning them over as if the story might be written there. ‘While the Pelarthi were settling to sleep the forest fell silent. They didn’t seem to notice but I felt it watching us, the whole place – the trees, the ground, the darkness – all of it watching. A warrior came out from the shadow where the trees grew thick. He had bramble in his beard and a shock of wild hair. He didn’t speak, just raised his sword and came on barefoot. None of the Pelarthi even looked up – just me, lying on my side with my hands tied behind my back. I thought he might be one of them, only he looked too … wild, as though he hadn’t ever lived anywhere but right there in the Rellam. And his sword was polished wood, black, or very deep brown.
‘First the wildman slew the warrior who had killed Mother. He just swung his sword overhead and brought it down on the Pelarthi’s neck. The man’s head came right off. The others jumped up then and they weren’t slow, but he moved among them as though it were a dance – didn’t say a word, didn’t make a sound … none of them met his blade with theirs … and every time he changed direction there was a wound behind him spraying blood, and someone falling.
‘The woman fell over me, stumbling away from a swing of the wildman’s sword. By the time I’d struggled out from underneath her it was all over. The Pelarthi lay dead and the man had gone. Just me and the corpses and the forest moving all around us.
‘A party of hunters that had tracked the raiders out from the village found me an hour after sunrise, covered in blood and with bodies all around me … in the haunted wood. They brought me back but the old women were already washing Mother for the pyre and Mari Streams had run off to White Lake to get Preacher Mickel to stop them. Preacher Mickel says when the Hope arrives then all the dead will step from their graves and be made whole … so they must be buried and not given to the fire, because even the Hope can’t make live men and women from smoke and ash.
‘It didn’t take long for the whispering to start. … came out of the Rellam covered in blood – not a scratch on her … … who killed the Pelarthi? … … bodies … … blood … … spirits …
‘I don’t know who said witch first, but the first to hiss it at me was the smith’s wife, Matha. She’d hated me since her little Billem tried to beat me with a stick and I hurt him back. It didn’t take long before they were all saying it, as if the Pelarthi hadn’t even come, as if the bodies in the forest hadn’t belonged to men who killed my mother and dragged me off. I think they were angry that of all those stolen by the Pelarthi I was the only one they got back. The one they hadn’t wanted in the first place.
‘The smith and Grettle Eavis wanted to tie me in a bag and drown me in the Blue River. They said that’s the way to kill a witch so she doesn’t come back – wrap her in iron chain, put her in a bag and drown her. Grey Stephen said no – he’s the one who gets to say how things will be in the village on account of he fought the Pelarthi way back when there was an empress, and he killed some too. Grey Stephen said no and that the tinker had seen a child-taker on the road and if the village wouldn’t have me the “taker would”.
‘I—’ The voice of a bell spoke over her, deep and throbbing in the sinkhole’s void. ‘Bray! That’s for the lesson!’ Nona leapt to her feet, unconcerned that she stood on the very brink of a high fall.
The other girls were slower to get up, pushing themselves back from the sinkhole’s lip.
‘That’s horrible,’ Jula said, brushing the grit from the seat of her habit.
‘It’s incredible!’ Ruli said. ‘Weren’t you terrified when—’
‘Is it true?’ Clera frowned, weighing Nona with a speculative gaze.
‘We have to get to Blade.’ Nona was already hurrying towards the Academia tower. ‘I can’t be late twice!’ She hesitated and looked back. ‘Where’s the lesson?’
Clera laughed at that. ‘Come on. She’s right – Sister Tallow will have us running up and down the Seren Way, you know what she’s like!’
A moment later the three novices were walking briskly towards a building at the far edge of the plateau, with Nona jogging to catch up.
‘That’s the Blade Hall.’ Clera pointed to a tall building with high arched windows. Walls of huge limestone blocks supported a peaked roof with stone gargoyles roaring beneath the eaves. To the south a row of carved buttresses reinforced the wall that faced out over the plateau’s edge. ‘And that’s the Heart Hall.’ Clera nodded to the building on their left as they passed its many-pillared portico.
‘The Persus Hall.’ Jula finished tying her hair back with a black cord. ‘After Emperor Persus, third of his name, whose line ended when the current—’
‘Everyone calls it the Heart Hall because it was built for the shipheart.’ Clera led up the steps of Blade Hall, almost running but not quite.
‘What’s the ship—’
But Clera had already pushed open the heavy door and slipped inside. Ruli followed.
‘I still don’t understand who paid your confirmation fee.’ Jula came up behind Nona.
Nona didn’t understand either. She worried that perhaps it had been overlooked and this evening or maybe tomorrow a sister would come with ledger and quill and a demand for ten gold sovereigns. Talking about it with the others seemed like tempting fate.
‘Nona!’ Sister Tallow called her name the moment Nona stuck her head around the door. ‘Come here beside me.’
Nona, saved from answering Jula, hurried across. The old woman shot her a narrow look then returned her gaze to the rest of Red Class, the last few of them lining up in a second rank. Arabella, now in a habit, stood at Mistress Blade’s other side, golden and perfect, her hair looking as if a trio of handmaids had spent an hour combing and pinning it.
The hall extended about half the length of the building, ending in galleried seating around a short tunnel that led to the remaining chambers. The ceiling vaulted above them high enough for an oak tree to grow to maturity at the centre. Apart from a collection of a dozen or so
