4

      ‘I hear you’ve been making friends in your new class.’ Ara sat herself down beside Nona, golden hair frothing around her shoulders.

      ‘How—’

      ‘Ruli told me. You know there’s nothing happens at Sweet Mercy without Ruli knowing minutes later. I think it’s her secret marjal talent. You have your claws, Ruli has gossip-magic.’ Ara nodded at Ruli, crossing the novice cloister to join them.

      ‘I heard you put Joeli in the sanatorium!’ Ruli sat heavily on Nona’s other side, habit billowing around her, cheeks red with excitement.

      ‘I hardly touched her.’ Nona frowned. Joeli had come to the Academia Tower with a shawl around her neck. In the corridor outside the lesson she came up to Nona and held her gaze for a long moment, pale green eyes fixed upon Nona’s black orbs without a flicker of fear. ‘Hessa’s name is so important to you? And yet you’ve never even visited the spot where she died. If you really thought Yisht killed Hessa … wouldn’t you want to find her murderer?’ She turned away then with just a hint of a smile, her words echoing in Nona’s head.

      A minute later Sister Rail had called the novices into the classroom. Inevitably she spotted Joeli’s neck scarf and asked about this departure from the novice uniform. Joeli had, in a croaking whisper wholly absent in the corridor, related a lurid tale of being throttled. Sister Rail had sent her to the sanatorium to be checked over and had fixed Nona with a steely eye. Sister Rule had been huge, straining every seam of her habit. Her replacement, Rail, was a short, painfully thin woman whose habit flapped around her. Both nuns controlled their class with a very firm hand, but Rule’s had at least been fair and she had welcomed questions, valuing cleverness of any kind. Although she’d endured just a handful of lessons so far it seemed clear to Nona that Sister Rail most valued the ability to recite what the mistress said. She appeared to consider questions to be a form of stupidity and contrary ideas tantamount to mutiny.

      Nona looked around at her friends on the cloister bench. ‘Really. I had a hand on Joeli’s neck but I held back. I didn’t choke her.’

      The pause, just a beat of silence, reminded Nona that even friends needed a moment to swallow unlikely statements, true or not.

      ‘Rosie won’t be taken in by a pretend croak,’ Ruli said. ‘She’ll send Joeli on her way soon enough.’

      But Joeli hadn’t returned to class. She wasn’t in the cloister either, and Joeli loved to hold court beneath the centre oak during breaks. Nona glanced at her friends. They had seen her rages, back before she started to master Keot, and those hadn’t been pretty scenes. Fortunately Zole had suffered the worst of them, mostly out on the sands of Blade Hall, and had never complained … probably because she usually won the fight. And even when Keot had his hooks set deep into the meat of her emotions Nona had never used her flaw-blades or raised her hand against a novice not training for the Red.

      ‘So, senior novice!’ Jula hailed. She bent over Nona’s shoulder, lowering her voice. ‘Are you too grand to come “below” with us now?’ She cropped her mousey hair short these days. It tickled Nona’s ear.

      ‘Try to stop me.’ Nona grinned. Jula had always been the most bookish and law-abiding of novices but since her discovery, close by the Seren Way, of a hidden entrance into the caves there had been no end to her enthusiasm for clandestine exploration.

      Darla came to join them, shouldering her way through the building crowd. ‘Oh Ancestor, that Sister Rail will kill me with those lessons. I don’t care which emperor annexed what territory.’

      ‘You should!’ Ruli said. ‘Your father’s promotion is any day now, and generals are always annexing something.’

      Darla scowled, sitting heavily on the bench. ‘And I don’t care which tax caused what revolt. The only good thing to happen in that lesson was Joeli leaving.’

      ‘Seriously, though.’ Ruli pushed aside the long pale fall of her hair and turned back to Nona. ‘Keep a lid on that temper. Sister Wheel would happily push you off the cliff and have Ara as Shield. And what would you do out there in the world if the abbess had to throw you out?’

      Ara nodded. ‘Joeli’s trouble. She’s got half the mistresses on her side and a lot more friends inside the convent than you do. Then you have to think about how many friends she has outside. Just because they like her family’s money rather than her doesn’t stop them being dangerous. The Namsis are as well placed as my family, plus if you’re discharged from the order they’d happily murder you just to earn favour with the Tacsis.’

      ‘Sometimes I think I’d like to go out there and let them try.’

      ‘Nona!’ Ruli looked shocked.

      ‘What? It’s the only way I’m ever going to find Yisht. She’s not going to come back here and let me kill her.’ Nona scowled up at the grey sky, darkening by the moment. The cloister roofs opposite lay white, plastered by the ice-wind. The centre oak’s branches tossed randomly as the wind sought its direction, the Corridor wind trying to reassert itself. The tree’s leaves were wrapped so tightly against the cold that the branches seemed bare. ‘Joeli said bad things about Hessa. That’s what got to me.’

      ‘That’s how she is. Pulling strings, even if it’s not thread-work,’ Ara said. ‘She’s even got on the Poisoner’s good side because she’s so good at brewing up nastiness in a pot. So watch what you touch around her! And she poisons minds just as easily. The girl’s got a tongue on her. It wasn’t bad luck you fell foul of her straight off. She made it happen. Perhaps she even had it hot for Raymel Tacsis. She wouldn’t be the first Namsis matched to a Tacsis.’

      Nona stared at the novices out on the gravelled yard, jaw clenched. Ara was right and the truth of it burned her. She’d been manipulated, moulded to the Namsis girl’s desire. Her eyes found Zole, alone as usual, sitting with her back to the centre oak, knees drawn up. Joeli could never sway Zole. The ice-triber gave out nothing for anyone to take a hold of. Since the bloodshed at the Devil’s Spine all those years ago Zole had perhaps spoken a hundred words to Nona. Most of them singular and days apart.

      ‘So, are we cave hunting tonight?’ Ruli asked.

      ‘Don’t you ever sleep?’ Darla was distinctly less keen than the rest of them when it came to exploring the tunnels riddling the Rock of Faith.

      Ruli stuck her tongue out. ‘So, are we?’

      ‘It’s dangerous.’ Ara closed her fingers, signing that Ruli should lower her voice.

      Ara didn’t just mean the chance of getting lost or injured. After the theft of the shipheart Abbess Glass had made clear that any novices exploring the convent’s undercaves would find themselves stripped of the habit, too untrustworthy to marry the Ancestor. And