“Before we get to your mission report . . . this business with Safira.”
Kettle flinched. The abbess doubted she would have reacted at all if she were outside the convent, if she had her Grey-face on, but here in her home, here she let her guard down, allowed herself both to be vulnerable and to be loved.
Glass started again. “You said Safira knew Zole was coming. Who took the message to Lord Mensis?”
“Sister Pail.”
“Hmmm.” As Novice Suleri, Sister Pail had been somewhat impetuous and hot-tempered but never someone Glass would have considered easily corrupted. The abbess wasn’t naïve enough to think that anyone was incorruptible, but Sister Pail wouldn’t be her choice as the weakest link in the convent’s chain. “Someone let the news slip, and not many of us knew. Look into it when you’ve time.”
Kettle nodded. “If Sherzal has an ear in Sweet Mercy I’ll cut it off.”
Glass shook her head. “If Sherzal has an ear in Sweet Mercy I want to decide what it hears. Now, to the matter in hand.” She picked up the report before her. “You’ve been out in the world, Kettle. Getting your hands dirty once again. Doing the things that let others sleep at night. Necessary things, but cruel. Such acts can taint us, if we let them.”
“I am already tainted, Mother.” Kettle raised her dark eyes and Glass for a moment felt her own weakness, her own taint.
“They call me abbess now.”
Kettle returned her gaze to her hands.
Glass’s given title had been Reverend Mother and the novices called her Mother. She had not long buried Able and while her son had gone beneath the ground her grief had stayed above it. She had given up the worldly, her job, her home, her wealth, but not her sorrow—that she had worn to the convent like a second habit. And the novices had been her children. She knew that now. Each of them a grain of sand to balance in the scales against the stone of her loss. But a mother is the root of the family and the strength, and the mother to so many must be stronger than most can imagine. Her weakness, her taint, had been to care for each instead of caring for the whole. So she set the title Reverend Mother aside and became the abbess. Her care was for all of them and it must be singular, it must be iron.
“Abbess,” said Sister Kettle. Somehow in her mouth it still sounded like Mother.
“Sister Apple pushed you into the shadow, Kettle. You did not step into it yourself and from where you stand you can still see the light. I believe the Ancestor will take you in when your work is done.”
Kettle had been a waif when she joined them. So quiet you might have thought she lost her tongue rather than her mother. But children have resilience. Children scar and those scars remain across the years, but children grow too. Kettle grew around her hurts and learned to laugh again—learned wickedness as they taught her scripture—learned the swiftness of her body and the sharpness of her mind. She grew into a woman and learned to love and to be loved.
“I’ve read your report, sister. Exceptional work, once again.”
Kettle twitched a smile, shadows rising across her throat like a blush spreading. Sometimes they danced around her, sometimes they lay quiet, a drifting smoke of them into which Glass’s imagination would pattern horrors of her own making. Some would call it a corruption. Some would say that the darkness spoke inside Kettle now and soon she would start to listen to it. But corruption knocked at every door, and power often invited it in, the power of emperors, of high priests, even of abbesses. Glass would back Kettle to turn a deaf ear to corruption’s whispers where many of those who might accuse her would be seduced.
Glass set the report down and laid her hand upon the papers, each covered with Kettle’s neat lettering, curled tight across the page. “Should we fear Adoma?”
“Mistress Shade teaches us to set fear aside.” Kettle looked at her hands.
“Sister Apple is correct, as she so often is.” No Grey Sister had come as close to the Scithrowl battle-queen as Kettle had. As much as she wanted to know Adoma’s plans Glass wanted to know the woman more. Plans were one thing, but what a person would do when the ice pressed depended more upon what lay inside them than on what they had written on parchment about the future. “Caution is wise, but fear is seldom of help and should be set aside. What do we need to set aside for Queen Adoma?”
Kettle smiled, a hint of the mischievous novice who had once dusted Sister Wheel’s habit with a sneezing powder so powerful that the nun had blown her own headdress off. “The queen is a very passionate woman. Nothing seemed to motivate her so much as being denied. I was never close enough to touch her, but I heard her hold court. She speaks well and knows it.”
Touch. Glass suppressed a shiver. For a Grey Sister “close enough to touch” meant close enough to kill. Kettle hadn’t been instructed to put
