“It won’t work.” Nona had seen Kettle call to Apple through her bond. The Noi-Guin used them too. “I lost my shadow.”
“I’m going to try. And if you need me . . . you could call.”
“Let’s try.” Nona attempted a smile. She couldn’t twist her face right though.
Kettle took Nona’s hand and interlaced their fingers into a tight grip, dark eyes determined. She frowned with concentration. The night thickened around them, blackening away the sky, swallowing the stars, leaving only the red eye of the moon. Kettle squeezed, hard enough to make the bones creak in Nona’s hand. The darkness became a physical thing, masking even the moon. Nona felt it washing over her but sensed no deeper connection.
“It’s not working,” Kettle moaned.
“Try!” Nona stared at the place she knew their hands were joined. She stared until her eyes burned and the Path sliced through the blackness, everywhere at once, infinite, complex, filling the space, defining the surfaces, shaping Kettle from nothing with a multitude of glowing veins, a light that no darkness could touch. Nona stared harder still, seeing past the Path’s brightness to the shining shroud of threads whispering through everything, strands freed from the unity of the Path.
“It’s not working . . .” Kettle tried to release Nona’s hand but Nona gripped back with all her strength.
A warmth rose around her. The focus approaching. They must have been locked in this embrace for hours! Anyone could find them. Inquisitors must be on their trail by now? Nona pushed away the sudden panic. The focus moon swept away Kettle’s shadows and the Grey Sister cried out as if scalded. Nona wouldn’t let her pull free. She remembered another focus, the heat bathing her and Hessa on the scriptorium steps on the night Hessa had thread-bound them both.
“It will work.” Nona seized the threads around her wrist and Kettle’s, without delicacy, taking all of them together, bundled in her left hand. She made a fist, and squeezed as hard as she could. And in that moment the focus moon blazed so bright it took the world away.
• • •
“WHAT HAVE YOU done?”
Nona opened her eyes to see Kettle kneeling over her, her face hidden in darkness.
“I . . . don’t know.” Nona struggled to sit. “I thread-bound us.”
“Only two quantals can thread-bind. You have to share the blood.” Kettle helped Nona to stand.
Nona put a hand to the cliff where the Rock rose from the plains. She felt too tall, as if her feet were twenty yards below her. “We do share a blood. We’re both hunska.”
Somewhere above them a scattering of rocks rattled down the slope.
“They’re coming! Go!” Kettle shoved Nona towards the Verity Road.
“Come with me!” Nona heard the pleading in her voice and hated herself for it.
“I can’t. Appy and the abbess need me. The convent needs me.” Kettle bit her knuckle, hard. “I just can’t.”
Nona started to run into the night.
“I’ll delay them,” Kettle called in a low voice. “Stay safe, little sister. Be careful.”
Moments later Nona was jogging along a rough track towards the Verity Road, everything she owned in a sack bouncing on her back, everyone she knew, everything she cared about, retreating behind her.
An hour later, running through rough fields of rain-lashed mud, she came to the margins of a wood and halted among the trees. The cold wrapped her, her stomach growled, her feet ached. An emptiness gnawed inside her, a sense of loss, of failure. She set her back to the trunk of a pine and the tears came. Wracking sobs that hurt her chest.
She cried for an hour.
You should have killed her when I said.
Nona didn’t have to ask who. Joeli had played her from the start. The girl had pulled her strings, her threads too, perhaps, but Nona wasn’t sure of that. Joeli had goaded her into those caves, taunting her about Hessa, knowing the punishment, and knowing all the time that the moment Nona set foot in the place where her friend had died her intrusion would be known. Nona had been a fool.
You should have murdered her that first day.
Yes. Nona wiped her eyes and set her mouth in a grim line. I probably should have.
20
WHERE WILL YOU go?
I don’t know. Nona had no idea. Crouching in the margins of a damp forest wasn’t a good long-term plan. It wasn’t even a good short-term plan.
You’ll need to steal food.
Probably.
You’ll have to kill them.
Who?
The people you steal the food from. You don’t want any witnesses to lead your enemies after you. Keot sounded quite cheerful about the whole thing.
Just a line of corpses to lead them instead?
You should go to the city. Keot had enjoyed their trip to Verity.
That’s where the Tower of Inquiry is. I’m not difficult to spot. Sister Rose had tried to reverse the effect the black cure had on Nona’s eyes several times, but none of her potions had any noticeable effect. Nona had been disappointed at the time but now those failures were taking on more importance. There’s nowhere I won’t be discovered.
In the east dawn made a sullen approach, shading the black sky towards grey. Nona’s legs hurt, she was tired, cold despite her windbreak and range-coat, and her stomach had started to grumble even though she wouldn’t have had breakfast yet.
“I’m going to have to leave the empire. I could take a ship to Durn . . .” She wriggled her fingers in the pockets of her coat, remembering that such things cost and that she had no money. “Or cross over the border into Scithrowl.”
Or go back to kill Joeli, and then her friends, and the inquisitor, and
