The traffic Nona met consisted mainly of tinkers and farmers, the former carrying their skills in their hands and on their backs, the tools of their trade, the latter bearing the produce of their fields, be it on four legs following along behind, or stacked as bales on a cart.
Few of them passed a word with her and most of those few words were warnings. Warnings of Durnish fleets, their sickwood barges packed so tight in the Marn that a man might walk across the sea from the southern ice to the northern without ever getting a foot wet. Warnings of the heretic hordes of the Scithrowl gathering behind their borders, whipped to a frenzy by their battle-queen. Nona nodded her thanks each time but robbers on the road and lack of food seemed more pressing concerns than distant armies.
She walked for half a day with an old woman who went from town to town sharpening edges—on knives, on ploughshares, on scythes, even on swords if such a thing were hung rusting above the elderman’s hearth. The woman, Gallabeth, hardly reached Nona’s shoulder, bent with age, all bones and uncomfortable angles. It took her three miles before she noticed Nona’s eyes.
“’Cestor’s Truth! Ain’t you got no eyes, sister?”
Nona suppressed a laugh. “They’re not holes, they’re just black. It was an illness. And I’m not a sister.” Not even a novice.
Gallabeth made the sign of the tree. “Thought you had the devil in you.”
Nona opened her mouth then closed it.
Gallabeth shuffled another ten yards before ceasing to suck at her few remaining teeth and offering another opinion. “It’s good you’re a nun, child.” Another shuffled yard. “Don’t have to worry about a husband.”
Nona had forgotten the uncompromising honesty of the ancient. Sister Pan had a touch of it but perhaps she still retained too many of her wits to let her tongue wander into unintentioned cruelty. But Gallabeth was right. Joeli and her friends had delighted in telling Nona how ugly her eyes made her. How no boy would ever want to gaze into them. The old woman knew it too. “I’m not a nun.” Nona made a mental note to cover up the sign of the Ancestor’s tree seared across the back of the coat she wore, branches spreading above, taproot reaching for the source below. “Not even a novice.”
Gallabeth waved the denial aside as if a convent range-coat and a glimpse of habit were impervious to dispute. “Husbands are overrated. I had one once. Oh yes. I was a pretty thing, long brown hair, good legs.” She slapped them for emphasis. “Was married for twenty years, till the flu took him. He was still a young man, not far past forty. Didn’t give me any children mind, or leave me much. Just a cottage too busy falling down to be much use, and this.” She rummaged in her skirts and produced a dull grey object, like a river stone, dark and specked with glints of crystal perhaps, longer than it was wide.
“What is it?”
“What is it? Best whetstone in the empire is what it is!” Gallabeth returned the object to its place. “My John didn’t leave me much, but this,” she patted her hip, “was how he made his living, and how an old woman like me is still welcomed up and down the Corridor. His grandfather found it under the ice. Harder than nails. Can put an edge on a diamond, he said, though I ain’t seen one of them . . .”
Kill her and take it. Keot flowed towards the hand nearest Gallabeth.
Why, what is it? Nona flexed the hand and kept Keot from passing her wrist.
Something old. A piece of the Missing.
A piece of them?
Ark-bone, not ship-bone, something older. Familiar. I can taste it.
“A useful thing to have,” Nona said.
“Keeps me fed, long as I can move my legs.” Gallabeth nodded. “And when I can’t walk the roads I’ll up and sell it to some youngster in Verity. Then I’ll see how long I can buy a place by a warm hearth. I won’t need long.” A grin. “My John always wanted a child so they could carry both his name and the stone. A son or daughter to have it and walk the Corridor. Keeping it sharp, he called it. Keeping us all sharp.”
Nona nodded. If it’s ship-bone or Ark-bone then it’s not from the Missing.
You don’t know anything: you’re too young to remember last year. Keot made a rush for her hand.
Nona held him back. And unless you start making sense I have to assume you’re too old to remember yesterday.
Keot sulked after that, only twisting her last farewell into a snarl when Nona finally managed to leave Gallabeth behind at a farm that needed her services, or at least needed her stone. Nona didn’t pursue the matter. She knew from experience that more than two questions in a row just set the devil talking nonsense. She’d come to think of him as a broken thing, part of a mind perhaps, filled with fragments of knowledge, occasionally useful as the shards of a pot can be, offering a sharp edge but no good for holding soup.
• • •
NONA’S RECOLLECTION OF the wider Grey, past the Rellam Forest to the west of the village and the bone-mire to the east was, like Keot’s memory, a fractured thing. Giljohn had taken them back and forth across the Grey and out beyond, chasing rumour when rumour showed its tail, then returning to some long-established if tortuous circuit when the well of gossip ran dry. What remained with Nona were slices. A town skirted here, a hillside there, a ruin, a lake.
Eventually, following directions from another village almost as small as hers though bearing a name, Nona found her way to the Rellam Forest. The old man who had
