“Rellam Village. Aye. Ain’t heard tell of that place for years though.” He gave Nona a peculiar look, as if she might be testing him. But then everyone Nona met gave her odd looks. Your eyes might occupy only a tiny fraction of what you present to the world but they are what each stranger seeks when they meet you, as if needing reassurance concerning the person that watches through them. When you present two wells of darkness to the world the world makes the sign of the Ancestor’s tree, or points a finger up across their heart to the Hope hidden above cloud-scattered skies, or makes the horns to summon the protection of the small gods who watch from between moments and under shadows.
Nona found that the unfamiliar track she had been directed along turned into a familiar one and led her through the arboreal gloom of the Rellam Forest where once she had run in the red mist of a focus moon. That time she had been chasing Amondo, her first friend and also a man who had betrayed her before they had even met. She paced the track with the woods whispering on both sides, remembering the juggler, the quick magic of his hands and the strangeness he’d brought with him into her life, a splash of colour, proof of a world beyond the boundaries of the Grey.
Nona had once told the girls at the convent a lie. On the first day she met them she had claimed that the bloodshed that saw her given to the child-taker was wrought by a wood-god upon the Pelarthi who captured her. There had been no Pelarthi. Nona had never seen a Pelarthi mercenary, only heard of them in Nana Even’s tales. There had been no wood-god either—though she had seen one of those, a year before, watching her from the Rellam, his face almost like those twisted into the bark of trees. Almost.
The shadows on the forest path lengthened while the distance to open ground shortened. Nona fought to keep her pace from quickening. Around her the wood grumbled at the wind, creaking, groaning, always in motion. Nona felt eyes watching her and wondered whose they might be. A wood-god perhaps, ragged, leaf-clad, crouched in the boughs of an oak. Or perhaps just an owl, shaking off sleep.
Somewhere along this path she had murdered half a dozen soldiers. The troop Sherzal had sent with her quantal thread-worker, to guard him as he sifted through the world’s threads in search of bodies in which more than one blood ran. The men who had hired Amondo to coax her from the village. How much had they paid? How much had it been worth to them to keep their business quiet? If Amondo had proved too expensive the soldiers would have just come in to take her. Their time was worth more to Sherzal than the lives of a few villagers.
Ahead, with the shadows of the trees slanting across the trail like cage bars, the green arch opened and the land lay exposed to the sky. Nona left the Rellam, still feeling the eyes upon her back, and followed the path up through the moor towards the fields and huts of her village.
• • •
IT’S BEEN TOO easy. Keot burned across the back of her neck and she lowered her hood to let the Corridor wind cool him.
It wasn’t easy. Though as she said it Nona realized that it had been. A walk through the empire’s garden lands and into the Grey.
She said they meant to kill you. The dark one said it.
Nona shrugged. Kettle was probably just trying to scare me into leaving more quickly and not coming back. They would certainly have whipped me and sent me from the Rock. She frowned. Perhaps the inquisitors might even have thrown her into the Glasswater to add her bones to the bottom. But why would they pursue her once she’d gone?
Only as she closed the last mile did Nona’s thoughts wander to the kind of reception she might find waiting. In her head the village had been an indivisible object, a ball of memories tight-bound, all or nothing. Now long-banished thoughts of her mother intruded for the first time in an age. Would she recognize her daughter? Would she be angry? Would she pull back from the blackness of her eyes, or open her arms with the mother’s love that haunted Nona’s most vague and distant recollections, soft, encompassing, safe, and forgiving?
You’ll see it now. My village. Nona crested the low rise that the village knew as Heddod’s Ridge. Her heart suddenly took to pounding as the land opened out before her. Her eyes tried to make sense of a scene that should have been familiar. At first it looked as if she had been mistaken and the village must lie over the next rise. The houses were gone. But here a spar stood, black and alone, there a scattering of tumbled stones, and everywhere the ghosts of pathways, covered now with grass and bushes, but clear enough if you knew where to look.
TURN AROUND! Keot’s voice exploded into her skull.
Nona found herself obeying without question, but sluggishly, as if her mind were an anchor her muscles had to drag, still mired in the scene before her. With hunska speed Nona’s body wrenched itself through the degrees, fighting inertia. Her head led the turn and out of the corner of her eye she saw the projectile’s glimmer as it sped towards her back. Confused, shocked, Nona felt her grip on the moment slipping. She drove her flaw-blades out from the fingers of the hand she was reaching over her shoulder. The missile held her focus, thin as a nail, long as a hand, flighted, spinning, some kind of disk around the shaft an inch back from the tip, as if
