Kitabı oku: «Red Sister», sayfa 5
5
When hunger has been your lifelong companion the smell of food is a physical thing, an assault, a seduction, a deep-sunk hook that will reel you in. Nona forgot about Suleri’s anger. The convent’s wonders slipped from her mind. The flood of warmth on passing through the tall oak doors, the rapid, high-pitch babble of many voices that became almost a roar … none of it mattered. The aroma of fresh bread held her, the captivating scent of bacon sizzling, buttery eggs, scrambled and sprinkled with black pepper.
‘This way!’ Suleri’s voice carried the edge added when someone has had to repeat themselves.
She led Nona through a crowd of older novices chatting animatedly by the entrance. Nona’s head barely rose above belt-height on many of them.
Four long tables ran across the width of the hall, each surrounded by high-backed chairs and with large bowls set along the centre. A dozen or more girls sat around each table save the nearest one where only a couple of novices had yet taken their place, both looking like grown women to Nona.
‘Is that her?’ A voice from behind.
The conversation around the doorway died to nothing and, glancing back, Nona found the novices staring down at her.
‘Red Class at the back, Grey Class next, Mystic …’ Suleri slapped the table immediately before them. ‘And Holy!’ She waved Nona away. ‘Go!’
Nona advanced into the room under the scrutiny of the girls by the doors, arms straight at her sides, hands in fists. Despite the crowd she had never felt more alone. She bit her bottom lip hard enough to taste blood. Easing her jaw, she pressed her lips together in a thin, defiant line.
The conversation failed at each table as she passed; by the time she reached the fourth the girls there were turning their chairs to watch.
Nona stopped at the last table. The girls there ranged across a few years in age, though none looked quite as small or young as her. The hunger that had wrapped her stomach in its iron fist slipped away under the stares of half a hundred novices. She looked for a chair but all of them were occupied.
‘She’s not the one.’ Suleri’s voice cut across the room. ‘She’s the dirty peasant we saw earlier. Look at her!’ Ignoring her own command, the novice turned her attention to the plate before her, heaping it with bacon and bread.
Nona’s treacherous stomach chose that moment to rumble more loudly than she had thought possible. The laughter that followed made her cheeks blaze and she stood, furious, staring at the floor, willing it to crack and burn. Instead, it was the laughter that cracked and fell into silence.
Tall men in the furs of the red bear, and armoured beneath in bronze scales, came through the doors, novices scattering from their path. The warriors carried themselves imperiously, as though they might just walk over any too slow to get out of their way. Each wore a helm coiffed with chainmail and visored to mimic the sternest of faces without hint of mercy.
Tacsis men! Come with their own rope to set right the mistake at Harriton, or perhaps to administer crueller justice of their own. Nona snatched the knife from the nearest girl’s plate and holding it before her, level with her eyes, she started to back towards the service door in the rear wall.
The men ignored her. They stepped to either side, clearing the main entrance, and raised their visors to reveal faces that admitted no more compassion than had been engraved upon the metal. The abbess came through the open doors behind them, one hand gripping her crozier, its golden curl rising above her head, the other resting on the shoulder of a blonde girl perhaps a year older than Nona.
‘Novices, this is Arabella Jotsis. She will be joining our order.’
‘As was foretold!’ Sister Wheel stepped out from behind the abbess, Sister Tallow to the other side. ‘As was foretold!’ She cast about rapidly, her watery stare challenging anyone to disagree.
Abbess Glass frowned. ‘We can be sure she is Arabella and that she is Jotsis. Anything else is open to interpretation.’ She struck the heel of her staff to the floor, the sharp retort cutting off the novices’ mutterings. ‘We can also be sure that Arabella will study hard and be treated no differently from any other novice.’
Sister Wheel seemed on the point of saying something but at a glance from the abbess closed her mouth with a snap.
‘Additionally, we may be certain that Novice Nona understands that it is impolite to point a knife at guests,’ the abbess added, tilting her head in Nona’s direction.
Nona set the blade back on the table with a guilty hand as laughter rose about her.
‘Gentlemen.’ Abbess Glass looked left then right. ‘Your duty is dispatched. Arabella is now the charge of the convent and her care rests in my hands.’
The four men inclined their heads and turned, marching out of the building without a word to either the abbess or the girl they had delivered.
Arabella herself didn’t appear to notice their departure. She looked, to Nona, like a different kind of creature, set apart from the dull and dirty humans who scurried about the world. Her hair seemed to glow golden in the light that reached through the still-open doors. Her travelling clothes were a wonder of brushed suede and fur-edged leather, with a magnificent dark red cape across her shoulders secured by a gold chain. Where others might be described by their collection of flaws Arabella Jotsis’s only identifying feature seemed to be that she was without blemish. Perhaps the Ancestor looked like this, but people didn’t.
‘Your table is at the end, Arabella. I’m sure Red Class will welcome you into their ranks. Nona too.’ The abbess nodded towards the end of the room and took her guiding hand from the girl’s shoulder.
‘Best behaviour!’ Sister Tallow added, running a hard stare across the room. And with that, Abbess Glass led the nuns from the refectory.
Arabella Jotsis surveyed her new classmates with a sort of serene confidence and stepped forward as if not only had she lived here all her life, but also as if she owned the place and paid the wages of everyone around her. As she drew near the table an older girl from table three hurried up behind her with a spare chair.
The girl whose knife Nona had snatched stood up the moment the doors closed behind the departing nuns. Tall, slim and pale, her hair a black and wild tangle of curls, she seemed less impressed with the golden newcomer than the rest of the novices. ‘You’ll find that the Ancestor doesn’t order any special treatment for royalty here, Arabella. Minor or otherwise. Your father’s title might let him crush honest men down in Verity, but up here fights are one on one and it’s skill that counts, not rank.’
Arabella hardly deigned to glance at the girl. ‘Your father put himself in prison, Clera Ghomal. He made a poor merchant.’ She sat, like a princess, in the offered chair. ‘And a worse thief.’ Her accent was new to Nona, rich and precise, words clipped, the emphasis on odd syllables.
Clera balled her hands into fists. ‘Be careful what you say—’
‘Oh please. You come from a family of money-grubbers who have lost their money … which makes them just … grubbers. Let it lie. From what I understand we will all have plenty of opportunity for hitting each other later. So do be quiet and let me eat.’ Arabella took a roll of crusty bread and broke it onto her plate.
‘Thank you for making it so clear.’ Clera sneered. ‘How terrible for you to have to endure the company of people who don’t own their bodyweight in jewellery. How can you stand to mix with us?’ She reached out and took Nona’s hand. ‘I suppose you hate Nona here most of all. Imagine, a peasant girl dining at the same table as a daughter of the Jotsis!’
Arabella spread butter onto the halves of her roll. ‘I’m not in the least interested in you or your skinny hunska peasant, Ghomal. Now do sit down, you both look ridiculous.’
Clera dropped Nona’s hand and took a step towards Arabella. ‘I—’
‘Clera!’ Suleri’s voice cut across her from the far end of the room. ‘Sit down. Shut up. Save it for Sister Tallow’s class or you’ll find yourself working in the laundry for a month.’
Clera sat down, mouth set in a vicious line. A heartbeat later she grinned, leaned back and pulled across a chair just vacated by a novice leaving the next table. ‘Nona. Take a seat. You look hungry.’
6
On his wagon Giljohn had fed Nona far better than her mother had ever been able to. At the Caltess the food had been better still and Nona’s bones had begun to sink from sight like a city child’s. The refectory at Sweet Mercy Convent put the Caltess meals to shame. Nona ate meat in whole pieces for the first time she could remember, not just a shred here or there but thick slices of bacon still hot from the pan. She wrapped them in crusty bread and chewed with dedication, scattering crumbs everywhere, while Clera chatted easily at her side.
The merchant’s daughter made no further mention of Arabella, not even glancing down the table in her direction. Instead she rattled on cheerfully about what could be expected from the day, requiring little from Nona in return save the occasional grunt or ‘yes’ in the brief gaps when her mouth wasn’t full.
‘Ghena’s the youngest in the class, she’s still nine. Me and Ruli are eleven. We’ll probably move into Grey soon – that’s Class Two. Class One is Red. Sister Oak is our mistress but we don’t see a lot of her.’ Clera paused to watch Nona eat. ‘You really were hungry!’
‘Mgmmmm.’
‘Our first class is Academia with Sister Rule – that’s everything from numbers and reading to history and geometry. Right now we’re doing geography.’
A full mouth saved Nona from having to admit that she didn’t know what geometry or geography were.
‘We have Blade this afternoon – we’re doing unarmed, but later we learn knives and stars, the older ones learn swords, and tactics and strategy too. In Red Class everyone studies everything. Later on the Holy Sisters do more Academia and Spirit classes. Martial Sisters do mostly Blade. Sisters of Discretion concentrate on Shade. Mystic Sisters spend their time learning Path. Everyone calls the Martial Sisters the Red Sisters, and the Mystic Sisters are Holy Witches – but don’t let a nun hear you call them witches!’
Nona kept eating, letting the confusion of names wash over her. It would sink in given time. She finished the bacon, struggled through the scrambled egg, but the bread bowl defeated her, sitting before her with three crusty rolls still nestled at the bottom. She had never stopped eating while food remained before her: to do so seemed desperately wrong.
‘Come on!’ Clera put a hand on her shoulder. ‘We’ll be really late.’
Looking up, Nona saw that they were the last two at the table. She glanced behind her and saw that only three other novices remained in the hall.
Clera hurried towards the main doors. ‘Come on!’
Nona followed, hands folded over her aching belly, so full it hurt to walk, let alone run. Clera led the way back past the dormitory building and across a quadrangle, cloisters to one side, a rectangular pool and fountain in the middle. Above the range forming the western end the sails of a windmill could just be seen passing through the top of their cycle. Clera hurried Nona out through a corridor penetrating the north range.
‘That’s the Academia.’ She pointed ahead to an ornate tower close to the cliffs on the plateau’s north side. Together they half walked, half ran to the archway at its base. A rapid ascent by the stone steps of a spiral staircase brought them to an oak door, the steps continuing up. Clera stopped at the door and pushed on through to the room beyond.
‘There’s no one here.’ Nona felt stupid the moment the words left her, a peasant girl stating the obvious. The classroom lay in shadow. A large, elderly cat watched from its grey curl in the far corner: Malkin, the abbess’s beast. Four rows of empty desks faced a polished table in front of a chalk-marked board. A confusion of maps and charts decorated the wall behind that, so many that pieced together they might show the whole world.
‘Damnation!’ Clera ran to one of the windows and threw open the shutters. Diamonds of glass, leaded together into a continuous sheet, ensured that only the light came in while the cold stayed out. She pressed her face to the panes, turning one way then the other. ‘She’s taken them out somewhere – can’t see them …’
Nona advanced towards the desk. It held all manner of fascinating objects, not least three leather-bound books and a large ledger beside a quill and inkpot. The objects that drew her though were a dog’s skull, a clear crystal nearly a foot long and too wide to close her hand about, and a glistening white ball in a brass stand. This last held her attention until she found herself beside it, knees bumping against the desk.
‘What is it?’ Nona set a finger to the enamelled whiteness of the ball, finding it rough beneath her touch, tiny ridges catching the light. It was a little larger than her head and perfectly round. A stand held it top and bottom so that it could rotate. And around its middle, like a belt, a very thin strand of colour no thicker than a piece of string.
‘Don’t touch! Mistress Academia would have a fit!’ Clera elbowed Nona out of the way and immediately ignored her own instruction by setting the thing spinning on its pivots. ‘It’s the world, silly.’
‘The world?’ That made no sense at all.
‘Abeth.’ Clera huffed her breath out as if Nona’s stupidity had hit her in the stomach. ‘A model of it.’
Nona blinked. Her world had been the village, the forests, the fields, and in the distance the northern ice forming one wall of the Corridor. She hadn’t ever considered that it might have a shape and if she had she would not have guessed at a ball, white or otherwise.
‘It’s a globe.’ Clera reached out to stop it spinning. ‘We live … here.’ She put her finger on the line around the middle.
‘We do?’ Nona leaned in to look more closely.
‘Want to see something special?’ Clera grinned. Without waiting for an answer she set one hand to the top of the globe and the other to the bottom then, with a little effort, rotated each in opposite directions. Smoothly and without noise the lower part of the white surface began to retreat. Nona saw that it was not one piece as she had imagined but comprised many bladed parts that shuffled beneath each other like the feathers of a folding wing. In consequence the cord-thin strip of colour girdling the globe widened, first to a finger’s width, then wider and wider still until Nona’s whole hand couldn’t cover it. The pattern of jewel-enamelled blues and greens and browns fascinated her eye.
‘What—’
‘That’s the world fifty thousand years ago, long before the tribes even came.’ Clera rotated the halves back slowly and the ice advanced. ‘All the people that lived across all these lands, pushed back.’ She returned the ice sheets to their original position. ‘Pushed into this tiny corridor as the sun got old and weak.’
‘How could they fit?’ Nona imagined them running before the ice.
Clera shrugged. ‘Mistress Blade says people need room. You can squash them in only so far, then the bleeding starts, and when it’s done … there’s just about enough room again.’
‘It’s good to see that some of your lessons stick, Novice Clera.’
Both girls turned to see the doorway behind them now almost entirely full of Sister Rule, the convent’s Mistress Academia, a woman of considerable height and still more considerable girth, all wrapped in the dark grey of a nun’s habit. Sister Rule pushed on into the classroom, the rest of Red Class filing in behind her, diverging towards their allotted desks. Arabella already had three girls pressed around her and they took seats beside each other, all of them smirking behind their hands.
‘Explain yourselves, novices.’ The nun fixed them with dark and beady eyes.
‘We were …’ Clera searched for an explanation … and could find nothing better than the truth, which she settled on with a sigh of defeat. ‘Nona was very hungry!’
A scatter of laughter went up at that, cut off sharply as Sister Rule’s yardstick cracked across a desktop. She reached the table, looming over both girls. ‘Well, Nona does appear to need some feeding up. Do not be late to my class again, Nona. Today you missed a quick observation of the layered structure of this plateau where the Glasswater sinkhole exposes it. Next time you could miss considerably more than that – dinner included.’
Clera slipped away to her desk near the door. Nona stayed by the table. She looked up at Sister Rule’s face, which was at once both fleshy and severe, then let her eyes slip to the globe again.
‘You can take either of those two desks at the back, Nona.’ Mistress Academia laid her yardstick against her table and let out a sigh. ‘I do hope you’re not going to slow us down too much, child. The abbess casts her nets very wide sometimes …’
Nona dropped her gaze to the floor and took a step in the direction the nun had waved at. A mixture of anger and defiance boiled behind her eyes but stronger than that, more than that, was the desire to know. Besides, she was too full to be properly angry.
‘I … don’t know what geography is.’
Sister Rule’s yardstick killed the laughter before it started. ‘Good. You’re clever enough to ask questions. That’s better than many I’ve had through these doors.’ She took her seat behind the desk, straightened her habit, then looked up. ‘Geography is like history. History is the story of mankind since we first started to record it. The story and the understanding of that story. Geography is the history of the world beneath our feet. The mountains and the ice, rivers, oceans, land, all of it recorded in the very rocks themselves for those with the wit to read what’s set there. Consider this slab of rock our convent rests upon, for example. The history of this plateau is written in the limestone layers that can be seen in the sinkhole two hundred yards west of this tower.’ She sent Nona on towards her desk with a gentle poke of her stick. ‘Our history is wide and we are narrow, so perhaps its lessons no longer fit. Cut your cloth to your measure, some say. But the history of the land has lessons more important than those of kings and dynasties. The history of the ice is written there. The tale of our dying sun, etched into rock and glacier. These are the lessons we all live by. And when the moon fails we will die by them too.’
7
Nona resolved to make it to Blade on time. Over lunch in the refectory Clera explained the meaning of the various bells that sounded throughout the day.
‘There are three bells. That’s the iron bell, Ferra, which just rang. It’s got a hollow sound and dies off quickly. That’s for the sisters, to tell them about prayers mainly. It hangs in the little belfry up on the Dome of the Ancestor. The one that looks like a nipple.’
‘Clera!’ Jula scolded. She had taken the chair on Nona’s other side and now turned to join the conversation. ‘Bray is the brass bell that hangs in the Academia, at the top of the tower. It sounds the hours, and that’s what you have to listen to for class and meals.’
‘And lights out and getting up.’ Clera cut back in. ‘Bray has a deep voice that hangs.’ She made her own deep and sonorous, a singer’s voice, Nona thought. ‘Afternoon class is sixth bell, lunch is fifth, dinner is seventh.’
‘Blade this afternoon.’ Jula rolled her eyes. ‘I hate Blade.’
‘Holies always do.’ Clera smirked.
Nona considered Jula for a moment. The girl had a studious look about her, slender despite more than a year eating at the convent table. She had mousey hair, cut at neck length. Nothing about her suggested that hunska or gerant blood might show in years to come. Almost nobody showed up quantal or marjal, however good the signs, so Jula would almost certainly be a Holy Sister. Nona knew very little about the Church of the Ancestor but the idea of a life spent in prayer and contemplation held no appeal at all. If the life in question didn’t also include being well fed and having a warm safe place to live then Nona might have felt sorry for the girl.
‘After Blade you’ll think you’ve met the hardest mistress,’ Clera said. ‘But Mistress Shade makes her seem gentle. Everyone calls her the Poisoner or Mistress Poison because she always has us grinding up stuff for one poison or another. She’s supposed to teach us stealth, disguise, and climbing and traps … but it’s always poison. Anyway, don’t ever call her Mistress Poison.’ Clera shuddered.
Jula nodded, looking grim. She picked up her fork and got it halfway to her mouth before remembering the bells. ‘Bitel is the third bell. The steel bell.’ She returned the fork to her plate, perhaps still thinking of poisons. ‘That’s almost always bad news, and you won’t confuse it for the others – it’s sharp and very loud. The abbess will ring Bitel if there’s a fire, or an intruder, or something like that. Hope you never hear it. But if you do and if nobody tells you different, go to the abbess’s front door and wait.’
‘I heard …’ The girl across the table spoke up, loud enough for everyone to hear. ‘I heard the abbess herself brought you up from Verity.’ The rest of the class had been focused on Arabella who had been telling them some story about the emperor’s court. Nona had only caught the odd word and had imagined it a fairy tale of the sort told about princesses around the hearth in her village … but then she had remembered Clera calling Arabella royalty and it struck her that the fairy story might actually be true.
‘I heard Abbess Glass brought you up the Seren Way in the middle of the night.’ The speaker was the one Clera had called Ghena and had said was the youngest in the class, a girl with a tightly curled cap of short, black hair. In the village Grey Stephen had a staff that had been his father’s and his father’s: where so many hands had polished the dark wood for so long it was the colour of Ghena’s skin. ‘I heard you’re a peasant. Where are you from? How did your people even pay the confirmation fee?’
‘I—’ Nona found she had the whole table’s attention. Even Arabella broke off her tale to stare.
‘You hear too much, Ghena.’ Clera cupped both hands behind her ears and laughed. ‘You were at the window all night looking to see “the Chosen One” arrive.’ She tilted her head just a fraction in Arabella’s direction. ‘Did you see the abbess going by with dust on her skirts and know she’d come up by Seren Way?’
Ghena scowled and looked away.
After lunch, and before Bray spoke for the sixth time that day to let them know they must hurry to class, there was time to wander or to sit. Arabella left the refectory with most of the class at her heels.
‘They’ll take her to the novice cloisters,’ Clera said.
‘It’s where most of us spend time after lunch,’ Jula explained. ‘It’s not like the nuns’ cloisters – it’s full of chat – too loud to think.’ She looked disapproving where Clera looked wistful.
‘We’ll take you to the sinkhole,’ Clera said. ‘You missed it today—’
‘I’m not swimming!’ Ruli interrupted, the last of those who’d stayed.
‘Me neither.’ Jula crossed her arms and pretended to shiver.
‘We’ll just sit and throw stones,’ Clera declared. ‘And my new friend Nona can tell us why her parents gave her up.’
The Glasswater sinkhole awed Nona. It looked as if some giant had poked a finger into the plateau when it was soft and new, leaving a perfectly round depression whose vertical stone walls dropped forty feet to the surface of dark and unrippled waters. She wondered what lay beneath the surface – hiding in unknowable depths.
The pool was about forty foot across. On the far side an iron ladder, bolted to the stone, led down into it. Nona could see the layers that Sister Rule had mentioned, showing in the sinkhole’s walls, as if the whole plateau were made of one thin slice laid atop the next.
The four novices sat on the edge, legs dangling out over the drop. Nona’s shoes were the finest pair she had ever owned, the only ones made of leather. She was terrified she’d lose them and clenched her toes inside, even though they were laced on tight. For a while none of them spoke. Clera played a copper penny across the backs of her fingers with practised ease. Nona enjoyed the silence. She didn’t want to tell her story, not yet … not ever. She didn’t want to lie either.
‘Everyone tells,’ Clera said, as if reading her mind.
‘Mother died trying to give me a little brother,’ Jula spoke into the awkward gap. ‘Father got very sad after that. He’s a scribe, not a practical man, he said. He thought the nuns would look after me better than he could.’
‘My dad ships convent wine across the Sea of Marn but he wasn’t paying the duty.’ Ruli grinned. ‘My uncles are all smugglers too. The ones they haven’t hanged. The abbess came to the trial and said she’d take me in. Dad had to agree, and it saved his neck.’
They both looked at Nona, waiting.
Clera raised her eyebrows, inviting Nona to speak. When they could rise no further, she herself spoke. ‘On the first day you tell why your parents didn’t want you any more. It’s supposed to stop it hurting. Sharing does that. Later you hear everyone else’s stories and you know you’re not the only one. If you’d ever been to prison you’d know that’s the first thing people do there – they tell what they did.’
Nona didn’t like to say that she had been to prison and that she hadn’t needed to tell because the guards had shouted it out as they led her to her cell. Murderer. It was on her lips to ask what a merchant’s daughter knew about such places – but as she opened her mouth to speak she remembered the cruel things Arabella had said about Clera’s father. He put himself in prison. And instead she began to answer the question that she had been trying to avoid. Nona’s story should have begun, ‘A juggler once came to my village. He was my first friend.’ She didn’t start there though. She started with a question of her own.
‘Did you ever have a dream that they were coming for you, in the night?’ she said, staring at her feet and the black water far below them.
‘Who?’ asked Clera.
‘Yes.’ Ruli lifted her head, shedding long pale hair to either side to reveal her long pale face.
‘They?’ Jula frowned.
‘They. Them. Bad people who want to hurt you,’ Nona said, and she told the girls a story. And though at first her words stumbled and she spoke as a peasant girl from the wild Grey lands of the west, out where the emperor’s name is rarely spoken and his enemies are closer than his palaces, she found her tongue and painted in the girls’ minds a picture that took hold of them all and wrapped them in a life they had never tasted or imagined.
‘I dreamed I was asleep in my mother’s house in the village where I had always lived. We weren’t like them, Mother and me. The villages along the Blue River are like clans, each one a family, one blood, the same looks, held by the same thinking. My father brought us there, me in my mother’s belly, but he left and we didn’t.
‘I dreamed of the focus moon, burning its way down the Corridor, and the boys and girls rising from their beds to play in the heat of it. The children joined hands around my mother’s hut, singing that old song:
She’s falling down, she’s falling down,
The moon, the moon,
She’s falling down, she’s falling down,
Soon, soon,
The ice will come, the ice will close,
No moon, no moon,
We’ll all fall down, we’ll all fall down,
Soon, too soon.
‘In the focus the boys and girls look so red they could be covered in blood. They’re coming. The bad ones. I know they’re coming. I see their path in my mind, a line that runs through everything, zig-zagging, curving left, right, coiling, trying to throw them off, but they’re following it – and it leads to me.
‘Outside the hut the children fall down. All at once. Without a scream.
‘I wake. All at once. Without a scream. It’s dark, the focus has passed and the fields lie restless beneath the wind. I sit up and the darkness moves around me like black water, deep enough to drown. For the longest time I sit there, shivering, my blanket wrapped tight around me, eyes on the door that I can’t see. I’m waiting for it to open.’
Dogs barking. A distant scream. Then a crash close at hand. The door-bar breaks at the first kick and a warrior fills the doorway, a lantern in one hand, sword in the other. He’s tall as any man in the village and muscle cords the length of him.
‘Take her!’ He steps in and others follow. The lantern finds dull glints among the iron plates on his leather shirt. He moves towards the workshop door, the other room where Mother sleeps on the reeds piled for her weaving.
Strong hands seize me, iron-hard and pinching. The men have braided beards. A woman slips a loop of rope around my wrists and draws it tight. Her face is marked with vertical bars of paint. Wooden charms hang in her tangle of dreadlocks. A Pelarthi. Raiders from the ice-margins.
Mother breaks from the workshop as the first raider reaches it. She’s very fast. Her reed-knife makes a bright sound as the blade skitters across the iron plates over his stomach. He swings his heavy sword but she’s not there. Her hand is at the neck of the woman holding me – the knife buried in the woman’s throat. My mother hauls me towards the main door. We nearly get there, but the man in leather and iron turns and swings again. The point of his sword finds the back of her neck. She falls. I fall beneath her. And the night goes dark again, and quiet.
