Abbess Glass shook her head. “A high inquisitor, former or current, may not be put to question on Inquisition property. It’s an old ruling passed after a succession of high inquisitors were removed from office following interrogation by their deputies. It appeared to be being used as a form of self-promotion. Fortunately the ‘former’ was added to the ruling in order to defend past office holders such as myself from having the Inquisition used against them to settle old debts. And as an abbess I am of course subject to Church law rather than secular law, so the judges’ courts are not a fit place either.”

Pelter, wrong-footed, began to bluster. “Where, pray tell, can an individual such as yourself be made to answer to heresy? You don’t expect me to believe there’s no place fit to host so eminent a person!”

“Of course not.” The abbess smiled. “Take me to the emperor’s palace.”

“I’m taking you off this rock, that’s for sure,” Pelter snarled. He waved the guards forward.

“Have the sisters watch from a discreet distance, Tallow dear,” Glass called over her shoulder as they led her out.

The inquisitor and his guards ushered the abbess down the stairs and along her own entrance hall to her front door. Glass drew a deep breath, preparing to face the day. Many at the convent had seen her paraded in an iron yoke by their own high priest. As humiliations went the silver chains of the Inquisition were not the worst.

She stood while the guards tied her outdoor robes around her shoulders. If Pelter took her to the emperor’s palace it wouldn’t guarantee Glass’s safety but there was no place within those walls that rumour would not spread from. Rather than have Sherzal hand him both a confession and control of the convent, along with an excuse perhaps to seize any monastery he liked, Crucical would have the whole business unfold under his own roof before the disapproval of the high priest and the archons, before the Sis and the Academy. To Glass’s knowledge Crucical wasn’t even aware what was happening. It was one thing to grumble about not having the Red and the Grey answer your every whim, quite a different thing to wield the Inquisition as a political knife to carve out what you wanted. The latter required a stomach for blood. Lots of blood.

26

IN THE BLACK and rolling confusion into which Nona woke she found nothing to hold on to. Her limbs refused to obey. Her eyes found nothing to see. Keot’s words were distant, muted beyond understanding. The world moved and creaked and jolted and swayed around her. Something contained her. A box? And she was in motion. Captive and being taken somewhere?

Nona discovered herself unable to form sentences or coherent thoughts. Everything swirled around in her mind with nothing constant. When, in all that shifting chaos, she stumbled upon a way out, she took it.

Nona left the maelstrom of her poisoned thoughts to sit mute and watchful in the quiet place into which she had fallen. The eyes through which she gazed were not hers and looked where they wanted to, but they were sharp enough.

I’ve done this before.

Nobody answered, though she could feel another’s thoughts all around her, pulsing back and forth between memories. Some thoughts spiralled towards action, others were discarded and began to fade.

I’m inside Kettle. We’re thread-bound.

Nona watched a disjointed series of images roll past. Scenes from the Seren Way, nightfall in a forest, roads thick with travellers, wagons and carts queuing at a bridge. Sunrise over a river, watched from the prow of a boat.

While she tried to make sense of it Nona reached for the memories closest at hand, letting them run through her. It seemed that the memories around her were . . . about her. Reading lessons in the scriptorium; the day she arrived and Sister Apple made her wash in the bathhouse, how small and skinny she’d been; the sight of herself jumping from one loop of the blade-path to the next—scores of others . . .

Nona took another memory, this one feeling fresher, still buzzing with energy. It jolted into her, filling her mind with sound and light.

* * *

• • •

“KETTLE? KETTLE, ARE you even listening to me?”

Kettle sat up, holding the sheet to her against the cold of the undercaves. Apple stood above her, a pewter cup in one hand, salt-glazed flask of the convent red in the other.

“What?”

“Did you want any more wine?”

Kettle glanced up at Apple, in her nightdress, red hair unbound and coiled around her shoulders. A moment later it was all gone, Apple, the bed, the cave, and Kettle was reliving Nona’s fight in the graveyard at White Lake. The shock of the attack had drawn Kettle along their thread-bond to experience it with Nona.

Nona discarded Kettle’s memory of the attack before the third dart that had brought her down. She worried that, if she let it, the memory would drag her back into the darkness and confusion she had so recently escaped.

* * *

• • •

NONA LEFT KETTLE’S memories alone, feeling guilty for trespassing, both nervous and intrigued about what she might accidentally happen upon. Instead she concentrated on what the nun was looking at now. Concentrating inside Kettle’s mind was easy, as if somehow Nona had left behind the poisons that kept her prisoner wherever her body was.

A boat. Kettle was on a boat, watching the bank pass by, bushes, stunted trees, fields beyond, low hills rising, the line of the ice in the distance, a white underscore beneath the clouds, so faint it could be imagination and nothing more.

“Nona?” Kettle’s voice but Nona could “hear” the thought too, directed at her where she lurked in the darkness behind Kettle’s eyes.

Nona tried to answer but found herself mute, perhaps not as free of the poisons as she thought, allowed to watch through Kettle, a passive passenger, but unable to take any action, or speak with a voice of her own.

Kettle frowned. She knew something had changed. The bond that Nona had made between them was not something she understood but it was something she could follow. Kettle had been trying to shadow-bond when Nona had taken over and thread-bound them. Some element of the shadow-bond had become woven in and shadow-bonds were something Kettle could follow. She had shadow-bonds with Apple, with Bhetna—whom she must learn to call Sister Needle—and with Sister Frost. Kettle’s bond with Safira had been cut years ago, the severing more painful than the knife that Safira had stuck her with. But no shadow-bond is ever truly broken. Since Apple had pushed her into the dark Kettle had started to hear whispers along that old bond with her former bedmate, hints of emotion, tugs of wanting.

“Nona?” she asked again. Nothing. But she felt the girl’s presence. “Be strong, Nona. I’m coming for you.”

Kettle glanced upstream. The river had been narrowing all morning and the first hint of rapids foamed white in the distance. The boat she’d hired wouldn’t get much further. Part of her regretted not disembarking at Feverton that morning, but with the Corridor wind filling the sail the skiff could eat up the miles faster than the alternatives, even heading upstream.

“Here! Stop here.” The River Ganymede fed the Swirl which in turn emptied into White Lake. Kettle had learned nothing in the town that she had not already seen when the sharpness of Nona’s fear had torn open the bond between them, channelling her experience into Kettle’s mind. It had been a revelation, far more intimate a connection than the shadow-bond.