“So, you cheated and then you fell.” Joeli put herself between Nona and the doorway.

Kill her!

Nona ignored Keot, slipping between Joeli and the tall girl from Holy.

At least cut an ear off . . .

Nona had her hand on the door before Joeli spoke again. “Did you cheat when you murdered Raymel Tacsis?”

Nona turned around.

“I can see it doesn’t take thread-work to pull your strings.” Joeli’s smile was an ugly thing.

Better. Make sure you scar her face.

“Raymel Tacsis sought to kill me out in the wilds. I killed him first.”

“There were half a dozen of you, including Tarkax Ice-spear. Raymel came alone.” Joeli managed to sound disgusted at the injustice of it.

“I heard she had some gerant helping her.” The girl from Holy Class wrinkled her nose at the thought of it, somehow ignoring the fact that Raymel stood close on nine foot tall and had sent his soldiers in first. “That girl . . .” She snapped her fingers, trying to recall a name. “You know the one . . . The fat—”

“Sorry.” Darla rubbed her elbow where it had struck the Holy Class novice in the face. She peered down at her, sprawled on the floor, moaning. “Didn’t see you there.”

Nona didn’t try to hide her grin. “I killed Raymel Tacsis. He was a murderer and I doubt many worse men have drawn breath. If that damaged your family connections at court or inconvenienced the Namsis in any way . . . I don’t care.” She turned to go. “You’ll have to work harder than that to provoke me, Joeli.”

“Of course the person who really pulled your strings was back here while you were murdering your betters out in the Corridor.”

Nona found herself facing Joeli again without remembering turning around.

“A pity she was killed in the cave-in while her conspirator escaped with the shipheart,” Joeli said. “I would have liked to have seen the peasant bitch drowned for her crimes against this convent. What did they call her? Hop-along! That was—”

“Hessa.” Nona found herself pinning Joeli to the floor. Her hand scarlet around the girl’s throat where Keot burned across her skin. “Her name was Hessa.”

Finish her! Tear her neck open! Keot fought Nona as she struggled to draw her hand back. Shouts of alarm rang out all around her, novices seized her shoulders, and still she couldn’t withdraw her hand though the trembling fingers, caught in a war between her and Keot, exerted no pressure.

As Darla lifted her clear Nona managed to force Keot into the shadows of her habit sleeve. Joeli’s throat slipped undamaged from her grip, just the faint white impression of fingers left to record the event. The girl’s eyes narrowed and she started to choke, clutching at her neck. Darla carried Nona out through the door, and the wave of Joeli’s concerned friends closed in around her. Their voices followed Nona, raised in such outrage that you might think Joeli lay disembowelled in a pool of her own gore. The last thing Nona saw through the ring of backs were Joeli’s eyes seeking hers, a small but triumphant smile on her lips.

4

“I HEAR YOU’VE been making friends in your new class.” Ara sat herself down beside Nona, golden hair frothing around her shoulders.

“How—”

“Ruli told me. You know there’s nothing happens at Sweet Mercy without Ruli knowing minutes later. I think it’s her secret marjal talent. You have your claws, Ruli has gossip-magic.” Ara nodded at Ruli, crossing the novice cloister to join them.

“I heard you put Joeli in the sanatorium!” Ruli sat heavily on Nona’s other side, habit billowing around her, cheeks red with excitement.

“I hardly touched her.” Nona frowned. Joeli had come to the Academia Tower with a shawl around her neck. In the corridor outside the lesson she came up to Nona and held her gaze for a long moment, pale green eyes fixed upon Nona’s black orbs without a flicker of fear. “Hessa’s name is so important to you? And yet you’ve never even visited the spot where she died. If you really thought Yisht killed Hessa . . . wouldn’t you want to find her murderer?” She turned away then with just a hint of a smile, her words echoing in Nona’s head.

A minute later Sister Rail had called the novices into the classroom. Inevitably she spotted Joeli’s neck scarf and asked about this departure from the novice uniform. Joeli had, in a croaking whisper wholly absent in the corridor, related a lurid tale of being throttled. Sister Rail had sent her to the sanatorium to be checked over and had fixed Nona with a steely eye. Sister Rule had been huge, straining every seam of her habit. Her replacement, Rail, was a short, painfully thin woman whose habit flapped around her. Both nuns controlled their class with a very firm hand, but Rule’s had at least been fair and she had welcomed questions, valuing cleverness of any kind. Although she’d endured just a handful of lessons so far it seemed clear to Nona that Sister Rail most valued the ability to recite what the mistress said. She appeared to consider questions to be a form of stupidity and contrary ideas tantamount to mutiny.

Nona looked around at her friends on the cloister bench. “Really. I had a hand on Joeli’s neck but I held back. I didn’t choke her.”

The pause, just a beat of silence, reminded Nona that even friends needed a moment to swallow unlikely statements, true or not.

“Rosie won’t be taken in by a pretend croak,” Ruli said. “She’ll send Joeli on her way soon enough.”

But Joeli hadn’t returned to class. She wasn’t in the cloister either, and Joeli loved to hold court beneath the centre oak during breaks. Nona glanced at her friends. They had seen her rages, back before she started to master Keot, and those hadn’t been pretty scenes. Fortunately Zole had suffered the worst of them, mostly out on the sands of Blade Hall, and had never complained . . . probably because she usually won the fight. And even when Keot had his hooks set deep into the meat of her emotions Nona had never used her flaw-blades or raised her hand against a novice not training for the Red.

“So, senior novice!” Jula hailed. She bent over Nona’s shoulder, lowering her voice. “Are you too grand to come ‘below’ with us now?” She cropped her mousey hair short these days. It tickled Nona’s ear.

“Try to stop me.” Nona grinned. Jula had always been the most bookish and law-abiding of novices but since her discovery, close by the Seren Way, of a hidden entrance into the caves there had been no end to her enthusiasm for clandestine exploration.

Darla came to join them, shouldering her way through the building crowd. “Oh Ancestor, that Sister Rail will kill me with those lessons. I don’t care which emperor annexed what territory.”

“You should!” Ruli said. “Your father’s promotion is any day now, and generals are always annexing something.”

Darla scowled, sitting heavily on the bench. “And I don’t care which tax caused what revolt. The only good thing to happen in that lesson was Joeli leaving.”

“Seriously, though.” Ruli pushed aside the long pale fall of her hair and turned back to Nona. “Keep a lid on that temper. Sister Wheel would happily push you off the cliff and have Ara as Shield. And what would you do out there in the world if the abbess had to throw you out?”