‘You two over there—’ Sister Tallow waved Arabella and Jula off to the side. ‘Both of our new arrivals come with reports of great potential. Let’s see how far potential gets them. Jula and Arabella first. Don’t hurt her, Jula.’ She stepped back and clapped once more. ‘Fight.’

Jula snapped into a fighting stance, body turned sideways to Arabella, fists raised at chest height, one a few inches behind the other, legs wide and braced. Arabella ignored her, looking instead at Sister Tallow. ‘Fight, Mistress Blade? How should—’

‘Fight!’ Sister Tallow spread her hands. ‘Kick her, punch her, bite her if you must. Put her down.’

‘But …’

Sister Tallow nodded to Jula. She exploded forward into a flying kick that hit Arabella on the shoulder and sent her sprawling to the floor.

‘The leg is stronger than the arm. The foot less delicate than the hand. Though to strike with them sacrifices balance.’ Sister Tallow motioned upward with fingers. ‘Get up, girl.’

The attack surprised Nona. Jula looked so bookish … she found herself smiling at the contrast, then noticed Arabella scowling at her from the ground.

Arabella rubbed her shoulder and got slowly to her feet.

‘Fight!’ Another clap.

Jula repeated the kick. Arabella stepped to the side, her speed remarkable. Jula kicked again, missed again. The two girls squared up, fists raised. Arabella threw the first punch, a swing, blindingly fast. Somehow Jula stepped into it and caught the blonde girl’s wrist, twisting her own body under Arabella’s to throw her over her shoulder. Arabella landed heavily on her back and, along with all the air in her lungs, spat out a word that Nona wouldn’t have thought ever got used in the emperor’s court.

Nona looked up at Sister Tallow for her reaction to the display and found her, together with the whole class, staring at Arabella, wide-eyed. The nun’s surprise was mixed with some emotion that Nona couldn’t identify but it was strong enough to make the lines of old scars stand out against her paling skin.

Jula said it first, even as she stood there in her victory. ‘She moves like a hunska.’

As a child in the ignorance of her village Nona had barely known about the four tribes of men or how their blood might show, but her months with Giljohn and then at the Caltess had taught her how deep one simple truth ran. Hunska-born were dark of eye and hair. She knew then why Arabella might be so special that the Church of the Ancestor would have negotiated to take her from a noble house. She knew it even before the first of the novices whispered ‘mixed’. Two-bloods were rare as a sheet-thaw. There hadn’t been a three-blood in the three centuries since Aran the Founder who carved out the realm from the chaos of wildmen and petty kingdoms. At least that’s what they said at the Caltess. If Arabella Jotsis showed the signs of the gerant line too she would be stepping into history. If she showed up quantal or marjal she could be stepping into legend.

‘Enough.’ Another of those claps that hurt the ears. ‘Nona, our ring-fighter from the Caltess …’ The novices laughed at the joke. ‘It’s your turn. Ghena? Are you ready?’

Nona turned to face Ghena and found her already in the fighting stance, eyes narrow with concentration, no smile, no snarl. The girl was perhaps an inch taller than her, making them the two smallest in the class. Her dark limbs were nearly as lean as Nona’s, every part of them muscle and bone.

The common sense behind the blade-stance was obvious: it presented a smaller area for attack while keeping a wide, stable base. Nona stood as she always stood though. She would learn and use the blade methods but it felt foolish to ape the stance immediately and face her first fight in a position she wasn’t used to.

‘Ready?’ Ghena asked. She hadn’t taken the advantage of surprise like Jula had, but looking at her Nona knew pride lay behind the restraint, not kindness. Ghena wanted to own her victory whole.

Nona gave a slight nod and Ghena snapped a punch at her, a straight jab, not Arabella’s clumsy swing announced by her whole body before she even started. This came sudden and direct. Nona blocked the fist with both hands, palms crossed before her face. The smack of flesh on flesh echoed in the space of the hall and the impact hurt far more than Nona had imagined.

She lowered her hands to see a look of surprise on Ghena’s face.

‘You’re fast.’ Ghena tilted her neck left, then right, stretching.

Without warning the novice launched a flurry of punches, advancing a step with each, a furious attack with no quarter granted. Nona let the world slow around her, the split seconds crystallizing into that clarity she had always been able to call upon. She stepped back, swaying out of the path of one punch, knocking the next aside so it passed within a hair’s breadth of her cheek. Ghena was quick. Very quick. Hunska-fast. Nona pushed aside another punch, another, sidestepped a third. Ghena’s mask cracked and her fury showed. Anger made her blows more wild but only seemed to increase her speed. Nona found herself having to work harder, saving herself only by the narrowest of margins. She gritted her teeth and dug deeper into the moment until her brain buzzed inside her skull like a trapped bee and even Ghena’s whip-crack blows became lazy things that she could step around.

Nona saw, even in the fractions their fight occupied, awareness start to enter Ghena’s eyes, a widening, a dilation of pupils. She knew the look – she had seen it before in the eyes of her first friend when he had tossed her a fourth ball and she added it to her juggling thinking to please him … She let Ghena’s fist catch her on the left shoulder, and spun with the impact, allowing it to carry her to the floor. A great spray of sand marked her arrival and she stayed there, panting.

A long moment passed and Nona let the world run at its own pace again, feeling the sand grains between her lips, the ache in her shoulder, the sting still in her palms. At last Mistress Blade’s clap broke the silence. Nona sat up, climbed slowly to her feet, and went to rejoin the line. The novices nodded their approval. Clera and Ruli looked impressed, Arabella sour. Of all of them only Ghena’s gaze held a measure of confusion, and in Sister Tallow’s there was a quiet speculation.

8

Nona liked the dormitories better than the nun’s cell of the night before. The building had three storeys, Red and Grey classes dividing the ground floor between them in two long, low rooms, Mystic and Holy each having their own floor, with study rooms for the Holies at the top. The beds were larger and more comfortable too, being raised on legs, each with a mattress of folded blankets over boards. Nona lay on hers while the class moved about her, chatting and getting ready for sleep. In the bed to Nona’s left Ghena had already crawled beneath her covers and lay dead to the world.

Nona stretched, yawning. The exercises in Blade, one punch and one throw repeated over and over, never quite to Sister Tallow’s satisfaction, had left her sore and sweat-soaked. The bathhouse afterwards took away the ache and stink of exercise and left in its place a warm and bone-deep weariness. If Clera hadn’t reached down a hand to help her out of the pool Nona suspected that she might still be there, floating helpless amid the steam.

Ruli came to sit at the end of Nona’s bed, her long hair pushed up into a nightcap bulging comically atop her head. ‘I’m surprised you can keep your eyes open after that.’ She nodded towards Ghena’s bed.