LITMIR.BIZ

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      Folded in the soft hubbub of voices and with the warmth of her bed drawing her down into sleep Nona let the contest with Ghena play across the back of her eyelids. The whole thing had lasted only moments, moments in which Ghena had thrown a dozen or more punches, a well-practised dance on her part, instinct and reflex on Nona’s. Memory of one fight slipped into memory of another, returning Nona to the sawdust and sweat of the Caltess, watching the apprentices spar. Partnis Reeve’s fight-masters taught discipline but left room for aggression.

      A week or two after Nona’s arrival Raymel Tacsis had strolled into the great hall where the apprentices were training. Nona, Saida and two other attic children engaged in sweeping the floor paused their labours and leaned on their brooms to watch the fighter. Up close his size was intimidating. Nona realized that her head wouldn’t even reach the man’s hip and that with the strength of one arm he would be able to toss her, Saida, and the other two sweepers across the room, not separately but together.

      ‘I’ve a better lesson for these puppies.’ Raymel climbed over the ropes into the ring where two gerant apprentices had been wrestling, both of them enormous but lacking more than a foot on the older man. He stood huge, blond, and glorious between them, somehow wearing his wealth though all that covered him was a loincloth and a sheen of oil.

      The fight-master stepped forward, an objection on his lips, but Raymel boomed across him, ‘And the rest of you.’ He beckoned another three apprentices from across the hall. Two hunskas holding nets and a gerant girl with a ponderous brow that looked as if it would break the fist of anyone foolish enough to punch her in the head.

      As the girl clambered in behind the two swifter apprentices Raymel drove an elbow into the throat of the gerant behind him. ‘Don’t ever wait to attack.’ The apprentice fell, clutching his neck. The rest stood, too stunned or nervous to act. Raymel slapped the girl, his huge hand covering half her face and sending her back into the ropes, spitting blood. His grin was an ugly thing, corrupting the good looks he’d been born with.

      Beside Nona, Saida covered her eyes, turning to reach for her broom.

      ‘Aren’t you going to watch?’ Nona couldn’t look away. The hunska apprentices had launched themselves at Raymel, two blurs of fists and feet.

      ‘I hate it.’ Saida resumed her sweeping. ‘It makes my stomach feel bad, seeing people hurt.’

      ‘But …’ Nona winced as Raymel trapped one hunska against the ropes and snatched him up by the leg. ‘Partnis bought you to fight. You’re going to have to.’

      She sensed rather than saw Saida’s broad shoulders shrug. ‘I’d rather mend people than break them. Is that a thing in the city? Mending people?’

      ‘I don’t know.’ Nona watched Raymel swing the hunska apprentice against the ring post. Part of her wanted to be unleashed within the roped enclosure. Another part wanted Saida’s hope to be true, wanted there to be people who put as much passion into healing as Raymel did into hurting.

      ‘Raymel!’ the fight-master barked. ‘Ease up.’

      Raymel continued to choke the apprentice in his hands, still seemingly impervious to the attacks of the last hunska remaining on her feet.

      Nona found herself turning away too, the undirected anger that built in her whenever she saw a fight now dissipating. ‘You won’t have to fight, Saida. They’ll see you’re no good at it and give you a different job. Regol said the old man who comes to the horses can sew up wounds like a seamstress. Perhaps he’ll need an apprentice soon. He is very old.’

      Saida managed a shy smile. ‘I’d like to help. I don’t want Partnis to give me away. I would miss you.’

      ‘I’d miss you too.’ Nona found her chest aching at the thought. ‘So I won’t let it happen!’ She said it with such fierce confidence that Saida’s smile had widened into something that made her blunt face suddenly beautiful.

      The dream turned darker, colder, shadows invading the Caltess hall. They were alone now, Saida and Nona, a sense of profound unease stalking between them.

      ‘Don’t hurt me!’ Saida was suddenly backing away from Nona, terrified.

      ‘Saida! I won’t let anyone—’

      ‘Don’t hurt me!’ Saida pointed at Nona, cowering.

      Nona tried to reassure her but found instead that she towered over Saida, holding her friend’s arm in a massive fist. The grey hall around her became the walls of Raymel’s apartment, Saida dangling above the thick luxury of a bearskin rug.

      Nona tried to let Saida go. ‘It’s not me. I’m not like him. I’m not!’

      ‘No, please! I didn’t mean to.’

      Anger flared somewhere deep in Nona’s chest. She was trying to help the silly girl. Why was she scared? Did she think Nona had anything in common with a creature like Raymel Tacsis? ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’ She found to her horror though that she was shaking Saida, the fist on her friend’s arm emphasizing her points as she spoke.

      ‘Let go!’

      ‘I am letting go …’ But the fist gripped tighter, twisted, and Saida’s screaming began.

      Nona drew a sharp breath and opened her eyes. The colours of her nightmare vanished leaving only black. It took a moment to realize where she was. The soft sounds of sleeping surrounded her on each side. At the back of her mind the dream carried on as if it neither wanted her attention nor required her permission to proceed. She had been following something, a line that ran its narrow path with danger to either side, on one flank a dark and consuming hunger, on the other a blindness, fierce as staring at the sun. And somehow she had been following someone else at the same time, black-clad, swift, certain, moving through a starless night, plotting a sure path between high buildings. The figure had found what it sought, looked up, reached out to find cold stone walls, and had started to climb.

      Nona strained her ears, hunting beneath the novices’ gentle snores and sighs, the soft turning of a body in sleep, the whisper of the wind … a scrape, a sudden movement … hard to judge at what distance in the unbroken night. Without warning, surprising herself, Nona jolted upright, as swift a motion as she had ever made, the blanket pulled from her. Perhaps some new sound had sat her up, perhaps nothing, just one of those twitches that comes out of nowhere and jerks your body as if by a string. Somewhere else in the dark a muffled impact, the sound of air leaving lungs fast and without orders …

      ‘Wuh-what?’ At the end of the row Ketti, the eldest of them, unhooded the lantern that sat beside her bed for anyone needing to make the trip to the Necessary in the dead of night.

      Just below the rolled blanket where Nona’s head had lain a small black object stood proud of the bed. She blinked, trying to focus – the hilt of something? Close by, Clera rose groggily from her own bed. ‘Can’t be morning already?’ Her voice thick with sleep. A figure stood between them, revealed in the light of the unhooded lantern – Arabella Jotsis, her face a mask.

      Nona took hold of the hilt – leather-bound, the pommel a ball of iron the size of an eye – and tugged. It took most of her strength to free the point from the boards, and when she saw the gleaming blade start to slide out from the slot it had put in her blankets she quickly covered it. Only Arabella noticed, her eyes moving from Nona’s hand on the hilt to Nona’s face as their eyes met.

      ‘Get back in bed! It’s the middle of the night.’ Ketti closed the lantern’s cowl until just a glow remained.

      Arabella hurried towards Ketti and moments later left the room holding the lantern.

      ‘Shut the window. It’s cold in here.’ Clera from her bed, the words all running together. Nobody replied.

      Nona lay back, pulling the blankets over her. It had grown cooler – the wind must have caught the window and pulled it wide – even so, if Clera called this cold then she had never known what it was to face the ice-wind, hungry and with only wattle walls

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