When the focus came it woke me, first patterning the world in glowing red, and black shadow, the undergrowth writhing beneath the sharp relief of branches. As the ground began to steam I thought I heard a shout, far off, and I took to the trail, running hard, knowing it would be Amondo.
I met him on the path, rushing towards me out of the fog as fast as I was running towards him. He nearly flattened me but I’m quick and I slipped aside at the last second. It happened so swiftly that he didn’t even see me. I shouted after him, but he was lost in the pink blanket of the fog.
I thought he was gone, but the sound of his feet pounding the track stopped in one sudden moment.
‘Nona?’
‘It’s me! I followed you.’
‘Dear Ancestor! Hide! Hide in the trees!’
I heard the sounds of his pursuit, more pounding feet, more shouts and cries.
‘Bleed me!’ And Amondo came running back, the hot mist swirling as it released him. He grabbed my arm and dragged me off the track, out into the forest. The thorns tore my skirt and cut my legs.
‘Shhhh.’ Amondo pulled me behind a tree, one hand over my mouth.
The band chasing him thundered by, clinking metal, rasping breaths, heavy boots.
A minute later Amondo drew his hand away and unclenched the other from around my arm.
‘Why were they chasing you?’
‘I owe them something.’
‘Why did you leave?’
‘I wore out my welcome on the first day, Nona. The real question is why would anyone stay?’
The focus was passing and already the fog lay in streamers being trailed through the tree trunks by the wind. The moon’s light, no longer fierce, showed Amondo’s face, worried and watchful.
‘I want to know—’
‘People always want to know things … until they hear them, and then it’s too late. Knowledge is a rug of a certain size, and the world is larger. It’s not what remains uncovered at the edges that should worry you, rather what is swept beneath.’
‘I don’t understand.’ He didn’t look like the juggler who had thrown and caught for a heel of bread. He looked older and sadder and wiser.
‘There’s a line, Nona, a burning line that runs through the world. It runs through dreams and beneath roots and across the sky … and it leads to you.’
‘Me?’ I asked. It didn’t seem likely. ‘Why?’
He managed a smile. ‘We’re back to knowledge again. The important thing is that those men who were chasing me – one of them can follow that line. He calls it a thread. A clever man with clever fingers … He can tie three knots in an eyelash, that one. And he’ll keep on following that thread. He didn’t want to go into the village to get you … so he sent me …’
‘You were there to get me out?’ I felt a numbness prickling across my cheekbones and a hollowness in my stomach. ‘But you said we were fr—’
‘And a fine job you’ve done of it, Amondo.’ A deep voice rolled out from the direction of the track. Figures moved from shadow to moonlight to shadow. Tall men in uniform, swords at their hips, the soft metal whisper of mailshirts. ‘Just when I was starting to doubt you!’ A laugh. ‘Nobody took her. Not even an itinerant juggler. She ran away by herself. Brilliant.’
The soldiers closed on us from all sides. Two seized Amondo’s arms, another took me by the scruff of my neck.
The leader, the one Amondo said could follow my thread, moved out into the moonlight. He wasn’t old, not much older than Amondo, but he didn’t look like us, not like a real person. He didn’t look hungry. His beard came rolling down to the bottom of his neck and there wasn’t a spot of dirt in it. His cloak was scarlet even in the moonlight and the silver bands across his shoulders shone bloody with it.
‘We still have to hurt you, of course,’ he said. ‘For the running.’ He motioned to the two soldiers and they began to twist Amondo’s arms. He cried out immediately.
‘And then of course we have to kill you,’ the man added when Amondo paused his scream to gasp in a breath. ‘To keep this secret.’
That’s when I did it. I reached around to where the man had hold of my neck and I cut him, skin, muscle, tendons, arteries – Sister Tallow is right, men are just like pigs inside – and his blood shot out so fast that it drenched my shoulders even though I was already moving as fast as I knew how to.
I knew I had to reach the man with the beard, the man with the clever fingers, without giving him the chance to show any of his cleverness. I slashed him across the stomach before he even noticed I was loose. I cut him and the bright rings of his mail made bright little sounds as they broke open. He noticed then and folded up, hugging his belly. I cut that beard of his with another slash and left him torrenting blood from an open throat.
Then it was all running and slicing and screaming. I climbed up one man who tried to chase me round a tree with his knife. I dug my blades into his back and hauled myself up him. A foot on his belt – thrust my blades into his neck – heaved up. I jumped from his shoulders onto the last of them. She still had a hand on Amondo’s arm, her other one on her sword hilt, half-drawn.
And when it was done and they were sprawled among the bushes and the trees were splashed with gore and cut here and there where the soldiers had swung their swords I stood in the middle of it all wearing their blood and screaming. And I was screaming for more. And Amondo ran … although he was my friend and I had saved him … he ran.
‘And that’s how they found me the next morning, and that’s my secret, and that’s why my mother let them give me away. I’m a monster.’
Nona started to walk towards the cave mouth and the day that was dying on the slopes just beyond. ‘That’s my secret and my shame. I’m Nona Grey, war is in my veins, and the screams of my enemies are music to me.’
‘Wait!’ Darla shouted. ‘That’s nonsense. Where did you get your knives from … how did you know how to use them? How did you kill six warriors?’
Nona turned and slashed a hand across the wall. A shower of fragments scattered out across the cave floor and where she had struck four gouges remained in the stone, deep and dark.
‘But … they had swords.’ Darla waved hers for good measure.
‘Never try to swing one in a forest,’ Nona said. ‘And never underestimate a wild animal, however small it might be.’
Darla had no reply. She set her fingers to the cuts Nona had left in the rock, and stared in wonder.
‘Scarlet and silver?’ Ruli spoke from the back of the cave where she had crouched, listening to Nona’s story.
‘What?’ With the truth out Nona ached to leave, before they properly understood what she had told them.
‘The man was in scarlet and silver? Were the others in uniform?’
‘I …’ Nona tried to see it. She saw blood mostly, and wounds. ‘Perhaps.’ Yes.
‘Those are Sherzal’s colours,’ Ruli said. ‘The headman at your village would have known that. He would have known that they couldn’t keep you – not with the emperor’s own sister after you. Your mother would have understood too. The child-taker was your best chance. Hiding in plain sight. A girl with a price on her head, sold for nothing, there in a cage ready for sale … It was all they could do to keep you safe.’
‘No.’ Nona waved the idea away, as if her blades could slice it into a lie. ‘It wasn’t like that. They would have told me …’
‘Really?’ Ruli stood up, staring at Nona with concern. It was more than she could take. ‘Not telling you was more likely to stop you coming back …’
‘I’m going out there.’ Nona started back towards the cave mouth. ‘Once it starts you—’
‘Nona, there are twelve of them!’ Jula stepped after her, though stopping short, as if she saw something new in Nona’s place. Some wild beast perhaps, with eyes like holes into the night and hands thick with old blood.
‘You might have …’ Ruli frowned, staring at Nona’s hands, ‘invisible daggers … But they have swords, as long as you are tall! And we’re not in a dark, misty forest! Don’t go!’