remember mercy. Mercy for others in victory. Mercy for yourself too. You deserve happiness, child. Never forget it.’
Nona had a bar of the Shade gate in each hand and her forehead to the metal when a hand settled on her shoulder.
‘Ara …’
Her friend joined her at the gate and for a time they stood in each other’s silence. Ara’s left hand holding the same bar as Nona’s right, almost touching.
‘It’s hard to believe she’s gone,’ Ara whispered.
‘She’s not gone.’ Each of them could be speaking of so many shes, but Nona was thinking of Apple and how these stairs, this gate, would always lead to her.
‘Abbess Glass spent her thoughts on might-bes,’ Ara said. ‘I find myself thinking too often about might-have-beens.’ She turned her head to look at Nona. ‘It’s strange to see your eyes. As if you’ve been hiding from me all these years.’
Nona opened her mouth to speak but another, darker shadow fell across her, one she could only feel and not see. ‘Kettle is coming back.’ Nona took her hands from the bars. ‘I have to go to her.’
The sun was falling as Nona reached the Seren Way and began to descend from the convent’s heights. Nona felt Kettle’s approach stop and the muted echoes of her grief became a tolling along their thread-bond, like the lament of a great and hollow bell. She carried on down, searching for her friend, and found her lying crumpled at the base of the Rock as if she had fallen from the windows of the Shade classroom. Kettle had dropped only from her feet though and rose like a broken doll when Nona pulled her into an embrace.
‘She was my life, Nona.’
Nona held her tight. ‘You have sisters. You’re not alone.’ They wept then, the river of Kettle’s sorrow washing through Nona until at last they could breathe again and Nona led her sister up the winding steepness of the Seren Way to Sweet Mercy.
Evening found Nona and the handful of seniors gathered around one of the refectory tables, a cold meal before them, rustled up from stores. Most of the nuns were in the Dome of the Ancestor, praying for the lost. Sisters Oak and Rule had helped Kettle across the convent to the Dome to join the prayer though Abbess Rose had insisted she stay in bed.
Nona sat, chewing on a heel of bread. Sister Elm had baked it. She would never bake another. At her side Ara sipped water from a clay cup and watched the light of the setting sun finger through the shutters.
‘The Durns are still coming.’ Clera banged the end of her knife on the table. ‘Are you going to light up a few of their barges and hope that they run away too? Because sooner or later you’re going to be standing before the throne and the emperor himself is going to order you to burn their cities to cinders.’
‘Have you ever been on the ice in a focus moon, Clera?’ Nona asked.
‘No.’ Clera scowled. ‘I didn’t last long enough at the convent to go ice-ranging. And why would I want to? It’s just Church stupidity, sending children up there.’
‘I used to think that,’ Nona said. ‘But I’ve been up there and I’ve waited through the focus, miles from the Corridor. You know what happens? The ice melts. An inch of ice melts. Then it freezes solid again. There’s nowhere for it to run. All that heat wasted. All the moon’s energy spent melting the same inch of ice night after night.’
Ruli looked up from her tortured hand. ‘But now you’ve got the moon! You can have it do anything!’
Jula shook her head. ‘The Ark told you that if you narrowed the focus from what it is it would kill plants and animals. That’s why it wouldn’t let you … until Zole said it should.’
‘We’ve seen it kill …’ Ruli gazed into space as if imagining the black circle of char that was all the moon left of the battle-queen.
Nona shook her head. ‘The focus stopped narrowing a long time ago. Anything that couldn’t live with what we experience every night has died out. What has survived has toughened. We can narrow the focus and see how things go. Or we can narrow it to a torch and run it along the edge of the ice, the whole focus burning along a strip a mile wide. We could burn channels to take the meltwater to the sea … the possibilities are endless