to slap the woman but Iron proved swift, Nona’s fingertips missing her cheek by a hair’s breadth.
Nona kicked her falling blade back into the air and caught it as Iron had but with far less grace. The pair of them finished two yards apart, gazes locked, one on the other.
‘No claws today, novice.’ The abbess’s voice from the stands. ‘Just the blade you hope to earn.’
Nona nodded her acknowledgement. She moved smoothly into attacking. No more playing, no more games. She told herself that Zole stood before her. With the exception of Yisht and Sister Tallow, Zole had been her most lethal opponent, faster than thinking, merciless, efficient.
Sister Iron replied with a storm of blows, feints, and counterattacks every bit as swift and ruthless as Zole’s had ever been. She had more than that, though. Something in her touch, a kind of mastery that let her tame a blow on her blade, guide it, twist it. At every exchange Nona felt on the edge of having her sword torn from her grasp. Sister Iron used combinations that Nona hadn’t seen before, series of moves that drove Nona step by inexorable step into the wrong place, her balance lost, her momentum stolen, sword unready.
Sister Iron ended a lengthy combination attack with a rising slice. An extravagance of speed saved Nona from being struck, though she would not have been surprised to find a thin line of blood across her front had she the time to look down. She spun away, sliding to a halt on one foot, spraying sand.
‘Ah!’ Nona staggered, her heel felt as if a hot wire had sliced partway through it.
Sister Iron came forward, pressing her attack. Nona defended with desperation, hobbling back before launching sideways on her good foot to win space. She rolled across the sand, biting down a scream as something cut into her just above the elbow. Coming to her feet she expected to find blood sheeting down her arm but the skin lay unmarked despite the agony.
Nona got to her feet, wincing, sword raised, injured arm held close to her body. As Iron came in Nona saw it. Where the sand had been scuffed away almost to the stone she glimpsed something, a nearly invisible distortion running over the slab beneath. If she had time to defocus she knew her Path-sight would show a thread, lurid green no doubt, as so many of Joeli’s curse-threads were.
As Sister Iron drew close Nona swept away the sand in front of her with one foot. It proved a useless endeavour: pressed to defend, she had no time to clear more ground or study the area exposed. Their swords met and met again, beating out a high-tempo tattoo. Sweat flew from the ends of Nona’s hair, sparkling droplets mired in the moment, unable to fall in the space between half a dozen strikes.
Another pain-thread caught Nona’s foot and she fell backwards with a cry, turning a thrust and a swing as she dropped. Nona rolled through three more pain-threads evading Sister Iron stamping at her. Finally the nun backed off, perhaps remembering that the exercise was a test rather than murder.
‘It’s only pain.’ She muttered the words, forcing her hunched body to straighten, relaxing the tight muscles of her arms and legs. She had suffered worse. Thuran Tacsis had pressed his sigil-marked toy called the Harm against her. It had hurt more than a thousand pain-threads. Later she had glued it to his flesh. He hadn’t been found for over a day. They said he sat drooling upon his lord’s chair now, ruler of the Tacsis in name only. Why his remaining son, Lano, didn’t have him quietly killed nobody could say.
‘Only pain.’ Spoken loud enough for Sister Iron to take note. Nona thought of Joeli creeping out in the dead of night to lay her threads in the Blade Hall sands, each full of malice and carefully attuned just to Nona. It was a work of art really. Nona doubted there were six thread-workers in all the empire who could match it. Maybe not so many. A red anger rose through her, its heat burning through the agony that lanced from her invisible wounds. Lips curled back from teeth, a savage grin.
Nona threw herself back across ground already trodden, the potency of the thread-traps there now spent. She attacked Sister Iron not with the calm efficiency Sister Tallow taught but with the honest and savage desire to do her