when she touched the Path. Sister Pan had endless stories of the dire ends to which it could lead the unwary, and used them regularly to scare any quantal novice in her care. Nona had to get back to Path Tower but the chance was gone and every shift of scene took her further from the convent, putting mile upon mile in her way and allowing no time to cross them. Whatever had gone wrong it must have happened when she had tried to walk through the wall to the Third Room. She had wandered into some realm of nightmare manufactured out of her past.
Nona ran through the darkness and smoke and confusion, ready to meet any challenge. Though she told herself that a lie surrounded her the truth of it seduced her senses. There was nothing counterfeit here. Beneath the stink of burning this place smelled of home, of a childhood now wrapped about her bones. This was hers, like it or not, her foundation though it stood in mud and ignorance.
Somehow no soldier came near her. Within moments she stood at the door to her mother’s cottage. The two rooms where she had spent so many years, growing from mewling infant to the girl who had taken half a dozen lives in the forest upon her doorstep. It was the price of one of those lives in particular that the whole village was now paying for her.
The thatch above had begun to smoulder, sparks from the Bluestones’ house starting to land among the straw. The interior lay dark. ‘It’s not real.’ Nona approached the entrance. Something would be different. Something would be wrong. Every scene so far had someone out of place, some detail changed. It was a clue, a riddle. Somehow. She stepped in, steeling herself, pulling her serenity around her like a shawl. ‘It’s not real.’
It took a moment for Nona’s eyes to adjust to the gloom. A single candle burned, spilling wax where it had fallen at the doorway to her mother’s workroom, the place where she wove the reeds. Nona’s mother lay sprawled, one arm reaching for the exit, her fingers nearly touching the toes of Nona’s shoes. A ruinous wound had opened her back, the blood pooling around her, the candle’s flame dancing across it in reflection. And despite all her protestations a hurt noise broke from Nona’s chest, a wet splutter, a numbness in her cheeks as she fell to her knees, hot tears jolted from her eyes by the impact with the hard-packed earth. Nona’s serenity shattered. She stayed on all fours, heaving in broken breaths. Her mother lay dead. Her mother. No matter what had passed between them there had always been a bond of love buried beneath the denials. Gentle times remembered, shared smiles, laughter, hugs. The bonds that formed a branch of the great tree of the Ancestor, a chain of humanity reaching back through aeons to the singular taproot of the arborat.
Nona panted away the hurt and rose to her knees. This was the test. This was the trap. She wiped her eyes, sought her centre.
‘Somewhere, it must be somewhere.’ She stood and cast around her. Something must be wrong. Something out of place? The serenity trance insulated her against grief but her eyes kept returning to her mother’s body, small and broken. ‘There’s nothing …’ Nona fell back to her knees, drawn down despite her trance by a weight she couldn’t understand. Tears returned to fill her eyes, blurring her vision as she gathered the woman who had been her everything into her lap.
‘… tired …’
‘Mother?’ Nona blinked away the tears. But the brown eyes she found herself looking down into were not her mother’s, the hand that enfolded hers was huge.
‘Darla?’ Nona choked out her friend’s name.
Darla’s brown eyes clouded with confusion, a kind of wonder, staring at some distant place above Nona’s head. The smoke and fire around them wasn’t that of Rellam Village. It was Sherzal’s stables starting to burn. The eighty miles to Path Tower had become hundreds.
‘She’s gone, Nona.’ Kettle put her hand on Nona’s shoulder.
‘Darla …’ Another raw wound. Nona ground her teeth. Darla’s hand still held hers, warm, solid, real. Maybe she could still be saved … Maybe this time it would be different.
To drag her eyes from Darla’s almost broke Nona. To turn her face from a friend who needed her, a dying friend. ‘It’s not real.’ Nona swung her head around, trying to call the clarity trance