though her heart ached and pounded. ‘None of it’s real.’
‘Nona …’ Kettle shook her head slowly as if the sorrow had made it too heavy. ‘We have to go.’
‘There!’ Amid the swirls of smoke and the red tongues of fire a door that had not been present when all this happened, a door with no place in Sherzal’s stables and no place to lead.
‘Nona!’ Cries from the great carriage before the main exit. ‘We need you.’
Letting Darla’s head fall felt like the ultimate betrayal. Every part of her wanted to stay. Every part of her wanted to face the danger with her friends. To save them. To do it better this time.
But she sprang to her feet and threw herself across the burning hall even as the door upon which her eyes were fixed started to fade from view.
‘No!’ She reached it just as the last lines melted away. ‘No!’ Flaw-blades dug deep and in a frenzy of hacking and a storm of splinters … Nona staggered through.
Curved, sigil-crowded walls surrounded her, the inlaid silver gleaming in a light that seemed to be dying swiftly. Nona turned in time to see a doorway fading, and beyond it the spiral steps of Path Tower. A person’s shadow, Ruli’s or Ara’s, lay across stone steps lit by the coloured whispers of the day that shone in the classroom above, streaming in through stained-glass windows.
A moment later the doorway had gone and Nona stood blind and alone.
‘It wasn’t true. Any of it.’ Whispered to the darkness.
Some of it was true though. Abbess Glass had died and Sweet Mercy would never be the same again.
7
Three Years Earlier
The Escape
‘They’re catching up again.’ Nona hunched against the hard-packed snow, too cold to shiver now. The wind stole her words and ran away with them, howling. Sherzal’s soldiers knew the mountains and had found better routes to gain the heights. Nona could see black figures to the south, little more than dots, almost at the shoulder between two peaks where she and Zole would have to cross if they were to make further progress towards the ice sheet.
‘We have to go down.’ Zole pointed to an icy defile where the east side of the ridge had fractured along some hidden fault line.
‘Down?’ Nona tried to imagine any way she could achieve that other than falling. ‘That’s Scithrowl.’ She stared at the foothills, hazy in the distance and partly obscured by wisps of cloud around the waist of the mountains.
‘They will be unlikely to follow us there.’ Zole shrugged and continued along the ridge. Their path proved to be a serrated blade of stone coated with two feet of icy snow on the southern face and with black ice on the northern side.
The descent proved as hard as the ascent, though in different ways. It found a whole new set of muscles to stress. Nona’s legs began to feel as if they belonged to someone else, paying scant regard to her instructions but letting her have full share of the hurting. Several times she started to fall and saved herself only by digging her flaw-blades through ice into rock. They climbed down for an hour and the world below seemed to grow no closer, though the expanse of black rock towering behind them assured her that they were making progress.
The wind blew less fiercely on the slopes that faced Queen Adoma’s lands but it was far from calm. The clouds surged below them, lapping the slopes like a grey sea. Nona heard shouts before they reached the swirling layer of mist, and looking back she saw that those leading the pursuit were less than a hundred yards away. A spear rattled past her.
‘We will lose them in the clouds,’ Zole said. She hopped down from rock to rock making it seem that her legs were as fresh as if she’d just got out of bed. Coming to the spear, jammed against an outcrop, she picked it up.
Nona followed, frowning at the clouds. ‘We’ll lose ourselves in there too.’ But she supposed ‘down’ to be an easy direction to follow whatever the visibility.
The mist rose to meet their descent, a cold white sea wrapping them, beading Zole’s hair with jewels of dew that froze into tiny pearls. Nona stumbled on in exhaustion, the shipheart’s fire filling her mind with unfocused energy but doing nothing for the muscles in her thighs.
‘Have you been into Scithrowl before?’ Nona asked, sliding down onto a ledge as Zole led off.
‘No.’
‘Their armies are at