so she hoped to hide it instead. The damage could look like the work of hammer and chisel now.
She was running before Kettle’s shout rang out. She tore along the tunnel, bashed through the door into Shade class and dived the length of the window tunnel, escape now her only thought.
As her body flew towards daylight Nona clung to the moment, so fiercely that she seemed to inch through the air. She couldn’t climb. Kettle was too fast. She would reach the window and look up. But down was so much further …
Nona touched her hands to the wall to slow her at the exit … and dropped.
The cliff below the windows was near vertical. The fall was more than three hundred yards to wooded slopes that rose in the shadow of the Rock of Faith. Nona twisted as she fell. When the rock face threatened to scrape against her she nudged herself out by fractions with hunska-speed kicks. She dropped a hundred yards, now travelling so fast that it seemed rapid even in the midst of her own swiftness.
Nona couldn’t use her flaw-blades, not in sight of the window. Her descent would be too slow and the marks left behind would make it obvious who had been there. Another fifty yards of wall sped by. The tree tops approached at frightening velocity.
At the last moment Nona drove her flaw-blades into the rock with one hand, at first just the tips, letting her arm take the strain of deceleration. She used the other arm to angle her blades against the stone and keep her body clear. Without that precaution she would have left half her flesh in a thirty-yard smear reaching to the ground. The force on her arm grew and grew with each passing yard, threatening to pull her shoulder from its socket. She slowed from a hurtle to a rush. The thump with which she hit the mossy boulders piled around the tree trunks at the Rock’s base was the kind you hobble away from cursing, rather than the kind that was both wet and crunchy.
Nona hugged the trunk of a screw pine and squinted up through the dense needles. Kettle’s upper half appeared through the Shade chamber’s middle window, tiny in the distance and pink in its nudity.
Nona slunk further into the undergrowth, stifling another sneeze. Pepper. Joeli hadn’t meant to kill her, just panic her and leave her to be found amid the inevitable mess. The lord’s daughter couldn’t have known for certain it was Nona in there, or whether she had been identified or not, but she’d been willing to take the risk on both. Clearly she felt that even if she was named as having been in there she would be protected, whereas whoever had broken in would be thrown to the wolves. Or more likely thrown into the Glasswater, or at least metaphorically from the Rock of Faith.
With the pepper still tickling her nose, Nona made her way down the slope. She needed to be somewhere else by the time Kettle thought to check for her along their thread-bond. In the meantime she did all she could to deaden the connection.
At the foot of the Seren Way a sudden panic gripped Nona and she patted her habit pockets. The damp patch and the crunching within told her all she needed to know. The vial into which she had poured those precious eye drops had broken as she rolled across the cave floor. The others had been right. The drops weren’t essential to penetrating the high priest’s vault. It was vanity that had drawn her to that cave. A desire to be normal, to meet another person’s gaze without seeing that momentary widening of their eyes.
Sister Apple said she had locked the drops away because of risk that they might take Nona’s sight. But Nona knew now that she had been blind all along.
11
Three Years Earlier
The Escape
The herder’s hut wasn’t more than a low circle of drystone wall topped with a cone of sticks and bracken. The goat shelter proved even more rudimentary – a slanting roof on four poles, sides of woven sticks, a simple door at each end with space to look over the top.
Zole lay down on the soiled bracken bedding and motioned for Nona to join her.
‘This is the worst hiding place ever.’
Zole patted the withered foliage beside her.
‘This is stupid.’ Nona crouched down. Old droppings speckled the bracken, which must be bitter stuff if the goats left it. ‘It’s