The Girl and the Moon by Mark Lawrence;

Author:Mark Lawrence; [Lawrence, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC
Published: 2022-04-26T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Mali found herself beneath the redness of the sun on a rare, almost windless day. Before her rose the Dome of the Ancestor, the huge structure dwarfing her, its limestone blocks taking colour from the light. The song of Holy Sisters came faintly from the many narrow windows piercing the dome’s walls in a band just above head height.

“Thank the Ancestor!” Mali let out a sigh of relief and turned, looking for Erris and Thurin. Instead she found a young novice, considerably shorter than her, racing past, probably late for Spirit Class.

“Blessings, sister!” The girl swerved around her.

Mali grinned. She’d never been mistaken for a nun before. A frown replaced the grin as she realized she didn’t recognize the novice. She knew every girl in the convent by sight. She could name most of them without needing to ponder.

“Mistress Path.” That was who she needed. Sister Owl would understand what had happened, how Mali had been transported from the city to the convent, and where the others were.

Mali turned until she sighted Path Tower. At least that was where she’d left it. She set off towards the spire, aching in every limb, as if she’d not just yanked on the bundled threads but on each of her muscles as well.

As she walked it seemed that somehow, impossibly, she was walking the Path too. It was nonsense of course. A hallucination. Some echo of the time-star’s magics. She shuffled across the Rock of Faith, and yet, somehow, she also strode the Path. Not as she did on those rare occasions when she edged along it for a few steps, gathering power and hoping that when she fell off back into the world she would be able to own it. This was different. She strode the Path confidently, full of a power so vast she couldn’t comprehend it, a power that filled her, overflowed her, and streamed around her, as though the Path were a river and she was a fish swimming through.

Mali pushed the curious hallucination from her mind and focused on the world of stone and wind and flesh.

A couple of nuns emerged from the laundry. Another vanished into the scriptorium, but none of them looked her way. Mali found her vision too blurry to make out at this distance which nuns they were.

The tower waited patiently as she hobbled towards it, amazed at her own exhaustion. She pushed open one of the four doors and entered the portrait room at the base. A senior novice was studying one of the paintings. She turned when Mali entered.

“Sister Pan. Ancestor’s blessings.”

Mali didn’t recognize the novice and, as she closed the distance between them, she realized that despite being very clearly a young woman rather than a girl, the novice was scarcely taller than she was.

“Pan?” It struck her that this novice, a novice she didn’t even know, had guessed the name she was planning to adopt when she became a nun. She hadn’t even told Sister Owl yet. There hadn’t been a good moment.

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