Holy Sister
Nona Grey’s story reaches its shattering conclusion in the third instalment of Book of the Ancestor.THEY CAME AGAINST HER AS A CHILD. NOW THEY FACE THE WOMAN.The ice is advancing, the Corridor narrowing, and the empire is under siege from the Scithrowl in the east and the Durns in the west. Everywhere, the emperor’s armies are in retreat.Nona faces the final challenges that must be overcome if she is to become a full sister in the order of her choice. But it seems unlikely that Nona and her friends will have time to earn a nun’s habit before war is on their doorstep.Even a warrior like Nona cannot hope to turn the tide of war.The shiphearts offer strength that she might use to protect those she loves, but it’s a power that corrupts. A final battle is coming in which she will be torn between friends, unable to save them all. A battle in which her own demons will try to unmake her.A battle in which hearts will be broken, lovers lost, thrones burned.HOLY SISTER completes the Book of the Ancestor trilogy that began with RED SISTER and GREY SISTER. A ground-breaking series, it has established Mark Lawrence as one of the most exciting new voices in modern speculative fiction.
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HarperVoyager
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Copyright © Mark Lawrence 2019
Cover © Tomasz Jeduszek 2019
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Mark Lawrence asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008152390
Ebook Edition © April 2019 ISBN: 9780008152413
Version: 2019-04-04
For my grandfather, ‘Bill’ William George Cook, who lived most of his first decade under the reign of Queen Victoria and who with great patience helped me make my first treasure box
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
The Story So Far
Prologue
Chapter 1. Holy Class: Present Day
Chapter 2. Three years earlier: The Escape
Chapter 3. Holy Class: Present Day
Chapter 4. Three Years Earlier: The Escape
Chapter 5. Holy Class: Present Day
Chapter 6. Holy Class: Present Day
Chapter 7. Three Years Earlier: The Escape
Chapter 8. Holy Class: Present Day
Chapter 9. Present: Holy Class
Chapter 10. Holy Class
Chapter 11. Three Years Earlier: The Escape
Chapter 12. Three Years Earlier: The Escape
Chapter 13. Present: Holy Class
Chapter 14. Three Years Earlier: The Escape
Chapter 15. Present: Holy Class
Chapter 16. Three Years Earlier: The Escape
Chapter 17. Holy Class
Chapter 18. Three Years Earlier: The Escape
Chapter 19. Present: Holy Class
Chapter 20. Holy Class
Chapter 21. Three Years Earlier: The Escape
Chapter 22. Present: Holy Class
Chapter 23. Holy Class
Chapter 24. Holy Class
Chapter 25. Holy Class
Chapter 26. Holy Class
Chapter 27. Holy Class
Chapter 28. Holy Class
Chapter 29. Holy Class
Chapter 30. Holy Class
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Also by Mark Lawrence
About the Publisher
For those of you who have had to wait a while for this book I provide brief catch-up notes so that your memories may be refreshed and I can avoid the awkwardness of having to have characters tell each other things they already know for your benefit.
Here I carry forward only what is of importance to the tale that follows.
The people and places in the brief summary I start with are expanded on further down, so if it means nothing to you, skip the next paragraph then come back to it.
Grey Sister ended with Nona, around fifteen years old, escaping Sherzal’s palace with troops in pursuit. She had friends with her, including Zole, Ara, Regol, Abbess Glass and Sister Kettle, and assorted other survivors. Zole had the Noi-Guin’s shipheart, stolen from the assassins’ headquarters beneath the palace. Clera helped Nona escape but went back to Sherzal’s service. Nona’s enemy from the convent, the novice Joeli Namsis, was still in the palace and her actions led to the death of Nona’s friend Darla during the escape. Nona and her companions are in the mountains on the border with Scithrowl and a long way from the convent. The story does not begin with this scene but will return to it presently.
Abeth is a planet orbiting a dying red sun. It is sheathed in ice and the vast majority of its people live in a fifty-mile-wide ice-walled corridor around the equator.
An artificial moon, a great orbiting mirror, keeps the Corridor free of ice by focusing the sun’s rays into it each night.
When, thousands of years ago, the four original tribes of men came to Abeth from the stars they found the ruins of a vanished people they called the Missing.
The empire is bounded by the lands of the Scithrowl to the east and by the Sea of Marn to the west. Across the sea the Durns rule. At the end of Grey Sister Scithrowl hordes under their Battle-Queen, Adoma, were amassing on their side of the mountain range that borders the battle lines.
The emperor’s sister, Sherzal, commands the defence against Scithrowl from her palace in the mountains. She was going to betray the empire and let Queen Adoma’s forces through the Grand Pass. The deal included combining the shipheart held by the Noi-Guin assassins and the shipheart stolen from Sweet Mercy Convent by the ice-triber Yisht, with the two shiphearts Queen Adoma has, thereby making the quartet of shiphearts believed necessary to open the Ark. The Ark lies beneath the emperor’s palace and was built either by the Missing or the first humans and is said to allow control of the moon.
