Vespertine

by Margaret Rogerson

  He jerked back, startled. I had almost reached him—almost touched his keys. His mouth twisted into an involuntary defensive snarl, like a cornered animal baring its teeth, before he drew his composure back into place with a strained effort. “I shouldn’t have come.” He turned sharply and began to step out of the harrow.

  “Nun! They’re here!”

  My hair had fallen in a curtain around my face. The strands quivered with my breath. “Your Grace,” I said. “Don’t you want to hear my confession?”

  He paused, one hand on the doorway.

  “The key! Nun—the key!”

  “I’m going to escape,” I told him.

  Slowly, he turned, his face wiped clean of emotion. Through my hair, I met his eyes. “I’m telling you,” I finished, “because there isn’t anything you can do to stop me.”

  Reflexively, he reached for his relic.

  Above us, Trouble’s mutterings had gone silent. Now he uttered a single clear word. “Dead.”

  Leander looked up, horror dawning across his face.

  “Nun, brace yourself!”

  That was my only warning before the harrow exploded.

  SEVEN

  The next thing I knew, I lay insensible among splinters of wood. My ears rang, and the stink of mud and copper filled my nose. Everything was chaos; hooves flashed perilously close to my face, the sun glancing from their metal shoes. The sounds of horses screaming, men shouting, and Trouble unleashing his harsh cry of “Dead!” sounded distorted and far away, like my head had been shoved underwater.

  The sky looked impossibly blue. The light seemed too bright, the shadows too dark. I watched clods of dirt fly through the air.

  “Get up, nun!”

  My senses came rushing back in a torrent of sound. I rolled over. The chain slithered with me, freed from the harrow’s wreckage. One of the carriage horses lay dead on the road, twisted up in its traces. Spirits flitted past, converging on the knights like wisps of fog.

  I half fell, half climbed over the harrow’s broken frame. And almost collapsed onto Leander, lying stunned amid the wreckage, a trickle of blood running from the corner of his mouth.

  “My reliquary. Get my reliquary first. There’s a rivener nearby. It’s coming—”

  That explained the harrow. Riveners were Fourth Order spirits risen from warriors slain in battle, armed with the rare ability to affect the living world with powerful blows that could splinter wood and shatter bone. I had no hope of surviving it without the revenant’s power.

  I wanted to get the key first, but the revenant sounded panicked. I yanked the chain from Leander’s neck and ducked my head through its loop. Thinking quickly, I stuffed the reliquary down the front of my robes, where the thick, bulky wool would conceal its shape.

  Leander groaned, then coughed. He was waking now, awareness returning to his staring blank eyes. I fumbled with the key ring at his belt. Sliding the correct key from the ring posed a challenge for my clumsy hands, their stiffness worsened by days of disuse. The revenant’s agitation flapped around in my head like a frenzied bat as the tiny key slipped repeatedly from my fingers. Finally, I gave up and yanked the entire ring free, snapping the leather thong that attached it to the belt.

  My victory lasted barely a heartbeat before Leander’s hand closed around my wrist.

  “Behind you!” the revenant shrieked.

  I threw myself to the side, dragging Leander with me. The spot where he had lain erupted in flying soil and shards of wood. Debris rained down, pelting my robes and pattering across the carriage’s wreckage.

  I looked up, and then up some more. The spirit that towered over us was nearly half again the height of a man. It was clad in cracked, battered armor, with broken arrows and spears protruding from its body, like a great bear that many hunters had tried and failed to kill. Two pinholes of light glowed in the cavernous recesses of its helmet.

  Recognition smote me—it was the same type of spirit as the one Mother Katherine had called forth in the chapel, bound to her amber ring.

  The rivener raised its sword for another sundering blow. I was lodged against one of the carriage’s wheels and couldn’t move. At my side, Leander gave me a quick startled glance and reached for a spar of wood among the wreckage. He still hadn’t let go of my arm.

  As the sword descended, he raised the piece of wood between us, which I saw was a slat broken from one of the harrow’s iron-studded wheels. The sword struck it and dissolved into a gust of mist that swept over us, as cold and stinging as a winter wind.

  Puzzled, the rivener looked down at the empty hilt clutched in its gauntleted hand.

  Of course—whoever had built the harrow hadn’t taken any chances. Even the wheels were consecrated.

  Leander scrambled to his feet, unsteady and panting. First he pointed the spoke at me, wild-eyed, and then at the rivener, whose broadsword had already re-formed and was sailing through the air in his direction.

  The keys’ jagged shapes bit into my palm, clenched in my fist. As Leander engaged the rivener, I scrambled over the broken wheel and huddled behind it, jabbing the key toward the left-hand shackle’s equally tiny keyhole.

  “Hurry,” the revenant seethed.

  “I am.”

  “Let me do it for you!” I felt a ripple of frustration. “Never mind, I can’t, not with the shackles… Just hurry, nun.”

  Furiously, I continued jabbing. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched spirits swarm around the knights, who spun this way and that, shaking their heads like boars beset with flies. Some still thundered around on horseback; others had been dismounted, their riderless horses stamping and rearing in the chaos. The knights’ consecrated armor helped protect them from blight and possession, but they were being overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Several already lay on the ground unmoving.

  At last the lock clicked, and the first shackle fell free. The revenant’s power surged eagerly, only to shrink back with a flash of pain that left spots dancing across my eyes. Gritting my teeth, I started in on the second shackle.

  Nearby, Leander remained locked in battle with the rivener. He had somehow managed to light his incense and was fighting with his censer in place of the spar. His survival mystified me until he made a sharp gesture with his free hand, and ghostly chains materialized from the air, coiling around the rivener as though alive.

  Every Fourth Order relic imparted an ability that could be used in combat. The chains had to be the penitent’s power. They tightened cruelly, and cracks split the rivener’s armor. It sagged, listing sideways.

  Leander might have defeated it easily if it weren’t for the other spirits mobbing him, forcing his attention away. He spun to swing his censer through a feverling that had snuck up on him from behind, then a gaunt on his other side. He clenched his relic hand into a fist, and more chains sprang forth, binding several more spirits at once. I had never seen anything like it before, even in the convent’s training grounds. He moved as though the battle were a dance, his motions swift and vicious, every strike deadly in its precision. But it wasn’t enough. While his focus lay elsewhere, the rivener shook itself free from the slackening chains. Implacably, it advanced, forcing him backward.

  “Nun.”

  The revenant issued its warning in a low voice, as though it were in danger of being overheard. I glanced over in time to see a silvery knobbed spine glide behind the wheel’s broken spokes. A second gaunt’s bald head rose into view over the shattered remnants of an incense burner, its oversized teeth bared in a morbid grin. The spirits had found me.

  The key slid into place. The revenant’s power roared up like an igniting pyre, the blistering force of it momentarily blinding me. When my vision cleared, I saw that the second shackle lay in the mud, cracked and smoking. And the two spirits were gone, obliterated: tatters of mist blew from the wreckage in their place.

  I got one of my feet under me. My ankle twisted when I put weight on it. The revenant’s power rushed downward, bolstering me, and with its
support I rose from the wreckage, lifting my bowed head.

  At once, the nearest spirits paused. They stared at me. And then they fled, streaming away from the road toward the trees, flickering erratically as they raced over the trampled ground and the bodies of knights scattered across it.

  The rest of the spirits hadn’t noticed. They were too busy swarming the remaining knights and thronging around Leander. He had been cornered against a weed-choked ditch along the roadside, battling for his life against the rivener’s relentless strikes and the half-dozen other spirits surrounding him. No matter his skill, it would take only one of the rivener’s blows to finish him if he lost his footing.

  “Leave them,” the revenant said. It tugged my gaze toward the forest. Leander’s dappled stallion stood alertly by the edge of the trees, watching the battle with pricked ears and flared nostrils. Missing his rider, he had bolted.

  I took a step in the opposite direction.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m not going to leave someone to die. Even someone I hate.”

  Leander faltered. Somehow, he had heard me—and my voice had distracted him in a way that the attacking spirits had not.

  The rivener’s next blow took him off guard. He stumbled as the earth beside him erupted in a fountain of dirt and rocks. The lesser spirits surged toward him.

  “Wretched nun,” the revenant seethed. Seeing that I wasn’t going to change my mind, it said quickly, “Watch out for the rivener’s strikes. I can’t protect you from those.”

  As I waded from the wreckage, I paused to wrench another spoke from the harrow’s broken wheel. Its splintered end dragged on the ground behind me, plowing a groove through the debris. The spirits that saw me coming fled from my path like frightened shades.

  The rivener had raised its sword high above Leander, poised for the same executioner’s strike that Mother Katherine’s spirit had performed in the chapel. Busy fighting for his life against the other spirits, he didn’t catch sight of it until it began to descend. His eyes fixed on the blade like a martyr awaiting judgment.

  I wasn’t going to get there in time. I raised the spoke over my shoulder and threw it. It went spinning through the air and punched through the rivener’s form, leaving a hole that swirled with vapor. The rivener’s sword froze. Slowly, its helmeted head turned.

  “Ah, fantastic. There goes your weapon. And here I thought you nuns were trained for combat.”

  I braced myself to dodge its next strike. But before the blow came, chains whipped around its body, binding it in place. Then Leander was beside me, a streak of blight darkening one of his cheekbones. That was all I had time to register before he shoved his censer into my hands and turned to use his relic against the spirits behind us.

  Unthinkingly, I fell into an offensive stance. My left hand felt empty without a dagger, but now I didn’t need it. Streaming incense smoke, the censer’s consecrated silver was a weapon in its own right. The revenant’s power surged through my limbs as I swung it in a practiced pattern. Censer forms could be used to attack as well as to defend, though the Gray Sisters considered this fighting style reckless and rarely featured it in our lessons.

  Bound in Leander’s chains, the rivener almost posed too easy a target. By the time they began to unravel, dissolving link by link into mist, my censer had done its work. The spirit went down on one knee, bracing its immaterial weight on its sword. Great gashes rent its form, trailing vapor. It struggled to rise, even just to lift its head, trembling with the effort.

  The gesture looked so human that I hesitated. The rivener had been a person once, a soldier who had fought to defend the living. Perhaps it had died in this very pose, refusing to surrender to the last. Even corrupted, even after becoming the very monster it had fought against, an echo of its former self remained.

  “Finish it,” the revenant snapped. Then it paused and added less harshly, “Don’t make it suffer.”

  One final swing, and the rivener collapsed, a cascade of mist spilling over the ground, swirling cool around the hem of my robes. An inexplicable feeling of loss gripped me. No one knew for certain whether spirits returned to the Lady after they were destroyed, or if their souls simply vanished, gone forever.

  When I looked up, Leander was watching me, surrounded by the vapor of dispersing spirits. Warring emotions played out across his face. Pausing to catch his breath, he raised a hand to touch the patch of blight on his cheekbone. Then his expression hardened.

  “Artemisia,” he said coldly. “The revenant is too powerful. You can’t control it for long.”

  I tightened my grip on his censer’s chain.

  “You don’t have a choice. Surrender.”

  “No,” I answered.

  In reply, he reached for his relic.

  I threw his censer at him. Before he could recover, as he stood there stunned with incense dusting his robes, I tramped into the weeds and shoved him backward into the ditch. There came a splash as he landed in the rank, swampy water at its bottom. Slipping in the mud, I followed him down. When he surfaced, spluttering, I yanked the onyx ring from his finger and hurled it as far as I could. It soared deep into the forest, glinting, and vanished somewhere among the leaves.

  Furious, Leander seized a handful of weeds and dragged himself partway out of the water. But it would take only my boot to his chest to push him back under, and judging by his expression, he knew it. “Restrain her,” he commanded.

  The surviving knights had gathered around the ditch, their swords lowered. They looked at one another, expressionless behind their visors, and then back at me, hesitating.

  I scrambled from the ditch and ran.

  After the past week, I shouldn’t have been able to run, much less quickly. But I whipped through the tall autumn-browned grass faster than I ever had before, almost weightless with the revenant’s power. I felt it reveling in the sensations of our flight—the sun blazing on my hair, the way the matted grass tore underfoot, even the rough scratching pulls of the seedheads snagging on my robes. Everything else melted away. We were alive, and free.

  Shouts rang out behind me. But the knights weren’t fast enough, and a moment later I had caught the dappled stallion’s dangling reins and leaped astride. Evidently the horse didn’t harbor much loyalty for his former master, because he wheeled around to escape as though he’d been waiting for the opportunity all his life. I bent low over his withers, and together we plunged into the trees in a whirlwind of fallen leaves.

  * * *

  By late in the day, the last signs of pursuit had faded. “I can’t sense them any longer,” the revenant said. “They either lost our trail, or they gave up. The priest wasn’t with them.”

  Good. I imagined Leander crawling across the forest floor on his hands and knees, searching for his relic in the dirt.

  I eased his horse out of the creek we had been following to hide our tracks, listening to the wet crunch of the stallion’s hooves transition to a solid thump on the soil. Sitting astride a warhorse was exhilarating after learning to ride on the calm old draft horses at my convent. He had carried me at a canter for the better part of an hour before we had finally slowed down, following the winding deer trails over the hills.

  I needed something to call him. “Priestbane,” I said experimentally, and watched his ears swivel back with interest. He snorted out a breath that I took for approval. Patting his neck, I cast around for a telltale flash of white among the trees ahead. When I caught sight of Trouble flapping through the bare branches, I adjusted our path.

  The revenant’s scornful voice broke in. “Don’t tell me you’re still following that raven.”

  “I think he’s taking us somewhere. He’s flying eastward, which means we’re heading deeper into Roischal.”

  “You do realize that there’s nothing mystical about ravens, don’t you? They don’t gather around convents because they’re divine messengers of your goddess. They come because that’s where humans bring the corpses.”


  “That’s fine. If he’s leading us to corpses, that’s where I want to go.”

  “You must be popular at the nun parties. Do you have any friends? Just out of curiosity.”

  My hands tightened on the reins. Sophia might count, but she was eight years old, so that seemed embarrassing to admit out loud. “Do you?” I asked without inflection.

  “I’ve been trapped inside a relic for the past century. What’s your excuse?”

  “I was possessed by an ashgrim as a baby.” My voice sounded harsh and ugly. “When I was ten, I stuck my hands in a fire to get it to stop trying to kill my family. The other novices think I murdered them. That’s why.”

  As soon as I finished, I felt blood rush to my face. That was a lot more than I’d intended to say out loud. A profound silence came from the revenant.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I added, before it could think of some other way to mock me.

  To my relief, it didn’t speak again for a very long time.

  Eventually, the trees thinned. Priestbane trotted into a clearing, a field hazy with mist flushed gold by the setting sun. I didn’t realize we had reached civilization until we startled a flock of grazing sheep, who fled bleating in terror, their rumps sodden with mud.

  I reined Priestbane to a halt as their shapes vanished into the mist. The rooftops of a town loomed ahead, eerily silent at a time when children should be shouting, dogs barking, the air fragrant with the smoke of evening cookfires.

  “Revenant, can you sense anything?”

  The question seemed to draw it out of thought. I wondered if it had been plotting its next attempt to possess me. “Nothing aside from a few shades infesting those buildings’ crypts.”

  “Cellars.”

  “What?”

  “When they aren’t under chapels, they’re called cellars.”

  “I don’t care,” it hissed. “Anyway, there are no humans ahead. At least,” it added nastily, “no living ones.”