The body of a dead soldier lay in our path, his sword jutting from the ground. I seized the hilt as we passed and freed it in a spray of dirt. Trees flashed by, flickerings of sun and shadow. Then we exploded into the battlefield’s chaos.
The first line of spirits broke against Priestbane like waves crashing against a stone. I knew the Clerisy’s warhorses were shod with consecrated steel, but I wasn’t prepared for the bravery with which he charged into the fray, snorting and trampling spirits beneath his hooves. Blight didn’t harm animals the way it did humans, and he had been trained to endure the stinging cold of the spirits’ touch.
“First we free the thralls,” the revenant said rapidly. “If the soldiers haven’t been possessed for long, some of them might still be strong enough to fight.”
A gaunt flitted toward us—more by accident than on purpose, I suspected. With the revenant guiding my arm, I cut it down, and saw its shocked expression as it dispersed. Priestbane charged onward. I had slain several more spirits before I found the breath to ask, “Can you handle that many at the same time?”
“We’ll have to do two passes.” A swift, calculating pause. “Ride toward them from the east. Most of the spirits won’t have adjusted to their human senses yet, and with the sun behind you, you’ll take them by surprise.”
As Priestbane forged us a path, I laid about with the sword. I could feel the revenant drinking everything in: the wind against my face, the flash of sunlight on metal, the shifting of muscles beneath my clothes. Its power soared through my veins like a battle hymn. I had never felt this alive before, as though I were experiencing every sense for the first time, and I understood how one of its vessels had fought until her heart burst. I could fight like this for days without stopping; part of me never wanted the feeling to end.
Through the haze of exhilaration I noted that the spirits around me were all Second and Third Order, their ranks dominated by a type I had never seen before, luminous and indistinct with shifting dark patches, like clumps of slag on white-hot metal. “Blight wraiths,” the revenant supplied. As their name suggested, blight wraiths were the Third Order spirits of those who had died of blight—previously rare in Loraille, now a testament to the number of bodies left abandoned in Roischal’s villages.
Soon we had gained enough ground to see the soldiers ahead. Their formation had dissolved into a ragged line. Some of the men had lost their helmets, and horror showed beneath the smears of mud and blood on their faces. The thralls they were fighting were their own friends, and would need to be killed to be stopped.
At the revenant’s prompting, I released the reins to stretch out my hand. Power funneled through me, and the nearest soldiers crumpled in a wave, the expelled spirits pouring from their bodies. For a heartbeat their former opponents stood stunned; then they set upon the spirits with a roar of victory.
I turned Priestbane away. As we carved an arc toward the other end of the line, a cry went up: “Vespertine!” And again, louder, triumphant. More soldiers joined in. “Vespertine!” It was a rallying cry, a roar of desperate hope.
The battle demanded my full attention. “What does that mean?” I asked, watching a gaunt disperse around my sword.
“It’s what you humans call a priestess who wields a Fifth Order relic,” the revenant said tersely, preoccupied. I felt it moving from place to place inside my body, driving back the blight from dozens of glancing blows. “On your left—watch out.”
I cut down spirit after spirit without effort. For a strange moment I felt as though I were watching myself from afar, a lone cloaked figure cleaving through an ocean of the Dead. The chant of “Vespertine!” shook the ground like a drumbeat. I could feel it in my bones.
After the battle ended, I might have to face those men, perhaps even talk to them. The thought filled me with dread. Saving people wasn’t a problem—it was the part that came afterward I couldn’t handle. If I could figure out some way to slip away unnoticed…
“Nun!”
The revenant’s warning came too late. Ahead of us, one of the possessed soldiers had turned and sighted his crossbow. I watched the bolt release, watched it spin through the air.
Desperately, the revenant grasped for control. My mind had gone blank. Without thinking, without even truly understanding what I was doing, I granted it permission. My hand snapped up with inhuman speed and caught the bolt a hairsbreadth from my chest, the whine of its flight still buzzing in my ears.
In the drawn-out seconds that followed, my arm didn’t belong to me. I could still feel it, but I wasn’t the one holding it aloft or gripping the quarrel. A heartbeat passed, another. Conflict roiled inside me. Then the revenant abruptly let go, almost disgustedly, as though throwing down a rag it had used to mop up a spill.
“Pay attention,” it snapped. “Don’t forget that you can be injured.”
My pulse thundered in my ears. I cast the bolt aside, its shaft red with blood. It had sliced through my glove. Ignoring the sting, I stretched out my hand. I couldn’t think about what had just happened. I concentrated instead on the force of the revenant’s power roaring through me as I drove the spirits from the remaining thralls.
The soldiers collapsed as I rode past, one after another, following the sweep of my outstretched hand. Circling around again, I saw that some of the men from my first pass were already being helped upright, marshaled into formation by a knight on horseback.
He was the only one wearing plate armor. The rest were normal soldiers like the ones who had attacked my convent, dressed in mail and leather. The chain mail had to be consecrated, but it wouldn’t afford nearly as much protection as full plate. I didn’t see any clerics, either. In all the descriptions of battles I had read, there had been clerics on the battlefield, aiding the soldiers with prayer, incense, and the power of their relics. I could only guess that the Divine had held back her forces because she didn’t want to risk the city’s safety by lowering the bridge.
Grimly, I hacked apart a witherkin, a feverling, a shivering frostfain whose eyes were hidden beneath the curtain of icicles hanging from its brow.
“Nun, there are too many spirits. We can’t defeat them this way.”
The revenant was right. Even cantering back and forth in front of the line, destroying the spirits one by one, I was barely able to thin their numbers enough for the soldiers to hold their own. And I was beginning to encounter another problem: the spirits had caught on and were starting to avoid me, darting away before I could reach them. A space was opening around Priestbane like the eye of a storm.
“Where’s their leader?” I asked through gritted teeth, remembering the fury in Naimes.
“Inside the city. Everything’s muddled up with the smell of Old Magic, but whatever’s happening in there, we won’t be able to reach it from here. Nun, you need to use my full power.”
My hands tightened on the reins. Without a word, I wheeled Priestbane around and urged him away from the men, away from the line. Spirits parted around us, shrinking back in fear as Priestbane’s strides lengthened to a pounding gallop. A path opened ahead.
“How far away do we need to be from the soldiers? And Bonsaint?”
The revenant lapsed into silence. I felt it calculating its answer, trying to conceal a sudden spark of hunger. “Farther,” it urged at last. “To the edge of those ruins.”
An outcropping of stone lay ahead. It looked like part of an ancient wall, a leftover remnant of the ruins that had been dismantled long ago to build Bonsaint. I leaned forward in the saddle, focusing on the outcropping’s steadily expanding outline as the wind gripped my cloak and tore at my hair. My hood had fallen back, but there wasn’t anything I could do about that. When we reached the ruins, I rode past, encouraging Priestbane onward.
The revenant’s power surged in outrage. “We’ve gone far enough!” it hissed. “Release me!”
The raw hunger in its voice convinced me otherwise. I had been right not to trust it. As Priestbane’s hooves devoured the ground, le
aving the ruins behind, the revenant’s power swelled like an unvoiced scream in my chest. A sharp sting pricked my eye—a blood vessel bursting. The spirits continued to retreat in front of us, more quickly now, leaving a widening gap ahead. We had nearly reached the other side of the valley. The hills grew nearer and nearer.
I couldn’t breathe. My vision began to tunnel, darkening and narrowing; the hills seemed to recede, spooling away into the distance. Dimly, I recognized that I was about to pass out.
“Now,” I gasped.
The revenant answered. Around me came an unfurling, the spreading of a great pair of ghostly wings. Silver light hazed my vision as phantom flames danced over my skin. The bright, cold essences of hundreds of spirits blazed across my senses like stars winking to life across a night sky, and then they vanished all at once, engulfed within the flames.
The valley steamed with the fog of dispersing spirits. I could almost smell it, a coppery tang in the air, until I felt wetness on my lips and recognized that what I was smelling was my own blood streaming from my nose.
The observation didn’t seem important. Those spirits hadn’t been enough. If anything, they had only made the hunger worse. We were still galloping toward the hills, so I turned Priestbane around in a wide arc, back toward the remaining bulk of the forces.
The stallion shivered beneath me. His ears were laid flat against his skull, and the whites showed around his eyes. Part of me wanted to lay a reassuring hand on his neck, but that same part didn’t dare. I knew I would burn his life away the instant I touched him. It took all my willpower to drive back the flames licking at his heels, greedily tasting his strength.
There were fewer spirits left than I expected, at least a quarter of the army already burned away, half or so of the rest retreating toward the trees in ghostly streams. I bore down on a knot of them before they could reach the forest and felt their sparks flare and extinguish like moths igniting in a pyre. I swept through the spirits beyond, incinerating them as I passed. The silver fire streamed from me like a cloak, leaving a broad swath of steaming ground in my wake.
Nothing could stop me. A third of the army was decimated—then half—the rest scattering, fleeing in every direction. It was time for me to curb the revenant’s power. But that thought seemed far away, feeble in comparison with the terrible hunger that gripped my body, growing ever stronger. It twisted like a knife in my gut, like a hand around my throat leaving me choked and breathless.
The spirits weren’t enough. I needed more than the cold, meager remains of the Dead. I could feel the bright living souls of the soldiers and refugees growing nearer and nearer, and I couldn’t look away.
Soon I had drawn close enough to see the soldiers’ faces. Silver light reflected in their eyes as they gazed at me in wonder. They had lowered their swords. They thought they no longer needed them.
Closer… closer…
At the last second, I wrenched on Priestbane’s reins and pressed my knee to his side. The pinion-edge of the flames sheared past the soldiers, the grass browning and shriveling at their feet. Priestbane’s hooves pounded onward, carrying me past.
Anguished, the revenant shrieked—or maybe I was the one screaming. I couldn’t tell. The reliquary grew hot against my skin, first itching, then burning. I gripped its edges through my robes.
“That’s enough,” I gasped. “Revenant, enough.”
At first I thought it was going to fight me for control. And it could. If it tried, I might not have enough strength left to fight it. A terrible moment passed—and then its power rushed from my body, leaving me gasping and hollow, as though something essential inside me had been torn away.
Priestbane slowed to a walk, his head drooping. I dropped the sword and bent over his saddle, pressing my face to his hot, sweat-dampened mane. His sides heaved like a bellows. Grass stretched dead around us for as far as I could see.
I didn’t know how long I sat there. The sun beat down on my cloak. My mouth tasted like blood. I heard shouts from the soldiers as they chased the last few spirits across the valley, sometimes close, sometimes far away, and remembered to pull the hood back over my head to hide my face. I focused on the smells of horse and hot leather, the green stink of the battlefield’s churned-up turf, so I didn’t have to think about anything else. The revenant said nothing. It had retreated somewhere deep inside me, far enough away that I could no longer sense its presence.
A shadow fell over me. Too late, I heard the jingle of another horse’s reins.
“Lady vespertine,” said a man’s gruff voice.
My shoulders tensed. Maybe if I ignored him, he would go away.
“Lady? Are you injured?”
It had been worth a try. Reluctantly, I lifted my head. Peering sidelong from the shadows of my hood, I saw that it was the knight who had led the soldiers in battle. As I watched, he pushed up his mud-spattered visor with the back of his gauntlet, revealing a brown, careworn face. There were exhausted-looking pouches beneath his eyes, but his gaze was kind—too kind.
I wished he would stop looking at me that way. It made me feel flayed open and pinned, like one of Sister Iris’s anatomical specimens.
“No,” I said hoarsely, sounding uncertain.
A murmur went around. “You see,” a child’s voice declared with authority. “That’s Artemisia of Naimes. I told you. She’s a saint.”
I flinched. After an awkwardly long pause, I lifted my head higher, expanding my field of vision beneath the hood’s ragged fringe.
Immediately, I wished I hadn’t. A crowd encircled me, soldiers on the inside, refugees on the outside—hundreds of people, dusty and bedraggled in the midday sun, all staring in wide-eyed silence. Seeing me looking, several quickly signed themselves. The rest joined in, and a flutter of motion passed through the crowd, hands touching foreheads in the sign of the oculus, accompanied by hushed and reverent whispers. One old woman started weeping.
I didn’t know what to do. Granted, I was used to making people cry, but it usually happened for different reasons. These people—I had nearly killed them all. None of them had any idea how close I’d come to slaughtering them instead of saving them. If they did, they would be fleeing in the opposite direction.
Why did they all have to stare like that? Even the baby hoisted up in its mother’s arms was staring at me. I doubted anyone could see my face beneath the hood, but the knowledge didn’t help. I just wanted to get away.
I was wondering if I could drag the revenant out of wherever it was hiding and use its power to immolate myself like the saints of old when the knight said “lady” again, and I realized he was holding out his water skin. I had my own, courtesy of Leander, but I had forgotten to use it. My throat suddenly felt so parched that I didn’t hesitate. I took the skin from his hand and swallowed the warm water in thirsty gulps, briefly forgetting about the crowd.
“I’m Captain Enguerrand,” the man said gently. “Lady, this isn’t the first time you’ve saved my men. I heard what you did for the soldiers in Naimes.”
I wiped my mouth on my sleeve. “They survived?”
“All but four. And today, before you appeared, we had nearly lost hope—”
He ceased talking abruptly, his gaze fixed on my sleeve. My mouth had left a smear of blood on the fabric.
“It’s nothing,” I croaked, handing back the skin. “I had a nosebleed.”
The movement shifted my cloak. The light slanted beneath my hood, and Captain Enguerrand’s eyes widened in surprise. “You’re young,” he said, sitting back. “You can’t be any older than my daughters.”
Just then, a commotion came from the direction of the river. The giant drawbridge was being lowered over the Sevre. Riders had gathered on the other side to cross it: knights, their armor blinding in the sun, and a handful of robed clerics. They were so far away that they looked like toys.
As the bridge touched the bank and the procession stepped onto it, a single figure separated from the rest to ride forward, cantering towa
rd us across the valley. I didn’t recognize him until he drew the horse up short a distance away, the sun bright on his golden hair.
“That girl has stolen the relic of Saint Eugenia,” he called in a clear, carrying voice. “She is in danger of being possessed. Seize her, by the order of Her Holiness the Divine.”
NINE
The silence that fell was so profound I could hear the distant flapping of the pennants over Bonsaint. Everyone seemed to be holding their breath.
“Revenant,” I muttered, too quietly for Captain Enguerrand to hear. It didn’t reply.
The soldiers traded glances. They looked battered and filthy compared to the polished splendor of the knights on the bridge. Behind them, a discontented murmur ran through the crowd. I stole a wary look at Enguerrand under my hood, only to find him watching me with a complicated expression—resignation, unhappiness, determination. He looked like he was steeling himself to make a decision that he knew he was going to regret.
“Sir,” pleaded one of the soldiers.
Enguerrand sighed. He turned to his men and nodded.
Everything seemed to happen at once. The soldiers moved. I tensed. At the same time, the old woman collapsed, wailing. One soldier immediately swerved to help her, tripping a second, who was making a halfhearted grab for my stirrup that already seemed calculated to miss. The cry spooked Enguerrand’s horse, which jostled sideways into its neighbor. Except I was close enough to see that it hadn’t really spooked; Enguerrand had jabbed his heel into its side.
The results were dramatic. Suddenly there were horses rearing and whinnying. The baby turned red as a beet and started howling. The little girl who had identified me as Artemisia of Naimes took one delighted look at the mayhem, clenched her fists at her sides, and exuberantly began to scream.
A young soldier approached me in the chaos, ducking to avoid a rotten turnip flying through the air. Fervently, he signed himself. “Lady, run,” he said, and slapped Priestbane across the flank.
Vespertine Page 10