Priestbane lunged into motion. Dazed, I caught his reins and laid a hand on his shoulder in silent apology. Cantering heavily, each stride accompanied by a labored, snorting breath, he carried me away. Civilians and soldiers alike moved out of my path, pausing to sign themselves as I passed. Some reached out to brush their fingers across my shoes or Priestbane’s side, like pilgrims touching a saint’s effigy for its blessing.
I didn’t see the point in trying to escape. Priestbane was spent; he wouldn’t be able to outrun our pursuers this time. But then I heard a raucous cry of “Crumbs!” and glanced over my shoulder. Trouble had returned, diving at the crowd with a vengeance. I saw in disbelief that the riot had spread across the entire encampment, engulfing the procession as it tried to exit the bridge. The caparisoned horses balked, too hemmed in to give chase. People had even closed in around Leander, miring him in a sea of bodies.
I turned back around, leaning over Priestbane’s withers. More faces flashed past. Outstretched hands surrounded me; shouts battered my ears. And then suddenly I burst free from the claustrophobic noise and stink and press of the crowd, open ground stretching away around me like a flung-out tapestry.
On one side the battlefield unfolded, the once-green valley reduced to a brown wasteland by the revenant’s power. On the other, the river glared like a sheet of hammered steel, winding its path toward the forest. Ahead lay the shadows of the trees.
As the crowd’s noise receded and the hills drew nearer, juddering up and down with each stride, it was difficult not to feel as though I were running in the wrong direction. What I’d done today wouldn’t last—those people still needed my help. I needed to get inside Bonsaint. I had to find a way, even with all the Clerisy’s forces in Roischal bent on my capture.
“Revenant, I need you.”
Silence.
Unexpectedly, its rejection stung. Even though I didn’t trust it, I had gotten used to relying on its advice. For a brief, horrible instant I had no idea what to do.
I shook off my uncertainty. I would get to the woods. Then I would figure out what to do next, with or without its help. I didn’t have a choice; I couldn’t ride Priestbane like this for much longer without hurting him.
The hills loomed above me. The shadows of the branches stretched over my cloak, breathing forth the forest’s damp, cool air. Priestbane’s hoofbeats muffled to a soft drumming on the leaves.
And then a shout rang out behind me.
I risked a look, already knowing what I would see. Leander. He’d escaped the crowd, galloping after me. My glance left me with a fleeting impression of green eyes blazing against a pale face. Captain Enguerrand thundered a few paces behind, his own stallion flagging, its black coat flecked with foamy saliva.
Leander’s mount was fresh, rapidly closing the distance between us. As I scrambled for an idea, I heard a thunk, and with a sickening weightless lurch found myself flung from the saddle. Priestbane’s hoof must have struck a root, I thought, even as the world turned upside down. I saw a flash of sky, and then I hit the ground.
The impact slammed the breath from my lungs. Unable to halt my momentum, I tumbled end over end down a hill, lashed by undergrowth, dead leaves choking me, tangling in my hair, stuffing their prickling edges into my sleeves and collar and stockings.
At last I slid to a partial stop at the bottom of an incline, still gradually slipping down in a stupor. Distantly, I heard shouting. Blood roared in my ears. I flung out an arm to steady myself, and my hand met empty air.
I blinked away dirt and realized the roaring wasn’t my blood after all. I’d slid to a halt at the edge of an embankment that abruptly cut off in a steep vertical plunge, the roots of the trees anchored along its edge dangling in midair over the roaring span of the Sevre. The river’s current raged, throwing up spray against sharp rocks that studded the frothing water like teeth.
For a moment everything else stopped existing. The white spray and jagged, glistening rocks seemed to expand, filling my vision like an animal’s gaping mouth. Even this high up, fine droplets of water misted my face. Slowly, I felt myself sliding over the edge.
In a rush, I came back to myself. I wrenched myself away, scrabbling, grabbing fistfuls of leaves. Loose dirt sifted into my gloves as I clawed for the roots beneath, tearing handfuls of them from the ground in my desperate scramble up the slope. When I reached a leaf-filled hollow behind a tree, I threw myself onto my side, panting.
And then, a voice. “I’ve found her horse, Your Grace.”
Enguerrand.
“That’s my horse,” Leander said coldly, his voice raised to make himself heard over the noise of the rapids. “She stole it from me.”
Every muscle in my body went rigid. Moving in stiff increments, I burrowed deeper into the leaves, hoping the Sevre would drown out the quiet rustling of my movements.
“Your Grace?”
“Never mind. Where did she go? She must be nearby. She couldn’t have run far.”
A pause followed. I shifted my head so I could peer through the leaves, bringing the two of them into focus on the trail above the slope. Captain Enguerrand held Priestbane’s reins. I guessed that he and Leander had continued their pursuit of the stallion before discovering that he was riderless and doubling back to find me. Enguerrand was gazing down the steep incline to the Sevre below, where my uncontrolled tumble had scuffed an obvious path to the edge of the precipice.
Leander followed his gaze, and the blood drained from his face. For a heartbeat he looked stricken. I thought this had to be a performance for Enguerrand’s sake, but Enguerrand wasn’t looking at him—and when the captain turned back around, Leander struggled to bring his expression back under control, appearing briefly horrified before his face smoothed into its usual pious mask.
“We’ve lost her,” Enguerrand said grimly. “I would wager she hit her head when she fell from the horse, and went over stunned. It wouldn’t be the first time. We lost a soldier last year the same way. It isn’t easy to judge how close the river is from the trails.”
As Enguerrand spoke, Leander’s hand spasmed. Reflexively, he reached for his onyx ring. Then his fingers stopped a hairsbreadth from the relic.
I held my breath, waiting to see what he would do. I noticed for the first time that he looked even worse than he had yesterday, the skin under his eyes bruised instead of merely shadowed, a match for the dark streak of blight on his cheekbone. He had likely forced his way out of the crowd by using his relic. He would have had to use it on dozens of people to manage that.
The moment stretched on. At last Leander laid his hand back down. He had little cause to suspect that Enguerrand was lying to him. The tracks spoke for themselves. The path I had clawed on my way back up overlapped too closely with the original for me to tell them apart, so I doubted Leander could, either.
Admirably, Enguerrand hadn’t looked at the relic. He didn’t seem to have even noticed Leander’s struggle. “She went over the edge,” he repeated, steadfast.
“Then have your men search the river,” Leander snapped.
Enguerrand hesitated. “Your Grace, does she know how to dismiss the revenant?”
“Of course not. She’s untrained.”
“Even Fifth Order spirits are said to be weakened by the Sevre. I don’t know as much about this as you do, Your Grace. But if she fell in with the revenant still summoned…”
He didn’t need to finish. The frothing water and jagged rocks would claim even a strong swimmer. Someone sharing a spirit’s weakness to running water wouldn’t stand a chance.
Leander’s eyes were drawn back to its current. For a long moment he stared into the rapids. After a few seconds, he started to look sick.
“Your Grace?”
“Search the banks,” he said, returning to himself. “As far south as necessary. Don’t stop until you find…” His face was white, his eyes stark. “Until you find her,” he finished, and wheeled his mount away.
Captain Enguerrand lingered a momen
t longer, studying the tracks I had left in the leaves. New lines already seemed to be etched into his weathered features. I wondered what he was risking by helping me—his family, the daughters he’d mentioned on the battlefield.
He raised his head, and his gaze brushed over my hiding place. Then he turned his horse to follow, drawing Priestbane after him, calling orders to his men.
* * *
I didn’t move until dark. At least what passed for dark in the woods, which barely counted for someone with the Sight. Wisps had emerged as dusk painted the landscape in shades of blue and purple, and now hundreds of them sparkled among the trees, casting a ghostly silver glow over the hills, illuminating my path.
I didn’t allow my gaze to linger as I trudged past. I knew from experience that I wouldn’t be able to see any sign of the children their souls had once belonged to. Even up close, wisps merely resembled hazy spheres of light hovering a handspan or so above the ground.
No one had ever bound a wisp to a relic. According to convent legend, Saint Beatrice had needed to starve herself for weeks to make her body weak enough for a shade to try possessing it, and even then it had barely been a shiver in her mind, effortless to subdue. The only stories about wisps were those describing how Sighted travelers had survived getting lost in the wilderness by following wisp-lights, which had floated ahead of them, guiding them to safety. I had never seen anything like that, but I hoped it was true.
There was a plot outside my old village where children were buried in unmarked graves. In a village like mine, far outside the route of the convent’s corpse-wagons, only those who could afford it sent their dead children to convents to get the bodies blessed. Wisps couldn’t hurt anyone, the reasoning went, and it cost money to borrow a horse, which most families needed to get the body to the convent in time. Spending that coin could mean a second child starving for lack of bread.
At night, peeking through the knotholes in the shed’s walls, I had been able to see the plot and the lights of the wisps hovering above its graves. My family had been keeping me in the shed for months by that point. I’d had no idea what the wisps were or what their presence meant, but their lights had comforted me all the same. Somehow, they’d always felt like kindred souls signaling to me across the dark.
At last, I reached the edge of the forest. I must have been lost in my thoughts, because I nearly stumbled into a group of people, hearing the loud crash of their footsteps through the undergrowth too late. I withdrew in time to avoid being spotted, cowering behind a bush like a startled animal.
“As if she would really fall into the river and drown! I’m telling you, the captain might as well have winked.”
“I doubt the old man knows how to wink,” another voice replied, with obvious pride.
“Did you see the silver fire?” a third was saying, also male. “I’ve never seen anything like it. No one has. A real vespertine—did you think you’d ever see a vespertine?”
“Not a vespertine,” corrected a quiet voice. “A saint.”
Following this pronouncement, everyone lapsed into reverential silence. Fabric rustled. A pattering sound followed.
I took a closer look through the leaves, and instantly wished I hadn’t. It was a group of young soldiers relieving themselves at the edge of the trees. Firelight glinted off their chain mail.
I could ask them for help. By the sound of it, I could probably trust them. But as they finished and turned to leave, and I tried to rise from behind the bush, I discovered that I couldn’t move. I tried again, to no avail. The mere idea of approaching them had immobilized me. Speaking to a group of strangers would have posed a challenge for me at the best of times. The idea of doing it now, after everything they had just said, made me want to turn back around and hurl myself into the river.
I watched them go, their figures silhouetted against a sea of flickering cookfires. Not too far away, the sides of tents and wagons danced with leaping shadows, painted red in the shifting light. Laughter and the smell of woodsmoke carried on the breeze. I had emerged from the forest in a different place than I had entered it, following the Sevre to make sure I didn’t get lost. In doing so, it appeared that I had stumbled across the far side of the refugee encampment.
It looked significantly larger up close than it had from far away. There had to be thousands of people camped out along the river. Suddenly I was grateful I’d remained hidden. No one in Roischal aside from Leander and Captain Enguerrand had seen my face closely enough to recognize me. My hood had fallen back during the battle, but I’d been enveloped in the revenant’s ghost-fire afterward, so I doubted the soldiers had gotten a good look.
Better if I remained dead, a body floating down the Sevre. The Clerisy might not be fully convinced of my demise, but at the very least, they would waste some time searching for me in the wrong direction. Meanwhile, I could vanish among the refugees without a trace.
I stumbled toward the fires, drawing my cloak closer around my body. As I picked my way across the dark field, alone in front of the vast, glittering sprawl of humanity, I was more conscious than ever of the continued silence inside my head. If I had consecrated steel, I would try using it to draw the revenant out. I had muttered a few prayers earlier while waiting for the sun to set, but disappointingly, the words hadn’t produced any interesting effects—no smoking welts or festering boils.
As I entered the encampment, the dazzle of the fires confused my sense of direction. Sounds and smells washed over me in waves, overwhelming my senses. The reek of sewage merged nauseatingly with the savory aroma of roasting meat; disorienting bursts of laughter erupted around me without warning. I averted my eyes from the groups gathered around the cookfires, searching for a dark, abandoned spot where I could huddle down and sleep. My steps weaved like a drunkard’s. Distantly, I wondered whether I should try to find something to eat. Sometimes I forgot.
Have you ever considered that your body carries you?
Someone had said that to me recently. Mother Katherine? No—the revenant.
A loud cheer went up, and I instinctively shrank away, crouching against the side of a cart. The cheer went up again as I pressed my face against the rough wood, retreating from the barrage of sound. It was my name, I realized. They were cheering my name.
I didn’t want to move. But eventually the cheering died down, and I had the unsettling sense that I was being watched. Reluctantly, I raised my head. Two grimy-faced children were regarding me solemnly over the edge of the straw-filled cart bed. After a moment of consideration, one of them broke off a piece of bread and held it down, as though I were a shy creature to be coaxed from the shadows.
“Are you alone?” someone else asked.
I hadn’t noticed the woman standing beside the cart, her face drawn with worry. She looked as though she had been watching me for a while. She reached for my shoulder, and I flinched. Slowly, she lowered her hand.
“Don’t worry—it’s all right. Are you looking for somewhere to sleep?” She was using the same gentle voice as Captain Enguerrand. It was how the sisters had spoken to me when I’d first arrived at the convent, a starved, voiceless child with burned hands and staring eyes.
When I didn’t answer, she went on, “You can sleep behind our cart if you want. We won’t bother you. Look, here’s a spare blanket….”
She moved away to lift a bundle from the cart. A man lay propped up against the leaned-over end, his face and neck mottled with blight. He was lucky to have survived. Since spirits could only possess people with the Sight, whatever attacked him wouldn’t have been interested in keeping him alive. Its goal would have been to drain the life from him as quickly as possible. Whenever the convent received corpses who had died of blight, Sister Iris would ride out the next morning to investigate, tracking down the stray witherkin or frostfain responsible.
My thoughts had wandered. Motion drew my attention back to the woman. She had spread the blanket across the ground in the shadows some distance from her family’s fire. “H
ere,” she said, patting the blanket as though I might not understand words.
I was used to that. Too exhausted to care, I dragged myself over to the blanket as the children watched my every move in fascination. I didn’t want to spend the night getting stared at, but I also didn’t have the energy to go anywhere else. It was either sleep on the blanket, or pass out on the ground. At least I had some comfortingly non-human company. There was a mule tied up behind the cart, which laid back its ears and flashed me the white of its eye before resuming its quest for a weed trapped under one of the wheels.
The woman returned to the fire and gathered her family around her, speaking quietly. I couldn’t make out what she was saying.
“The poor girl,” the man said. “She’s so thin. I wonder what happened to her family.”
I caught a snatch of her reply. “Better not to ask, I think. That look on her face…”
As far as I knew, I hadn’t been making any particular expression. She was likely referring to my normal one, which I supposed, in certain lighting, could look somewhat disturbed. I burrowed deeper into the blanket.
I didn’t emerge when she stealthily returned to set something down nearby: close enough to reach, not close enough to frighten me. I looked after she had gone and discovered that she had left a crust of bread. I wondered if it was the same one that the children had been eating previously. They were still in the cart, watching.
Her charity made me uncomfortable. I should eat, but the children needed it more. I rolled the bread over to the cart and waited for one of them to pick it up before I turned away.
The revenant would be angry when it came back and discovered that I hadn’t eaten, but it had chosen to abandon me, so it didn’t have the right to complain.
As I drifted off, I listened to the man and woman speak in hushed voices. I learned that they had originally left their town to visit Bonsaint for the festival of Saint Agnes. They’d gotten caught up in the attacks during their journey, and by the time they had arrived at Bonsaint, the drawbridge—which they called the Ghostmarch—had already been lifted for everyone except those bringing supplies into the city.
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