At home we celebrated Saint Agnes with only a single holy day, but she was the patron saint of Bonsaint. She had died attempting to bind a revenant, and in the process had destroyed it instead, burning her entire body to ashes. That qualified her as a high saint, even though she hadn’t left a relic behind. Bonsaint devoted several days of festivities to her memory. People traveled far for the celebration, even from outside Roischal.
That might be useful to keep in mind, if the Old Magic practitioner in Bonsaint was using the festival to cover their actions. Materials could be smuggled into the city as supplies for the festival; strange actions might go unnoticed amid the preparations. I was busy mulling this over when I heard the man mention the Ghostmarch again and realized they were talking about the drawbridge finally being lowered to let the refugees inside.
“Why wait until tomorrow?” he was saying angrily. “They saw what happened—they know the danger we’re in.”
“It’s all right,” she said, reaching out to clasp his hand. “Artemisia of Naimes is watching over us tonight.”
Faith shone in her eyes. I thought that was a ridiculous thing to say, but in all fairness, I couldn’t argue. I was lying on her blanket.
Unfortunately, I was more or less useless without the revenant. It occurred to me how disastrous it would be if I had to try to save someone while it was absent throwing a tantrum. Whenever it came back, we were going to need to discuss that. It couldn’t vanish whenever it pleased, at least not without warning me first.
Unless—
The thought struck like a torrent of cold water. I rolled over and drew out the reliquary with unsteady hands, fumbling with the latches. My chest still felt tender from how hot the metal had grown at the end of the battle. I imagined the air inside simmering, the delicate bone splintering, the revenant destroyed just like the one fatally bound to Saint Agnes.
I had been a fool not to think of that earlier. The relic was old; there might be a limit to how much power it could channel at once. It took me an agonizingly long time to get the latches open, cursing myself every second of the way.
Even after I had opened the reliquary, I couldn’t see well enough to tell whether the relic looked damaged. I pried the bone from its velvet notch and turned it over onto my hand.
With shocking speed, the revenant came boiling up from the depths of my mind and slammed into full power with a force that left me reeling. “Stop that,” it hissed, spitting with fury. “Put it away!”
“Revenant,” I whispered hoarsely. “You’re still here.”
It paused, its emotions a confused, sharp-edged jumble. Relief clearly hadn’t been the reaction it had expected. “You aren’t going to destroy my relic?” it asked finally, in a tone of lingering disbelief.
“I was checking to see if it had been damaged. I thought that was why you disappeared. Where were you?”
It hesitated. Then it snapped, “I’m entitled to some privacy, aren’t I? It isn’t as though there’s much to go around. Being trapped inside your body isn’t the panoply of delights you might imagine. Oh, pardon me, you’re a nun. Silly of me to suggest that you’ve ever imagined a single delightful experience in the entire span of your dull, miserable, hateful nun existence.”
I had almost missed talking to the revenant. At least I wasn’t worried about making it cry. I glanced over my shoulder at the couple, but they didn’t seem to have noticed anything amiss. Even if they did overhear me muttering to myself, they would likely mark it down as a sign of my ordeal. The children appeared as though they had fallen asleep.
“The priest almost caught me,” I whispered. “I could have used your help.”
“Please. If you had truly needed me, I would have intervened.”
I nearly dropped the relic in shock. “You were watching that entire time?”
“It isn’t as though I have much else to do,” the revenant snapped. “In any case, if the priest had caught you again, what do you suppose I could have done about it? Since you’re so determined not to hurt any humans, even the ones who deserve it.”
“Did those people you tried to kill on the battlefield deserve it?” My voice had gone as cold and dull as lead.
The revenant didn’t answer. It seemed to have realized it had gone too far. I still held the relic on my palm, and it looked suddenly pathetic, a fragile nub of ancient, brittle bone.
For a moment I had been worried about the revenant—actually worried that I might have lost it, and not merely because I couldn’t help the people of Roischal without its power. Even after it had nearly slaughtered hundreds of people using my body as a vessel, including the woman who was helping me and her family. I didn’t understand how I could still spare a single scrap of concern for it after that.
“What I hate about you is that you aren’t some mindless creature,” I said tonelessly. “That’s what I thought you would be, when I first opened the reliquary—a more powerful version of the ashgrim. But you can talk. You can think. Which means that when you do something, you’re making a choice to do it, like a person. I had started to think of you as a person,” I realized aloud, disgusted. “I suppose that was stupid of me.”
“Yes, I suppose it was,” the revenant retorted, but there was a note in its voice I couldn’t interpret. It had listened to that entire speech in silence. It was probably waiting to see whether I was about to crush its relic in my hand.
Using slow, deliberate movements, I placed the relic into its velvet slot, shut and latched the reliquary, and tucked it back underneath my clothes. Then I drew the blanket over my head and stared into the dark.
TEN
Today I would have to cross the Ghostmarch. Its shape loomed above the encampment in the predawn gloom, leashed to the city walls with a complex array of ropes and pulleys as though it were a beast in danger of breaking free.
I vanished from the family’s camp before dawn, leaving them asleep in the murky half-light. Before I left, I pried one of the smaller, less recognizable gems from the reliquary and placed it carefully in front of the woman’s face as she slept on unawares, ignoring the revenant’s hissed objections. I was certain the Lady would want her family to have it.
People were already stirring, but the smoke of last night’s banked cookfires hung low above the ground, shrouding everyone’s movements. No one bothered me as I passed.
As I neared the edge of the encampment, the roaring of the Sevre grew louder, and louder still as I picked my way up the rocky escarpment that overlooked the river, its weathered boulders pockmarked with pools of standing water. No one had camped here, likely because the wind kept blowing the river’s spray in drenching sheets over the bank. I found an outcropping of rock to crouch behind that shielded me from the spray but still afforded me a view of the drawbridge and the city.
Up close, Bonsaint lost some of its grandeur. My view was mostly of the walls. The banners hung sodden with dew, the high gray battlements that thrust from the tumbled rock of the bank mottled with lichen from the endless moisture of the Sevre crashing below. The soldiers patrolling the battlements were so high up they looked like toy figures, their positions betrayed by the occasional glint of steel. From this vantage, I would be able to study the Clerisy’s defenses before I crossed the bridge.
Eerie groaning and creaking sounds shuddered across the bank, like the whale song we sometimes heard on the coast of Naimes, echoing up from the depths of the sea. They were coming from the Ghostmarch, the revenant explained, as the colossal wooden beams expanded and contracted in the damp, straining against the drawbridge’s metal components.
“The metal is consecrated, of course, but that won’t be the unpleasant part. I haven’t crossed the Sevre since before I was bound, and I’m not looking forward to doing it again.”
“Won’t walking on a bridge make a difference? We’ll be high above the water.”
“Certainly, it will make a difference. You can’t drown from on top of a bridge. You can, however, ardently long for death as you
vomit over the rail. I’ll be able to suppress my power to reduce the effects on your body, but you’ll still feel sick as we cross, and you’ll need to hide it from the other humans. Your Clerisy will be watching for signs of possession.”
Neither of us mentioned that the problem could be avoided entirely if I were able to dismiss the revenant back into its relic, even just for a few minutes.
“Lean over and look into that puddle,” it said suddenly.
“What?”
“Your reflection,” it said impatiently. “I want to see what you look like.”
Soon it was going to regret saying that. “Just don’t scream.”
“Why would I scream?”
I shrugged. That was how Marguerite had reacted when she’d first arrived at the convent and discovered me watching her from beneath the bed of our shared room. But possibly, hiding under the bed had been a factor.
I bent over the puddle, watching my reflection materialize in the shallow water. Gray eyes, stark against a filthy face smeared with dirt and dried blood. The skin underneath ghastly in its pallor, surrounded by a tangled curtain of long black hair, snarled like a bird’s nest with burrs and leaves. Overall, not the worst I had ever looked first thing in the morning.
I felt the revenant recoil.
“If we come across the priest, he won’t recognize me,” I pointed out.
“If the Clerisy sees you like this, they’ll think you’re a thrall!”
“My eyes aren’t glowing.”
“That isn’t always a reliable sign,” the revenant snapped. “Experienced spirits know how to prevent it. In any case,” it hurried on, possibly realizing it had revealed too much, “we don’t want to give them any reason to pay special attention to you, and you look precisely like a thrall that’s spent a fortnight blundering through the wilderness, trying to eat twigs and moss because it has no idea how to care for its human vessel. And you smell like one, too, for that matter.”
A fair observation. I soaked a corner of my cloak in the puddle and scrubbed my face, which the revenant endured in prickly silence. I got the feeling it wanted to complain about the cold but couldn’t, since I was acting on its advice. “Clean that cut on your hand while you’re at it. I would consider it a personal affront if you got this far only to die of wound fever.”
I had forgotten about my hand. The thin, shallow gash looked like it had been sliced by the bolt’s fletching, right through my glove. I more regretted the damage to the glove. My scars made it impossible to handle a needle and thread.
After I had cleaned the wound to the revenant’s satisfaction, I shoved the wet handful of cloak beneath my tunic and scrubbed away at my armpits and the other parts of my body that I could reach. The revenant seemed utterly uninterested in the proceedings, just as it had on the occasions when I’d relieved myself in the woods or the harrow’s chamber pot.
“Is it true that spirits can’t remember anything about their human lives?”
“Yes,” it answered tartly.
I had never considered before now that someone would have needed to speak to a spirit to learn that information. I had always merely accepted it as one of the Clerisy’s teachings. “So you don’t know whether you were a man or a woman in life.”
“No, and I don’t see why it matters. Humans are so tedious. Oh, you have dangly bits. Congratulations, you’re going to put on armor and swing a sword about. Oh, you’ve ended up with the other kind. Too bad—time to either have babies or become a nun.”
It wasn’t exactly that simple, but I decided that I didn’t want to argue about the Clerisy’s hierarchy with a Fifth Order spirit. Also, it had a point. “It would be useful if you did remember something. We still don’t know why your soul turned into a revenant.”
“No doubt because I was horrifically nasty and evil,” it spat.
Probably, but I received the impression that I would upset it if I agreed. Instead, I said nothing, giving my dirty fingernails a final halfhearted scrub before I tugged my gloves back on. “How is this?” I asked, leaning over the now-murky puddle again.
It gave me a grudging inspection. “Better,” it admitted, then added darkly, “But you’re going to have to do something about that hair.”
* * *
We spent the rest of the morning going over the various obstacles that we might encounter on the bridge and what I might have to say if I was stopped for questioning. By the time the sun rose above the city’s battlements, I had nearly succeeded in picking most of the burrs from my hair. We were debating whether I should claim I was from Roischal or Montprestre when a ratcheting sound echoed across the bank, and I looked up to see the towering span of the Ghostmarch move. In slow, ponderous jerks, the bridge slanted away from the city walls and began to descend over the river, producing a tortured, drawn-out groan like a living creature in agony.
I tensed behind the outcropping, the back of my neck prickling. I had never seen anything like this before. It seemed impossible that something so large could move, much less at the whim of humankind. Up along the wall, I glimpsed the furious spinning of winches and pulleys as workers let out the ropes. In the river below, massive pilings stood anchored in the rapids, waiting to receive the bridge’s weight. The Ghostmarch plunged them into deep shadow before at last, with a crunch and scrape of rock, it settled in place against the opposite bank.
A crowd had already gathered, but no one approached the end of the bridge. I thought it likely that some were remembering the effects of Leander’s relic from the day before. Thankfully, though I was too far away to make out details, I didn’t see any sign of his black robes among the knights and clerics gathered on the other side.
“Those clerics will be using their relics,” the revenant warned.
“Will they be able to sense you?”
“Not while I’m suppressing myself. But, nun, I won’t be able to stay hidden and lend you my power at the same time. While we’re over the river, I won’t be able to use my power at all. You’ll be on your own.”
I bit back a number of possible replies about its performance yesterday, which it seemed to be doing its best to pretend hadn’t happened. In silence, I clambered down, slipped out from behind a boulder, and merged with the crowd.
I had chosen a spot away from the front, not wanting to be one of the first to cross. I regretted it as a sea of humanity closed in around me, shoulders jostling mine, bodies pressing close, dozens of voices vying for supremacy in my ears. Babies were crying, couples arguing. Nearby someone was consoling an elderly man on a cart, begging him to drink a little water. My head swam. I wished that I could pull my hood up, but the revenant and I had agreed earlier that hiding my face would seem too suspicious.
“What’s wrong with you?” Its voice sounded muted. Suppressing itself, I guessed. “You already feel like you’re going to vomit.”
“It’s the people,” I muttered under my breath.
“What about the people?”
“There are a lot of them.”
“You could have mentioned that this would be a problem earlier,” the revenant hissed.
I hadn’t known it would be. I took measured breaths through my nose, focusing on the ground in front of my feet. The crowd inched forward in fits and starts, clogged with carts and wagons, periodically halted by balking mules that refused to set foot over the river.
And then I reached the bridge. The moment I stepped onto the planks, I felt as though all the blood had drained out of my body through my feet. I could feel the power of the current raging beneath me, snatching my strength and carrying it away, hurling it onward down the river, pummeling it to nothing. I didn’t feel my next shuffling step. My legs had gone numb.
For the revenant, the effects seemed to be worse. It had curled itself into a tight knot to hide, and now I felt it struggling not to unravel, radiating feeble pulses of misery. I doubted it would be able to speak even if it tried.
Through the waves of dizziness and nausea, I slowly became aware t
hat the knights stationed along the bridge were paying special attention to dark-haired girls. Some they drew aside to be scrutinized by a funereal-looking old man in crimson and silver vestments, which I recognized from the convent’s books as the robes of a sacristan. As we drew nearer, I caught the red glint of a ruby on his finger. One of a sacristan’s duties included lighting the cathedral’s candles and incense, like Sister Lucinde had done for our chapel in Naimes.
But the ashgrim wasn’t his only relic. An oval-shaped moonstone pendant gleamed at his breast, too large to wear as a ring. I noticed that he was waiting on the far side of the bridge, where he would be able to use his shade to examine the girls as they stood over the Sevre. Even worse, there was a raven perched on his shoulder, which seemed to fix me with a beady stare as I hunched inward, hoping to pass unnoticed.
It was no use. A knight loomed from the crowd to block my path, his visored face impassive as he gestured me over to wait. Unable to think of any way to escape, I joined the group of girls clustered by the rail. Some of them were looking over it at the frothing chaos of the Sevre, the mere idea of which made bile creep up my throat.
The nearest girl turned and gave me a tentative smile, which quickly changed into a look of alarm when she took in my expression.
“I have the flux,” I croaked, and she sidled away with gratifying haste.
One by one, the knights motioned us forward. The reliquary hung as a leaden weight beneath my tunic, and the raven’s attention seemed focused on me as the other girls filed past. Finally, my turn arrived. A gauntleted hand halted me mere steps from dry land.
My vision blurred. I had an impression of rheumy eyes peering at me from beneath dark, silver-shot brows, and a deep, sonorous voice asking me a question.
“Anne,” I replied, hoping the sacristan had asked for my name. “I’m from Montprestre. I came to visit my aunt, for the feast, but then—on the road…”
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