Leander’s head jerked up, his gaze fixing on the statue of Saint Agnes. I followed it to see that Trouble had landed on the statue’s head, his white feathers striking in the gloom. My stomach plunged. Some of the people here had to be refugees; they must have seen Trouble in the aftermath of the battle, diving at the clerics to aid my escape. And if they had made the connection between me and Trouble, Leander certainly had too. Looking back, I found that he had gone very still, his fingers poised over his onyx ring. Beside him, the Divine looked overwhelmed, glancing around as though searching for someone to tell her what to do.
The shouting continued, growing bolder. “It’s a sign! Saint Artemisia is with us!”
“There’s something here,” the revenant said suddenly. “An unbound spirit. It reeks of Old Magic. It’s possessing someone.”
I cast a horrified eye over the hundreds of people gathered in the square. There were too many possibilities. Dozens of soldiers, visibly uncertain whether to contain the crowd or help disperse it; the monks who had helped set up the effigy; even the clerics and knights standing on the platform with the Divine. Each of them Sighted, vulnerable to possession.
Nearby, alarmed cries rang out, more of disgust than fear. I learned forward, trying to see the cause of the disturbance. People were jumping away from something on the ground. It was rats—rats scattering beneath their feet, fleeing across the cobblestones.
“There it is,” the revenant hissed triumphantly.
Marguerite’s shade must have sensed it too. She was staring at a shape in the crowd, a dark figure limping along behind the rats, shoving people aside. My breath caught as the dwindling light glanced from a piece of metal on the figure’s brow. It was the beggar from earlier, the one playing the part of the Raven King. He was still wearing his crown and cloak of feathers. Now his face was contorted, his teeth bared in a grimace. His head wagged from side to side like a maddened bear. I felt the revenant recoil at whatever it sensed within him.
“That human wasn’t possessed when we saw him earlier. Nun, the spirit inhabiting him knows we’re here. It’s looking for us.”
As though it had heard the revenant speak, the thrall jerked to a halt. The beggar’s eyes met mine across the crowd, flashing silver in the dusk.
“It’s been sent to find us.”
NINETEEN
The beggar bared his blackened teeth in a rictus grin. Then he ducked his head and continued shoving through the crowd, his limbs moving in labored fits and jerks.
“It’s powerful,” the revenant was saying, speaking more to itself than to me. “Fourth Order, certainly, but the stink of Old Magic is obscuring it…. Nun?” It sounded alarmed. “Whatever you’re thinking of doing, don’t.”
All I cared about was that the thrall had come for me, which meant that anyone nearby was in danger. Charles wasn’t carrying his sword; even if Jean had had one, he was in no condition to fight. And I couldn’t let anything happen to Marguerite.
Roughly, I shoved her hand away. “I need to go,” I grated out, and jumped off the awning, hardening myself against her cry of protest.
“Nun!”
I didn’t answer. As soon as my boots hit the cobbles, I was weaving through the crowd, shoved from side to side by the unpredictable lurch of bodies. I paused to let the beggar catch sight of me, willing him to follow. Then I yanked my hood over my face. If I managed to lead him out of the square, I might be able to fight the spirit inhabiting him without anyone getting hurt.
“You are the worst vessel I’ve ever had,” the revenant hissed.
At first my strategy seemed to work. I caught a few glimpses of the beggar over my shoulder, twitching and grimacing as he prowled along my trail. Then I heard a scream.
“Blight!” someone shouted. “The Dead are among us!”
As though this were a signal, the ravens took flight at last, erupting over the crowd in a storm of beating wings. Their voices echoed the cry of “Dead, dead, dead!”
I jerked to a halt as panic raged around me. The thrall had stopped in the middle of the square near the statue of Saint Agnes. His bloodshot gaze locked on mine as his hand snapped out and grabbed a passing woman’s wrist. He let go as soon as she screamed, and she was carried away by the crowd, terror boiling in her wake. No one else could see the silver sheen that glazed his eyes. As far as these people knew, anyone around them could be possessed; the square could be full of spirits, and none of them would be the wiser.
The message was clear: it wasn’t going to let me lure it away. It would hurt people until I stopped and faced it here. Whatever it was, it was intelligent, or it was following Leander’s orders.
The ravens blotting out the sky made it difficult to see what was happening on the platform, but it appeared as though the clerics were trapped with the crowd blocking the stairs. Through the gale of flickering black wings, I saw someone drop a censer, which rolled across the boards until it struck the base of the effigy, showering the robes of nearby clerics with embers. The Divine frantically patted at her smoking vestments—and just like that, Leander was no longer at her side.
My hands curled into fists. Ducking my head, I shouldered toward the beggar, who stood waiting for me, eerily still in the midst of the chaos.
“Wait,” the revenant said hurriedly. “It wants you to fight it. This is a trap. The aim isn’t to destroy my relic; it’s to force you to reveal your presence to the Clerisy.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?”
The harsh cries of the ravens drowned out my voice, but I knew the revenant had heard me. The answer hung in the silence between us. Run. Leave these humans to their fate. At least it didn’t bother saying those words out loud. It knew me too well for that.
The thrall briefly vanished from view as someone staggered past clutching a bloodied face. I needed to move quickly. Soldiers had begun pushing their way forward, halting people to look into their eyes. Organizing them was an armored knight who I hoped was Captain Enguerrand, not a member of the cathedral guard.
I pushed forward, straining in the opposite direction as the people fleeing past. I had barely managed a few steps when a body slammed into me, bowling me to the ground. What followed was a disorienting muddle of churning legs and stamping boots. A burst of heat flooded my ear, and then the revenant yanked me back up so forcefully that I thought for an instant it had taken over my body. I gasped for air as though surfacing from underwater.
My ear stung. Someone had kicked me.
“You could have been killed,” the revenant snapped. “Right now the humans pose a greater threat to you than the thrall.”
“Help me fight it,” I panted, undeterred.
“Have it your way, nun. Get as close to the thrall as you can.” It sounded bitterly angry. “This is a foolish thing to even attempt, but while the clerics are distracted, they might not be able to tell my power apart from the spirit possessing him.”
No matter how dangerous it was, I had to try. If I could just flush the spirit from hiding, the Clerisy’s forces should be able to fight it. The Divine carried at least one Fourth Order relic, and she wouldn’t have been ordained if she were incapable of using it.
A few more steps, and I broke into a small clearing created by the crowd surging around Saint Agnes’s statue. The beggar stood waiting. As soon as I stepped back into sight, his eyes rolled up, locking on to me through the flitting shapes of ravens, the whites so bloodshot they burned red in the twilight. Then he charged.
His weight bowled me to the cobblestones, his frame thin but wiry, clawing at me in a frenzy of motion empowered by the spirit’s unnatural strength. His scrabbling hands closed around my throat and squeezed. I wrenched myself to the side and sent us tumbling over each other across the ground, into the path of people fleeing past. A boot clipped my shoulder; another struck the beggar’s head. His grip loosened enough for me to drag in a painful, fiery breath. Only then did the revenant’s power push forth, a trickle compared to its usual violent flood. The beggar collapsed,
convulsing.
Veins bulged in his face, and his mouth opened in a silent scream. His lips were tinged blue, his tongue purple and swollen. I grabbed his head in both hands so he wouldn’t crack his skull on the cobbles. His eyes fixed on me with a terror that I couldn’t identify as his own or that of the spirit possessing him.
“You’re killing him,” I said.
“I’m doing my best,” the revenant retorted, its voice strained with effort.
I bit back a terse reply, remembering the limitations of my own hands. I could hold a sword, but not a sewing needle. The revenant’s destructive power likewise wasn’t designed for subtlety—but for my sake, it was trying.
The beggar went limp. At first I thought he had died. Then silver light hazed his eyes. The terror in them vanished, replaced with an expression of cold condemnation.
“Traitor,” he declared.
I almost released him in shock. That deep, rasping voice wasn’t the thrall speaking. It was the spirit possessing him.
“Betrayer of your own kind,” it went on, the beggar’s mouth contorting strangely around the words. With another, greater shock, I realized that it was speaking to the revenant.
“Do you not see,” it rasped, “that the humans will destroy you if we fail? There is no path for you, Scorned One. No mercy, no escape. Wherever you go, you will be—”
I didn’t get to hear the rest. The revenant interrupted with a final, vicious shove of power, like the twisting of a knife. The beggar’s eyes fell shut and his lungs rattled in a long exhale. A gout of silver vapor poured from his body, twisting away in a gyre above the crowd.
Whatever form it took, the Clerisy could handle it now. It might be powerful, but it was only one spirit against the combined might of Bonsaint’s forces. I had seen Leander alone take on a rivener.
As far as I could tell, my struggle with the beggar had gone unnoticed amid the chaos. I dragged his unconscious body toward the statue and hauled him up on the plinth, where he wouldn’t get trampled. Every breath burned my bruised throat like fire. I imagined that I tasted smoke. Not incense, but the stench of something burning. The pain must have brought back a memory of my family’s hearth, the heat of the fire as I plunged my hands inside.
When I looked up, one last person fled past, leaving behind an expanse of empty cobbles, littered with debris—scraps of food, crushed blossoms. I looked up farther, bringing a circle of boots into view. Drawn swords. Soldiers.
I hadn’t been fast enough. They had finished combing through the crowd. Converging at the square’s center, they had all stopped dead around me. Ravens still swarmed overhead, panic still churned behind them, but it was as though the space surrounding Saint Agnes’s statue had turned into the eye of a storm, briefly quiet and still.
A loud, metallic clatter shattered the illusion. One of the soldiers had dropped his sword. He didn’t seem to notice he’d done it; he was too busy staring at me.
“Oh, fantastic,” spat the revenant.
These soldiers had the Sight. They had seen everything. Not just two people fighting on the ground, but the spirit I had driven from a thrall’s body—even if they had seen nothing else, they couldn’t have missed its silver light twisting overhead.
I was still holding the beggar’s arms. Slowly, I lowered him to rest against Saint Agnes’s feet.
They didn’t know my face. Perhaps they wouldn’t recognize me. Who would look at me and think I could possibly be Artemisia of Naimes? The real Artemisia could have slipped away, and I was just some bystander she’d left behind. That was how I felt, like an imposter at risk of being mistaken for myself.
“I told you she couldn’t have drowned,” said one of the men. They were gazing at me in wonder.
“Anne!” came a ragged shout.
I flinched. I was still imagining that I smelled smoke, and the sound of my old name belonged to that same pain-filled darkness, an echo of reproval, of fear. I wasn’t ready for Charles to break into the circle of soldiers, elbowing them aside. He looked frantic. He must have jumped down from the awning to look for me. I remembered, dazed, that he had five sisters.
First he looked at me; then his eyes slid to the unconscious beggar at my side. He glanced around at the soldiers, confused. “Anne?” he repeated, lost.
“That isn’t my name,” I said.
He looked at the other soldiers again and then back at me, his gaze dropping to my gloves. Understanding began to dawn. He was realizing that he had never seen my hands.
I didn’t know what I had expected him to do once he figured out who I was—laugh, maybe. Look disappointed or betrayed. He did none of those things. Instead, he dropped to his knees on the dirty cobbles.
“Lady vespertine,” he said, gazing up at me. His eyes were dark and sincere beneath the lock of sweaty hair plastered to his forehead.
The smell of smoke was growing stronger. The air was too hot. I couldn’t breathe. I wanted Charles to stop kneeling—to get up. I tried to stand, but my legs folded. Charles lunged forward and caught me before I fell from the statue’s plinth.
“Nun, what’s wrong?”
I couldn’t think. The revenant’s alarm swirling around in my head was only making me dizzier. “Is something burning?” I asked.
A new soldier answered, using the gentle tone that meant I had asked a strange question, one with an answer so obvious that a normal person shouldn’t have needed to ask. “Lady, the effigy caught on fire.”
Of course. The sparks from the dropped censer would have easily ignited the dry straw. That seemed clear enough. But my thoughts were dizzy, muddled. For a confusing moment I felt the grit of my family’s hearth beneath my knees, saw the red, living pulse of the coals before I thrust my hands inside. But that had happened years ago. Hadn’t it?
My skin was clammy with sweat. I had the sickening awareness that something was wrong with me, but I didn’t know what it was.
“You told me fire doesn’t bother you,” the revenant said suddenly, as though solving a mystery that had troubled it for days.
“It doesn’t.” I sounded uncertain.
“Lady?” asked one of the soldiers. I felt Charles touching my scalp.
“You idiot,” the revenant said with feeling. Yet for once the insult wasn’t aimed at me. I thought it might be calling itself an idiot, even though that didn’t make any sense. “This isn’t an ordinary cookfire—of course it’s affecting you.”
“I don’t think she took a blow to the head,” Charles was saying. And then, in a different voice, “Captain!”
Over his shoulder, I had a woozy impression of armor, its polished surface reflecting the dancing glow of flames. Enguerrand.
“Get her out of here,” he ordered. His voice was rough, as though he had been shouting. “She needs to be brought to safety. The spirit is Fourth Order—we don’t know what kind yet. Talbot, Martin—”
He was giving orders, but I didn’t hear the rest. A terrible scream split the noise of the crowd. Silver light flashed across Captain Enguerrand’s armor.
“What’s happening?” I rasped. This was wrong—the Divine and her clerics should have destroyed the spirit by now. A red glow lapped against the buildings, alive with the shadows of people running. Heat rolled mercilessly across the square. I fought against the arms restraining me, then recognized who they belonged to and tried to stop. It was Charles. I didn’t want to hurt Charles.
“They’re taking you away. It’s over now. You don’t need to see.”
“Show me!”
“Nun—”
Worriedly, Charles called out to someone, “I think she’s delirious!”
Perhaps the revenant feared that if I didn’t shut up, someone would figure out I was talking to it. It relented, and my vision shifted. This time I was prepared to see the world through its senses—or thought I would be. But there was more than just the translucent, smoked-glass tint to the world, the muffling of scents and sounds. Something impossible was happening in the square.
Silver forms were darting through the crowd, hunting, swooping toward the soldiers and the clerics on the platform. Spirits.
“Blight wraiths,” the revenant supplied.
But where had they come from?
Anticipating the question, it tugged my eyes toward the spirit we had exorcised. It hovered above the crowd, invisible to the Unsighted multitude below. Pointed slippers encased its skeletal feet; lavish robes hung from its emaciated frame. A miter crowned its head, the trailing ribbons framing a withered face, the desiccated skin stretched tightly over bone, giving its hollow-cheeked visage an expression of sour disdain.
Below it lay a scattering of large black lumps on the cobbles, like doused coals—bodies.
As I watched, it bent to lay its thin hand on the head of a passing woman as though in benediction. The moment it touched her, she collapsed to the street, dead of blight. It assumed a stance of prayer above her, and the golden light swirling within her chilled to cold, lifeless silver.
A white vicar.
These were the worst of the Fourth Order spirits, risen from clerics who had met violent ends. They were so feared that even clerics who died of natural causes were given elaborate rites to protect their souls from any risk of corruption. Supposedly, their kind had been eradicated from Loraille centuries ago.
The white vicar pointed, and the silver funneled out of the dead woman’s body, taking shape as it went. The newly formed wraith joined the others streaming through the crowd.
The revenant must have decided I’d had enough, because my senses flooded back in a roar of fire. The effigy had transformed into a tower of flame, lapping out folds of greasy black smoke, the heat of it blistering my face even from across the square. Everything was lit red with deep blue shadows in between, and embers swirled in the air overhead.
My eyes caught on a soldier engaging a blight wraith nearby, its silver glow illuminating the openmouthed terror on his face. I wasn’t conscious of reacting, but I must have tried to throw off Charles’s grip. Another soldier came into view, steadying me, blocking the wraith from sight.
Vespertine Page 23