Vespertine

by Margaret Rogerson

  After a moment Sarathiel drew back to look at me, seemingly unperturbed that I had witnessed the exchange. “If you tell us where the reliquary is, you will spare us a great deal of unpleasantness. We will release you unharmed, rid of Rathanael forever.”

  I felt a spasm of distress from the revenant.

  “What do you want?” I asked. I honestly wanted to know. “Not right now, but after you destroy Saint Eugenia’s relic.” Remembering what Leander had said to me in the harrow, I added, “Do you even know what you want?”

  In his eyes, a flicker. My breath stopped. In that instant I had thought I had seen Leander looking out at me, as though appearing in a window of the great, crumbling ruin that was Sarathiel. And then he was gone again, reclaimed by shadow.

  “I want to be free,” it replied without inflection, drawing a questioning look from the Divine.

  Had I imagined what I had seen? My heart thumped so forcefully I could feel my pulse against every point of contact with my skin—my clothes, the cushions piled against my side. If something had just happened, Sarathiel seemed unaware of it.

  “You already are,” I said. “What do you plan on doing next? Killing all the humans in Loraille? Then you’ll just be alone. You’ll have made the world your reliquary.”

  “Be careful, nun,” the revenant warned.

  “Sarathiel?” the Divine asked.

  Instead of answering, Sarathiel drew her carefully into an embrace. It pressed Leander’s mouth to her curls. And then a sharp crack split the room.

  At first I thought something had fallen off a shelf and broken, even though that didn’t make any sense. Then I saw how limply the Divine hung in Leander’s arms, the unnatural angle of her lolling head.

  “I regret that the altar was destroyed,” Sarathiel said, gazing over her shoulder at nothing. “It would have been a fitting way to dispose of Rathanael. Rathanael, naughty Rathanael, with its vile little obsession with Old Magic. But I will confess, I almost find it comforting that some things haven’t changed. The world is so very different now than it was before.”

  My nerves screamed with the urge to move, to fight, to run, as Sarathiel crossed the room, the scrape of the Divine’s slippers dragging across the carpet the only sound in the silent apartment. It settled on the chair opposite me, laying the Divine down so that her head was cradled against Leander’s chest, almost the same way she had held it in the chapel. Her open eyes stared glassily at the ceiling. I remembered comparing her to a doll, and felt sick.

  “She was starting to doubt you,” I guessed.

  “Indeed. Perhaps I should have tried being more like Rathanael. But I’m not certain I could stand it. I hate humans so very much, you see.” Seemingly unconsciously, it placed a hand on the Divine’s curls and began to stroke. “All those nights she prayed in the dark, yearning for someone to listen. How lonely she was, how uncertain. How desperate to prove herself as Divine. She required so much reassurance; it was sickening. And even then, it took me years to persuade her to trust me. How long did it take Rathanael? Days?”

  I swallowed. “I didn’t trust it.”

  “Oh, come now,” it said.

  “I controlled it.”

  The revenant winced. Leander’s hand stilled. “Is that what you believe?” it asked, in what seemed like real curiosity. I wondered again how much of this Leander was experiencing: if he could see and hear and feel it all, the warmth and weight of the Divine’s body, the softness of her hair, and if he were somewhere inside screaming.

  “We came to an agreement,” I conceded, hearing how pathetic that sounded even as the words left my mouth.

  “An agreement,” Sarathiel repeated, in a slightly marveling tone. “Rest assured that the moment you resort to bargaining with a revenant, you have already lost. The only reason you aren’t Rathanael’s thrall this very moment is because it chose not to make you one. It could have possessed you a thousand times over—every little moment that you were sleeping, injured, distracted. Quite honestly, I am surprised it didn’t possess you by accident.”

  I remembered suddenly how it had vanished after the Battle of Bonsaint. It had nearly taken over my body, and then it had stopped. It had pulled itself back. It hadn’t abandoned me after all—at least not in the way I had thought.

  “Silly Rathanael,” Sarathiel said, watching me through Leander’s eyes. “It always did care for its human vessels.”

  Blood pounded in my ears. “The same way you cared about Gabrielle?” I asked.

  It was as though the air had been sucked from the apartment. Sarathiel went very still. My revenant did too. The question had been a gamble, but it was increasingly obvious to me that its decision to kill the Divine hadn’t been logical. She would have been the perfect vessel, far better than inhabiting Leander in every respect, yet it had chosen to remain in his body instead. And the way it was holding her; I didn’t think it realized how it looked.

  “Is that why you killed her?” I persisted.

  “Nun,” the revenant warned, but now that I had started, I couldn’t stop. Pieces were falling into place. I remembered the things the revenant had raved about in the tunnels beneath the city—what it had said about Saint Eugenia.

  “If you’d kept her around, she might have betrayed you.”

  “Stop antagonizing it, you idiot. It just murdered another human in front of you.” There was true panic in the revenant’s voice now.

  “Better to kill her than suffer her betrayal,” I continued, relentless. “That makes sense. But what if she hadn’t betrayed you? What if she had decided to remain your friend?”

  Sarathiel still hadn’t answered. It sat as though petrified, its thoughts crawling slowly behind Leander’s unblinking eyes. Then it did something strange. It let out a faint gasp, as though gripped by a sudden pain, and buried Leander’s head in his hands. After a long pause, it stirred to pluck one of Leander’s hairs and lower it for inspection. In the candlelight, the strand shone white.

  “The priest,” the revenant said in surprise. “He’s resisting it. I very much doubt he has the strength to regain control, but he’s trying.”

  This could be my chance. The rest of the room disappeared, my focus narrowing to Sarathiel—Sarathiel, and Leander. “Or maybe you weren’t worried she would betray you,” I went on. “I could have had that backward. Perhaps you didn’t want her to watch you betraying her.”

  I had no idea whether I had hit the mark. Sarathiel barely seemed to be listening. It had buried Leander’s fingers in his hair, searching. It plucked out a second white strand. A third. It hissed and dug Leander’s fingers against his scalp. Clenched them, as though to restore clarity through the pain.

  I swallowed. It was working; I had to keep talking. “Or perhaps you just couldn’t admit to yourself that you might care about a human. Is that it? You killed her to make sure you would never have a chance to find out.”

  That struck a nerve. It stopped and looked up at me through a cage of Leander’s fingers. Deep within his devastated green eyes, I saw something familiar gazing back at me. Pleading.

  “But you have found out, haven’t you?” I heard the words as though they were spoken by someone else, hollow and cold. “Too late.”

  Sarathiel—or Leander, I couldn’t tell—took one ragged, struggling breath, then another. Leander’s face twisted. A sob wrenched from his chest.

  I didn’t dare breathe. “Leander?”

  His face lifted: pale, emotionless, streaked with tears. “No.”

  I didn’t have time to react. The Divine’s body tumbled to the floor between us with a sick, heavy thump. Ignoring it, Sarathiel lunged forward to seize me, Leander’s fingernails digging into the flesh of my arms. It bent his head over my shoulder, turning his face toward my ear.

  “I do not need you to speak,” it said, Leander’s breath hot on my neck. “Rathanael will do that for you. Won’t you, Rathanael? I’ll put your vessel in a little dark room and see how long it takes you to go mad and screa
m the truth. Or perhaps I will try something else. I will carve off all your vessel’s fingers, one by one. Then her nose. Her eyes. It may not make the vessel talk. But it will make you talk.”

  A knock came on the door. Sarathiel stopped, panting.

  “What?” it inquired, still crouched over me.

  “The search—the search has been successful,” a voice on the other side stammered. “We’ve found someone willing to speak to the Divine.”

  Sarathiel made no visible effort to calm itself. It simply was calm, as though it had closed a pair of shutters over Leander’s face. Eerily like him, it smoothed his black robes as it stood. It stepped neatly over the Divine’s sprawled body on its way across the room.

  “The Divine is not to be disturbed,” it said. “She is resting. I will meet them in the hall.”

  After it had slipped out the door, I snuck over to place my ear against the wood. Outside I heard a familiar teary, quavering voice. Marguerite. She was sobbing, “I know where it is. I can take you to the reliquary.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I didn’t know where we were going. Marguerite wouldn’t look at me during the walk through the cathedral, her tearstained face downcast. Occasionally I heard her sniffling, and wondered if someone had hurt her. She had been taken away for questioning while I had been returned to the tower for several more hours to wait, watching the red stain of dawn bleed into the horizon beyond the window’s bars, imagining her being tortured, picturing the Divine’s forces converging on Saint Eugenia’s reliquary and destroying it in hundreds of different ways. “Sorry,” she had repeated tearfully, “I’m sorry,” as they had led her away.

  Now I felt as though I were on my way to an execution. The shackles weighted my wrists like millstones. Soldiers from the city guard marched around me, surrounded by a company of the heavily armored cathedral guard, their combined footsteps rapping crisply from the walls.

  “Sarathiel has been busy,” the revenant observed. “All those knights are thralls.”

  I snuck the cathedral guards a sideways glance. They were moving a little stiffly beneath their armor, but with their helmets on and their visors lowered, I couldn’t see any sign that they were possessed. The same appeared true of the soldiers marching obliviously at their sides.

  I was sure they believed they were acting on the Divine’s orders. For now, her absence didn’t seem suspicious. Sarathiel had spoken to the attendants and left behind the possessed orphrey so that it would seem she had company in her chambers as she slept. It had until early afternoon, perhaps, before someone grew concerned and insisted on checking on her.

  The cathedral’s brooding stone corridors gently yielded to morning light, which striped the floor as it spilled through the windows and filled the air with a soft, rosy glow. Sarathiel paused once to lay Leander’s slender hand on a marble bench beside a window. Bathed in its radiance, his pale, finely sculpted face a contrast to the severity of his black robes, he looked like a painting, transported outside of time. I wondered if this was a place where the Divine had often sat in prayer. When Sarathiel finally turned away, I couldn’t tell for certain, but I thought Leander’s hair shone whiter.

  We passed through the arches of the cloister and into a courtyard. The sun hadn’t reached it yet, blocked by the cathedral’s surrounding bulk. A damp, moldering chill pervaded, as though hundreds of dreary autumns and bitter winters lingered in the ancient stone. Ravens roosted above, dark blemishes dotting the buttresses and grotesques. They shifted restively, but didn’t raise an alarm.

  “Interesting,” the revenant observed. “It seems they can’t easily sense the spirits through the knights’ consecrated armor. I doubt Sarathiel planned that—it never was one of the cleverest of us revenants. Once, when we were a good deal younger, Malthas and I nearly convinced it to try possessing a duck.”

  I couldn’t tell whether it was prattling out of nerves, or a vain attempt to cheer me up. I had spent much of the walk trying to recall how it felt to be alone inside my head. Not long ago, the quiet would have come as a blessed relief. Now the idea seemed bleak beyond imagining. Perhaps, with the Lady’s mercy, the revenant and I would find each other again in the afterlife.

  As we crossed the lawn, I noticed in the gloom that one of the soldiers escorting us looked familiar. He was resolutely gazing forward, his jaw set. I thought he might have been one of the soldiers from the square. Not the one who had dropped his sword, but one of the others.

  Talbot, I remembered vaguely, putting a name to his face—not that it mattered. Captain Enguerrand was in prison. These weren’t his men any longer. The city guard was being led by someone named Halbert, who Charles had said was loyal to the Clerisy.

  Talbot happened to glance my way and accidentally met my eyes. He looked away quickly. His throat bobbed as he swallowed.

  It occurred to me, almost idly, that a being like Sarathiel, who had the power to kill anyone it wanted without effort, to obliterate the population of an entire city on a whim, would never stoop to wonder whether humans were capable of outsmarting it. Certainly not a human like Marguerite.

  Talbot stepped away to knock on one of the cloister’s doors. An answering voice called out from the other side, and a key rattled in the lock. I looked at Marguerite more closely. She still had her head down, sniffling, her face mostly hidden behind clumps of hair, which was kinked and disheveled, coming loose from its festival braids. Her lip was swollen—someone had struck her.

  Her voice came back to me. Something she had said in the infirmary. Everyone thinks I’m just a stupid, silly little girl without a single useful thought in her head.

  I watched Talbot push open the door, revealing the knight guarding it on the other side. And I watched him slowly tip over, unconscious, landing on the ground with a boneless crash of armor.

  Over him, into the courtyard, stepped Mother Dolours.

  Our retinue came to a halt. Beside me, Sarathiel paused to take her in: the plain gray robes swathing her enormous girth, her eyes like gimlets above chapped, ruddy cheeks. “What is this?” Distaste crossed its features. “A nun?”

  “Oh, you’re about to find out,” said the revenant gleefully.

  The knights straightened, gripping the hilts of their swords. Before they could draw, the soldiers turned on them, unsheathing their own swords in arcs of steel that flashed blue in the shadows. The clash of blades filled the courtyard.

  Mother Dolours strode through the melee, her robes billowing behind her like a ship’s sails filling with wind. Swords swung past, narrowly missing her; she didn’t look at them as she came. It shouldn’t have been possible to hear her through the noise, but her voice echoed from the courtyard’s walls, resounding. “Lady of Death, I seek Your mercy, for my enemies are many.”

  A soldier fell to a blow from a knight. I jerked forward, but a merciless grip closed on my arm. Sarathiel yanked me against Leander’s chest, wrapping his fingers around my throat, prepared to snap my neck as easily as it had the Divine’s.

  Mother Dolours didn’t falter. “May Your gaze fall upon them; may Your unseen hand strike them down.” Her voice had become less a voice and more a roll of thunder, the tolling of a great bell. “May they cower before Your shadow. May You fill their minds with desolation.”

  As her prayer crashed over me, my senses sharpened to crystalline clarity: the hard warmth of Leander’s chest pressing against my back, his uneven breath stirring my hair. The faint smells of soap and incense clinging to his skin. The trembling of his hand.

  Sarathiel might be powerful beyond imagining, but it hadn’t inhabited a human body in centuries. I expected there were some details it had forgotten. Sending a mental apology to Leander, I gathered my strength and drove my elbow against the concealed wound in his side. With a startled gasp, Sarathiel released me.

  That was the only opening Mother Dolours required. She signed herself, and for a moment she seemed to transform into Mother Katherine, though the two of them looked nothing alike.
Still I saw the elderly abbess framed by the opened door of the shed, my parents watching cowed behind her, their illusion of power stripped away. “By Your mercy,” she boomed, “cast my enemies into darkness.”

  Ravens exploded cawing from the rooftops. Inside me, the revenant quailed and guttered like a candle in a winter’s wind. For a terrible heartbeat I was overcome with the mindless, primordial fear of a small creature crouched in the grass, paralyzed by a hawk’s shadow passing overhead. But the prayer wasn’t aimed at me. In Leander’s voice, Sarathiel let out a sharp, anguished cry and fell to the ground.

  Amid the clashing swords, Mother Dolours turned to me. Fear lanced through my gut.

  “Come, child,” she said, her eyes dark as night.

  I hesitated, looking down at Leander, writhing white-faced on the flagstones at my feet.

  Mother Dolours said curtly, “Even if we had the time, exorcising Sarathiel from his body wouldn’t help us. I can’t destroy a revenant—only delay it. And not for very long.”

  I thought of Sarathiel’s true form hovering above me in the chapel, so gargantuan that it had filled the nave. Marguerite’s hand found mine. I let her drag me away. As we moved, the soldiers retreated and drew into a tight formation around us. In what seemed to be a mutual truce, the knights closed in around Leander, guarding him in turn. Light had almost reached the courtyard now, glancing from the rooftop finials and setting the uppermost windows aflame. Belatedly, it sank in that Mother Dolours had said Sarathiel’s name.

  Something must have shown on my face. Marguerite said in a rush, out of breath through the pounding of boots, “After you left Elaine’s house and disappeared, I went to her for help. I didn’t know what else to do. I told her what you told me about the page Confessor Leander took from the chambers, and she looked at a bunch of scrolls and figured out he was looking for Saint Agnes’s ashes.” We passed into the deeper darkness of the opposite cloister. “And then, when—when you turned up in the cathedral and got arrested—she said she sensed two revenants all the way from the convent, even though everyone else couldn’t tell. It was awful—my shade was so frightened.” Her blue eyes sought mine. “Is it really true? He’s possessed by a revenant?”