Vespertine

by Margaret Rogerson

  I wasn’t so sure. Marguerite had hatched a plan to run away—a successful one—and I hadn’t had the slightest inkling of it. She had survived the journey, then managed to conceal her identity in Bonsaint for days. If she’d been helping out in the infirmary for a while now, as the sister had suggested, she might have managed to sneak inside the city with one of the supply caravans. All that took planning.

  Disturbed, I wondered if I even knew her at all.

  “I think it’s better to let her keep your reliquary for now. We would draw too much attention by fighting with her.” Not least of all because, in my current condition, she might win. “And if the Clerisy discovers that I’m still alive, the absolute last place they’ll expect to find Saint Eugenia’s relic is with Marguerite.”

  The revenant didn’t agree. We argued until our heated back-and-forth made me dizzy, and I had to curl up and close my eyes as the world tipped around me. It fell silent then. I would have thought it was sulking if not for its cold, careful touches glancing around my body, as though it was examining me for injuries. My last thought before I drifted away was that I must have been worse off than I had realized for it to be so concerned.

  * * *

  I dozed on and off for the rest of the afternoon. Eventually, the revenant alerted me to someone approaching.

  “Whoever it is, they smell like incense, porridge, soul-numbing misery… Ah, yes. A nun.”

  I poked my head out to discover that it was a sister carrying a tray, which she carefully set down at my bedside, revealing a hunk of dark-brown barley bread and a steaming bowl of pottage. Then she looked up and exclaimed, “Shoo!”

  A raven’s indignant muttering answered. I followed the nun’s gaze, already knowing what I would see. Trouble had landed on the window’s ledge, his eye fixed greedily on the tray. The sister flapped her hand at him until he squawked and flew away.

  “That bird—Lady, have mercy,” she said as she helped me sit up. “Someone’s even taught him to speak—a naughty little girl, by the sound of it. Don’t let him steal your food, now, dear. The healers say you need to eat. I expect to find this bowl as clean as a confessor’s kerchief when I come back. I don’t need to watch you, do I?”

  She looked at me sternly until I awkwardly maneuvered the wooden spoon into my bandaged hands. She had barely nodded in approval and set off when I heard a flutter of wings. Trouble had reappeared, tilting his beak inquisitively at my bread. I bit off a piece and spat it onto my hand.

  “Don’t,” the revenant warned. “You heard the nun.”

  “It’s just a crumb.”

  “Crumbs!” Trouble agreed, hopefully fluffing up his feathers. “Good bird!”

  “It’s more than you’ve eaten since the day of the battle. That raven can take care of itself, unlike you.” Its vehemence startled me. I paused, looking Trouble over. His bright eyes and glossy feathers suggested that he had been eating well despite his outcast status among the other ravens. I reluctantly returned the bread to my mouth and considered the pottage, letting the revenant examine the lumpy green mash that filled the bowl.

  At last it said, “I might have argued differently if I’d known you would be fed this appalling gruel.”

  “It’s peas pottage.”

  “You say that like it’s an improvement. Well, go on. Eat it while I suffer.”

  Fortunately, that seemed to be the end of its complaints. It spent the rest of the meal in uncharacteristic silence, until it said, “Nun, I need to ask you something,” and the food instantly turned to lead in my stomach. Something about its tone suggested that I wasn’t going to enjoy this conversation.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Can you not tell when you’re hungry?”

  I sat back without speaking. I didn’t know what to say.

  “Or tired,” it added, “or in pain, for that matter.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How can you not know?”

  I pushed aside the empty bowl. Somehow, “I don’t know how I don’t know” didn’t seem like an answer that would satisfy the revenant.

  “It isn’t just that you’re sick. Every time you move, it hurts. You have a cracked rib; you almost broke it yesterday when you fell from the horse. And I wrenched your shoulder, catching that thing the thrall shot at you—”

  “It was a crossbow bolt.”

  “Never mind what it was. You feel wretched. You’re in nearly the worst physical condition of any vessel I’ve ever inhabited, but it’s as though you haven’t even noticed.”

  “It’s better to not think about it. I’ve gotten used to ignoring things. I had to, in the shed.”

  “In the what?”

  “It’s a—”

  “I know what a shed is,” it snapped. “Why were you in a shed?”

  I had forgotten that the revenant didn’t know. “When I was possessed by the ashgrim—” I couldn’t decide how to finish that sentence. A flash of memory lit the inside of my head like lightning, an oddly still image of me suddenly lunging for my little brother. I saw myself from the perspective of an observer standing outside my body, a hollow-eyed, snarling child, fingers bloody, nails torn: I had clawed through the rope. That time, I had managed to yank out some of my brother’s hair before my father had wrestled me to the ground.

  I felt a stir of impatience from the revenant and realized that I still hadn’t answered its question. “My parents kept me tied up at first. Then, when that stopped working, they locked me in the shed behind our house.”

  Silence. Then, “They didn’t try giving you to the nuns?”

  “They didn’t know I was possessed. They thought I was mad. Mother Katherine believes the ashgrim found me when I was a baby, so to them, it seemed as though there had always been something wrong with me.”

  I hoped I didn’t need to explain further. Most people manifested the Sight later in childhood, when they were old enough to tell someone. Developing it in infancy wasn’t unheard of, but on the rare occasion it happened, the babies seldom survived. Few were aware that it was possible to be possessed so young—my family certainly hadn’t been. All they had known was that I’d gone from a screaming, difficult infant to a toddler who bit and scratched like an animal, driven by strange and violent whims they didn’t understand. No one in my village had had the Sight, so if my eyes had ever glowed silver, they wouldn’t have been able to see it.

  “I didn’t know that I was possessed, either,” I added, before the revenant could ask the obvious question—why didn’t you ask for help? “No one told me about spirits. People don’t talk about them in villages like the one I came from. It’s considered bad luck.”

  Not that anyone had ever tried speaking to me, anyway. They had only come by to stare. Often I had woken up to eyes pressed to the shed’s knotholes, the village children peering in at me, whispering. There hadn’t been anywhere I could go to hide.

  “Idiots. Humans simply love inventing superstitions and then getting killed because of them. Or better yet, using them as an excuse to kill other humans.” It paused. “What did you think was happening to you?”

  I almost answered that I didn’t want to talk about it. Then it occurred to me that perhaps for once, I did. The revenant wasn’t human; I doubted there was anything I could say to it that it would find truly shocking. Whatever had happened to me, it had seen and done worse. I didn’t want to find that idea reassuring, but somehow it helped.

  “That the ashgrim was a part of me. An evil part that wanted to do bad things. Hurt people. Or, if there weren’t any people around…” I stared at a crack in the ceiling, remembering.

  “It would make you hurt yourself.”

  “I’m not sure. It might have been the ashgrim. It might have been me doing it to stop the ashgrim. I couldn’t tell the difference.”

  “And the humans left you there to your own devices.”

  I felt the revenant drawing conclusions as I did myself. Surprisingly, sharing those memories aloud for the first time
allowed me to see them in a new light. How I had learned, in the shed, that no one would come if I needed help. There would be no comfort when I was in pain. No guarantee of food when I was hungry. That there was nothing I could do to change that; I could only endure it. Now, deprived of my routine in Naimes, I had fallen back into old habits.

  I found the revenant almost comforting in its lack of judgment. To it, a creature that had had to learn how human bodies worked through trial and error, my problems weren’t even out of the ordinary.

  “I’ll remind you,” it said finally. “Rather than expecting you to remember on your own. When you need to eat, when you’re sick or hurt, and whether it’s serious enough to seek help. But you have to promise that you’ll listen to me. Nun?”

  I had been quiet, wondering whether having an evil spirit inhabiting my body might turn me into a halfway normal person. I turned my face toward the window, letting the sunlight sting my eyes. “Yes,” I answered. “I promise.”

  * * *

  I slept deeply again. Sometime after dark, I awoke to hear the sisters singing evening prayers. Their voices floated across the grounds from the chapel and into the infirmary as though carried by the moonlight spilling through the shutters. As I listened to them, an ache of homesickness swelled inside my chest.

  I remembered hearing the choir in Naimes for the first time. In my village, I had sometimes listened to my neighbor humming out of tune while she did her washing near my shed—that was the only music I had known before I heard the sisters raise their voices in song.

  It was difficult to describe what I had felt then. I had spent my life believing that everything about me was as small and dim and dirty as the inside of that shed. But the high, clear notes had seemed to echo in the unlit chambers of my soul, revealing its shape, vaster than I had ever known. And the sound had filled me with longing for something I didn’t understand—like a desperate thirst, except it wasn’t for water, or anything else that existed in the life I had led before.

  Mother Katherine had found me afterward, gripping the pew’s back in front of me like I’d been swept out to sea. She had shown me how, across the chapel, the flames of the candles were standing still.

  I understood now, away from my convent for the first time since I had arrived there, that the longing I had felt that day and many days since was homesickness. Homesickness for a place I had never been, for the answers to questions I carried in my heart but for which I had no words. I hadn’t recognized it then, because I hadn’t understood what it felt like to have a home.

  I had nearly drifted back to sleep when voices carried softly through the wing, accompanied by the quiet scuff of footsteps. A pair of sisters patrolling the hall, making sure that nothing was amiss with the patients. They walked past the sleeping bodies, some of whom were snoring, others motionless in slumber. Though I was fully awake now, I lay still and pretended to be among them.

  “Two days since the battle, and there hasn’t been a sighting of a dangerous spirit anywhere in Roischal,” one sister whispered. “Do you think it’s possible? That Artemisia of Naimes is truly a saint?”

  The other nun sighed. I felt the revenant tense and knew before she spoke that it was Mother Dolours. “I fear that an age of saints and miracles isn’t something to celebrate, Sister Marie. The Lady sends us such gifts only in times of darkness. Do you recall the writings of Saint Liliane?”

  The sister was silent a moment. Then she murmured, “And so the silent bell wakens to herald the Dead; and the last candle is lit against the coming night….”

  I strained to hear more, but their voices had dwindled as they passed outside the hall, leaving a cold lump in my stomach and the lingering image of a single, steady candle flame slowly burning itself down, the only remaining light to hold off the dark.

  THIRTEEN

  The next morning, I woke to a different world. Everywhere, people lay moaning on pallets, sisters hastening back and forth between them. Marguerite came by, her cheeks flushed with exertion, and explained that a sickness had reached the convent. So far it was only affecting the refugees who had slept in the camp, but there was fear that it would spread.

  Soon, barely any room remained for the sisters to pick their way through the halls. Hastily assembled pallets encroached on mine until I could have stretched out an arm and touched three other patients, not that I tried. I braced myself against both the unwanted company and the rising stench. Going back to sleep wasn’t an option. Sisters were constantly hurrying past to help ailing patients to the privy, sometimes failing to reach it in time, with explosive results.

  The revenant watched the tableau unfold in such horror that I felt my hair trying to stand on end.

  “Disgusting,” it hissed, as one man bent retching against the wall. “How many different fluids can they possibly have in their bodies? If there’s one thing I haven’t missed about having a vessel, it’s being forced to endure the appalling quantities of effluence you humans spew out of every orifice at the slightest opportunity.”

  “They aren’t doing it on purpose,” I said, not worried about being overheard. My neighbors were too preoccupied with their own misery to notice. “It’s involuntary.”

  “And that’s supposed to make me feel better?” it retorted shrilly.

  The revenant had been carrying on like that all morning, which meant it was nervous. I had noticed by now that its talkativeness increased when it was working itself up into a panic. I decided that the best strategy was to ignore it. Instead, I focused on watching Marguerite.

  To my surprise, she hadn’t scurried off somewhere to hide. She was working alongside the healers, bundling away soiled linens and coaxing patients to take sips of broth. Some of it she did with her face screwed up in dismay, but she did it anyway, her shoulders squared in determination. Yesterday, I had found her claim that she’d helped in the infirmary in Naimes difficult to believe; I had envisioned her loitering in the hall, occasionally fetching unguents for the sisters, using the assignment as an excuse to avoid more unpleasant chores. Now I wasn’t so certain.

  The revenant had prodded me several times about its reliquary, but I couldn’t begin to guess where she had hidden it. I was starting to realize that I knew much less about her than I had thought. Perhaps that shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Over the past few years, I had made it my primary goal to avoid her as much as possible. In some ways I still thought of her as the little girl who had screamed at her first sight of me hiding beneath the bed.

  Everywhere patients moaned, vomited, prayed to the Lady for mercy. And that turned out to be the relaxing part of the day. It wasn’t long before the whispers of plague began.

  I first grew aware of the change in the air when I noticed two lay sisters comforting a sobbing novice. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the rumors quickly spread. Somewhere in the infirmary, a patient had died. The lay sisters delivering fresh linens and broth began to look tense, their grips tight on their trays. At the second death, panic struck. Someone screamed at the sight of the limp, shrouded figure being carried out the doors to the fumatorium.

  With so many ill and injured patients being cared for in the infirmary, it was inevitable that some of them would die. But the threat of plague still haunted Loraille even a hundred years after its last appearance. Cities ravaged by pestilence gave birth to plague specters, Third Order spirits whose trailing miasma seeped beneath doors and through the cracks in windows, infecting anyone it touched. Only a single relic capable of curing plague existed, and it was located far away in Chantclere.

  The scream shattered the hall’s fragile calm. Some of the patients tried to bolt, while sisters rushed to restrain them. The healers shouted for order—in the mayhem, the patients who were unable to stand were at risk of being trampled. A lay sister dropped her tray with a crash of broken crockery, then sank to the floor in tears.

  “What in the Lady’s name is going on in here?” boomed Mother Dolours.

  She swept into the r
oom like an advancing storm, the skirts of her robes bunched in her hands to keep them off the floor. She paused to take in the scene, then looked directly at a patient lying on a pallet nearby. He paled, shrinking against the wall.

  “Goddess grant me patience,” she said. She waded toward him through the sea of pallets, bent, and took his arm. “It isn’t plague!” she roared.

  The hall went still. As everyone stared in shocked silence, she slapped a hand to the man’s chest. Color flooded back into his pallid face, and he shot up from his pallet, gasping. Mother Dolours roughly patted his cheek, much as one would pat an obedient horse, then grunted in satisfaction at whatever she saw and moved on to the next patient.

  The revenant had gone quiet along with everyone else, huddling down to watch. I had never seen someone healed by a relic before. I had been taught that the process was slow and taxing; the bound spirit needed to be carefully controlled, or else it would worsen the illness instead of curing it. But Mother Dolours moved to another patient, and another, without so much as pausing for breath between them. Silence reigned as it became clear that she intended to heal the entire hall.

  “The relic she’s using binds a wretchling,” the revenant said. “That explains it—these humans must have been drawing their water downriver from the city, where it’s tainted with refuse. I’ve seen it happen before, but naturally no one ever listens when I warn them about it.”

  It fell silent again as Mother Dolours started down my side of the hall. I felt it squashing itself out of sight, an uncomfortable sensation, as though it were wedging itself beneath my rib cage to hide. I tensed with the certainty that Mother Dolours would be able to sense it anyway, but when she reached me, she merely gave my bandaged hands a perfunctory once-over. “You don’t have it, child?”

  I shook my head, resisting the instinct to flatten myself against the wall like the first man had. Dozens of people healed, and she wasn’t even out of breath. “Blight,” I lied. “I’m feeling better.”