“Good girl.” And she moved on to the patient beside me.
By the time Mother Dolours left, the wing was full of dazed-looking patients sitting up and wolfing down bowls of porridge. The first man she had healed fearfully signed himself every time her voice thundered in from an adjoining hall. All seemed to be well until a young novice skidded around the corner, panting.
“Curists are being sent from the cathedral,” she announced. “Her Holiness is investigating the reports of plague!”
The sisters, who had all sat down in exhausted relief, leaped up and rapidly began tidying. Marguerite joined them in bundling away armfuls of linens. She kept giving me pointed looks that I eventually realized were intended to communicate something to me, but I had no idea what, and the stare I sent back attempting to convey this made her blanch and flee to the other end of the hall.
“Next time, you need to do that into a mirror so I can see what it looks like,” the revenant remarked, sounding slightly impressed.
I wondered if she had been trying to warn me that the convent’s sanctuary law might not hold up against the threat of plague. The Divine might be able to use the fear of an outbreak, even a rumored one, as an excuse to search the refugees. The remainder of the evening became a race for Mother Dolours to finish healing the other halls before the curists arrived.
“There are too many,” one sister whispered. “She’ll do it,” another insisted. Even the revenant was invested. “Once I saw a curist try to heal a third this many humans, only to get partway through and keel over dead into a chamber pot.”
The chapel’s bells rang the fifth hour; lamps were lit to stave off the dark. Meanwhile the novice ran in and out, thrilled to be the bearer of important news. “She’s in the north wing!” she reported. “The east wing! There’s only half the wing left!”
Sighs of relief filled the hall.
Moments later, the curists arrived. I received my first glimpse of them when they paused in the adjoining corridor, resplendent in their cream-colored robes and half-capes trimmed in gold. I guessed which one was the head curist by the number of rings on her fingers: a diminutive woman with elegant Sarantian features, a hawklike nose, and black hair streaked dramatically with gray.
“Where is the abbess?” she asked, casting a keen glance around our hall.
“Dead, most likely. And good riddance—”
It choked on its words as Mother Dolours came striding into view. “As you can see, Curist Sibylle,” she said in her resonating voice, “there is no sickness here.”
“I do see that, Mother,” the head curist said dryly, still surveying our hall. “How curious, that out of hundreds of patients, not one of them appears to be ill.”
A lay sister squeezed out a shrill, nervous giggle before the others managed to hush her. The head curist raised her eyebrows but didn’t comment. She turned back to Mother Dolours. In a softer voice, she said, “We will cause the least disruption that we can, Dolours, but Her Holiness demands a thorough report.”
I didn’t think I imagined the note of disapproval in her voice as she spoke of the Divine, and was certain of it when Mother Dolours laid a grateful hand on her arm.
Once she had gone, the sisters rushed over to guide Mother Dolours toward a stool, hastily shoving it beneath her when she tottered dangerously on her feet. She collapsed onto it with a great whoosh of air and over the next few minutes, to the awed astonishment of everyone in the hall, proceeded to drink her way through several mugs of ale, passed along to her by a chain of sisters with practiced efficiency. Then, ruddy-faced and restored to full vigor, she charged off to resume her duties. I felt the revenant wince as she went by.
“She could exorcise you, couldn’t she?” I asked, and knew I was right when it sourly refused to answer.
* * *
Full dark had fallen by the time the curists left. They passed my pallet on their way to the door at the end of the hall, speaking to each other in low voices. I was doing my best not to look suspicious in any way—and failing miserably, according to the revenant—when amid their low-voiced conversation I caught a familiar name. Leander.
As soon as I lurched out of bed, Marguerite appeared as though my disobedience had summoned her. “What are you doing?” she demanded. “You need to get back in bed.”
“I can’t believe I agree with this human,” the revenant said. “Though I still think we should kill her. We could always stuff her body down a latrine.”
“I need to follow them,” I said.
“Why?”
“I need to hear what they’re saying about Confessor Leander.”
Her mouth fell open. “That horrible priest who gave us our evaluations?”
I hesitated. My legs were already wobbling. I couldn’t follow the curists without her help, and I doubted she would cooperate unless I gave her a good reason.
“He’s involved in the spirit attacks.” I hesitated again, then added, “I found out he’s been practicing Old Magic.”
Her eyes went round. As I had hoped, there was only one force stronger than Marguerite’s terror of me: her insatiable hunger for gossip. “I knew it,” she said with conviction. “I knew there was something evil about him. Come on.”
Our differences momentarily forgotten, she shrugged out of her cloak and tossed it over my chemise. Then she glanced left and right and bundled me out the door.
“You’re lucky she didn’t ask how you knew about the Old Magic.” The revenant clearly didn’t approve. “If you tell that to anyone with half a brain, it won’t take them long to figure out we’re working together.”
I already knew that; otherwise I would have gone to Mother Dolours for help. I wished I could. But I strongly doubted she would let me go free if she found out that I was conspiring with a revenant.
We followed the curists to a small courtyard behind the kitchens. Lay sisters were working strenuously inside, scraping loaves of bread out of the ovens on long-handled wooden peels, sweating in the heat. Billows of steam poured from the windows, rich with the smell of herbs. As the curists collected their suppers, Marguerite drew us into a shadowed entryway. Judging by the gritty kernels of grain on the cobbles beneath my feet, it led to the granary. A few shades swirled around the stone ceiling, goggling down at us as though we had barged into their house without knocking.
“Confessor Leander saw them,” the youngest curist was insisting, anxiously twisting her stole in her hands. “He told me so last week. Dead rats, without any marks on their bodies, as though they simply dropped where they stood.”
“It isn’t plague, Camille,” said the head curist, Sibylle. “There are no swellings, no rashes. It is merely a flux.”
“Perhaps you shouldn’t take Confessor Leander’s claims as fact.” This was the only man in the group, white-haired and stooped, with bushy eyebrows that gave him the look of a kindly sheepdog. “He’s a favorite of the Divine, this is true, but he is far too young for the burden placed upon his shoulders. There are only two penitent relics in all of Loraille, and most clerics are near my age when they take up the mantle of confessor. He has the ability, yes… but the strain upon him is great. Have you not noticed how changed he has been since his return to Bonsaint? The death he has seen in the countryside these past weeks, the suffering—he has hardly been sleeping since. He has been spotted wandering at odd hours. I fear the ordeal was too much for him after the loss of his elder brother.”
“Gabriel of Chantclere,” murmured one of the other curists to her neighbor, who had looked up inquiringly.
Marguerite let out a tiny gasp. “I know that name,” she whispered. “If it’s the same Gabriel, Aunt Gisele mentioned him in some of her letters. He was expected to serve on the Assembly one day.”
This surprised me. The gift of Sight was rare enough that it was unusual to hear of two Sighted people from the same family, let alone both achieving high ranks within the Clerisy.
“How did it happen, Curist Abelard?” asked the youngest, Cami
lle. “How Gabriel died. No one will tell me.”
“He drowned in the sea. It seems that he”—here the old curist, Abelard, hesitated minutely—“fell from the battlements of Chantclere.”
“Or someone pushed him,” the revenant remarked, but I only half heard it speak; I was remembering the look on Leander’s face as he stared into the Sevre, believing I had drowned.
Curist Abelard went on, “Some might say it is necessary for a confessor to be submitted to adversity. To experience failure and pain. Only those who bear a great burden of guilt are able to control a penitent. But there is a reason why most confessors do not retain the post for long. The responsibility breaks them; it is not uncommon for them to lose their wits before they retire.”
“Enough of this. We do not encourage idle talk among our ranks,” said the head curist, to which Abelard raised his open palm in rueful agreement.
“But you see, Camille, why it may not be wise to listen to him about the rats,” he finished gently.
She nodded, looking meekly at her lap. Their conversation turned to other topics, the winter’s stores and how long they might last the city’s increased population. A moment later they were drowned out by a noisy group of children who ran shouting into the courtyard, playing a game that seemed to involve one chasing the others around with a large stick.
The revenant mused, “Not sleeping well, keeping odd hours… It sounds as though he’s been sneaking out at night.”
I turned the old curist’s words over in my head. A great burden of guilt. “Maybe he did murder his brother.” A twisted thought occurred to me. “I wonder if he did it so he would be able to wield the penitent relic. He might not have shown an aptitude for any other kind. That could have been his only opportunity to advance within the Clerisy.”
“Oh!” Marguerite gasped. I had been addressing the revenant, but she couldn’t tell. “He must have been awfully jealous of Gabriel, don’t you think? Aunt Gisele made it sound like everyone in Chantclere adored him. She never even mentioned that he had a younger brother. Living in someone else’s shadow like that, never being noticed, always second best…” She trailed off, looking at me.
“Yes?” I ventured, hoping that was the right thing to say.
It wasn’t. She pressed herself against the wall, as far away from me as she could get. “You weren’t talking to me, were you?” she accused. Her frightened eyes glittered in the dark, reflecting the silver light of the shades.
An icy finger drew down my spine. The revenant had gone very quiet, and very tense. “What do you mean?”
“You keep pausing like you’re listening to someone speak. In Naimes, in the chapel—you were arguing with it.” Her voice thinned to a whisper. “With the revenant.”
I thought back to the aftermath of the battle, when the revenant had been trying to possess me, and winced. I had been too distracted at the time to consider what that must have looked like to everyone watching. Marguerite, on the other hand… “You were unconscious.”
In the same tiny whisper, she said, “I heard the sisters talking about it.”
Of course they would have talked about it. Everyone had seen it, not just the sisters. Sophia had seen it—she’d seen me holding a dagger to my chest, threatening to plunge it between my ribs. The thought made me feel sick. I stared at Marguerite. I had no idea what to say.
“Fine. Don’t answer me. You don’t need to, anyway.” She backed up a step toward the granary, then seemed to realize she couldn’t escape in that direction. She flattened herself against the opposite wall and edged past me instead, which would have been comical if I weren’t so tired of her being scared of me. I watched her start to leave, then waver, taking in the way I was slumped against the stone, remembering I couldn’t get back to the infirmary on my own.
Her mouth twisted unhappily. She gripped the pocket tied to her belt as though for reassurance. I guessed that it had her amulet inside—it was too small to be the place she was hiding Saint Eugenia’s reliquary.
I noticed in the shade-light that there were a few minor burns on her fingers. They looked new. Which was odd; I didn’t think she had time to help in the kitchens.
She saw me looking. “I’ll send a healer to come get you,” she blurted out, and fled.
As soon as she left, the revenant roused itself. “We aren’t killing Marguerite,” I said. “She isn’t going to tell anyone.”
“Are you certain about that, nun?”
There was a silkiness to its tone that made the hair stand up on my arms. I realized I had no idea what it would do if it thought we were at imminent risk of being discovered. Anything, I suspected, to avoid going back to its reliquary, even if that meant breaking our agreement.
The group of children ran past, laughing and screaming. None of them noticed me lurking in the shadows. I remembered the way the revenant’s ghost-fire had poured across the convent’s grounds, eager to devour even the grass and the worms in the soil. If my control slipped, if it unleashed itself here, nothing would survive.
The tension strained to a breaking point, and then it eased. A sister had entered the courtyard, glancing around with a slight frown of impatience. By the looks of it, Marguerite had told her that I’d gotten lost on my way to the privy. Our secret was safe. I felt the revenant relax as it reached the same conclusion.
As I stepped into the light, using the wall for support, the stick the children were playing with went flying across the courtyard and clattered to the ground at my feet. Instantly I found myself enveloped in a waist-high squabble. “No, it’s my turn!” they shouted. “It’s mine!” Standing in the middle, I might as well have turned invisible.
Finally a girl snatched up the stick, brandishing it at her competitors. “Now I get to be Artemisia of Naimes!” she declared boldly, and ran.
I stared dumbfounded as the children raced away, fighting over their makeshift sword. Their running back and forth was a reenactment of the Battle of Bonsaint: one of them playing me, others the soldiers, the rest the army of the Dead.
The revenant was observing me, assessing my reaction. “Is that so difficult for you to believe?” it asked at last.
I didn’t know how to answer as I watched the children go.
FOURTEEN
The next day, I felt well enough to make a trip to the privy on my own, though I ended up regretting it. The privy took the form of a small stone garderobe that jutted from the convent’s exterior wall over the Sevre. Inside it smelled of damp and echoed with the river’s muted roaring. A wooden bench with a hole in it emptied into the water below. The revenant’s weakness overtook me the moment I entered, and by the time I staggered out, pale and sweating, everyone waiting in line for their turn looked like they were having second thoughts.
The revenant was in a foul mood, which turned fouler as we entered the infirmary. “Oh, just what we need,” it snapped.
Charles was standing over my pallet, glancing around. The healed flux patients had been discharged earlier that morning and their bedding removed, leaving my abandoned place on the floor one of only about a dozen left in the hall, and it seemed that his bafflement was starting to give way to alarm. I watched as he knelt and gingerly lifted one of my pallet’s corners as though I might be hiding underneath it. When he saw me, he sprang upright, looking embarrassed.
“Anne!” he exclaimed, relieved.
“Charles.” I wasn’t used to people looking glad to see me, and I had no idea what to say. I settled on, “Thank you for bringing me to the sisters.” I knew he had to be the soldier who’d found me in the barnyard; none of the others knew my name.
“I should have done it earlier. Your hands…” I felt an unpleasant squirm in my stomach before he went on, “Why didn’t you tell me about the blight?”
“It wasn’t important.”
Apparently, that was the wrong thing to say. Looking concerned, Charles stepped toward me. Instinctively, I stepped back. I was grateful that the sisters had laundered my clothes and r
eturned them to me, so I wasn’t standing in front of him wearing only my chemise.
He opened his mouth, but he never got the chance to speak. Outside, someone screamed.
I recognized the scream. Not long ago, I had been the cause of it on a nearly daily basis. “Marguerite.”
Charles gripped his sword’s hilt and hurried outside at my heels. Marguerite had been avoiding me since yesterday; I hadn’t seen her since we had eavesdropped on the curists last evening. We found her in the courtyard in front of the infirmary. A crate lay broken at her feet, its load of glass jars and the straw they had been packed in spilled across the cobbles. She was clutching one arm to her chest in pain. Jean’s massive silhouette loomed over her, backlit by the low winter sun. A crowd had already gathered around them, muttering restlessly.
“He tried to hurt her!” someone called.
“No,” she protested weakly. “He just surprised me, that’s all—he was trying to help—”
Her objections were lost in the rising din of angry voices. “I saw it—he grabbed her! He nearly broke her arm!”
It wasn’t difficult to piece together what had happened. Marguerite had been struggling to carry the heavy crate, and Jean, likely waiting outside for Charles, had noticed and tried to lift it from her arms. But that wasn’t the picture everyone else saw. Ugly, swathed in bandages, a full head taller than a normal man, Jean looked like a monster threatening pretty, blue-eyed Marguerite. He didn’t show any sign of being aware of what was going on, except for the way he had backed up, his huge fists balled and a muscle clenching rhythmically in his jaw.
“That strength of his, it isn’t natural,” the woman in front of me whispered. Another was saying, “Not right in the head, I heard… possessed…”
I didn’t think the situation could get much worse. Then Charles shouldered his way forward, and Jean’s eyes fell on the sword. He let out a bellow like a wounded animal and flung out an arm, knocking someone over. They went down with a cry of pain.
Vespertine Page 17
