Vespertine (Vespertine #1)(100)

“And Sarathiel isn’t?”

Gently, she shook her head. “It was sent to me by the Lady. Perhaps you have heard…” She hesitated, color rising to her cheeks. I wondered if that was why she wore the maquillage. “It’s true that I was not the Assembly’s first choice for Divine. When I arrived in Bonsaint, I was so alone. But after countless nights of praying for guidance, uncertain of my ability to lead, the goddess gave me Sarathiel. Trust me when I say that it has spent centuries regretting its misdeeds. Lifetimes in which it has listened to the devotions, the choir, has been surrounded by the Lady’s presence. It has changed—repented. Can you say the same of yours?”

The longer she spoke, the deeper my stomach sank. I too believed that the Lady had sent me a revenant. But there was one key difference.

“No,” I said, “because my revenant doesn’t lie to me.”

Disappointment shaded her features. She badly wanted me to believe her. “But how long have you known it? Sarathiel has been my heart’s companion for many years. Of course, there are still moments when I am unsure… but the Lady sent me a sign,” she added swiftly. “You wouldn’t understand. You weren’t there.”

“In the cathedral?”

“You heard of it,” she said breathlessly.

“The pauper’s balcony. I was there.”

Her eyes widened. We regarded each other at an impasse, and the world fell away in a weightless plunge as I realized that looking into her face was like gazing into a mirror. We both believed the other misguided for trusting a revenant—both thought the Lady meant us to ally ourselves with our own. One of us was right, the other wrong. A warped reflection in a glass.

A sense of unreality crept over me. Could I truly claim to know better than a Divine? What if the sign in the cathedral hadn’t been for me after all? Who was I, to believe that I alone knew the Lady’s will? I had based my convictions on the path of a raven’s flight. The dying words of a half-insane holy woman.

Perhaps we were both wrong, both equally deluded, and it was never possible to trust a revenant.

Then the Divine shook her head. She said with quiet faith, “The sign… no—it was for me, I am certain of it,” and the illusion cracked, a mirror fracturing.

I spoke through gritted teeth. “You have to know by now that Sarathiel’s been controlling the spirits. It’s the one who told you not to lower the drawbridge, isn’t it?”

A sad smile crossed her face. “No. You are misinformed. Those spirits… they are why I must become Sarathiel’s true vessel. Otherwise, they cannot be stopped. Sarathiel has been helping me protect the people of Bonsaint; it would not take lives.”

“What about the sacristan?”

The Divine’s smile turned puzzled. She turned to look at Sarathiel, who was watching us intently. “Sarathiel, why are you staying in Leander’s body? When will we be together, like you promised?”

“Gabrielle,” it said quietly.

She rose and went to it by the window, cupping Leander’s cheek. “Perhaps you should rest. It must be taxing, inhabiting a body after so long without one.”

Sarathiel turned Leander’s face against her hand, closing his eyes as though seeking a momentary respite from the world. The Divine watched this with a tenderness that bordered on pain. I could tell she had been honest about her history with Sarathiel; there was a familiarity to their intimacy that spoke of countless hours in each other’s company, whispered confessions exchanged in the chapel’s shadows. I imagined her solitary, white-robed figure bent over the altar nightly in prayer. How pious she must have appeared—how lonely.

Suddenly her delusions made sense. Being a Divine wasn’t so far off from being a saint. Sarathiel was perhaps the only being in Bonsaint who knew her not as the Divine, untouchable in her holiness, but as Gabrielle. No wonder she had fallen for it. She hadn’t had anyone else.

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.