Vespertine (Vespertine #1)(113)
“You aren’t a good person, but I think you could be if you tried. So perhaps you should try.”
For a long time, he didn’t respond. It wasn’t until I stood up to leave the room that he spoke. “Thank you,” he said softly, and seemed to mean it.
* * *
Slowly, I regained my strength. I didn’t visit Leander again, but I heard he had narrowly escaped death and was on his way to an astonishing recovery. I happened across a pair of monks huddled behind the refectory, discussing in hushed tones how he had begun improving immediately after my visit. “A miracle,” they murmured. “A true miracle…”
Too busy signing themselves, they failed to notice me slipping away.
One early morning before dawn, I wrapped myself in a blanket and snuck onto the battlements. I had chosen this solitary spot for a reason. Over the past few days, the revenant had been uncharacteristically quiet, obviously working itself up to something. We wouldn’t be disturbed here by Marguerite or the shy glances of brothers, their ears straining to make out the words of my frequent “prayers.”
Winter had fully descended upon Roischal. Snow flurries rushed down from the black sky to land shivering on my blanket’s wool; the cold numbed my ears and nose. But I didn’t have to wait long. The revenant soon said, “Nun, there’s something you should know before you choose to remain my vessel.” It was silent a moment, then plunged onward. “I’m the one who invented the binding ritual. I’m the reason why relics exist.”
My insides flipped. At first I felt sure it had made some bizarre joke, but then I thought—Traitor. Scorned One. Betrayer of its own kind.
Its vile little obsession with Old Magic.
I had never gotten a clear answer about why it was called “the Scorned.”
“I didn’t do it purposefully,” the revenant continued. “In fact, I never intended for the ritual to be used. I was trying to find a way to help Eugenia control my power. That particular version… I discarded it after realizing that Eugenia would need to sacrifice herself for it to work. But of course, being my vessel, she had helped me transcribe it. I couldn’t hide its existence from her.”
I listened as though bespelled, cocooned inside the blanket’s warmth. I had wanted to know more about Eugenia for so long, but I had never dared ask. Now I wondered whether I desired the truth after all.
“Later, there was a battle. She survived, but lost hundreds of soldiers—men who had followed her charge onto the battlefield. Their bodies couldn’t be recovered. In the next battle came the riveners.”
My chest tightened. I remembered the defeated rivener kneeling before me, struggling to rise. If there had been a chance of it being the soul of someone I had known, fought alongside—Charles, or Jean, or Enguerrand…
“After that, she changed. We failed to make progress on the ritual. She began praying to the Lady for hours, sometimes through the night. One morning, she blocked my voice from her mind. She went to her general and told him to find her a new vessel. She gave him the notes—the ways in which I could be controlled by a priestess after I had been bound to her bones. I fought, but she used every method at her disposal to subdue me, including the ones that I had taught her. And then came the pain, and the fire. I lived every moment as her bones burned to ash.”
The snowflakes hurled themselves down, seeming to fly at me with dizzying speed until they drew closer and drifted the rest of the way like eiderdown. They landed on my cheeks in gentle puffs of cold.
“She was only fourteen,” it said, “and she died screaming to your Lady.”
I shook my head in denial, my heart aching. I could easily imagine how Eugenia must have felt, willing to make any sacrifice in her despair. “That couldn’t have been what the Lady wanted her to do.”
“Are you so certain? Even if you’re right, it was done in Her name. In the end, for you humans, does that make so very great a difference?”
For once, I had no words to argue.
“I’ve told you all this because you should know that the Dead despise me as much as the living. One day we may face another revenant—one even more powerful than Sarathiel. And if we do, it isn’t going to be pleased to see me.”
The snow landing on my face suddenly felt like the pricks of icy needles. I pictured the melted crown of Cimeliarch the Bright, dripping down its skull. The skeletal hand of Architrave the Dim, holding its unbalanced scales. Their ancient minds twisted with resentment, grown cruel and clever and half-mad from centuries of imprisonment at human hands.
The Lady had let me keep the revenant. But what if She had done so not in answer to my prayers, but for reasons of Her own?
Before, I had compared Her plans to a game of knights and kings. Now I imagined the checkered board growing vaster, stretching far into shadow. The game piece carved into Sarathiel’s likeness knocked over by an unseen hand. The shape concealed behind it gliding forward from the dark.
Something occurred to me that I had never considered before. If the Lady was playing a game, a great game, a game of life and death, then who was Her opponent?
I shivered and tried my best to banish the image from my mind.
“There’s something I’ve been wondering,” I said, eager to change the subject. “The first humans who got possessed, the ones who went on to become saints; they weren’t all strong enough to control unbound spirits, were they? They couldn’t have been. At least some of them must have fought with their spirits the same way I do.”