Vespertine (Vespertine #1)(17)
“You won’t possess me.” My voice barely sounded human. “If I have to take my own life to stop you, I will.”
“You idiot! You have no idea what you’re doing. If you die while I’m still in your body, our souls will become entangled—you’ll be imprisoned with me in the reliquary!”
“Then I pity you, revenant.”
“What?” it seethed.
“You’ll be trapped with me forever. After a few days, you’ll beg for your relic’s destruction just to get away from me.”
“You’re insane!” it howled. It lashed out with renewed fury, but I knew that I had won. I grimly held on as it railed against its fate, its deliberate struggle giving way to frenzied clawing, clawing and shrieking, wordless in its rage. And as my consciousness faded, I gripped it tightly and bore it down with me into the dark.
FIVE
I burned with fever. I had been split into two halves, and both were trying to devour the other. I twisted in sweat-dampened sheets, seeing the faces of nuns warp above me, my body shoved down again and again by their restraining hands. Prayers stung my ears; incense scoured my lungs like poison. My mouth was pried open and a bitter syrup poured down my throat. After that I fell still, my thoughts lurching strangely to and fro.
I loved the nuns, but I also despised them. There was something terrible about being their prisoner. They would lock me in a dark box and leave me there forever. Sometimes they would even pray about the Lady’s mercy while they did it. Wretched nuns! All I cared about was not going back into that box. I would do anything, anything…
“I’ll do anything,” I moaned aloud. “Please.”
Sister Iris’s face hovered above me. There was a cut on her forehead, which made me think about shards of glass flying through the air. How long ago had that happened? The cut was already scabbed over and beginning to heal.
“I know, Artemisia,” she said, brushing a sweaty lock of hair from my face. “Remain strong. Help is on the way.”
Part of me clung to those words fiercely while the other part thought about biting the nun’s hand. She moved away before I could decide. Soon I was given more syrup and no longer had to think about anything at all.
* * *
As the battle raged on inside me, time lost its meaning. Sometimes the world was dark. Sometimes it was light. But eventually I noticed something different: a sense of movement, a jolting and juddering, my head swaying against a padded surface that felt too flat to be a pillow. Horses’ hooves clattered in my ears, and the space around me gave little squeaks of wood and metal and leather as it bounced and jostled around.
The hot, stifling air couldn’t belong to a wagon. A carriage? I tried to focus, but my thoughts slipped from my grasp, slimy and elusive. The syrup’s taste still coated my tongue, and I was already drifting away.
Later, I was woken by shouting.
Consciousness returned in a slow trickle of sensations, each one more unpleasant than the last. My head pounded. My skin felt greasy and itched beneath my robes. The carriage jerked along at a slower pace now than before, queasily bumping over every rut and rock on the road. I blinked until an expanse of dark, cracked leather swam into focus in front of my face. It smelled musty with age and incense. Under that there was another, fainter smell, like old meat mixed with dirty coins. Blood.
Four long gashes scored the leather, as though someone had clawed through it with their fingernails.
“Stay back!” a man’s voice commanded. “Clear the road!”
I shot fully awake, my heart hammering. I recognized that voice.
When I dragged myself upright, there came a heavy clink of metal and a drag against my wrists. Looking down, I discovered that I wore iron shackles, their cuffs engraved with holy symbols. The thick links of the chain attached to them lay coiled at my feet.
I was in a carriage, but not a normal one. It looked like the inside of a confessional booth. The tall, narrow walls were lined with tarnished metal, stamped to give the appearance of ornate molding, and the single arched window to my left was set with a perforated screen, a somber red glow filtering through. Locks covered the door on the carriage’s opposite side. The chain’s slack fed into a winch sunk into the middle of the floor, which I guessed could be tightened to restrain me.
I knew what this was. A harrow, a type of carriage that had been popular over a century ago, designed to transport people who were possessed—usually the most dangerous cases, in which a divine was needed to perform the exorcism. I knew about harrows only because I had seen illustrations in the scriptorium’s books. I hadn’t known that any still existed.
The revenant must still be inside me, even though I couldn’t feel it. Perhaps the harrow had driven it into hiding.
I breathed in and out, fighting the nausea brought on by the harrow’s relentless heat and motion. Then I eased myself to the window and peered through the screen. I almost jerked back when I saw the crowd outside, dozens of people, hundreds, all standing along the side of the road staring, their faces dirtied by travel and drawn with fear.
After a moment, I relaxed slightly, realizing that they couldn’t see me through the screen. They were only staring at the harrow as it went by. But my relief proved short-lived as I took in the children’s hunger-dulled eyes, the mud coating the wheels of the overburdened wagons, the dead mule that lay in a ditch, buzzing with flies. Smoke gusted past the screen, streaming from incense burners fixed to the harrow’s roof. The setting sun lit the smoke pink and soaked the crowd in ominous shades of crimson, throwing long shadows across the rutted field beyond.