Vespertine (Vespertine #1)(18)

As I watched, a woman drew her child toward her body and signed herself. A dark blighted mark stood out vividly on her arm.

These people must have fled their homes, which meant we were probably traveling through Roischal. There had been stories of families abandoning their villages, fearful of spirits and possessed soldiers, but in however much time had passed since the attack on Naimes, the situation had clearly gotten worse.

Lifting one of the heavy manacles, I pushed up my sleeve. The weals left by my dagger’s consecrated steel had healed to pale pinkish stripes. I’d lost a week, at least.

“Clear the road!” called the voice again. “Let us pass by the authority of Her Holiness the Divine!”

I shifted until the speaker came into view, riding ahead of the harrow on a magnificent dapple-gray stallion, his black robes untouched by the filth.

The faces turned his way reflected both fear and desperate hope. My attention caught on a man arguing with his family. I willed him not to do whatever it was he was thinking of doing, but then he stumbled out onto the road, jogging to keep pace with the stallion. He looked dirty and unkempt beside the rider’s austere magnificence.

“Please, Your Grace, we’ve been driven from our homes—and we were turned away at the bridge at Bonsaint—”

The tall, golden-haired figure turned slowly to look down at him as he rambled on, unaware of the danger.

“We’re traveling north. There’s word of a saint in Naimes. They say she carried the relic of Saint Eugenia into battle and defeated a legion of spirits… and that she has scars, that we will know her by her scars. Please, is it true?”

Instead of answering, the rider made a subtle motion with his hands. The man toppled to his knees as though felled by an axe. In the crowd, someone screamed. As the harrow drew closer, I saw that the man’s face was contorted with guilt and anguish, and he was clutching helplessly at the pebbles on the road. “Forgive me,” he gasped over and over as the harrow rumbled past, spraying mud on him with its wheels.

The priest had changed since I’d last seen him. His pale, imperious features had frozen to the cold hardness of marble. He rode stiffly, as though he were favoring an injury beneath his robes, and dark shadows bruised the skin beneath his eyes. Saint Eugenia’s relic hung from a chain around his neck, the reliquary’s opals sparking fiercely in the fading light.

The man on the ground hadn’t recognized it. He’d had no idea that the relic was right in front of him or that the person they sought was chained inside the harrow, heading past them in the opposite direction.

By chance, the priest glanced toward me, and our eyes met through the screen. His hands tightened on the reins. Without expression, he spurred his mount onward out of sight.

Confessor Leander. That was what the page had called him. I couldn’t forget what he had said right before he’d used his relic on me. It was the same thing I would have tried to convince myself about the shackles, the harrow, the locks on the door. This is for your own good.



* * *



“Revenant,” I said into the dark. Again, nothing answered.

I’d been trying for hours. Night had fallen outside the harrow, and finally we’d passed the last of the wagons, only that hadn’t necessarily been an improvement—the abandoned villages had come next, their rooftops black against the darkening sky, the doors of houses hanging askew on their hinges, and the streets littered with refuse and occasionally bodies. I knew the priest had to have seen them too, but the harrow never slowed down.

No one was going to bless those bodies. Soon their souls would rise as spirits.

With that I knew for certain that whatever was happening in Roischal, the Clerisy couldn’t stop it. Perhaps they’d sent soldiers to help at first, but the soldiers had only gotten possessed and killed more people, which meant more spirits, then more soldiers to fight those spirits, then more thralls. Everything was going to keep getting worse.

“Revenant,” I tried again.

Silence.

Eventually, we stopped to change out the horses. I didn’t see much, because shortly after the harrow came to a halt, a torturous grinding sound vibrated through the walls, announcing the tightening of the winch. Once the chain had been pulled taut, tugging me down to the floor, someone shoved a chamber pot and a tin cup of water through a slot in the bottom of the door. I made use of them both and then nudged them back toward the slot with my shoe. The hand that retrieved them was gauntleted with consecrated steel. Moments later, we started moving again.

I pushed aside my physical discomfort and closed my eyes, trying to concentrate, which wasn’t easy with the way the harrow slammed over every rut in the road, rattling my teeth and bouncing the chain. I focused on remembering what the revenant had felt like—the roiling darkness, the seething anger, the prickles of annoyance and grudging approval—the heady rush of its power flowing through me.

There. A presence lurked deep inside my mind, like a drowned thing floating in the water at the bottom of a well. It wasn’t moving. Carefully, I imagined doing the mental equivalent of poking it with a stick.

“Stop,” the revenant hissed feebly. “That hurts.”

My eyes flew open. “What happened to you?” I demanded.

“You did,” it answered. “But right now… the shackles you’re wearing. They’re Old Magic. Designed for me… for revenants.”