Vespertine (Vespertine #1)(20)

I ventured, “The fury—”

“It wasn’t the fury. Furies are solitary by nature; it wouldn’t have gotten involved unless someone forced it to. And someone did force it—those spirits reeked of Old Magic.”

“That’s impossible.”

“You asked for my help. It isn’t my fault if you don’t like what I have to say.”

“Old Magic hasn’t been practiced in hundreds of years. It’s heresy.”

“So is talking to a revenant, and you seem to be managing admirably.” Its voice dripped with sarcasm.

“That isn’t what I meant.” I swallowed, my throat dry. “No one would dabble in Old Magic after the Sorrow. No one would be that—”

“Stupid? If there’s one thing I can always rely upon, it’s the reassuring dependability of human idiocy. Give your kind a century or so, and they’ll happily repeat the exact same mistakes that nearly wiped them all out a few generations before. The spirits smelled of Old Magic; that’s all I know. What you do with the information is up to you.”

I gazed out the window in silence, watching the wisps glitter among the trees. The revenant had been wrong about the shackles. Maybe it was wrong about this, too.

But what if it wasn’t?

The Clerisy had spent the decades following the War of Martyrs purging all traces of Old Magic from Loraille. Even after the war had been won—the spirits driven back, the seven revenants imprisoned—the cause of the Sorrow remained. Left to fester, it could rise again. An even larger cataclysm could result.

The worst thing about the Sorrow was that it had happened by accident. The Raven King had so badly feared death that he had doubted the promise of the Lady’s afterlife. He had been attempting a ritual to grant himself immortality when he had, instead, inadvertently shattered the gates of Death. In doing so, he had granted a worldly existence beyond Death to all. Immortality, of a kind—but a terrible un-life, a cursed half-life. Such was the evil of Old Magic. It twisted back on its users, granting them what they sought in the worst way imaginable. It was a perversion, unfit for human hands.

Maybe the revenant wasn’t confused—maybe it was trying to deceive me. But it stood to gain nothing by lying. We were enemies turned fellow prisoners, bound by the same set of chains.

And if it was right…

“Suppose you’re telling the truth. Why would someone force spirits to attack? How would it benefit them?”

“Why do humans do anything?” it snapped in reply. “You’re far better equipped to answer that question than I am.”

I wasn’t certain that I was. Already, I found the revenant easier to have a conversation with than Marguerite or Francine. Deciding not to voice that dismal thought aloud, I looked down at the shackles around my wrists. “After you’re exorcised from me, what’s going to happen to you?” The answer seemed obvious. “Someone else will wield your relic, won’t they? Someone who has training and can come back here and stop this.”

It didn’t answer for a long time. I began to get a bad feeling. Then it asked, “How old was the aspirant who died in your crypt?”

Aspirant—it had used that word to describe Sister Julienne before. “I’m not sure. Old.” An image surfaced of Sister Julienne shuffling through the catacombs, her cobwebby hair hanging past her waist. “Eighty, at least.”

I felt a strange pinch from the revenant, a pang of some nameless emotion, quickly suppressed. “She might have been the last. I don’t think the Clerisy is training vessels for me any longer. The last two, or three—they were nearly useless. I suspect that over time, the knowledge of how to wield me has been lost.”

I had no idea when a high relic had last been used in Loraille. A hundred years ago, perhaps more. The need for them had faded with time. The Clerisy might have decided that training more aspirants wasn’t worth the risk.

If there was no one else…

“Those people were traveling north because of me,” I heard myself say. “They heard about what happened in Naimes, and they think I can help them. They think I’m a saint.”

“They might be right. You’re horrid and annoying enough to be one. As far as I can tell, that seems to be the criteria.”

I barely heard it speak. This is the Lady’s will. That was what Sister Julienne had told me in the crypt. What if she hadn’t just meant saving the convent? It didn’t seem like a coincidence that people needed help, and I was here, traveling right past them, the only person in Loraille who had wielded a high relic within living memory.

But I wasn’t a saint. I wasn’t even trained. I remembered enough fleeting snatches of the days following the battle to know that the revenant had succeeded in at least partially taking over my body. Without the sisters’ efforts, it would have possessed me. And if it had done so, the consequences would have been catastrophic. I had felt its violent intentions as though they had been my own. It would have slain the sisters without a second thought.

And yet another of its emotions dominated my memories, stronger than its rage, its resentment, its hunger—stronger than all of them combined.

Fear.

I watched the light cast shifting patterns on the harrow’s wall, turning an idea over in my mind like a dagger’s blade, examining it for nicks and scratches. And then I asked, “Revenant, is it true you’ll do anything not to go back into your reliquary?”