Vespertine (Vespertine #1)(26)

Unthinkingly, I fell into an offensive stance. My left hand felt empty without a dagger, but now I didn’t need it. Streaming incense smoke, the censer’s consecrated silver was a weapon in its own right. The revenant’s power surged through my limbs as I swung it in a practiced pattern. Censer forms could be used to attack as well as to defend, though the Gray Sisters considered this fighting style reckless and rarely featured it in our lessons.

Bound in Leander’s chains, the rivener almost posed too easy a target. By the time they began to unravel, dissolving link by link into mist, my censer had done its work. The spirit went down on one knee, bracing its immaterial weight on its sword. Great gashes rent its form, trailing vapor. It struggled to rise, even just to lift its head, trembling with the effort.

The gesture looked so human that I hesitated. The rivener had been a person once, a soldier who had fought to defend the living. Perhaps it had died in this very pose, refusing to surrender to the last. Even corrupted, even after becoming the very monster it had fought against, an echo of its former self remained.

“Finish it,” the revenant snapped. Then it paused and added less harshly, “Don’t make it suffer.”

One final swing, and the rivener collapsed, a cascade of mist spilling over the ground, swirling cool around the hem of my robes. An inexplicable feeling of loss gripped me. No one knew for certain whether spirits returned to the Lady after they were destroyed, or if their souls simply vanished, gone forever.

When I looked up, Leander was watching me, surrounded by the vapor of dispersing spirits. Warring emotions played out across his face. Pausing to catch his breath, he raised a hand to touch the patch of blight on his cheekbone. Then his expression hardened.

“Artemisia,” he said coldly. “The revenant is too powerful. You can’t control it for long.”

I tightened my grip on his censer’s chain.

“You don’t have a choice. Surrender.”

“No,” I answered.

In reply, he reached for his relic.

I threw his censer at him. Before he could recover, as he stood there stunned with incense dusting his robes, I tramped into the weeds and shoved him backward into the ditch. There came a splash as he landed in the rank, swampy water at its bottom. Slipping in the mud, I followed him down. When he surfaced, spluttering, I yanked the onyx ring from his finger and hurled it as far as I could. It soared deep into the forest, glinting, and vanished somewhere among the leaves.

Furious, Leander seized a handful of weeds and dragged himself partway out of the water. But it would take only my boot to his chest to push him back under, and judging by his expression, he knew it. “Restrain her,” he commanded.

The surviving knights had gathered around the ditch, their swords lowered. They looked at one another, expressionless behind their visors, and then back at me, hesitating.

I scrambled from the ditch and ran.

After the past week, I shouldn’t have been able to run, much less quickly. But I whipped through the tall autumn-browned grass faster than I ever had before, almost weightless with the revenant’s power. I felt it reveling in the sensations of our flight—the sun blazing on my hair, the way the matted grass tore underfoot, even the rough scratching pulls of the seedheads snagging on my robes. Everything else melted away. We were alive, and free.

Shouts rang out behind me. But the knights weren’t fast enough, and a moment later I had caught the dappled stallion’s dangling reins and leaped astride. Evidently the horse didn’t harbor much loyalty for his former master, because he wheeled around to escape as though he’d been waiting for the opportunity all his life. I bent low over his withers, and together we plunged into the trees in a whirlwind of fallen leaves.



* * *



By late in the day, the last signs of pursuit had faded. “I can’t sense them any longer,” the revenant said. “They either lost our trail, or they gave up. The priest wasn’t with them.”

Good. I imagined Leander crawling across the forest floor on his hands and knees, searching for his relic in the dirt.

I eased his horse out of the creek we had been following to hide our tracks, listening to the wet crunch of the stallion’s hooves transition to a solid thump on the soil. Sitting astride a warhorse was exhilarating after learning to ride on the calm old draft horses at my convent. He had carried me at a canter for the better part of an hour before we had finally slowed down, following the winding deer trails over the hills.

I needed something to call him. “Priestbane,” I said experimentally, and watched his ears swivel back with interest. He snorted out a breath that I took for approval. Patting his neck, I cast around for a telltale flash of white among the trees ahead. When I caught sight of Trouble flapping through the bare branches, I adjusted our path.

The revenant’s scornful voice broke in. “Don’t tell me you’re still following that raven.”

“I think he’s taking us somewhere. He’s flying eastward, which means we’re heading deeper into Roischal.”

“You do realize that there’s nothing mystical about ravens, don’t you? They don’t gather around convents because they’re divine messengers of your goddess. They come because that’s where humans bring the corpses.”

“That’s fine. If he’s leading us to corpses, that’s where I want to go.”