Vespertine (Vespertine #1)(50)
She rounded on me. Her furious blue gaze reminded me of the day I had returned to our room to find her aunt’s letters strewn across the floor. “They can’t send me back to Naimes,” she declared, angry tears welling in her eyes. “They can’t.”
I wasn’t certain I could handle watching Marguerite cry. “I’m not going to tell on you.” She didn’t look reassured, so I added, hopefully more convincingly, “I couldn’t do that without explaining how I know you, and then I would get caught, too.”
That seemed to get through to her. I watched her scowl and wipe her eyes on her sleeve. If she was so afraid of being sent home, why had she risked her own cover to help me when she could have simply faded into the background and watched me get taken away by the Clerisy? I didn’t understand.
She’s claiming to be your friend.
Something twisted in my chest. I wondered if the fever had caused organ damage. “The same is true of you,” I went on. “All we need to do is keep each other’s secrets.”
The revenant had been listening to our exchange with something approaching horror. “Oh, I don’t see how this could possibly go wrong.”
“But I can’t stay in the infirmary,” I finished, ignoring it.
Marguerite rocked back. “You have to. Didn’t you hear what I said? You almost died.” She was giving me that look again.
“I’m better now.”
“No, you aren’t,” Marguerite and the revenant said in unison. The revenant cringed. “You can’t even stand up,” she continued. “Anyway, healers take an oath not to talk about their patients. If one of them sees your hands, they won’t let word of it spread outside the infirmary.”
That was what I should have been worried about. In actuality, I had merely been thinking I might go mad surrounded by this many people, especially if any of them tried to talk to me. Pretending otherwise, I asked, “How do you know that?”
She stiffened as though I’d reached up and slapped her. “You never noticed where I spent all my free time in the convent, did you? Ever since Mathilde had the sweating sickness.” Her expression turned bitter when I didn’t answer. “I need to go now. You aren’t the most important person in the entire world. I have other patients I need to look after.” She returned a moment later, her cheeks pink, snatched up the fallen amulet, and hurried away again.
The revenant thoughtfully watched her go. “Well, it appears we have no choice. We’re going to have to torture the location of my reliquary out of her, and then kill her.”
I slumped back, exhausted. “We aren’t killing Marguerite.”
“Just think how satisfying it would be to dispose of the body.”
“Revenant.”
“I know a great deal about thumbscrews,” it said. “One of my previous vessels—not my favorite one, mind you—liked to use them as a self-mortification technique.”
I pulled the covers over my head, as if in doing so I could block out the revenant’s voice. At the very least, it would prevent anyone from noticing that I was talking to myself.
“We need to get my reliquary back,” it hissed angrily. “She could hand it over to the nuns at any moment.”
“I doubt she will,” I answered, imagining how that conversation would go. “She could have died trying to come here. She wouldn’t throw all that away unless she felt she had no other choice.”
“Providing prior examples of her poor life choices fails to reassure me, nun.”
I wasn’t so sure. Marguerite had hatched a plan to run away—a successful one—and I hadn’t had the slightest inkling of it. She had survived the journey, then managed to conceal her identity in Bonsaint for days. If she’d been helping out in the infirmary for a while now, as the sister had suggested, she might have managed to sneak inside the city with one of the supply caravans. All that took planning.
Disturbed, I wondered if I even knew her at all.
“I think it’s better to let her keep your reliquary for now. We would draw too much attention by fighting with her.” Not least of all because, in my current condition, she might win. “And if the Clerisy discovers that I’m still alive, the absolute last place they’ll expect to find Saint Eugenia’s relic is with Marguerite.”
The revenant didn’t agree. We argued until our heated back-and-forth made me dizzy, and I had to curl up and close my eyes as the world tipped around me. It fell silent then. I would have thought it was sulking if not for its cold, careful touches glancing around my body, as though it was examining me for injuries. My last thought before I drifted away was that I must have been worse off than I had realized for it to be so concerned.
* * *
I dozed on and off for the rest of the afternoon. Eventually, the revenant alerted me to someone approaching.
“Whoever it is, they smell like incense, porridge, soul-numbing misery… Ah, yes. A nun.”
I poked my head out to discover that it was a sister carrying a tray, which she carefully set down at my bedside, revealing a hunk of dark-brown barley bread and a steaming bowl of pottage. Then she looked up and exclaimed, “Shoo!”
A raven’s indignant muttering answered. I followed the nun’s gaze, already knowing what I would see. Trouble had landed on the window’s ledge, his eye fixed greedily on the tray. The sister flapped her hand at him until he squawked and flew away.