Vespertine (Vespertine #1)(53)
The revenant watched the tableau unfold in such horror that I felt my hair trying to stand on end.
“Disgusting,” it hissed, as one man bent retching against the wall. “How many different fluids can they possibly have in their bodies? If there’s one thing I haven’t missed about having a vessel, it’s being forced to endure the appalling quantities of effluence you humans spew out of every orifice at the slightest opportunity.”
“They aren’t doing it on purpose,” I said, not worried about being overheard. My neighbors were too preoccupied with their own misery to notice. “It’s involuntary.”
“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?” it retorted shrilly.
The revenant had been carrying on like that all morning, which meant it was nervous. I had noticed by now that its talkativeness increased when it was working itself up into a panic. I decided that the best strategy was to ignore it. Instead, I focused on watching Marguerite.
To my surprise, she hadn’t scurried off somewhere to hide. She was working alongside the healers, bundling away soiled linens and coaxing patients to take sips of broth. Some of it she did with her face screwed up in dismay, but she did it anyway, her shoulders squared in determination. Yesterday, I had found her claim that she’d helped in the infirmary in Naimes difficult to believe; I had envisioned her loitering in the hall, occasionally fetching unguents for the sisters, using the assignment as an excuse to avoid more unpleasant chores. Now I wasn’t so certain.
The revenant had prodded me several times about its reliquary, but I couldn’t begin to guess where she had hidden it. I was starting to realize that I knew much less about her than I had thought. Perhaps that shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Over the past few years, I had made it my primary goal to avoid her as much as possible. In some ways I still thought of her as the little girl who had screamed at her first sight of me hiding beneath the bed.
Everywhere patients moaned, vomited, prayed to the Lady for mercy. And that turned out to be the relaxing part of the day. It wasn’t long before the whispers of plague began.
I first grew aware of the change in the air when I noticed two lay sisters comforting a sobbing novice. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the rumors quickly spread. Somewhere in the infirmary, a patient had died. The lay sisters delivering fresh linens and broth began to look tense, their grips tight on their trays. At the second death, panic struck. Someone screamed at the sight of the limp, shrouded figure being carried out the doors to the fumatorium.
With so many ill and injured patients being cared for in the infirmary, it was inevitable that some of them would die. But the threat of plague still haunted Loraille even a hundred years after its last appearance. Cities ravaged by pestilence gave birth to plague specters, Third Order spirits whose trailing miasma seeped beneath doors and through the cracks in windows, infecting anyone it touched. Only a single relic capable of curing plague existed, and it was located far away in Chantclere.
The scream shattered the hall’s fragile calm. Some of the patients tried to bolt, while sisters rushed to restrain them. The healers shouted for order—in the mayhem, the patients who were unable to stand were at risk of being trampled. A lay sister dropped her tray with a crash of broken crockery, then sank to the floor in tears.
“What in the Lady’s name is going on in here?” boomed Mother Dolours.
She swept into the room like an advancing storm, the skirts of her robes bunched in her hands to keep them off the floor. She paused to take in the scene, then looked directly at a patient lying on a pallet nearby. He paled, shrinking against the wall.
“Goddess grant me patience,” she said. She waded toward him through the sea of pallets, bent, and took his arm. “It isn’t plague!” she roared.
The hall went still. As everyone stared in shocked silence, she slapped a hand to the man’s chest. Color flooded back into his pallid face, and he shot up from his pallet, gasping. Mother Dolours roughly patted his cheek, much as one would pat an obedient horse, then grunted in satisfaction at whatever she saw and moved on to the next patient.
The revenant had gone quiet along with everyone else, huddling down to watch. I had never seen someone healed by a relic before. I had been taught that the process was slow and taxing; the bound spirit needed to be carefully controlled, or else it would worsen the illness instead of curing it. But Mother Dolours moved to another patient, and another, without so much as pausing for breath between them. Silence reigned as it became clear that she intended to heal the entire hall.
“The relic she’s using binds a wretchling,” the revenant said. “That explains it—these humans must have been drawing their water downriver from the city, where it’s tainted with refuse. I’ve seen it happen before, but naturally no one ever listens when I warn them about it.”
It fell silent again as Mother Dolours started down my side of the hall. I felt it squashing itself out of sight, an uncomfortable sensation, as though it were wedging itself beneath my rib cage to hide. I tensed with the certainty that Mother Dolours would be able to sense it anyway, but when she reached me, she merely gave my bandaged hands a perfunctory once-over. “You don’t have it, child?”
I shook my head, resisting the instinct to flatten myself against the wall like the first man had. Dozens of people healed, and she wasn’t even out of breath. “Blight,” I lied. “I’m feeling better.”