Vespertine (Vespertine #1)(58)
Searching for you, her expression said, though she wasn’t meeting my eyes. She pushed a bundle into my bandaged hands and withdrew, waiting. Relief flooded me when I saw what it was: my gloves, the one item the sisters hadn’t yet returned to me. I made short work of tearing off the bandages and tugging the gloves on in their place. But I shook my head when Marguerite glanced questioningly at my boots. It would take my scarred hands too long to lace them, and I didn’t want her to watch.
“The graveyard,” I said.
Marguerite had always hated going into the graveyard in Naimes. She shivered as she walked with me across the darkened grounds, even though I was the one walking barefoot, the pebbled earth icy beneath my feet. Once she almost shrieked when a windblown leaf skittered across her path, and I realized she’d thought it was a spider. Marguerite was terrified of spiders; this had proven one of our earliest points of contention, just days after we started sharing a room. I had only wanted to show her that they were harmless, but when I had tried to demonstrate that by picking one up and offering it to her, she hadn’t spoken to me for a week.
She paled when I tugged her toward a mausoleum, a dark, ominous shape with its gate standing slightly ajar. Shade-light shone through the rusty bars, outlining the withered flowers that littered its steps in silver.
“I’m fine here by myself,” I told her. “You can leave.”
She shifted from foot to foot, her cloak drawn tightly around herself. She seemed like she wanted to argue. I hoped she wasn’t going to offer to stay with me. As surprisingly generous as that would be coming from Marguerite, I imagined it would increase my chances of getting caught substantially.
I peered more closely at the mausoleum and said, trying to sound enthusiastic, “I bet it’s full of spiders. I can’t wait.”
That was all it took to send her scurrying back across the grounds.
I slipped through the open gate into the mausoleum. The floor was damp and gritty, with slippery mats of decaying leaves piled in the corners. Small mortar-sealed drawers lined the walls to the ceiling, filled with cremated remains. The shades swirling around them reached for me, then shrank away, making horrified faces. I guessed that they had sensed the revenant. Despite myself, I felt bad for them. They had only wanted a little of my warmth.
“Merely out of curiosity, when choosing a hiding place, do you always select the most unpleasant option available to you?”
I took in our surroundings. “Revenant, you’re dead.”
“That doesn’t mean I like being around other things that are dead,” it snapped, which I supposed was fair enough; I usually didn’t like being around other humans, either. We waited in uncomfortable silence for a time before it said without warning, “I can sense the priest. He’s walking in this direction, speaking to a nun.”
My breath stopped. I had expected Leander to check the dormitory, the refectory, the infirmary. Not to be here.
Voices carried faintly in the cold air. I climbed onto the molding and hoisted myself up, finding fingerholds in the crumbling mortar, to peer through the tiny barred window set into the mausoleum’s wall. Darkness blanketed the graveyard, but I picked out the dim movement of two figures walking along a path. The sister’s gray robes were easier to make out. If it weren’t for Leander’s pale skin and golden hair, he would have blended completely into the night. He seemed to be heading somewhere with purpose. I relaxed slightly as it became apparent that he wasn’t searching for me; he was in the convent on some other business.
Hardly sleeping. Wandering at odd hours. If he wasn’t here for me, his visit had to be related to the Old Magic.
“I can’t hear what they’re saying,” I said in frustration.
“I can.”
The revenant paused, and then the world around me changed. The walls of the mausoleum grew smoky and translucent, like stained glass. I no longer needed to peer out the tiny window; I could see straight through the stone around me to the graveyard and the tombstones beyond, their outlines shifting like vapor trapped in overturned jars. I could see the shades swirling inside the other mausoleums, unimpeded by stone, their forms a bright mercurial silver. And in the distant buildings of the convent—the dormitory, the infirmary—golden lights shone like candles, except they weren’t candles; I watched one glide slowly past a neat row of other lights, and realized it was a person, a sister patrolling between the pallets of slumbering refugees. They were souls—living souls.
Warmth radiated from them even from a distance. I felt a shivering cramp in my stomach. A straining urge to get closer, as though I were lost in the cold on a winter’s night, lured by the distant heat of a fire.
I gripped the bars, my hands no longer flesh, but shadows veined with gold. “What did you do to me?”
“This is how I perceive the world, at least partly. Oh, calm down, nun. If you were trained, you would have learned how to do this. It’s a basic skill. Even clerics with shade relics can do it, though naturally a shade’s senses pale in comparison to mine.” I opened my mouth, and it chided, “Be quiet and listen.”
I steeled myself, searching the phantasmal graveyard until I regained sight of Leander and the sister, now a pair of shadowy figures whose souls lit them from within like lanterns. A poisonous-looking red haze clung to the censers hanging from their belts—incense, I guessed. Their voices rang as though echoing down a long tunnel, slightly distorted but much louder than before.