Vespertine (Vespertine #1)(69)

When I woke, I knew I wasn’t alone. The weight of someone else’s company filled the loft. I cracked open my eyes, sore and swollen from crying, and found Marguerite sitting near the edge with her knees drawn up to her chest, her arms wrapped tightly around them. She looked like she hadn’t slept much. I remembered with a twist of dread that I had agreed to go with her to the ceremony today.

Seeing me stir, she bent to do something out of my line of sight. I heard water dripping as she wrung out a cloth. “Here,” she said, passing over the wet rag. “Put this over your eyes. I promise it helps.”

You would know, I thought, then felt bad for thinking it. She was right—it did help. Also, it gave me an excuse to cover my face.

Into my private darkness, she said as though she had heard me, “Crying doesn’t make you weak, you know. It’s just a reaction your body has, and there isn’t anything you can do about it.” She sounded sullen. “I know what you’re probably thinking, and it isn’t like I do it on purpose. I don’t want to go around crying all the time. But usually, I’m not even feeling that emotional when it happens. I just leak more than most people.”

I wasn’t certain how to answer. If I tried, I knew I would accidentally say something horrific and ruin the moment.

But Marguerite obviously wanted me to say something. “I told the sisters you had left the infirmary and I would be checking on you to make sure you’re all right.” The silence drew out. “Artemisia,” she said, “I couldn’t stay in Naimes.”

“Why?” I asked. My voice sounded awful, like a croak throttled from a half-dead raven.

Fortunately, she was used to that. “I hated it there. I didn’t want to be a nun, and no one gave me a choice. Wearing gray for the rest of my life, being surrounded by dead people, never leaving the grounds… It was a nightmare.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that, either.

“I’m not like you,” she answered anyway. “I didn’t belong in a place like that.” She took a deep breath. The next time she spoke, her voice shook with something almost like anger. “When I ran away, I knew I might die, or worse. But it would have been worth it. Worth it to live for a week, a day, even a minute outside those miserable gray walls. Being stuck there was like dying already, except so slowly that I barely noticed.”

I risked a glance at her from underneath the rag. She wasn’t looking at me; she was staring out into the stable, seeing someplace else, her jaw set and the color high in her cheeks.

“I want to go places,” she declared. “To see the world for myself, not just read about it in letters. I want to travel all the way to Chantclere. I’m going to see it. I’m going to see the ocean. Aunt Gisele said it’s blue down there, not gray like it is in Naimes. And I’m going to see it.”

Those words had the quality of being repeated over and over to herself like a prayer. I wondered again why her aunt had stopped sending her letters. I didn’t know a great deal about her family, only that they had visited her often in the early years of her novitiate, but over time their visits had dwindled. I supposed it would be easy to forget about a daughter locked far away amid the rocky cliffs of Naimes—easy to justify not making the long, dull, treacherous journey to see her.

“I’m glad you took the relic,” I said.

I heard a sharp intake of breath. I couldn’t bring myself to look at her again, but I imagined her hesitating, wondering if I was playing some sort of trick. “You’re glad that I stole it, you mean?”

“The revenant told me that the shade’s been helping you because Mother Katherine was friends with it, and it’s learned to like people.”

“I didn’t put it that way,” the revenant snapped. “I didn’t say they were friends.” So it was listening after all.

“Oh,” Marguerite said quietly.

“If you hadn’t taken it, it would be trapped alone inside its relic right now. Someone else would have gotten it eventually, but they might not have treated it well, and they wouldn’t have kept it summoned for long. It’s better off with you. I think Mother Katherine would like that—knowing it’s gone to someone who cares about it.” Incredibly, crying all night seemed to have left me clearer-headed, which wasn’t a result I had anticipated. “She would want you to have it.”

A morose sniff came from Marguerite’s direction. “I still stole it.”

“I’m not sure it counts as stealing,” I said, grim with the certainty that I was inching toward the same kind of heresy that had nearly gotten Josephine of Bissalart burned at the stake. “You can steal a thing. You can’t steal a person.”

The revenant didn’t say anything. I had the sense that it was crammed into a corner of my mind, nursing some complicated emotions. I risked a look at Marguerite and saw her swipe roughly at her eyes with her sleeve.

She mumbled, “Saint Eugenia’s reliquary—if you want it back…”

“Finally!” the revenant exclaimed, at the same time I said, “Keep it.”

“No!” it hissed.

“Really?” Marguerite sounded dubious.

“Nun!”

“It’s the only way the revenant can be destroyed,” I explained.

“Don’t tell her that,” it snapped. “Why are you telling her that?”