Vespertine (Vespertine #1)(81)

I said, “I’ll go, but I need to do it alone.”

“We already talked about this!” Marguerite cried.

“Both of you have been seen with me since then. Marguerite, you’re the only person who knows where Saint Eugenia’s reliquary is hidden. You need to keep it safe in case something happens. And, Charles, you need to stay with Jean.”

They both opened their mouths to object. They were forestalled by a shuffling sound beneath the table, which stilled upon being noticed. Then a small voice demanded from beneath the table, “Do they hurt?”

“Thomas!” someone exclaimed—Elaine.

I knew what he was asking about. I had taken my gloves off to eat. I shook my head to let her know it was fine.

“No,” I answered, watching Thomas emerge from hiding and clamber onto an empty stool beside me. Guessing what he wanted, I held out my bad hand. “You can touch it if you want to.”

He diligently felt my scars, then grew bolder and tried to straighten my curled fingers. A collective indrawn breath filled the hallway, followed by a pause as everyone waited, I assumed, to see if the Lady was going to send a lightning bolt through the window to punish him. When nothing happened, everyone relaxed—except for Thomas, who was too busy inspecting my hand to notice.

Marguerite was watching with an oddly soft expression. “Artemisia,” she said, “you know you don’t need to do everything alone.”

I glanced around at her, Charles, Jean. The people in the hall. I felt the revenant, bristling with impatience. And I realized she was mistaken—I hadn’t been alone, not for some time.





TWENTY-ONE


In the mostly deserted streets, I saw the aftermath of the fire. I had to walk through the main square, and I passed the building that had stood behind the effigy, its shutters charred, a huge black scorch mark cast against its stone edifice like a shadow. Below, the Clerisy’s platform had been reduced to a jumble of brittle burned sticks. The stink of damp charcoal hung in the air, its last resentful smoldering extinguished by the morning dew.

The square was deserted now, clearly being avoided after last night’s events. The few people I came across looked fearful and ducked quickly back inside. Litter had accumulated around the base of Saint Agnes’s statue. I wondered what had become of the beggar—whether he had survived. Whether he had people to care for him, or if he was out there on his own.

I discovered where everyone in the city had gone when I reached the cathedral’s square. It was packed full of people, their numbers barely contained by the shops and counting houses that hemmed the area in. And everywhere, I heard my name.

“A scrap of cloth from Saint Artemisia’s cloak!” shouted a vendor ahead. “As powerful as any relic!”

“Its smell is, at any rate,” the revenant said. “This way.”

I pushed through the vendor’s line, ignoring the protests of the customers who stood waiting. Farther in, other vendors were trying to sell various items that I had supposedly touched, like pieces of Priestbane’s tack, and even in one case, “a lock of hair from the maiden’s own head.” “Blond,” the revenant supplied. “Also, they got it from a horse.”

The crossbow bolt was still the most common ware being hawked, but no one was calling it that any longer. It had become the holy arrow instead. I supposed that sounded nicer. The buyers most likely didn’t know any better, or they were simply eager to believe that the more romantic-sounding version was the truth. Some might remember that the story had begun differently, but perhaps once they heard other people call it the holy arrow enough times, they started to doubt their memory, then started to forget.

And it appeared the strategy was working. The vendors were selling out nearly faster than they could make them. With my head down, I watched a boy working in a stall surreptitiously dip a splinter of wood into a jar of pig’s blood and then stick it in a bowl of sand to let it dry. I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t been looking down and happened to glimpse him working through a tear in the stall’s fabric.

Perhaps this was how history treated saints. It didn’t matter what was real, what had truly happened. Even as they lived, their lives passed into legend.

“Nun?”

I had halted in the middle of the square, the traffic flowing around me as though I’d turned to stone. A sudden impulse had seized me to tear off my glove and look at the cut on my hand. It hadn’t even finished healing yet. I felt as though I needed to prove it still existed as around me a dozen voices shouted my name, desperate to own pieces of me, uncaring of the truth: even if they butchered me like an animal, there wouldn’t be enough blood in my body to anoint their holy arrows. They would martyr me themselves to satisfy their hunger for a saint.

“Nun?” the revenant repeated.

“Nothing,” I said, and put down my hand.

A moment later, a shadow fell over me. I was distracted, so for the first time since entering the square, I made the mistake of looking up. Panic descended on me like the stroke of a gavel. When my wits returned, I found myself crouched in an alley with my heart hammering, feeling like an idiot as the revenant flitted through my body searching for injuries, finding nothing.

“What happened?” it demanded for the fourth or fifth time. “What’s wrong with you?”