I wasn’t in the habit of praying alone. I recited the sisters’ prayers out loud every day along with everyone else, but that was different, easier than coming up with my own words. I could barely talk to people; trying to talk to a goddess seemed like a bad idea. But I needed to know.
Lady. Please, if this is truly Your will, give me a sign.
Two things happened at once. There came a knock of metal against stone, and something cool and hard touched my knee. The reliquary had tumbled from Sister Julienne’s slack grip and had fallen against me, candlelight glinting in the opals’ depths.
Simultaneously, barely an arm’s length away, the soldier’s corpse exhaled. Mist poured in streams from his eyes and nose and mouth, gathering into a shape that hovered in the air above him. He had died, and the spirit that had possessed him was exiting his body. As soon as it re-formed, it would attack.
I had no more time to think, to hesitate, to doubt. The Lady had answered me—not once, but twice. Swallowing back bile, I took the reliquary and pried its latches open.
FOUR
For a heartbeat, nothing happened. The inside of the reliquary was lined with crimson velvet, so old that it had worn smooth and dark in places and reeked suffocatingly of dust. Saint Eugenia’s finger bone was slotted into a groove in the velvet, blackened as though by fire. I saw no evidence of the revenant bound to it, and more unsettlingly, felt nothing.
I was starting to wonder whether there was something I was supposed to do, a ritual to perform or a blessing to recite, when mist boiled upward from the bone and my world exploded into pain.
Sometimes, I sat on the dormitory’s roof before dawn to watch the bats return from the countryside. They roosted in the chapel’s bell tower by day, and just before sunrise they descended upon it in enormous flurrying clouds of black. That was what it felt like to take the revenant into my body—as though its essence funneled into me in a whirling, shrieking cloud, flashing dark behind my eyelids and battering the inside of my rib cage with a thousand wings. It was too much. I couldn’t contain it all.
A scream tore from my throat. Convulsions overtook my body. Through red streaks of agony, I felt my spine arching and my heels gouging the floor. Inside me, something howled, and my own thoughts disintegrated before the onslaught. My fingers twitched, then curled into claws.
I hadn’t thought it would feel like this, like being possessed again, a thousand times worse than the ashgrim. I remembered what Mother Katherine had said in the garden. I wasn’t a match for a high relic; the revenant was trying to overpower me.
I couldn’t let it. I forced a resisting arm downward inch by inch to reach for my misericorde. I wrenched it free from its sheath and pressed the flat of the blade against my wrist.
My skin sizzled where the consecrated metal touched. The dagger fell from my nerveless fingers and I collapsed, relieved, as the revenant’s power shrank back. But spasms still racked my body, and I couldn’t do much more than twitch and gasp against the flagstones.
That was when I heard the voice.
“Get up, human.” The rasping command came from everywhere and nowhere, slithering between the spaces of my thoughts. “Do you want to die? Get up!”
I wondered if I had lost my mind. Spirits weren’t supposed to be able to talk. Even while possessing me, the ashgrim had only expressed itself through simple urges, flashes of rage and hunger that I’d barely been able to tell apart from my own desires. Most of the time, it hadn’t even felt like a separate entity. But I remembered, touching Eugenia’s effigy, how different the revenant had felt compared to the less powerful spirits—
“If you don’t get up, I will make you. I’ll tear your mind apart, if that’s what it takes.”
Yes, it could speak. I heard myself laugh, a horrible mirthless croak.
“What’s wrong with you?” the voice hissed. “Are you mad? That’s just what I need, a deranged nun for a vessel.” And then, “Move!”
From somewhere inside me, the revenant pushed. I rolled over in time to see a spirit’s ghostly claws rake through the air where my face had been a moment before. Instinctively, I reached for my misericorde.
“No,” said the revenant. “Not that. Take the dead soldier’s sword.”
The sword lay within reach. Staggering upright, I eyed the heavy length of steel. “I’ve never—”
“That doesn’t matter. Pick it up. Now!”
I wasn’t about to start taking orders from a spirit, but I sensed movement nearby and knew I couldn’t hesitate. I lunged for the weapon, only to stumble an extra step forward when it proved impossibly light in my grasp, almost weightless. Normally my hand’s weakened muscles wouldn’t be able to grip something this heavy securely enough to use it in combat, but that didn’t seem to impede the revenant.
“Turn,” it commanded.
I pivoted, trying not to overbalance again. The spirit flowed toward me as a boiling mass of vapor, becoming more defined the nearer it grew. I made out a lopsided face, the features melted like wax, its eyes febrile sparks of light in sunken sockets. A feverling.
“Swing.”
Unearthly strength coursed through my body. The sword traced an effortless arc, steel flashing in the candlelight. It felt so easy that at first I thought I had missed. Then I saw that the feverling hung sliced nearly in two, only a few wispy filaments of vapor connecting its halves. And its face—I had never seen a spirit look afraid.
“Again.”
One final swing, and the feverling shredded away to nothing. Satisfaction coiled through me, like a cat licking its whiskers after a kill. I clenched my hand on the sword’s hilt. That feeling had belonged to the revenant, not me.
“Perhaps you aren’t as useless as I feared. Still, there’s something strange about you—you’re listening to me, for one thing… Oh, what’s this?”
Sister Julienne’s blood pooled at the corner of my vision, shining crimson. I looked away, but it was too late. Everything I saw, the revenant also perceived through my eyes.
“A dead aspirant? What does that make you?” An astonished pause. “You don’t have any training at all, do you?”
“Be quiet.” It hurt to speak, my throat raw from screaming. I rested the sword’s point on the ground and bent to retrieve my dagger.
“I doubt you even know how to dismiss me back into the relic,” it went on, incredulous. “Do you have any grasp of the danger you’re in, human? It’s only a matter of time before I possess your body and take it on a long, merry—”
Its voice cut off with a hiss. I had slapped the dagger against my arm again, raising another welt. In the merciful silence that followed, I tasted a coppery tang in my mouth. When I swiped a hand across my lips, my fingers came away freshly gleaming red. I must have bitten my tongue while convulsing.
The blood looked unnaturally scarlet, almost pulsing in the crypt’s shifting candlelight. It wasn’t just mine; most of it belonged to Sister Julienne. As soon as I had that thought, my vision tunneled, and a rush of vertigo swept through me, turning my knees to water.
Weakness wasn’t an option. Taking measured breaths through my nose, I sheathed my dagger and tucked the reliquary beneath my arm, making sure it was tightly latched as I set foot on the stairs. Though the revenant’s presence had receded, I still felt it evaluating me, circling my defenses like a fox around a henhouse. The moment I let down my guard, it would try to possess me again. That was assuming it got a chance.