“Nun.”
The revenant issued its warning in a low voice, as though it were in danger of being overheard. I glanced over in time to see a silvery knobbed spine glide behind the wheel’s broken spokes. A second gaunt’s bald head rose into view over the shattered remnants of an incense burner, its oversized teeth bared in a morbid grin. The spirits had found me.
The key slid into place. The revenant’s power roared up like an igniting pyre, the blistering force of it momentarily blinding me. When my vision cleared, I saw that the second shackle lay in the mud, cracked and smoking. And the two spirits were gone, obliterated: tatters of mist blew from the wreckage in their place.
I got one of my feet under me. My ankle twisted when I put weight on it. The revenant’s power rushed downward, bolstering me, and with its support I rose from the wreckage, lifting my bowed head.
At once, the nearest spirits paused. They stared at me. And then they fled, streaming away from the road toward the trees, flickering erratically as they raced over the trampled ground and the bodies of knights scattered across it.
The rest of the spirits hadn’t noticed. They were too busy swarming the remaining knights and thronging around Leander. He had been cornered against a weed-choked ditch along the roadside, battling for his life against the rivener’s relentless strikes and the half-dozen other spirits surrounding him. No matter his skill, it would take only one of the rivener’s blows to finish him if he lost his footing.
“Leave them,” the revenant said. It tugged my gaze toward the forest. Leander’s dappled stallion stood alertly by the edge of the trees, watching the battle with pricked ears and flared nostrils. Missing his rider, he had bolted.
I took a step in the opposite direction.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m not going to leave someone to die. Even someone I hate.”
Leander faltered. Somehow, he had heard me—and my voice had distracted him in a way that the attacking spirits had not.
The rivener’s next blow took him off guard. He stumbled as the earth beside him erupted in a fountain of dirt and rocks. The lesser spirits surged toward him.
“Wretched nun,” the revenant seethed. Seeing that I wasn’t going to change my mind, it said quickly, “Watch out for the rivener’s strikes. I can’t protect you from those.”
As I waded from the wreckage, I paused to wrench another spoke from the harrow’s broken wheel. Its splintered end dragged on the ground behind me, plowing a groove through the debris. The spirits that saw me coming fled from my path like frightened shades.
The rivener had raised its sword high above Leander, poised for the same executioner’s strike that Mother Katherine’s spirit had performed in the chapel. Busy fighting for his life against the other spirits, he didn’t catch sight of it until it began to descend. His eyes fixed on the blade like a martyr awaiting judgment.
I wasn’t going to get there in time. I raised the spoke over my shoulder and threw it. It went spinning through the air and punched through the rivener’s form, leaving a hole that swirled with vapor. The rivener’s sword froze. Slowly, its helmeted head turned.
“Ah, fantastic. There goes your weapon. And here I thought you nuns were trained for combat.”
I braced myself to dodge its next strike. But before the blow came, chains whipped around its body, binding it in place. Then Leander was beside me, a streak of blight darkening one of his cheekbones. That was all I had time to register before he shoved his censer into my hands and turned to use his relic against the spirits behind us.
Unthinkingly, I fell into an offensive stance. My left hand felt empty without a dagger, but now I didn’t need it. Streaming incense smoke, the censer’s consecrated silver was a weapon in its own right. The revenant’s power surged through my limbs as I swung it in a practiced pattern. Censer forms could be used to attack as well as to defend, though the Gray Sisters considered this fighting style reckless and rarely featured it in our lessons.
Bound in Leander’s chains, the rivener almost posed too easy a target. By the time they began to unravel, dissolving link by link into mist, my censer had done its work. The spirit went down on one knee, bracing its immaterial weight on its sword. Great gashes rent its form, trailing vapor. It struggled to rise, even just to lift its head, trembling with the effort.
The gesture looked so human that I hesitated. The rivener had been a person once, a soldier who had fought to defend the living. Perhaps it had died in this very pose, refusing to surrender to the last. Even corrupted, even after becoming the very monster it had fought against, an echo of its former self remained.
“Finish it,” the revenant snapped. Then it paused and added less harshly, “Don’t make it suffer.”
One final swing, and the rivener collapsed, a cascade of mist spilling over the ground, swirling cool around the hem of my robes. An inexplicable feeling of loss gripped me. No one knew for certain whether spirits returned to the Lady after they were destroyed, or if their souls simply vanished, gone forever.
When I looked up, Leander was watching me, surrounded by the vapor of dispersing spirits. Warring emotions played out across his face. Pausing to catch his breath, he raised a hand to touch the patch of blight on his cheekbone. Then his expression hardened.
“Artemisia,” he said coldly. “The revenant is too powerful. You can’t control it for long.”
I tightened my grip on his censer’s chain.
“You don’t have a choice. Surrender.”
“No,” I answered.
In reply, he reached for his relic.
I threw his censer at him. Before he could recover, as he stood there stunned with incense dusting his robes, I tramped into the weeds and shoved him backward into the ditch. There came a splash as he landed in the rank, swampy water at its bottom. Slipping in the mud, I followed him down. When he surfaced, spluttering, I yanked the onyx ring from his finger and hurled it as far as I could. It soared deep into the forest, glinting, and vanished somewhere among the leaves.
Furious, Leander seized a handful of weeds and dragged himself partway out of the water. But it would take only my boot to his chest to push him back under, and judging by his expression, he knew it. “Restrain her,” he commanded.
The surviving knights had gathered around the ditch, their swords lowered. They looked at one another, expressionless behind their visors, and then back at me, hesitating.
I scrambled from the ditch and ran.
After the past week, I shouldn’t have been able to run, much less quickly. But I whipped through the tall autumn-browned grass faster than I ever had before, almost weightless with the revenant’s power. I felt it reveling in the sensations of our flight—the sun blazing on my hair, the way the matted grass tore underfoot, even the rough scratching pulls of the seedheads snagging on my robes. Everything else melted away. We were alive, and free.
Shouts rang out behind me. But the knights weren’t fast enough, and a moment later I had caught the dappled stallion’s dangling reins and leaped astride. Evidently the horse didn’t harbor much loyalty for his former master, because he wheeled around to escape as though he’d been waiting for the opportunity all his life. I bent low over his withers, and together we plunged into the trees in a whirlwind of fallen leaves.