“Yes, that’s all I do, isn’t it?” the revenant hissed. And then it vanished from my mind with a kind of angry flourish, like it had stalked out of a room and slammed the door behind it.
I shrugged. Priestbane followed obediently, his head low and ears relaxed as he clopped up to the stable. The latch came unstuck with a squeak of rain-swollen wood, and the door shuddered open after I kicked the bottom slat a few times. The inside was dim, pungent with the musty odor of mice and horses.
First I took off Priestbane’s tack, staggering under the weight of his sweaty saddle, and left him inside. Then I drew water from the well in the yard, filled the stable’s trough, and dried him off with handfuls of straw. I found hay in the loft and checked it for mold before I tossed it down to him. While I worked, I felt the revenant slowly creeping back into my consciousness.
“You treat that beast better than you do yourself,” it commented sourly, watching Priestbane nose through the pile.
“He’s a good horse. He carried me all day. He doesn’t deserve to suffer because of the things I ask him to do.”
“Have you ever considered that your body carries you?”
I didn’t know what to say to that. As I stood watching Priestbane, the light shining through the gaps in the walls slid upward and disappeared, casting the stable into darkness. The sun must have descended below the rooftops outside.
“Don’t sleep here,” the revenant said suddenly. “There’s a human building attached to this one, isn’t there?”
“I think so.” I had seen something like that out in the yard, possibly living quarters for the inn’s ostler. Honestly, though, I didn’t see the point. My gaze fixed on the deep drifts of straw piled up along the wall.
It must have noticed me looking. “Don’t you dare. Your pathetic little meat body is on the verge of collapse, and there’s a building made specially for humans just a few steps away. Go on, move. And bring the priest’s things. You may have forgotten that you need to eat to survive, but I haven’t. Nun!” It gave me a jab that made me sway on my feet. I was still staring at the piles of straw as though I’d fallen into a trance.
My vision seemed to be fading in and out, but perhaps that was only because the stable had gotten darker. Finding that I didn’t have the energy to argue, I reached for the straps of Leander’s saddlebags and dragged them after me as I stumbled toward the door to the ostler’s room. I almost tripped over the threshold on the way inside.
“Build a fire,” the revenant ordered, before I could even take in my surroundings. It poked me again, nudging me forward through the dark room until I collided with a stone ledge, fumbled, and heard something clatter to the floor. A mantelpiece, I realized, as my eyes began to adjust, and then I made out what had fallen off: a carved wooden animal, something the ostler had been whittling before he’d left. A child’s toy, still unfinished.
I picked it up and carefully put it back on the mantelpiece. For some reason, my hands were shaking.
“What are you doing? Don’t bother with that. Light the fire.” There was real urgency in the revenant’s voice now, not just impatience. I considered telling it that I wasn’t going to freeze to death, not this time of year, and especially not down south in Roischal, but speaking didn’t seem worth the effort. Numbly, I felt around on the mantelpiece until I found a tinderbox. Crouching, I shoved some wood into the hearth from the bin nearby and went to work with the flint, my clumsy hands striking a few weak sparks.
Power surged forth from the revenant. The next spark flared brightly. Fire licked across the kindling, the dry wood hungrily popping and crackling. A warm glow illuminated my surroundings, which turned out not to contain much: half-repaired bridles hanging from nails on the wall, a straw mattress piled with horse blankets.
The revenant relaxed as soon as the fire blazed to life. My hands also stopped shaking. I stared at them, suspicious.
“Now eat something,” the revenant said quickly. “You haven’t eaten a legitimate meal the entire time I’ve been in your body. The nuns occasionally forced some sort of horrid gruel down your throat, but I hardly think that counts.”
Once again, arguing seemed pointless. I dragged Leander’s bags closer and rummaged through them. Sheafs of parchment, an ivory comb, spare smallclothes. Finally, a bag that contained a loaf of bread, a few wrinkled apples, and a round of cheese wrapped in wax. I hesitated as I shook everything out onto the floor. Something about this seemed like a bad idea.
“The smoke could lead people to us,” I concluded finally, my thoughts working at a fraction of their usual speed.
“There aren’t any humans close enough. If that changes, which I sincerely doubt, I’ll wake you.” It was silent a moment. Then it asked, as though it had been mulling over the question for a while, “Fire doesn’t bother you?”
“No.” Occasionally the smell of burned ham made me vomit, but the revenant didn’t need to know that. “It isn’t as though someone else shoved me in. I did it to myself.”
The revenant was silent again. I started to get the vague sense that there had been something wrong with my answer. Then it said, “Go on, eat.”
I felt it monitoring me closely as I took a bite of bread and chewed. Whatever this loaf was, it bore little resemblance to the coarse barley bread we ate at the convent. I had never tasted anything like it before. It melted in my mouth like butter, and its crust looked golden in the firelight. “Another bite,” the revenant prompted.
I ate the entire loaf that way. As soon as I swallowed, the revenant would tell me to take another bite, or command me to drink from Leander’s water skin. It didn’t relent until crumbs dusted my robes and the skin hung empty. Then it let me crawl over to the bed and collapse on top of the blankets. Surrounded by the smell of horses, I could almost imagine that I was back at the convent, sleeping in the barn to avoid Marguerite.
My full stomach felt as heavy as an anchor, dragging me down toward sleep. I had the murky sense that I was forgetting something important. The reliquary. I needed to keep the reliquary within reach, in case… in case the revenant…
In case the revenant what?
The revenant was saying something, but I couldn’t muster up the energy to listen. “Good night, revenant,” I mumbled, hoping that for once, it would be quiet.
It stopped. At last, blessed silence. I had almost drifted to sleep before I heard its low reply. “Good night, nun.”
EIGHT
Dead. Dead! Dead!”
I jerked awake to the sight of Trouble’s beak poised above my face, his angry gray eye glaring down at me. As my brain scrambled to catch up, he hopped over me with a flick of his tail and snatched the round of cheese from Leander’s half-open bag. He flapped away triumphantly, his cries of “Dead!” muffled by his prize.
By the time the revenant spoke, I had already thrown back the blankets and reached for my nonexistent dagger. “There isn’t anything here—the bird sensed me, that’s all. We’ll have to be careful about that in the future.” Balefully, it watched Trouble flap away into the stable. “We could always eat raven for breakfast instead.”