The body of a dead soldier lay in our path, his sword jutting from the ground. I seized the hilt as we passed and freed it in a spray of dirt. Trees flashed by, flickerings of sun and shadow. Then we exploded into the battlefield’s chaos.
The first line of spirits broke against Priestbane like waves crashing against a stone. I knew the Clerisy’s warhorses were shod with consecrated steel, but I wasn’t prepared for the bravery with which he charged into the fray, snorting and trampling spirits beneath his hooves. Blight didn’t harm animals the way it did humans, and he had been trained to endure the stinging cold of the spirits’ touch.
“First we free the thralls,” the revenant said rapidly. “If the soldiers haven’t been possessed for long, some of them might still be strong enough to fight.”
A gaunt flitted toward us—more by accident than on purpose, I suspected. With the revenant guiding my arm, I cut it down, and saw its shocked expression as it dispersed. Priestbane charged onward. I had slain several more spirits before I found the breath to ask, “Can you handle that many at the same time?”
“We’ll have to do two passes.” A swift, calculating pause. “Ride toward them from the east. Most of the spirits won’t have adjusted to their human senses yet, and with the sun behind you, you’ll take them by surprise.”
As Priestbane forged us a path, I laid about with the sword. I could feel the revenant drinking everything in: the wind against my face, the flash of sunlight on metal, the shifting of muscles beneath my clothes. Its power soared through my veins like a battle hymn. I had never felt this alive before, as though I were experiencing every sense for the first time, and I understood how one of its vessels had fought until her heart burst. I could fight like this for days without stopping; part of me never wanted the feeling to end.
Through the haze of exhilaration I noted that the spirits around me were all Second and Third Order, their ranks dominated by a type I had never seen before, luminous and indistinct with shifting dark patches, like clumps of slag on white-hot metal. “Blight wraiths,” the revenant supplied. As their name suggested, blight wraiths were the Third Order spirits of those who had died of blight—previously rare in Loraille, now a testament to the number of bodies left abandoned in Roischal’s villages.
Soon we had gained enough ground to see the soldiers ahead. Their formation had dissolved into a ragged line. Some of the men had lost their helmets, and horror showed beneath the smears of mud and blood on their faces. The thralls they were fighting were their own friends, and would need to be killed to be stopped.
At the revenant’s prompting, I released the reins to stretch out my hand. Power funneled through me, and the nearest soldiers crumpled in a wave, the expelled spirits pouring from their bodies. For a heartbeat their former opponents stood stunned; then they set upon the spirits with a roar of victory.
I turned Priestbane away. As we carved an arc toward the other end of the line, a cry went up: “Vespertine!” And again, louder, triumphant. More soldiers joined in. “Vespertine!” It was a rallying cry, a roar of desperate hope.
The battle demanded my full attention. “What does that mean?” I asked, watching a gaunt disperse around my sword.
“It’s what you humans call a priestess who wields a Fifth Order relic,” the revenant said tersely, preoccupied. I felt it moving from place to place inside my body, driving back the blight from dozens of glancing blows. “On your left—watch out.”
I cut down spirit after spirit without effort. For a strange moment I felt as though I were watching myself from afar, a lone cloaked figure cleaving through an ocean of the Dead. The chant of “Vespertine!” shook the ground like a drumbeat. I could feel it in my bones.
After the battle ended, I might have to face those men, perhaps even talk to them. The thought filled me with dread. Saving people wasn’t a problem—it was the part that came afterward I couldn’t handle. If I could figure out some way to slip away unnoticed…
“Nun!”
The revenant’s warning came too late. Ahead of us, one of the possessed soldiers had turned and sighted his crossbow. I watched the bolt release, watched it spin through the air.
Desperately, the revenant grasped for control. My mind had gone blank. Without thinking, without even truly understanding what I was doing, I granted it permission. My hand snapped up with inhuman speed and caught the bolt a hairsbreadth from my chest, the whine of its flight still buzzing in my ears.
In the drawn-out seconds that followed, my arm didn’t belong to me. I could still feel it, but I wasn’t the one holding it aloft or gripping the quarrel. A heartbeat passed, another. Conflict roiled inside me. Then the revenant abruptly let go, almost disgustedly, as though throwing down a rag it had used to mop up a spill.
“Pay attention,” it snapped. “Don’t forget that you can be injured.”
My pulse thundered in my ears. I cast the bolt aside, its shaft red with blood. It had sliced through my glove. Ignoring the sting, I stretched out my hand. I couldn’t think about what had just happened. I concentrated instead on the force of the revenant’s power roaring through me as I drove the spirits from the remaining thralls.
The soldiers collapsed as I rode past, one after another, following the sweep of my outstretched hand. Circling around again, I saw that some of the men from my first pass were already being helped upright, marshaled into formation by a knight on horseback.
He was the only one wearing plate armor. The rest were normal soldiers like the ones who had attacked my convent, dressed in mail and leather. The chain mail had to be consecrated, but it wouldn’t afford nearly as much protection as full plate. I didn’t see any clerics, either. In all the descriptions of battles I had read, there had been clerics on the battlefield, aiding the soldiers with prayer, incense, and the power of their relics. I could only guess that the Divine had held back her forces because she didn’t want to risk the city’s safety by lowering the bridge.
Grimly, I hacked apart a witherkin, a feverling, a shivering frostfain whose eyes were hidden beneath the curtain of icicles hanging from its brow.
“Nun, there are too many spirits. We can’t defeat them this way.”
The revenant was right. Even cantering back and forth in front of the line, destroying the spirits one by one, I was barely able to thin their numbers enough for the soldiers to hold their own. And I was beginning to encounter another problem: the spirits had caught on and were starting to avoid me, darting away before I could reach them. A space was opening around Priestbane like the eye of a storm.
“Where’s their leader?” I asked through gritted teeth, remembering the fury in Naimes.
“Inside the city. Everything’s muddled up with the smell of Old Magic, but whatever’s happening in there, we won’t be able to reach it from here. Nun, you need to use my full power.”
My hands tightened on the reins. Without a word, I wheeled Priestbane around and urged him away from the men, away from the line. Spirits parted around us, shrinking back in fear as Priestbane’s strides lengthened to a pounding gallop. A path opened ahead.
“How far away do we need to be from the soldiers? And Bonsaint?”