The revenant lapsed into silence. I felt it calculating its answer, trying to conceal a sudden spark of hunger. “Farther,” it urged at last. “To the edge of those ruins.”
An outcropping of stone lay ahead. It looked like part of an ancient wall, a leftover remnant of the ruins that had been dismantled long ago to build Bonsaint. I leaned forward in the saddle, focusing on the outcropping’s steadily expanding outline as the wind gripped my cloak and tore at my hair. My hood had fallen back, but there wasn’t anything I could do about that. When we reached the ruins, I rode past, encouraging Priestbane onward.
The revenant’s power surged in outrage. “We’ve gone far enough!” it hissed. “Release me!”
The raw hunger in its voice convinced me otherwise. I had been right not to trust it. As Priestbane’s hooves devoured the ground, leaving the ruins behind, the revenant’s power swelled like an unvoiced scream in my chest. A sharp sting pricked my eye—a blood vessel bursting. The spirits continued to retreat in front of us, more quickly now, leaving a widening gap ahead. We had nearly reached the other side of the valley. The hills grew nearer and nearer.
I couldn’t breathe. My vision began to tunnel, darkening and narrowing; the hills seemed to recede, spooling away into the distance. Dimly, I recognized that I was about to pass out.
“Now,” I gasped.
The revenant answered. Around me came an unfurling, the spreading of a great pair of ghostly wings. Silver light hazed my vision as phantom flames danced over my skin. The bright, cold essences of hundreds of spirits blazed across my senses like stars winking to life across a night sky, and then they vanished all at once, engulfed within the flames.
The valley steamed with the fog of dispersing spirits. I could almost smell it, a coppery tang in the air, until I felt wetness on my lips and recognized that what I was smelling was my own blood streaming from my nose.
The observation didn’t seem important. Those spirits hadn’t been enough. If anything, they had only made the hunger worse. We were still galloping toward the hills, so I turned Priestbane around in a wide arc, back toward the remaining bulk of the forces.
The stallion shivered beneath me. His ears were laid flat against his skull, and the whites showed around his eyes. Part of me wanted to lay a reassuring hand on his neck, but that same part didn’t dare. I knew I would burn his life away the instant I touched him. It took all my willpower to drive back the flames licking at his heels, greedily tasting his strength.
There were fewer spirits left than I expected, at least a quarter of the army already burned away, half or so of the rest retreating toward the trees in ghostly streams. I bore down on a knot of them before they could reach the forest and felt their sparks flare and extinguish like moths igniting in a pyre. I swept through the spirits beyond, incinerating them as I passed. The silver fire streamed from me like a cloak, leaving a broad swath of steaming ground in my wake.
Nothing could stop me. A third of the army was decimated—then half—the rest scattering, fleeing in every direction. It was time for me to curb the revenant’s power. But that thought seemed far away, feeble in comparison with the terrible hunger that gripped my body, growing ever stronger. It twisted like a knife in my gut, like a hand around my throat leaving me choked and breathless.
The spirits weren’t enough. I needed more than the cold, meager remains of the Dead. I could feel the bright living souls of the soldiers and refugees growing nearer and nearer, and I couldn’t look away.
Soon I had drawn close enough to see the soldiers’ faces. Silver light reflected in their eyes as they gazed at me in wonder. They had lowered their swords. They thought they no longer needed them.
Closer… closer…
At the last second, I wrenched on Priestbane’s reins and pressed my knee to his side. The pinion-edge of the flames sheared past the soldiers, the grass browning and shriveling at their feet. Priestbane’s hooves pounded onward, carrying me past.
Anguished, the revenant shrieked—or maybe I was the one screaming. I couldn’t tell. The reliquary grew hot against my skin, first itching, then burning. I gripped its edges through my robes.
“That’s enough,” I gasped. “Revenant, enough.”
At first I thought it was going to fight me for control. And it could. If it tried, I might not have enough strength left to fight it. A terrible moment passed—and then its power rushed from my body, leaving me gasping and hollow, as though something essential inside me had been torn away.
Priestbane slowed to a walk, his head drooping. I dropped the sword and bent over his saddle, pressing my face to his hot, sweat-dampened mane. His sides heaved like a bellows. Grass stretched dead around us for as far as I could see.
I didn’t know how long I sat there. The sun beat down on my cloak. My mouth tasted like blood. I heard shouts from the soldiers as they chased the last few spirits across the valley, sometimes close, sometimes far away, and remembered to pull the hood back over my head to hide my face. I focused on the smells of horse and hot leather, the green stink of the battlefield’s churned-up turf, so I didn’t have to think about anything else. The revenant said nothing. It had retreated somewhere deep inside me, far enough away that I could no longer sense its presence.
A shadow fell over me. Too late, I heard the jingle of another horse’s reins.
“Lady vespertine,” said a man’s gruff voice.
My shoulders tensed. Maybe if I ignored him, he would go away.
“Lady? Are you injured?”
It had been worth a try. Reluctantly, I lifted my head. Peering sidelong from the shadows of my hood, I saw that it was the knight who had led the soldiers in battle. As I watched, he pushed up his mud-spattered visor with the back of his gauntlet, revealing a brown, careworn face. There were exhausted-looking pouches beneath his eyes, but his gaze was kind—too kind.
I wished he would stop looking at me that way. It made me feel flayed open and pinned, like one of Sister Iris’s anatomical specimens.
“No,” I said hoarsely, sounding uncertain.
A murmur went around. “You see,” a child’s voice declared with authority. “That’s Artemisia of Naimes. I told you. She’s a saint.”
I flinched. After an awkwardly long pause, I lifted my head higher, expanding my field of vision beneath the hood’s ragged fringe.
Immediately, I wished I hadn’t. A crowd encircled me, soldiers on the inside, refugees on the outside—hundreds of people, dusty and bedraggled in the midday sun, all staring in wide-eyed silence. Seeing me looking, several quickly signed themselves. The rest joined in, and a flutter of motion passed through the crowd, hands touching foreheads in the sign of the oculus, accompanied by hushed and reverent whispers. One old woman started weeping.
I didn’t know what to do. Granted, I was used to making people cry, but it usually happened for different reasons. These people—I had nearly killed them all. None of them had any idea how close I’d come to slaughtering them instead of saving them. If they did, they would be fleeing in the opposite direction.
Why did they all have to stare like that? Even the baby hoisted up in its mother’s arms was staring at me. I doubted anyone could see my face beneath the hood, but the knowledge didn’t help. I just wanted to get away.