For a moment everything else stopped existing. The white spray and jagged, glistening rocks seemed to expand, filling my vision like an animal’s gaping mouth. Even this high up, fine droplets of water misted my face. Slowly, I felt myself sliding over the edge.
In a rush, I came back to myself. I wrenched myself away, scrabbling, grabbing fistfuls of leaves. Loose dirt sifted into my gloves as I clawed for the roots beneath, tearing handfuls of them from the ground in my desperate scramble up the slope. When I reached a leaf-filled hollow behind a tree, I threw myself onto my side, panting.
And then, a voice. “I’ve found her horse, Your Grace.”
Enguerrand.
“That’s my horse,” Leander said coldly, his voice raised to make himself heard over the noise of the rapids. “She stole it from me.”
Every muscle in my body went rigid. Moving in stiff increments, I burrowed deeper into the leaves, hoping the Sevre would drown out the quiet rustling of my movements.
“Your Grace?”
“Never mind. Where did she go? She must be nearby. She couldn’t have run far.”
A pause followed. I shifted my head so I could peer through the leaves, bringing the two of them into focus on the trail above the slope. Captain Enguerrand held Priestbane’s reins. I guessed that he and Leander had continued their pursuit of the stallion before discovering that he was riderless and doubling back to find me. Enguerrand was gazing down the steep incline to the Sevre below, where my uncontrolled tumble had scuffed an obvious path to the edge of the precipice.
Leander followed his gaze, and the blood drained from his face. For a heartbeat he looked stricken. I thought this had to be a performance for Enguerrand’s sake, but Enguerrand wasn’t looking at him—and when the captain turned back around, Leander struggled to bring his expression back under control, appearing briefly horrified before his face smoothed into its usual pious mask.
“We’ve lost her,” Enguerrand said grimly. “I would wager she hit her head when she fell from the horse, and went over stunned. It wouldn’t be the first time. We lost a soldier last year the same way. It isn’t easy to judge how close the river is from the trails.”
As Enguerrand spoke, Leander’s hand spasmed. Reflexively, he reached for his onyx ring. Then his fingers stopped a hairsbreadth from the relic.
I held my breath, waiting to see what he would do. I noticed for the first time that he looked even worse than he had yesterday, the skin under his eyes bruised instead of merely shadowed, a match for the dark streak of blight on his cheekbone. He had likely forced his way out of the crowd by using his relic. He would have had to use it on dozens of people to manage that.
The moment stretched on. At last Leander laid his hand back down. He had little cause to suspect that Enguerrand was lying to him. The tracks spoke for themselves. The path I had clawed on my way back up overlapped too closely with the original for me to tell them apart, so I doubted Leander could, either.
Admirably, Enguerrand hadn’t looked at the relic. He didn’t seem to have even noticed Leander’s struggle. “She went over the edge,” he repeated, steadfast.
“Then have your men search the river,” Leander snapped.
Enguerrand hesitated. “Your Grace, does she know how to dismiss the revenant?”
“Of course not. She’s untrained.”
“Even Fifth Order spirits are said to be weakened by the Sevre. I don’t know as much about this as you do, Your Grace. But if she fell in with the revenant still summoned…”
He didn’t need to finish. The frothing water and jagged rocks would claim even a strong swimmer. Someone sharing a spirit’s weakness to running water wouldn’t stand a chance.
Leander’s eyes were drawn back to its current. For a long moment he stared into the rapids. After a few seconds, he started to look sick.
“Your Grace?”
“Search the banks,” he said, returning to himself. “As far south as necessary. Don’t stop until you find…” His face was white, his eyes stark. “Until you find her,” he finished, and wheeled his mount away.
Captain Enguerrand lingered a moment longer, studying the tracks I had left in the leaves. New lines already seemed to be etched into his weathered features. I wondered what he was risking by helping me—his family, the daughters he’d mentioned on the battlefield.
He raised his head, and his gaze brushed over my hiding place. Then he turned his horse to follow, drawing Priestbane after him, calling orders to his men.
* * *
I didn’t move until dark. At least what passed for dark in the woods, which barely counted for someone with the Sight. Wisps had emerged as dusk painted the landscape in shades of blue and purple, and now hundreds of them sparkled among the trees, casting a ghostly silver glow over the hills, illuminating my path.
I didn’t allow my gaze to linger as I trudged past. I knew from experience that I wouldn’t be able to see any sign of the children their souls had once belonged to. Even up close, wisps merely resembled hazy spheres of light hovering a handspan or so above the ground.
No one had ever bound a wisp to a relic. According to convent legend, Saint Beatrice had needed to starve herself for weeks to make her body weak enough for a shade to try possessing it, and even then it had barely been a shiver in her mind, effortless to subdue. The only stories about wisps were those describing how Sighted travelers had survived getting lost in the wilderness by following wisp-lights, which had floated ahead of them, guiding them to safety. I had never seen anything like that, but I hoped it was true.
There was a plot outside my old village where children were buried in unmarked graves. In a village like mine, far outside the route of the convent’s corpse-wagons, only those who could afford it sent their dead children to convents to get the bodies blessed. Wisps couldn’t hurt anyone, the reasoning went, and it cost money to borrow a horse, which most families needed to get the body to the convent in time. Spending that coin could mean a second child starving for lack of bread.
At night, peeking through the knotholes in the shed’s walls, I had been able to see the plot and the lights of the wisps hovering above its graves. My family had been keeping me in the shed for months by that point. I’d had no idea what the wisps were or what their presence meant, but their lights had comforted me all the same. Somehow, they’d always felt like kindred souls signaling to me across the dark.
At last, I reached the edge of the forest. I must have been lost in my thoughts, because I nearly stumbled into a group of people, hearing the loud crash of their footsteps through the undergrowth too late. I withdrew in time to avoid being spotted, cowering behind a bush like a startled animal.
“As if she would really fall into the river and drown! I’m telling you, the captain might as well have winked.”
“I doubt the old man knows how to wink,” another voice replied, with obvious pride.
“Did you see the silver fire?” a third was saying, also male. “I’ve never seen anything like it. No one has. A real vespertine—did you think you’d ever see a vespertine?”
“Not a vespertine,” corrected a quiet voice. “A saint.”
Following this pronouncement, everyone lapsed into reverential silence. Fabric rustled. A pattering sound followed.