I took a closer look through the leaves, and instantly wished I hadn’t. It was a group of young soldiers relieving themselves at the edge of the trees. Firelight glinted off their chain mail.
I could ask them for help. By the sound of it, I could probably trust them. But as they finished and turned to leave, and I tried to rise from behind the bush, I discovered that I couldn’t move. I tried again, to no avail. The mere idea of approaching them had immobilized me. Speaking to a group of strangers would have posed a challenge for me at the best of times. The idea of doing it now, after everything they had just said, made me want to turn back around and hurl myself into the river.
I watched them go, their figures silhouetted against a sea of flickering cookfires. Not too far away, the sides of tents and wagons danced with leaping shadows, painted red in the shifting light. Laughter and the smell of woodsmoke carried on the breeze. I had emerged from the forest in a different place than I had entered it, following the Sevre to make sure I didn’t get lost. In doing so, it appeared that I had stumbled across the far side of the refugee encampment.
It looked significantly larger up close than it had from far away. There had to be thousands of people camped out along the river. Suddenly I was grateful I’d remained hidden. No one in Roischal aside from Leander and Captain Enguerrand had seen my face closely enough to recognize me. My hood had fallen back during the battle, but I’d been enveloped in the revenant’s ghost-fire afterward, so I doubted the soldiers had gotten a good look.
Better if I remained dead, a body floating down the Sevre. The Clerisy might not be fully convinced of my demise, but at the very least, they would waste some time searching for me in the wrong direction. Meanwhile, I could vanish among the refugees without a trace.
I stumbled toward the fires, drawing my cloak closer around my body. As I picked my way across the dark field, alone in front of the vast, glittering sprawl of humanity, I was more conscious than ever of the continued silence inside my head. If I had consecrated steel, I would try using it to draw the revenant out. I had muttered a few prayers earlier while waiting for the sun to set, but disappointingly, the words hadn’t produced any interesting effects—no smoking welts or festering boils.
As I entered the encampment, the dazzle of the fires confused my sense of direction. Sounds and smells washed over me in waves, overwhelming my senses. The reek of sewage merged nauseatingly with the savory aroma of roasting meat; disorienting bursts of laughter erupted around me without warning. I averted my eyes from the groups gathered around the cookfires, searching for a dark, abandoned spot where I could huddle down and sleep. My steps weaved like a drunkard’s. Distantly, I wondered whether I should try to find something to eat. Sometimes I forgot.
Have you ever considered that your body carries you?
Someone had said that to me recently. Mother Katherine? No—the revenant.
A loud cheer went up, and I instinctively shrank away, crouching against the side of a cart. The cheer went up again as I pressed my face against the rough wood, retreating from the barrage of sound. It was my name, I realized. They were cheering my name.
I didn’t want to move. But eventually the cheering died down, and I had the unsettling sense that I was being watched. Reluctantly, I raised my head. Two grimy-faced children were regarding me solemnly over the edge of the straw-filled cart bed. After a moment of consideration, one of them broke off a piece of bread and held it down, as though I were a shy creature to be coaxed from the shadows.
“Are you alone?” someone else asked.
I hadn’t noticed the woman standing beside the cart, her face drawn with worry. She looked as though she had been watching me for a while. She reached for my shoulder, and I flinched. Slowly, she lowered her hand.
“Don’t worry—it’s all right. Are you looking for somewhere to sleep?” She was using the same gentle voice as Captain Enguerrand. It was how the sisters had spoken to me when I’d first arrived at the convent, a starved, voiceless child with burned hands and staring eyes.
When I didn’t answer, she went on, “You can sleep behind our cart if you want. We won’t bother you. Look, here’s a spare blanket…”
She moved away to lift a bundle from the cart. A man lay propped up against the leaned-over end, his face and neck mottled with blight. He was lucky to have survived. Since spirits could only possess people with the Sight, whatever attacked him wouldn’t have been interested in keeping him alive. Its goal would have been to drain the life from him as quickly as possible. Whenever the convent received corpses who had died of blight, Sister Iris would ride out the next morning to investigate, tracking down the stray witherkin or frostfain responsible.
My thoughts had wandered. Motion drew my attention back to the woman. She had spread the blanket across the ground in the shadows some distance from her family’s fire. “Here,” she said, patting the blanket as though I might not understand words.
I was used to that. Too exhausted to care, I dragged myself over to the blanket as the children watched my every move in fascination. I didn’t want to spend the night getting stared at, but I also didn’t have the energy to go anywhere else. It was either sleep on the blanket, or pass out on the ground. At least I had some comfortingly non-human company. There was a mule tied up behind the cart, which laid back its ears and flashed me the white of its eye before resuming its quest for a weed trapped under one of the wheels.
The woman returned to the fire and gathered her family around her, speaking quietly. I couldn’t make out what she was saying.
“The poor girl,” the man said. “She’s so thin. I wonder what happened to her family.”
I caught a snatch of her reply. “Better not to ask, I think. That look on her face…”
As far as I knew, I hadn’t been making any particular expression. She was likely referring to my normal one, which I supposed, in certain lighting, could look somewhat disturbed. I burrowed deeper into the blanket.
I didn’t emerge when she stealthily returned to set something down nearby: close enough to reach, not close enough to frighten me. I looked after she had gone and discovered that she had left a crust of bread. I wondered if it was the same one that the children had been eating previously. They were still in the cart, watching.
Her charity made me uncomfortable. I should eat, but the children needed it more. I rolled the bread over to the cart and waited for one of them to pick it up before I turned away.
The revenant would be angry when it came back and discovered that I hadn’t eaten, but it had chosen to abandon me, so it didn’t have the right to complain.
As I drifted off, I listened to the man and woman speak in hushed voices. I learned that they had originally left their town to visit Bonsaint for the festival of Saint Agnes. They’d gotten caught up in the attacks during their journey, and by the time they had arrived at Bonsaint, the drawbridge—which they called the Ghostmarch—had already been lifted for everyone except those bringing supplies into the city.
At home we celebrated Saint Agnes with only a single holy day, but she was the patron saint of Bonsaint. She had died attempting to bind a revenant, and in the process had destroyed it instead, burning her entire body to ashes. That qualified her as a high saint, even though she hadn’t left a relic behind. Bonsaint devoted several days of festivities to her memory. People traveled far for the celebration, even from outside Roischal.