That might be useful to keep in mind, if the Old Magic practitioner in Bonsaint was using the festival to cover their actions. Materials could be smuggled into the city as supplies for the festival; strange actions might go unnoticed amid the preparations. I was busy mulling this over when I heard the man mention the Ghostmarch again and realized they were talking about the drawbridge finally being lowered to let the refugees inside.
“Why wait until tomorrow?” he was saying angrily. “They saw what happened—they know the danger we’re in.”
“It’s all right,” she said, reaching out to clasp his hand. “Artemisia of Naimes is watching over us tonight.”
Faith shone in her eyes. I thought that was a ridiculous thing to say, but in all fairness, I couldn’t argue. I was lying on her blanket.
Unfortunately, I was more or less useless without the revenant. It occurred to me how disastrous it would be if I had to try to save someone while it was absent throwing a tantrum. Whenever it came back, we were going to need to discuss that. It couldn’t vanish whenever it pleased, at least not without warning me first.
Unless—
The thought struck like a torrent of cold water. I rolled over and drew out the reliquary with unsteady hands, fumbling with the latches. My chest still felt tender from how hot the metal had grown at the end of the battle. I imagined the air inside simmering, the delicate bone splintering, the revenant destroyed just like the one fatally bound to Saint Agnes.
I had been a fool not to think of that earlier. The relic was old; there might be a limit to how much power it could channel at once. It took me an agonizingly long time to get the latches open, cursing myself every second of the way.
Even after I had opened the reliquary, I couldn’t see well enough to tell whether the relic looked damaged. I pried the bone from its velvet notch and turned it over onto my hand.
With shocking speed, the revenant came boiling up from the depths of my mind and slammed into full power with a force that left me reeling. “Stop that,” it hissed, spitting with fury. “Put it away!”
“Revenant,” I whispered hoarsely. “You’re still here.”
It paused, its emotions a confused, sharp-edged jumble. Relief clearly hadn’t been the reaction it had expected. “You aren’t going to destroy my relic?” it asked finally, in a tone of lingering disbelief.
“I was checking to see if it had been damaged. I thought that was why you disappeared. Where were you?”
It hesitated. Then it snapped, “I’m entitled to some privacy, aren’t I? It isn’t as though there’s much to go around. Being trapped inside your body isn’t the panoply of delights you might imagine. Oh, pardon me, you’re a nun. Silly of me to suggest that you’ve ever imagined a single delightful experience in the entire span of your dull, miserable, hateful nun existence.”
I had almost missed talking to the revenant. At least I wasn’t worried about making it cry. I glanced over my shoulder at the couple, but they didn’t seem to have noticed anything amiss. Even if they did overhear me muttering to myself, they would likely mark it down as a sign of my ordeal. The children appeared as though they had fallen asleep.
“The priest almost caught me,” I whispered. “I could have used your help.”
“Please. If you had truly needed me, I would have intervened.”
I nearly dropped the relic in shock. “You were watching that entire time?”
“It isn’t as though I have much else to do,” the revenant snapped. “In any case, if the priest had caught you again, what do you suppose I could have done about it? Since you’re so determined not to hurt any humans, even the ones who deserve it.”
“Did those people you tried to kill on the battlefield deserve it?” My voice had gone as cold and dull as lead.
The revenant didn’t answer. It seemed to have realized it had gone too far. I still held the relic on my palm, and it looked suddenly pathetic, a fragile nub of ancient, brittle bone.
For a moment I had been worried about the revenant—actually worried that I might have lost it, and not merely because I couldn’t help the people of Roischal without its power. Even after it had nearly slaughtered hundreds of people using my body as a vessel, including the woman who was helping me and her family. I didn’t understand how I could still spare a single scrap of concern for it after that.
“What I hate about you is that you aren’t some mindless creature,” I said tonelessly. “That’s what I thought you would be, when I first opened the reliquary—a more powerful version of the ashgrim. But you can talk. You can think. Which means that when you do something, you’re making a choice to do it, like a person. I had started to think of you as a person,” I realized aloud, disgusted. “I suppose that was stupid of me.”
“Yes, I suppose it was,” the revenant retorted, but there was a note in its voice I couldn’t interpret. It had listened to that entire speech in silence. It was probably waiting to see whether I was about to crush its relic in my hand.
Using slow, deliberate movements, I placed the relic into its velvet slot, shut and latched the reliquary, and tucked it back underneath my clothes. Then I drew the blanket over my head and stared into the dark.
TEN
Today I would have to cross the Ghostmarch. Its shape loomed above the encampment in the predawn gloom, leashed to the city walls with a complex array of ropes and pulleys as though it were a beast in danger of breaking free.
I vanished from the family’s camp before dawn, leaving them asleep in the murky half-light. Before I left, I pried one of the smaller, less recognizable gems from the reliquary and placed it carefully in front of the woman’s face as she slept on unawares, ignoring the revenant’s hissed objections. I was certain the Lady would want her family to have it.
People were already stirring, but the smoke of last night’s banked cookfires hung low above the ground, shrouding everyone’s movements. No one bothered me as I passed.
As I neared the edge of the encampment, the roaring of the Sevre grew louder, and louder still as I picked my way up the rocky escarpment that overlooked the river, its weathered boulders pockmarked with pools of standing water. No one had camped here, likely because the wind kept blowing the river’s spray in drenching sheets over the bank. I found an outcropping of rock to crouch behind that shielded me from the spray but still afforded me a view of the drawbridge and the city.
Up close, Bonsaint lost some of its grandeur. My view was mostly of the walls. The banners hung sodden with dew, the high gray battlements that thrust from the tumbled rock of the bank mottled with lichen from the endless moisture of the Sevre crashing below. The soldiers patrolling the battlements were so high up they looked like toy figures, their positions betrayed by the occasional glint of steel. From this vantage, I would be able to study the Clerisy’s defenses before I crossed the bridge.
Eerie groaning and creaking sounds shuddered across the bank, like the whale song we sometimes heard on the coast of Naimes, echoing up from the depths of the sea. They were coming from the Ghostmarch, the revenant explained, as the colossal wooden beams expanded and contracted in the damp, straining against the drawbridge’s metal components.