I didn’t remember that at all. “Then why haven’t you reported me to Mother Dolours?”
She bit her lip. She glanced down the corridor again, but not before I saw a flash of uncertainty cross her face. “I—everyone’s talking about you. About the battle. All the people you saved… and you saved me, too, in the chapel. But I haven’t made up my mind yet,” she added in a rush. “Even if you aren’t possessed, you’re still dangerous.”
She was right about that, at least. “Give the reliquary back.”
“No.”
Taking her eyes off me had been a mistake. I lunged from the pallet and clapped a bandaged hand over her mouth before she could scream. I hooked the other beneath the leather thong that hung around her neck and yanked it until it snapped—“Be careful,” the revenant said, alarmed—but nothing else came free with the amulet, which chimed delicately as it bounced away across the flagstones. Marguerite wasn’t wearing the reliquary.
She trembled in my grip, taking short, rapid breaths like a frightened rabbit. I waited until she made eye contact, then moved my hand away enough for her to speak.
“I don’t have it with me.” Defiance shone through her fear. “I hid it. Somewhere no one will find it.”
I shouldn’t have gotten up. The infirmary tilted sickeningly around me. I backed away, reaching the pallet just as my legs gave out and deposited me in a pathetic heap. I had the humbling realization that even if I’d found the reliquary concealed somewhere else on Marguerite, I wouldn’t have had the strength to take it from her.
She was looking at me strangely. After a moment I realized she had never seen me in a state like this before. Whenever I hadn’t felt well in the convent, I had always crept off and hidden in the stable until the malady passed. Probably, from her perspective, that had made it seem as though I never fell ill. Perhaps she hadn’t even imagined it was possible.
She hesitated and then said, “You were really sick, you know. If that soldier hadn’t found you, you could have died.”
I didn’t want to talk about it. “What are you doing in Bonsaint?” Terrible possibilities filled my mind: more thralls attacking Naimes, the chapel burning, the sisters fleeing.
She frowned. “I ran away, obviously.”
I stared at her, speechless.
She turned slightly red. “I told you I would rather die than stay in Naimes!”
“I didn’t think you were serious.”
Her face hardened. “That’s right. No one ever thinks I’m serious. Everyone thinks I’m just a stupid, silly little girl without a single useful thought in her head. Well, I’ve been planning it for weeks. None of the nuns noticed. You didn’t notice, and you lived with me. They probably haven’t even noticed I’m gone.”
“Of course they’ve noticed. You can’t believe that.” But seeing her expression, I wasn’t so sure. I wondered if she had even told Francine. I’d thought she told Francine everything; I never imagined she was capable of keeping secrets. “You could have gotten possessed.”
“As if you’re one to talk. Anyway, I thought of that. Obviously.” She hugged herself and evasively glanced away, rubbing her arms as though to scrub away my touch. She was still keeping an eye on the corridor.
Of course. The sisters here didn’t know she was a novice. “You’re afraid I might tell someone you’re a runaway,” I realized.
She rounded on me. Her furious blue gaze reminded me of the day I had returned to our room to find her aunt’s letters strewn across the floor. “They can’t send me back to Naimes,” she declared, angry tears welling in her eyes. “They can’t.”
I wasn’t certain I could handle watching Marguerite cry. “I’m not going to tell on you.” She didn’t look reassured, so I added, hopefully more convincingly, “I couldn’t do that without explaining how I know you, and then I would get caught, too.”
That seemed to get through to her. I watched her scowl and wipe her eyes on her sleeve. If she was so afraid of being sent home, why had she risked her own cover to help me when she could have simply faded into the background and watched me get taken away by the Clerisy? I didn’t understand.
She’s claiming to be your friend.
Something twisted in my chest. I wondered if the fever had caused organ damage. “The same is true of you,” I went on. “All we need to do is keep each other’s secrets.”
The revenant had been listening to our exchange with something approaching horror. “Oh, I don’t see how this could possibly go wrong.”
“But I can’t stay in the infirmary,” I finished, ignoring it.
Marguerite rocked back. “You have to. Didn’t you hear what I said? You almost died.” She was giving me that look again.
“I’m better now.”
“No, you aren’t,” Marguerite and the revenant said in unison. The revenant cringed. “You can’t even stand up,” she continued. “Anyway, healers take an oath not to talk about their patients. If one of them sees your hands, they won’t let word of it spread outside the infirmary.”
That was what I should have been worried about. In actuality, I had merely been thinking I might go mad surrounded by this many people, especially if any of them tried to talk to me. Pretending otherwise, I asked, “How do you know that?”
She stiffened as though I’d reached up and slapped her. “You never noticed where I spent all my free time in the convent, did you? Ever since Mathilde had the sweating sickness.” Her expression turned bitter when I didn’t answer. “I need to go now. You aren’t the most important person in the entire world. I have other patients I need to look after.” She returned a moment later, her cheeks pink, snatched up the fallen amulet, and hurried away again.
The revenant thoughtfully watched her go. “Well, it appears we have no choice. We’re going to have to torture the location of my reliquary out of her, and then kill her.”
I slumped back, exhausted. “We aren’t killing Marguerite.”
“Just think how satisfying it would be to dispose of the body.”
“Revenant.”
“I know a great deal about thumbscrews,” it said. “One of my previous vessels—not my favorite one, mind you—liked to use them as a self-mortification technique.”
I pulled the covers over my head, as if in doing so I could block out the revenant’s voice. At the very least, it would prevent anyone from noticing that I was talking to myself.
“We need to get my reliquary back,” it hissed angrily. “She could hand it over to the nuns at any moment.”
“I doubt she will,” I answered, imagining how that conversation would go. “She could have died trying to come here. She wouldn’t throw all that away unless she felt she had no other choice.”
“Providing prior examples of her poor life choices fails to reassure me, nun.”
I wasn’t so sure. Marguerite had hatched a plan to run away—a successful one—and I hadn’t had the slightest inkling of it. She had survived the journey, then managed to conceal her identity in Bonsaint for days. If she’d been helping out in the infirmary for a while now, as the sister had suggested, she might have managed to sneak inside the city with one of the supply caravans. All that took planning.