Disturbed, I wondered if I even knew her at all.
“I think it’s better to let her keep your reliquary for now. We would draw too much attention by fighting with her.” Not least of all because, in my current condition, she might win. “And if the Clerisy discovers that I’m still alive, the absolute last place they’ll expect to find Saint Eugenia’s relic is with Marguerite.”
The revenant didn’t agree. We argued until our heated back-and-forth made me dizzy, and I had to curl up and close my eyes as the world tipped around me. It fell silent then. I would have thought it was sulking if not for its cold, careful touches glancing around my body, as though it was examining me for injuries. My last thought before I drifted away was that I must have been worse off than I had realized for it to be so concerned.
* * *
I dozed on and off for the rest of the afternoon. Eventually, the revenant alerted me to someone approaching.
“Whoever it is, they smell like incense, porridge, soul-numbing misery… Ah, yes. A nun.”
I poked my head out to discover that it was a sister carrying a tray, which she carefully set down at my bedside, revealing a hunk of dark-brown barley bread and a steaming bowl of pottage. Then she looked up and exclaimed, “Shoo!”
A raven’s indignant muttering answered. I followed the nun’s gaze, already knowing what I would see. Trouble had landed on the window’s ledge, his eye fixed greedily on the tray. The sister flapped her hand at him until he squawked and flew away.
“That bird—Lady, have mercy,” she said as she helped me sit up. “Someone’s even taught him to speak—a naughty little girl, by the sound of it. Don’t let him steal your food, now, dear. The healers say you need to eat. I expect to find this bowl as clean as a confessor’s kerchief when I come back. I don’t need to watch you, do I?”
She looked at me sternly until I awkwardly maneuvered the wooden spoon into my bandaged hands. She had barely nodded in approval and set off when I heard a flutter of wings. Trouble had reappeared, tilting his beak inquisitively at my bread. I bit off a piece and spat it onto my hand.
“Don’t,” the revenant warned. “You heard the nun.”
“It’s just a crumb.”
“Crumbs!” Trouble agreed, hopefully fluffing up his feathers. “Good bird!”
“It’s more than you’ve eaten since the day of the battle. That raven can take care of itself, unlike you.” Its vehemence startled me. I paused, looking Trouble over. His bright eyes and glossy feathers suggested that he had been eating well despite his outcast status among the other ravens. I reluctantly returned the bread to my mouth and considered the pottage, letting the revenant examine the lumpy green mash that filled the bowl.
At last it said, “I might have argued differently if I’d known you would be fed this appalling gruel.”
“It’s peas pottage.”
“You say that like it’s an improvement. Well, go on. Eat it while I suffer.”
Fortunately, that seemed to be the end of its complaints. It spent the rest of the meal in uncharacteristic silence, until it said, “Nun, I need to ask you something,” and the food instantly turned to lead in my stomach. Something about its tone suggested that I wasn’t going to enjoy this conversation.
“What?” I asked.
“Can you not tell when you’re hungry?”
I sat back without speaking. I didn’t know what to say.
“Or tired,” it added, “or in pain, for that matter.”
“I don’t know.”
“How can you not know?”
I pushed aside the empty bowl. Somehow, “I don’t know how I don’t know” didn’t seem like an answer that would satisfy the revenant.
“It isn’t just that you’re sick. Every time you move, it hurts. You have a cracked rib; you almost broke it yesterday when you fell from the horse. And I wrenched your shoulder, catching that thing the thrall shot at you—”
“It was a crossbow bolt.”
“Never mind what it was. You feel wretched. You’re in nearly the worst physical condition of any vessel I’ve ever inhabited, but it’s as though you haven’t even noticed.”
“It’s better to not think about it. I’ve gotten used to ignoring things. I had to, in the shed.”
“In the what?”
“It’s a—”
“I know what a shed is,” it snapped. “Why were you in a shed?”
I had forgotten that the revenant didn’t know. “When I was possessed by the ashgrim—” I couldn’t decide how to finish that sentence. A flash of memory lit the inside of my head like lightning, an oddly still image of me suddenly lunging for my little brother. I saw myself from the perspective of an observer standing outside my body, a hollow-eyed, snarling child, fingers bloody, nails torn: I had clawed through the rope. That time, I had managed to yank out some of my brother’s hair before my father had wrestled me to the ground.
I felt a stir of impatience from the revenant and realized that I still hadn’t answered its question. “My parents kept me tied up at first. Then, when that stopped working, they locked me in the shed behind our house.”
Silence. Then, “They didn’t try giving you to the nuns?”
“They didn’t know I was possessed. They thought I was mad. Mother Katherine believes the ashgrim found me when I was a baby, so to them, it seemed as though there had always been something wrong with me.”
I hoped I didn’t need to explain further. Most people manifested the Sight later in childhood, when they were old enough to tell someone. Developing it in infancy wasn’t unheard of, but on the rare occasion it happened, the babies seldom survived. Few were aware that it was possible to be possessed so young—my family certainly hadn’t been. All they had known was that I’d gone from a screaming, difficult infant to a toddler who bit and scratched like an animal, driven by strange and violent whims they didn’t understand. No one in my village had had the Sight, so if my eyes had ever glowed silver, they wouldn’t have been able to see it.
“I didn’t know that I was possessed, either,” I added, before the revenant could ask the obvious question—why didn’t you ask for help? “No one told me about spirits. People don’t talk about them in villages like the one I came from. It’s considered bad luck.”
Not that anyone had ever tried speaking to me, anyway. They had only come by to stare. Often I had woken up to eyes pressed to the shed’s knotholes, the village children peering in at me, whispering. There hadn’t been anywhere I could go to hide.
“Idiots. Humans simply love inventing superstitions and then getting killed because of them. Or better yet, using them as an excuse to kill other humans.” It paused. “What did you think was happening to you?”
I almost answered that I didn’t want to talk about it. Then it occurred to me that perhaps for once, I did. The revenant wasn’t human; I doubted there was anything I could say to it that it would find truly shocking. Whatever had happened to me, it had seen and done worse. I didn’t want to find that idea reassuring, but somehow it helped.