“That the ashgrim was a part of me. An evil part that wanted to do bad things. Hurt people. Or, if there weren’t any people around…” I stared at a crack in the ceiling, remembering.
“It would make you hurt yourself.”
“I’m not sure. It might have been the ashgrim. It might have been me doing it to stop the ashgrim. I couldn’t tell the difference.”
“And the humans left you there to your own devices.”
I felt the revenant drawing conclusions as I did myself. Surprisingly, sharing those memories aloud for the first time allowed me to see them in a new light. How I had learned, in the shed, that no one would come if I needed help. There would be no comfort when I was in pain. No guarantee of food when I was hungry. That there was nothing I could do to change that; I could only endure it. Now, deprived of my routine in Naimes, I had fallen back into old habits.
I found the revenant almost comforting in its lack of judgment. To it, a creature that had had to learn how human bodies worked through trial and error, my problems weren’t even out of the ordinary.
“I’ll remind you,” it said finally. “Rather than expecting you to remember on your own. When you need to eat, when you’re sick or hurt, and whether it’s serious enough to seek help. But you have to promise that you’ll listen to me. Nun?”
I had been quiet, wondering whether having an evil spirit inhabiting my body might turn me into a halfway normal person. I turned my face toward the window, letting the sunlight sting my eyes. “Yes,” I answered. “I promise.”
* * *
I slept deeply again. Sometime after dark, I awoke to hear the sisters singing evening prayers. Their voices floated across the grounds from the chapel and into the infirmary as though carried by the moonlight spilling through the shutters. As I listened to them, an ache of homesickness swelled inside my chest.
I remembered hearing the choir in Naimes for the first time. In my village, I had sometimes listened to my neighbor humming out of tune while she did her washing near my shed—that was the only music I had known before I heard the sisters raise their voices in song.
It was difficult to describe what I had felt then. I had spent my life believing that everything about me was as small and dim and dirty as the inside of that shed. But the high, clear notes had seemed to echo in the unlit chambers of my soul, revealing its shape, vaster than I had ever known. And the sound had filled me with longing for something I didn’t understand—like a desperate thirst, except it wasn’t for water, or anything else that existed in the life I had led before.
Mother Katherine had found me afterward, gripping the pew’s back in front of me like I’d been swept out to sea. She had shown me how, across the chapel, the flames of the candles were standing still.
I understood now, away from my convent for the first time since I had arrived there, that the longing I had felt that day and many days since was homesickness. Homesickness for a place I had never been, for the answers to questions I carried in my heart but for which I had no words. I hadn’t recognized it then, because I hadn’t understood what it felt like to have a home.
I had nearly drifted back to sleep when voices carried softly through the wing, accompanied by the quiet scuff of footsteps. A pair of sisters patrolling the hall, making sure that nothing was amiss with the patients. They walked past the sleeping bodies, some of whom were snoring, others motionless in slumber. Though I was fully awake now, I lay still and pretended to be among them.
“Two days since the battle, and there hasn’t been a sighting of a dangerous spirit anywhere in Roischal,” one sister whispered. “Do you think it’s possible? That Artemisia of Naimes is truly a saint?”
The other nun sighed. I felt the revenant tense and knew before she spoke that it was Mother Dolours. “I fear that an age of saints and miracles isn’t something to celebrate, Sister Marie. The Lady sends us such gifts only in times of darkness. Do you recall the writings of Saint Liliane?”
The sister was silent a moment. Then she murmured, “And so the silent bell wakens to herald the Dead; and the last candle is lit against the coming night…”
I strained to hear more, but their voices had dwindled as they passed outside the hall, leaving a cold lump in my stomach and the lingering image of a single, steady candle flame slowly burning itself down, the only remaining light to hold off the dark.
THIRTEEN
The next morning, I woke to a different world. Everywhere, people lay moaning on pallets, sisters hastening back and forth between them. Marguerite came by, her cheeks flushed with exertion, and explained that a sickness had reached the convent. So far it was only affecting the refugees who had slept in the camp, but there was fear that it would spread.
Soon, barely any room remained for the sisters to pick their way through the halls. Hastily assembled pallets encroached on mine until I could have stretched out an arm and touched three other patients, not that I tried. I braced myself against both the unwanted company and the rising stench. Going back to sleep wasn’t an option. Sisters were constantly hurrying past to help ailing patients to the privy, sometimes failing to reach it in time, with explosive results.
The revenant watched the tableau unfold in such horror that I felt my hair trying to stand on end.
“Disgusting,” it hissed, as one man bent retching against the wall. “How many different fluids can they possibly have in their bodies? If there’s one thing I haven’t missed about having a vessel, it’s being forced to endure the appalling quantities of effluence you humans spew out of every orifice at the slightest opportunity.”
“They aren’t doing it on purpose,” I said, not worried about being overheard. My neighbors were too preoccupied with their own misery to notice. “It’s involuntary.”
“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?” it retorted shrilly.
The revenant had been carrying on like that all morning, which meant it was nervous. I had noticed by now that its talkativeness increased when it was working itself up into a panic. I decided that the best strategy was to ignore it. Instead, I focused on watching Marguerite.
To my surprise, she hadn’t scurried off somewhere to hide. She was working alongside the healers, bundling away soiled linens and coaxing patients to take sips of broth. Some of it she did with her face screwed up in dismay, but she did it anyway, her shoulders squared in determination. Yesterday, I had found her claim that she’d helped in the infirmary in Naimes difficult to believe; I had envisioned her loitering in the hall, occasionally fetching unguents for the sisters, using the assignment as an excuse to avoid more unpleasant chores. Now I wasn’t so certain.
The revenant had prodded me several times about its reliquary, but I couldn’t begin to guess where she had hidden it. I was starting to realize that I knew much less about her than I had thought. Perhaps that shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Over the past few years, I had made it my primary goal to avoid her as much as possible. In some ways I still thought of her as the little girl who had screamed at her first sight of me hiding beneath the bed.
Everywhere patients moaned, vomited, prayed to the Lady for mercy. And that turned out to be the relaxing part of the day. It wasn’t long before the whispers of plague began.