She turned that glare on us now, lingering on me for a few additional seconds. She liked me, but she knew I was responsible for the screaming. I almost always was.
“May I remind you all that a priest is arriving from Bonsaint in one month’s time to evaluate each one of you for admittance into the Clerisy. You may wish to use your time more wisely, for you will not,” she said pointedly, “receive a second chance to leave Naimes.”
Looks passed between the girls. No one wanted to stay in Naimes and spend the rest of her life tending to corpses. Except for me.
If I was selected for a higher education by the Clerisy, I would have to talk to people. Then, after I completed my studies, I would be ordained as a priestess, which would involve talking to even more people and also trying to solve their spiritual problems, which sounded horrific—I’d probably make them cry.
No one could deny that I was better suited to the life of a Gray Sister. Administering death rites was important work, more useful than idling away my life in a gilded office in Bonsaint or Chantclere, upsetting people. Then there was the other duty of the Gray Sisters, the one I looked forward to the most. They were responsible for investigating reports of children with the Sight.
I rubbed the scar tissue on my hands, conscious of the places where I felt no sensation. It was like touching leather, or someone else’s skin. If someone had looked harder, found me sooner…
I doubted it would be difficult to fail the evaluation on purpose. The priest could hardly drag me out of Naimes by force.
Sister Iris was watching me as though she knew exactly what I was thinking. “I see you’ve finished examining the bodies. Artemisia, tell me your conclusions.”
I looked down. “He died of fever.”
“Yes?”
“There aren’t any marks on his body to suggest a death by injury or violence.” I was conscious of the other girls watching me, some leaning toward each other to trade remarks. I could guess what they were saying. Commenting on my stony, unsmiling expression, my flatly emotionless voice.
Little did they know that this was better than the alternative. I had once tried smiling in a mirror, with profoundly unfortunate results.
“And?” Sister Iris prompted, sending a look at the novices that quieted them at once.
“He’s young,” I went on. “Unlikely to have experienced a paroxysm of the heart. He would be thinner if he’d died of a wasting disease or the flux. His tongue and fingernails aren’t discolored, so poisoning is unlikely. But there are broken veins in his eyes, and his glands are swollen, which indicate a fever.”
“Very good. And what of the condition of his soul?” The whispering had started up again. Sharply, Sister Iris turned. “Marguerite, would you care to answer?”
Marguerite’s cheeks flamed red. She wasn’t as pale as me, but her fair skin could display a spectacular variety of colors—generally shades of pink, but sometimes an impressive purple flush, and occasionally an interesting greenish cast, when something I said to her almost made her throw up. “Could you repeat the question, Sister Iris?”
“What manner of spirit would this man’s soul become,” Sister Iris said in a clipped tone, “if the sisters did not purify it before it succumbed to corruption?”
“A shade,” Marguerite blurted out. “Most souls turn into First Order spirits, no matter how they died. If not a shade, then—” She cast a panicked look at Francine, who avoided her eyes. She hadn’t been listening, either.
I shared a room with Marguerite in the dormitory, which was so cramped that our hard, narrow beds nearly touched. She signed herself against evil every night before she went to sleep, eyeing me meaningfully the whole time. Truthfully, I didn’t blame her. Mostly I felt sorry for her. If I were someone else, I was sure I wouldn’t want to share a room with me, either.
Lately, I felt even sorrier for her than usual because I didn’t think she was going to pass the evaluation. I couldn’t imagine her becoming a nun, and I had an equally difficult time envisioning her as a lay sister, shouldering the convent’s never-ending burden of washing, cooking, gardening, and mending. But if she failed, those would be her only two choices. The Lady had granted her the Sight, which meant a life dedicated to service. None of us could survive without the protection of the convent’s lichgate, or the incense and consecrated daggers provided to us by the Clerisy. The risk of possession was too great.
Sister Iris had her back to me. When Marguerite’s desperate gaze wandered over in my direction, I raised a hand to my forehead, miming checking my temperature. Her eyes widened.
“A feverling!” she exclaimed.
Sister Iris’s lips thinned. She cast me a suspicious look. “And to which order does a feverling belong, Artemisia?”
“The Third Order,” I recited dutifully. “The order of souls lost to illness and plague.”
This received a curt nod, and Sister Iris moved on to questioning the other novices. I listened with partial attention as they described causes of death: exposure, starvation, flux, a case of drowning. None of the corpses provided to us had died violently; those souls could turn into Fourth Order spirits, and they got whisked off to the chapel immediately.
It was difficult to conceive of a time when Fourth Order spirits weren’t the most dangerous threat in Loraille. But Fifth Order spirits had been orders of magnitude more destructive. During the War of Martyrs, the seven revenants had raged across the country like storms, leaving entire cities lifeless in their wake. Blighted harvests had blown away as ashes on the wind. There was a tapestry in the scriptorium that depicted Saint Eugenia facing the revenant she had bound, armor flashing in the sun, her white horse rearing. It was so old and faded that the revenant looked like an indistinct cloud rising up over the hill, edges picked out in fraying silver thread.
I could still feel its hunger and fury, its despair at being bound. I imagined that if I listened closely enough to the stillness that yawned beneath the convent’s mundane everyday bustle, past the muffling hush of shadowed corridors and ancient stone, I would be able to sense it festering in the darkness of its prison.
“Are there any questions?”
Sister Iris’s voice snapped me back to the present. We were about to be dismissed. As everyone else drifted toward the door in anticipation, already beginning to murmur among themselves, I heard myself ask, “What causes a soul to become a Fifth Order spirit?”
Silence descended like an axe. Everyone turned to look at me, and then at Sister Iris. In all our years as novices, this was something no one had dared to ask.
Sister Iris pursed her lips. “That is a fair question, Artemisia, considering that our convent is one of few to house a high relic. But it is not an easy question to answer. The truth is that we do not know for certain.”
Whispering started up again. Uncertain glances traveled between the novices.
Sister Iris didn’t look at them. She was studying me with a slight frown, as though she knew again what was on my mind. I wondered if Sister Julienne had revealed to anyone what had happened in the crypt.
Her expression gave no clue as she went on. “It is, however, beyond a doubt that no more revenants have risen since the Sorrow, Goddess have mercy.” She sketched the four-point sign of the oculus on her forehead, a third eye that represented the Lady and Her gift of Sight. “The scholar Josephine of Bissalart believed that their rising was tied to the cataclysm that brought about the Sorrow—the Old Magic ritual performed by the Raven King.”