As soon as I lurched out of bed, Marguerite appeared as though my disobedience had summoned her. “What are you doing?” she demanded. “You need to get back in bed.”
“I can’t believe I agree with this human,” the revenant said. “Though I still think we should kill her. We could always stuff her body down a latrine.”
“I need to follow them,” I said.
“Why?”
“I need to hear what they’re saying about Confessor Leander.”
Her mouth fell open. “That horrible priest who gave us our evaluations?”
I hesitated. My legs were already wobbling. I couldn’t follow the curists without her help, and I doubted she would cooperate unless I gave her a good reason.
“He’s involved in the spirit attacks.” I hesitated again, then added, “I found out he’s been practicing Old Magic.”
Her eyes went round. As I had hoped, there was only one force stronger than Marguerite’s terror of me: her insatiable hunger for gossip. “I knew it,” she said with conviction. “I knew there was something evil about him. Come on.”
Our differences momentarily forgotten, she shrugged out of her cloak and tossed it over my chemise. Then she glanced left and right and bundled me out the door.
“You’re lucky she didn’t ask how you knew about the Old Magic.” The revenant clearly didn’t approve. “If you tell that to anyone with half a brain, it won’t take them long to figure out we’re working together.”
I already knew that; otherwise I would have gone to Mother Dolours for help. I wished I could. But I strongly doubted she would let me go free if she found out that I was conspiring with a revenant.
We followed the curists to a small courtyard behind the kitchens. Lay sisters were working strenuously inside, scraping loaves of bread out of the ovens on long-handled wooden peels, sweating in the heat. Billows of steam poured from the windows, rich with the smell of herbs. As the curists collected their suppers, Marguerite drew us into a shadowed entryway. Judging by the gritty kernels of grain on the cobbles beneath my feet, it led to the granary. A few shades swirled around the stone ceiling, goggling down at us as though we had barged into their house without knocking.
“Confessor Leander saw them,” the youngest curist was insisting, anxiously twisting her stole in her hands. “He told me so last week. Dead rats, without any marks on their bodies, as though they simply dropped where they stood.”
“It isn’t plague, Camille,” said the head curist, Sibylle. “There are no swellings, no rashes. It is merely a flux.”
“Perhaps you shouldn’t take Confessor Leander’s claims as fact.” This was the only man in the group, white-haired and stooped, with bushy eyebrows that gave him the look of a kindly sheepdog. “He’s a favorite of the Divine, this is true, but he is far too young for the burden placed upon his shoulders. There are only two penitent relics in all of Loraille, and most clerics are near my age when they take up the mantle of confessor. He has the ability, yes… but the strain upon him is great. Have you not noticed how changed he has been since his return to Bonsaint? The death he has seen in the countryside these past weeks, the suffering—he has hardly been sleeping since. He has been spotted wandering at odd hours. I fear the ordeal was too much for him after the loss of his elder brother.”
“Gabriel of Chantclere,” murmured one of the other curists to her neighbor, who had looked up inquiringly.
Marguerite let out a tiny gasp. “I know that name,” she whispered. “If it’s the same Gabriel, Aunt Gisele mentioned him in some of her letters. He was expected to serve on the Assembly one day.”
This surprised me. The gift of Sight was rare enough that it was unusual to hear of two Sighted people from the same family, let alone both achieving high ranks within the Clerisy.
“How did it happen, Curist Abelard?” asked the youngest, Camille. “How Gabriel died. No one will tell me.”
“He drowned in the sea. It seems that he”—here the old curist, Abelard, hesitated minutely—“fell from the battlements of Chantclere.”
“Or someone pushed him,” the revenant remarked, but I only half heard it speak; I was remembering the look on Leander’s face as he stared into the Sevre, believing I had drowned.
Curist Abelard went on, “Some might say it is necessary for a confessor to be submitted to adversity. To experience failure and pain. Only those who bear a great burden of guilt are able to control a penitent. But there is a reason why most confessors do not retain the post for long. The responsibility breaks them; it is not uncommon for them to lose their wits before they retire.”
“Enough of this. We do not encourage idle talk among our ranks,” said the head curist, to which Abelard raised his open palm in rueful agreement.
“But you see, Camille, why it may not be wise to listen to him about the rats,” he finished gently.
She nodded, looking meekly at her lap. Their conversation turned to other topics, the winter’s stores and how long they might last the city’s increased population. A moment later they were drowned out by a noisy group of children who ran shouting into the courtyard, playing a game that seemed to involve one chasing the others around with a large stick.
The revenant mused, “Not sleeping well, keeping odd hours… It sounds as though he’s been sneaking out at night.”
I turned the old curist’s words over in my head. A great burden of guilt. “Maybe he did murder his brother.” A twisted thought occurred to me. “I wonder if he did it so he would be able to wield the penitent relic. He might not have shown an aptitude for any other kind. That could have been his only opportunity to advance within the Clerisy.”
“Oh!” Marguerite gasped. I had been addressing the revenant, but she couldn’t tell. “He must have been awfully jealous of Gabriel, don’t you think? Aunt Gisele made it sound like everyone in Chantclere adored him. She never even mentioned that he had a younger brother. Living in someone else’s shadow like that, never being noticed, always second best…” She trailed off, looking at me.
“Yes?” I ventured, hoping that was the right thing to say.
It wasn’t. She pressed herself against the wall, as far away from me as she could get. “You weren’t talking to me, were you?” she accused. Her frightened eyes glittered in the dark, reflecting the silver light of the shades.
An icy finger drew down my spine. The revenant had gone very quiet, and very tense. “What do you mean?”
“You keep pausing like you’re listening to someone speak. In Naimes, in the chapel—you were arguing with it.” Her voice thinned to a whisper. “With the revenant.”
I thought back to the aftermath of the battle, when the revenant had been trying to possess me, and winced. I had been too distracted at the time to consider what that must have looked like to everyone watching. Marguerite, on the other hand… “You were unconscious.”
In the same tiny whisper, she said, “I heard the sisters talking about it.”
Of course they would have talked about it. Everyone had seen it, not just the sisters. Sophia had seen it—she’d seen me holding a dagger to my chest, threatening to plunge it between my ribs. The thought made me feel sick. I stared at Marguerite. I had no idea what to say.