I couldn’t remember the last time I had shouted. It hurt, as though my voice had been torn raw from my chest. Everyone quieted and looked at me in confusion.
Thankfully, no one was staring at Jean any longer. Unfortunately, now they were all staring at me instead.
After what they had lived through, I couldn’t blame them for being afraid. Some of them had seen groups of possessed soldiers ransacking their towns, killing people they loved. I knew what it felt like when something reminded you of terrible things that had happened to you. But more than that, I knew what it felt like to be Jean.
The mutterings were starting up again. My harsh question cut through them like a knife. “Do you know how he got like this?”
No one answered, but at least they went quiet again.
“He was a soldier,” I said. “He was fighting to save your lives.”
That seemed to penetrate. Shame colored many of their faces; a few people looked away. Then a defiant voice piped up, “Artemisia of Naimes saved us.”
I searched the crowd until I found the man who had spoken. “Maybe. But if he hadn’t fought for you first, you would have been dead by the time she got there.”
I hadn’t meant for that to sound like a threat, but apparently it did. He took a step back, bumping into the person behind him. Then he muttered something that sounded like an apology and slunk off with his head down.
“Oh, I really need to see what you look like when you do that,” the revenant said.
As quickly as it had formed, the crowd’s remaining energy evaporated. They weren’t bad people, just people who had been through too much. They left quietly, helping up the bystander who had been knocked to the ground, some shooting guilty looks at Jean, who was hunched over with his arms in front of his face as though to fend off a blow, unresponsive to Charles’s careful efforts to lower them. I was watching everyone disperse when my back prickled—the telltale warning of a stare boring into me.
It was Marguerite. She was looking at me with wide eyes and a slightly parted mouth, as though she wanted to say something.
Whatever it was, I didn’t want to hear it. I had the uncomfortable feeling that I wouldn’t be able to bear it. I turned away and vanished with the crowd.
* * *
“Artemisia.”
It was dark, and Marguerite had woken me by shaking me. At first I had the mortifying thought that she wanted to talk about what had happened with Jean. I considered pretending to still be asleep, but that wasn’t possible because I had flinched violently when she’d touched me, and she definitely knew I was awake.
I felt her silent, hesitant presence hovering over me. I braced myself and rolled over. The lanterns burned low behind her, turning her hair into a frizzy glow around her darkened face. It was the dead of night, and everyone else was asleep.
“You need to hide,” she whispered. “Leander is here. He’s searching for something.”
Searching for you, her expression said, though she wasn’t meeting my eyes. She pushed a bundle into my bandaged hands and withdrew, waiting. Relief flooded me when I saw what it was: my gloves, the one item the sisters hadn’t yet returned to me. I made short work of tearing off the bandages and tugging the gloves on in their place. But I shook my head when Marguerite glanced questioningly at my boots. It would take my scarred hands too long to lace them, and I didn’t want her to watch.
“The graveyard,” I said.
Marguerite had always hated going into the graveyard in Naimes. She shivered as she walked with me across the darkened grounds, even though I was the one walking barefoot, the pebbled earth icy beneath my feet. Once she almost shrieked when a windblown leaf skittered across her path, and I realized she’d thought it was a spider. Marguerite was terrified of spiders; this had proven one of our earliest points of contention, just days after we started sharing a room. I had only wanted to show her that they were harmless, but when I had tried to demonstrate that by picking one up and offering it to her, she hadn’t spoken to me for a week.
She paled when I tugged her toward a mausoleum, a dark, ominous shape with its gate standing slightly ajar. Shade-light shone through the rusty bars, outlining the withered flowers that littered its steps in silver.
“I’m fine here by myself,” I told her. “You can leave.”
She shifted from foot to foot, her cloak drawn tightly around herself. She seemed like she wanted to argue. I hoped she wasn’t going to offer to stay with me. As surprisingly generous as that would be coming from Marguerite, I imagined it would increase my chances of getting caught substantially.
I peered more closely at the mausoleum and said, trying to sound enthusiastic, “I bet it’s full of spiders. I can’t wait.”
That was all it took to send her scurrying back across the grounds.
I slipped through the open gate into the mausoleum. The floor was damp and gritty, with slippery mats of decaying leaves piled in the corners. Small mortar-sealed drawers lined the walls to the ceiling, filled with cremated remains. The shades swirling around them reached for me, then shrank away, making horrified faces. I guessed that they had sensed the revenant. Despite myself, I felt bad for them. They had only wanted a little of my warmth.
“Merely out of curiosity, when choosing a hiding place, do you always select the most unpleasant option available to you?”
I took in our surroundings. “Revenant, you’re dead.”
“That doesn’t mean I like being around other things that are dead,” it snapped, which I supposed was fair enough; I usually didn’t like being around other humans, either. We waited in uncomfortable silence for a time before it said without warning, “I can sense the priest. He’s walking in this direction, speaking to a nun.”
My breath stopped. I had expected Leander to check the dormitory, the refectory, the infirmary. Not to be here.
Voices carried faintly in the cold air. I climbed onto the molding and hoisted myself up, finding fingerholds in the crumbling mortar, to peer through the tiny barred window set into the mausoleum’s wall. Darkness blanketed the graveyard, but I picked out the dim movement of two figures walking along a path. The sister’s gray robes were easier to make out. If it weren’t for Leander’s pale skin and golden hair, he would have blended completely into the night. He seemed to be heading somewhere with purpose. I relaxed slightly as it became apparent that he wasn’t searching for me; he was in the convent on some other business.
Hardly sleeping. Wandering at odd hours. If he wasn’t here for me, his visit had to be related to the Old Magic.
“I can’t hear what they’re saying,” I said in frustration.
“I can.”
The revenant paused, and then the world around me changed. The walls of the mausoleum grew smoky and translucent, like stained glass. I no longer needed to peer out the tiny window; I could see straight through the stone around me to the graveyard and the tombstones beyond, their outlines shifting like vapor trapped in overturned jars. I could see the shades swirling inside the other mausoleums, unimpeded by stone, their forms a bright mercurial silver. And in the distant buildings of the convent—the dormitory, the infirmary—golden lights shone like candles, except they weren’t candles; I watched one glide slowly past a neat row of other lights, and realized it was a person, a sister patrolling between the pallets of slumbering refugees. They were souls—living souls.