Marguerite was glaring at me. I took my hand away. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve before saying, “I saw the priest on my way back to the infirmary, and I knew you were going to get into trouble.” She looked uncertainly at Jean, who had curled into a huddle against the wall. “I didn’t know who else to ask for help.”
“It’s good you chose him. I don’t think anyone else in Bonsaint would have been strong enough.”
“Strong enough for what?” she demanded. “What was that? What was the confessor doing?”
Reflexively, I glanced up at the graveyard, wondering if he was about to come swooping down on us.
“The priest is gone,” the revenant said. I got the impression that if it had its own body, it would be collapsed beside us against the door in an attitude of stunned exhaustion. “Next time, nun—not that I expect there to be a next time—remind me not to call a dreadnought an antique.”
My spine prickled. In the ivy-draped darkness of the stairwell, Marguerite was watching me.
“You’re doing it again,” she said. “You’re listening to it.”
My stomach turned over. “If you tell anyone—”
“I wasn’t going to.” She frowned, avoiding my eyes. “You obviously aren’t possessed.”
“How do you know?”
I could tell she was frightened; she was gripping her pocket again, the one she kept her amulet inside. But she said defiantly, “I shared a room with you for almost seven years. You’re just as weird and creepy as you were before. Being possessed by a Fifth Order spirit would probably make you less weird.”
“Astonishingly,” the revenant said, “I find myself agreeing with this pink human a second time.”
“And anyway,” she muttered, “you know things that only you would know. Like how much I hate spiders.”
She was taking this much better than I had expected. “Thanks,” I said after an awkward pause, also avoiding her eyes.
In a sudden decisive movement, she clambered to her feet, standing over me. She took a deep breath, then extended her hand. I stared at it. In all the years I’d known her, I couldn’t remember her ever willingly offering to touch me.
“Will you tell me what you’re doing? I want to know. I promise I can keep it a secret.” She stubbornly lifted her chin. “And I might—I might be able to help.”
I continued to stare at her, nonplussed.
“Believe it or not, I do actually have a brain,” she said, turning a little redder. “And you need help. Whatever you’re up to, you can’t do it alone.”
“I have the revenant.”
I felt it stifle its surprise—for some reason, it hadn’t expected me to say that—as Marguerite retorted, “That’s not enough.”
“It’s gotten me this far,” I said.
“Can a spirit cover for you if you go missing from the infirmary?” she challenged. “Or if you pass out and someone sees your hands? Does it know all the latest news in the city? It isn’t just gossip, you know,” she said with unexpected heat. “Sometimes it’s useful information. There’s nothing wrong with paying attention to what’s going on around you.”
I leaned back, wishing the ground would swallow me whole. I recognized the signs that Marguerite was getting emotional about something, but as usual, I couldn’t tell what.
When I didn’t answer, she made a frustrated sound. Clearly releasing a long-pent-up grievance, she declared, “Just because you can survive by being scary and intense all the time doesn’t mean you should judge everyone who can’t.”
So that was what she was angry about. I looked from her face to her extended hand and back again. The truth was, she had come to my rescue twice now. She had helped hide me, and tonight she had probably saved my life. All that time in Naimes, I had underestimated her.
Reluctantly, I took her hand.
SEVENTEEN
Marguerite and I sat opposite each other on the stable’s floor with a lantern flickering between us. I had just finished relaying everything I knew to her, ending with the revenant’s explanation of the dreadnought. She had watched me in horrified fascination the entire time, her expression exaggerated by the flame lighting her face from beneath.
“It really said all that?” she squeaked.
If only she knew. “It said a lot more. I’m only sharing the important parts.”
She looked away, chewing her lip. She still had a death grip on her pocket. I considered telling her that her amulet wouldn’t protect her from the revenant, but I didn’t want her to take it as a threat, so I didn’t say anything. I waited.
“It’s—you know, it’s smart?” she asked finally. “Like a person?”
It is a person, were the first words that jumped to mind. Instead, I said, with the revenant’s indignation needling me to speak, “It thinks humans are all idiots.”
“That’s an understatement,” it hissed.
I wasn’t fooled by its nasty tone. Now that Marguerite knew about it, I could tell it was secretly enjoying having a conversation with someone new, even with me acting as the intermediary. For a being who liked to talk so much, going for hundreds of years without anyone listening to it must have been torture.
“I thought it would be more like…” Marguerite shook her head. She took a deep breath, collecting herself. “Never mind. So you think you can use Jean to help find out where Confessor Leander has been practicing Old Magic. And it really won’t hurt him?”
I followed her gaze to Jean. He was sitting outside the candlelight, gazing forlornly at the horse in the nearest stall with his hands knotted in his lap. Despite his size, he looked like a little boy who wanted to pet the horse but had been denied permission. “The revenant says it won’t.”
“And you believe it?”
That was a good question. I still didn’t know why the revenant was so interested in Old Magic. However, I could say with complete certainty, “If the revenant wanted to possess me and kill everyone, it would have already tried. That isn’t what it wants.”
I felt a startled hitch from the revenant, and then it went very still. Apparently it hadn’t realized that I was onto it. That was what it got for assuming all humans were idiots.
Fortunately, Marguerite seemed reassured. She rose and went to Jean, moving carefully, as though approaching an injured animal. “Jean,” she said softly, reaching for his shoulder. She flinched when he turned to face her. Then she set her jaw in determination and completed the gesture, her hand tiny against his bandaged shoulder. “Will you come sit down with us?”
He rose, startlingly big in the stable’s gloom, shedding pieces of straw. He stared down at her hand as though he barely recognized what it was, but he still allowed it to guide him. Marguerite settled him onto the floor opposite me and then looked up with a question in her eyes. Her mouth was pressed small, her brows furrowed.
“How does it work?” she asked.
The revenant said, “All you need to do is touch him, and I’ll get an impression of the place where the ritual was cast. I doubt either of us will recognize it—some hideous dungeon filled with whips and chains, I expect; you would never believe what priests get up to in their spare time—but I’ll be able to trace its direction, and we can follow it to the source.”