I wasn’t sure how much of our earlier conversation Jean had overheard, if any. I shook my head at Marguerite, requesting her silence.
“Just touch him,” the revenant prompted. “I’ll do the rest.”
I tried to move, and found that I couldn’t. Jean was sitting there looking at the ground, showing no indication of being aware of what was happening. He might not feel anything I was about to do to him, but it felt wrong to use him without his knowledge.
“I’m like you,” I told him impulsively. “I got possessed, too. By an ashgrim.”
That broke through the fog. He looked up, his dark eyes meeting mine. It was the first time he had truly looked at me. I could see the pain deep within his gaze, the tortured hope, like an open wound. My chest tightened.
He needed to know. If I was going to use him for this, he deserved to know everything. “What are you doing?” the revenant hissed as I stripped off my gloves.
I held my hands out for Jean to see. I was so used to their appearance I rarely looked at them closely, but now I saw them as a stranger might, red and oddly wrinkled in the candlelight, the left permanently curled, missing the fingernails on the last two fingers. Those fingers were the most badly burned, left with only shiny knobs of flesh at the shortened tips.
Out of the periphery of my vision, I saw that Marguerite was holding her breath. Jean’s own hands reached out very slowly to cradle mine, holding them as though they were something precious that might break. No, not that. As though they were unbreakable—the one thing in the world that he knew he couldn’t hurt.
“My name is Artemisia of Naimes,” I said.
He didn’t react. Wet tracks shone on his cheeks beneath the craggy line of his brow. He already knew. An echo of a voice came back to me, the man on the road to Bonsaint. She has scars. We will know her by her scars.
“I’m sorry,” I told him. “I should have gotten there faster.” He was shaking his head, but I went on, my voice harsh. “I should have stopped what happened to you. I’m trying to make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else. But I need to do something to you to figure out how. Will you let me?”
A tear dripped to the ground between us, a dark blot in the dirt. He nodded.
I gripped his hands in mine.
The stable shifted. The walls turned to smoke-colored glass; the horses in their stalls became dark shapes threaded with gold. That was all I was able to observe before the floor opened up and the stable dropped away.
I plunged silently into darkness. In the void, a vision materialized before me. Shards of color reared upward from the emptiness, assembling themselves into seven tall, narrow shapes. A plinth of some kind lay below them, blazing white. A bent figure straightened neatly from behind it, tall, slender, dressed in black. His hands were filled with shadow.
He looked directly at me, his face cold and his eyes as green as moonlit glass. His lips formed a word. Artemisia.
My heart stopped.
The vision drained from me along with my strength. The world tipped sideways, but I didn’t hit the ground. Disoriented, I struggled to identify the warmth surrounding me until I realized that Jean had caught me in his arms. Marguerite hovered over us, anxious.
“Did he see us?” I demanded of the revenant, too panicked to care what they would think.
“No. It was just an imprint—a memory. It happened the night after you escaped from the harrow.”
The night after I escaped from him. I wondered if my flight had driven him to desperate measures, if the ritual he had carried out that night had been because of me. The army of spirits had gathered outside Bonsaint the next morning. The timing couldn’t be a coincidence.
I squeezed my eyes shut. The revenant had said it would be able to find the place we had seen in the vision. Concentrating hard, I thought I felt something—a subtle yet insistent pull, like the tug of a ghostly string.
“We need to go,” I said.
“You need to rest.”
“I’ve rested enough.”
“You said you would listen—”
“Artemisia.” Marguerite’s tentative voice broke in. I opened my eyes.
She looked unsettled. Jean was staring at me, but he hadn’t let go. I wondered what all that had looked like from the outside. Probably not as threatening as it could have, since the revenant had obviously been scolding me like an overprotective nanny.
Marguerite opened her mouth, closed it again. Then hesitantly spoke. “It’s almost sunrise.”
“Good,” I said. “The streets will be empty.”
“Nun,” the revenant snapped.
“No—what I mean is, today’s the first day of the festival. There’s going to be an effigy of the Raven King in the main square. Practically everyone in the city will be there.” She was twisting one of her chestnut curls around her finger, winding it up hard enough to look painful. “Maybe…”
I had forgotten about the festival of Saint Agnes. Something Leander had said to the sister in the graveyard came back to me. It must be tonight.
“I need to go,” I said in alarm. “Leander might be planning to do something during the ceremony. Whatever he was looking for tonight could be part of it.”
“That’s exactly what I thought,” she agreed in a rush, then flushed with embarrassment. She hurried on, “It’s just, it’s the biggest event Bonsaint has all year. If he’s planning on doing something really awful to a lot of people, that would be the best time to do it. And the square is right in the middle of the city, so you’ll probably need to go through there anyway, right?”
She was watching me anxiously, waiting for my reaction. “I would imagine so,” I offered, trying not to sound too surprised that she had thought of all that on her own.
She took a fortifying breath, as though she were preparing to plunge into cold water. Then she said, “If you’re going, I’ll go with you.”
I looked at her in disbelief. “It could be dangerous.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s why I should go.”
My first instinct was to say no. But she had traveled all the way from Naimes to Bonsaint on her own. Everything I had witnessed through the harrow’s screen, she had seen too, except closer up and without the protection of armed guards. She might not have known what true danger meant before, but she did now.
“All right,” I said, ignoring the revenant’s hiss of protest.
Her eyes shone as Jean helped me upright, setting me on my feet as though I weighed nothing. The moment he let go, I stumbled. Marguerite gave a little cry of surprise and tried to catch me. When we collided, something fell from her pocket to tumble glittering into the straw.
She gasped and snatched it back up. But not before I saw it, and recognized it. An ancient silver ring set with a tiny moonstone, like countless others in Loraille, except I knew this one—I could see it anywhere and not mistake it. The relic of Saint Beatrice, worn on Mother Katherine’s hand.
Before she could return it to her pocket, I caught her wrist. She tried to yank herself free, but I didn’t budge.
“It was just sitting on the altar,” she said hotly. “No one was using it. Let go of me.”
Instead, I gripped her tighter. “So you stole it?”