“I’m glad you took the relic,” I said.
I heard a sharp intake of breath. I couldn’t bring myself to look at her again, but I imagined her hesitating, wondering if I was playing some sort of trick. “You’re glad that I stole it, you mean?”
“The revenant told me that the shade’s been helping you because Mother Katherine was friends with it, and it’s learned to like people.”
“I didn’t put it that way,” the revenant snapped. “I didn’t say they were friends.” So it was listening after all.
“Oh,” Marguerite said quietly.
“If you hadn’t taken it, it would be trapped alone inside its relic right now. Someone else would have gotten it eventually, but they might not have treated it well, and they wouldn’t have kept it summoned for long. It’s better off with you. I think Mother Katherine would like that—knowing it’s gone to someone who cares about it.” Incredibly, crying all night seemed to have left me clearer-headed, which wasn’t a result I had anticipated. “She would want you to have it.”
A morose sniff came from Marguerite’s direction. “I still stole it.”
“I’m not sure it counts as stealing,” I said, grim with the certainty that I was inching toward the same kind of heresy that had nearly gotten Josephine of Bissalart burned at the stake. “You can steal a thing. You can’t steal a person.”
The revenant didn’t say anything. I had the sense that it was crammed into a corner of my mind, nursing some complicated emotions. I risked a look at Marguerite and saw her swipe roughly at her eyes with her sleeve.
She mumbled, “Saint Eugenia’s reliquary—if you want it back…”
“Finally!” the revenant exclaimed, at the same time I said, “Keep it.”
“No!” it hissed.
“Really?” Marguerite sounded dubious.
“Nun!”
“It’s the only way the revenant can be destroyed,” I explained.
“Don’t tell her that,” it snapped. “Why are you telling her that?”
“Which means it’s dangerous for me to carry,” I continued doggedly. “There’s no sense in me wearing it, especially in battle. Having someone else keep it safe for me is the best way to protect it.”
The revenant shuddered, its presence sinking away to sulk. But if it would only stop and think rationally for a moment, it would realize I was right. Also, it still didn’t know the reason why I had wanted to keep Saint Eugenia’s reliquary on hand. Hopefully it would never find out.
Marguerite gave a damp-sounding laugh. “I was always jealous of you, you know,” she admitted.
The rag nearly fell off my face. “What?”
“You were always so sure of yourself. You knew exactly what you wanted to do, and everyone could tell you were going to be good at it. All the sisters liked you. They hated me.”
“No, they didn’t.”
“Fine.” Her voice deadened. “They didn’t notice me. That’s worse.”
I remembered what she had said in the infirmary, They probably haven’t even noticed I’m gone, and how much she had sounded as though she’d believed it.
“I’m sorry I talked about you behind your back,” she went on. “It was mean, and I shouldn’t have done it. I never meant it. I just wanted the other girls to like me. I wanted to be friends with someone, and you obviously didn’t want—”
“I wanted to be friends with you,” I interrupted, the terrible words erupting forth without my permission, as though they had been lurking somewhere inside me for years, waiting for the worst possible moment to be spoken.
Marguerite swiveled around and stared at me in shock while I fervently wished I could obliterate myself on the spot. “You tried to put a spider on me,” she said finally.
“Just to show you it wouldn’t hurt you.”
“Oh. I didn’t…” She trailed off, looking away. She gnawed on her lip, then glanced at me sidelong, as though to make sure I was still myself and not an Artemisia-shaped imposter. “I wish you had told me that,” she said.
Instead of silently trying to make a spider crawl up her arm. In hindsight, I saw where that had gone wrong.
I had begun to feel cautiously optimistic that we might be finished talking when she confessed in a sudden rush, “I never knew what to say to you! I always felt like I was saying the wrong thing. The way you looked at me sometimes, it was like you wished I would just jump out the window and die.”
“I wasn’t thinking that,” I protested, surprised. “I was probably trying to figure out how to answer you. I never knew what to say to you, either.”
“Really?”
She looked skeptical. This was why I hated trying to have conversations with people. I said in frustration, “You wouldn’t have died if you had jumped out the window. We were only one story above the ground. At worst, you would have broken an arm. And if I had really wanted you to go out the window, I would have pushed you myself.”
A smile touched her mouth before she forced it away. “You would have,” she admitted.
“This is nauseating,” the revenant put in. I felt it loitering at the margins of my consciousness, revolted. “Hurry up and get it over with.”
“Marguerite, I never hated you,” I insisted.
She looked down. Then the smile crept back onto her face. “You might hate me soon.”
I tensed. “Why?”
She climbed down the ladder and came back up with a basket of white flowers. I recognized them. They were called Lady’s tears, the only flowers that bloomed this time of year, sprinkling the barren hillsides with their starry blossoms. It was a tradition to weave them into your hair on Saint Agnes’s holy day.
I had never participated. My hands couldn’t manage a task as delicate as braiding, and also no one had wanted to touch me, to my profound relief—I hadn’t wanted to touch them, either.
She said with the same shy smile on her face, “I was thinking, Confessor Leander is probably going to be there, and he knows what you look like.”
I leaned away slightly. “He knows what you look like, too.”
“I doubt he remembers me. I was in there for less than a minute, and he barely looked up from the desk. Anyway, this would be a perfect disguise. No one would expect to see you with flowers braided into your hair.”
With any luck, Leander wouldn’t expect to see me at all. As far as I knew, he still thought I had drowned in the Sevre. But I had the bleak suspicion that this was Marguerite’s equivalent of trying to hand me a spider. I needed to participate in this activity to secure our friendship, which for some reason was something I wanted.
“Fine,” I intoned, as though staring into my own grave.
EIGHTEEN
Isn’t it marvelous?” Marguerite asked, her wondering face tipped upward at the colorful banners flapping overhead, while I stared hard at the cobbles and tried not to lose my breakfast.
I had thought Bonsaint’s sights and smells were too much on a normal day. As it turned out, Bonsaint during a festival was a hundredfold worse. I shuffled along behind Marguerite like an invalid, my stomach clenched against the odors of sweat and greasy street pies. The jeering voices of puppet shows vied with the clamor of vendors loudly hawking their trinkets; my head itched from the flower stems poking my scalp. The revenant kept making me pause to look at my reflection—first in a polished tin plate, then a lady’s mirror on display in a stall. It would never admit it, but I strongly suspected that it had enjoyed the hair braiding.