The ravens blotting out the sky made it difficult to see what was happening on the platform, but it appeared as though the clerics were trapped with the crowd blocking the stairs. Through the gale of flickering black wings, I saw someone drop a censer, which rolled across the boards until it struck the base of the effigy, showering the robes of nearby clerics with embers. The Divine frantically patted at her smoking vestments—and just like that, Leander was no longer at her side.
My hands curled into fists. Ducking my head, I shouldered toward the beggar, who stood waiting for me, eerily still in the midst of the chaos.
“Wait,” the revenant said hurriedly. “It wants you to fight it. This is a trap. The aim isn’t to destroy my relic; it’s to force you to reveal your presence to the Clerisy.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?”
The harsh cries of the ravens drowned out my voice, but I knew the revenant had heard me. The answer hung in the silence between us. Run. Leave these humans to their fate. At least it didn’t bother saying those words out loud. It knew me too well for that.
The thrall briefly vanished from view as someone staggered past clutching a bloodied face. I needed to move quickly. Soldiers had begun pushing their way forward, halting people to look into their eyes. Organizing them was an armored knight who I hoped was Captain Enguerrand, not a member of the cathedral guard.
I pushed forward, straining in the opposite direction as the people fleeing past. I had barely managed a few steps when a body slammed into me, bowling me to the ground. What followed was a disorienting muddle of churning legs and stamping boots. A burst of heat flooded my ear, and then the revenant yanked me back up so forcefully that I thought for an instant it had taken over my body. I gasped for air as though surfacing from underwater.
My ear stung. Someone had kicked me.
“You could have been killed,” the revenant snapped. “Right now the humans pose a greater threat to you than the thrall.”
“Help me fight it,” I panted, undeterred.
“Have it your way, nun. Get as close to the thrall as you can.” It sounded bitterly angry. “This is a foolish thing to even attempt, but while the clerics are distracted, they might not be able to tell my power apart from the spirit possessing him.”
No matter how dangerous it was, I had to try. If I could just flush the spirit from hiding, the Clerisy’s forces should be able to fight it. The Divine carried at least one Fourth Order relic, and she wouldn’t have been ordained if she were incapable of using it.
A few more steps, and I broke into a small clearing created by the crowd surging around Saint Agnes’s statue. The beggar stood waiting. As soon as I stepped back into sight, his eyes rolled up, locking on to me through the flitting shapes of ravens, the whites so bloodshot they burned red in the twilight. Then he charged.
His weight bowled me to the cobblestones, his frame thin but wiry, clawing at me in a frenzy of motion empowered by the spirit’s unnatural strength. His scrabbling hands closed around my throat and squeezed. I wrenched myself to the side and sent us tumbling over each other across the ground, into the path of people fleeing past. A boot clipped my shoulder; another struck the beggar’s head. His grip loosened enough for me to drag in a painful, fiery breath. Only then did the revenant’s power push forth, a trickle compared to its usual violent flood. The beggar collapsed, convulsing.
Veins bulged in his face, and his mouth opened in a silent scream. His lips were tinged blue, his tongue purple and swollen. I grabbed his head in both hands so he wouldn’t crack his skull on the cobbles. His eyes fixed on me with a terror that I couldn’t identify as his own or that of the spirit possessing him.
“You’re killing him,” I said.
“I’m doing my best,” the revenant retorted, its voice strained with effort.
I bit back a terse reply, remembering the limitations of my own hands. I could hold a sword, but not a sewing needle. The revenant’s destructive power likewise wasn’t designed for subtlety—but for my sake, it was trying.
The beggar went limp. At first I thought he had died. Then silver light hazed his eyes. The terror in them vanished, replaced with an expression of cold condemnation.
“Traitor,” he declared.
I almost released him in shock. That deep, rasping voice wasn’t the thrall speaking. It was the spirit possessing him.
“Betrayer of your own kind,” it went on, the beggar’s mouth contorting strangely around the words. With another, greater shock, I realized that it was speaking to the revenant.
“Do you not see,” it rasped, “that the humans will destroy you if we fail? There is no path for you, Scorned One. No mercy, no escape. Wherever you go, you will be—”
I didn’t get to hear the rest. The revenant interrupted with a final, vicious shove of power, like the twisting of a knife. The beggar’s eyes fell shut and his lungs rattled in a long exhale. A gout of silver vapor poured from his body, twisting away in a gyre above the crowd.
Whatever form it took, the Clerisy could handle it now. It might be powerful, but it was only one spirit against the combined might of Bonsaint’s forces. I had seen Leander alone take on a rivener.
As far as I could tell, my struggle with the beggar had gone unnoticed amid the chaos. I dragged his unconscious body toward the statue and hauled him up on the plinth, where he wouldn’t get trampled. Every breath burned my bruised throat like fire. I imagined that I tasted smoke. Not incense, but the stench of something burning. The pain must have brought back a memory of my family’s hearth, the heat of the fire as I plunged my hands inside.
When I looked up, one last person fled past, leaving behind an expanse of empty cobbles, littered with debris—scraps of food, crushed blossoms. I looked up farther, bringing a circle of boots into view. Drawn swords. Soldiers.
I hadn’t been fast enough. They had finished combing through the crowd. Converging at the square’s center, they had all stopped dead around me. Ravens still swarmed overhead, panic still churned behind them, but it was as though the space surrounding Saint Agnes’s statue had turned into the eye of a storm, briefly quiet and still.
A loud, metallic clatter shattered the illusion. One of the soldiers had dropped his sword. He didn’t seem to notice he’d done it; he was too busy staring at me.
“Oh, fantastic,” spat the revenant.
These soldiers had the Sight. They had seen everything. Not just two people fighting on the ground, but the spirit I had driven from a thrall’s body—even if they had seen nothing else, they couldn’t have missed its silver light twisting overhead.
I was still holding the beggar’s arms. Slowly, I lowered him to rest against Saint Agnes’s feet.
They didn’t know my face. Perhaps they wouldn’t recognize me. Who would look at me and think I could possibly be Artemisia of Naimes? The real Artemisia could have slipped away, and I was just some bystander she’d left behind. That was how I felt, like an imposter at risk of being mistaken for myself.
“I told you she couldn’t have drowned,” said one of the men. They were gazing at me in wonder.
“Anne!” came a ragged shout.
I flinched. I was still imagining that I smelled smoke, and the sound of my old name belonged to that same pain-filled darkness, an echo of reproval, of fear. I wasn’t ready for Charles to break into the circle of soldiers, elbowing them aside. He looked frantic. He must have jumped down from the awning to look for me. I remembered, dazed, that he had five sisters.