First he looked at me; then his eyes slid to the unconscious beggar at my side. He glanced around at the soldiers, confused. “Anne?” he repeated, lost.
“That isn’t my name,” I said.
He looked at the other soldiers again and then back at me, his gaze dropping to my gloves. Understanding began to dawn. He was realizing that he had never seen my hands.
I didn’t know what I had expected him to do once he figured out who I was—laugh, maybe. Look disappointed or betrayed. He did none of those things. Instead, he dropped to his knees on the dirty cobbles.
“Lady vespertine,” he said, gazing up at me. His eyes were dark and sincere beneath the lock of sweaty hair plastered to his forehead.
The smell of smoke was growing stronger. The air was too hot. I couldn’t breathe. I wanted Charles to stop kneeling—to get up. I tried to stand, but my legs folded. Charles lunged forward and caught me before I fell from the statue’s plinth.
“Nun, what’s wrong?”
I couldn’t think. The revenant’s alarm swirling around in my head was only making me dizzier. “Is something burning?” I asked.
A new soldier answered, using the gentle tone that meant I had asked a strange question, one with an answer so obvious that a normal person shouldn’t have needed to ask. “Lady, the effigy caught on fire.”
Of course. The sparks from the dropped censer would have easily ignited the dry straw. That seemed clear enough. But my thoughts were dizzy, muddled. For a confusing moment I felt the grit of my family’s hearth beneath my knees, saw the red, living pulse of the coals before I thrust my hands inside. But that had happened years ago. Hadn’t it?
My skin was clammy with sweat. I had the sickening awareness that something was wrong with me, but I didn’t know what it was.
“You told me fire doesn’t bother you,” the revenant said suddenly, as though solving a mystery that had troubled it for days.
“It doesn’t.” I sounded uncertain.
“Lady?” asked one of the soldiers. I felt Charles touching my scalp.
“You idiot,” the revenant said with feeling. Yet for once the insult wasn’t aimed at me. I thought it might be calling itself an idiot, even though that didn’t make any sense. “This isn’t an ordinary cookfire—of course it’s affecting you.”
“I don’t think she took a blow to the head,” Charles was saying. And then, in a different voice, “Captain!”
Over his shoulder, I had a woozy impression of armor, its polished surface reflecting the dancing glow of flames. Enguerrand.
“Get her out of here,” he ordered. His voice was rough, as though he had been shouting. “She needs to be brought to safety. The spirit is Fourth Order—we don’t know what kind yet. Talbot, Martin—”
He was giving orders, but I didn’t hear the rest. A terrible scream split the noise of the crowd. Silver light flashed across Captain Enguerrand’s armor.
“What’s happening?” I rasped. This was wrong—the Divine and her clerics should have destroyed the spirit by now. A red glow lapped against the buildings, alive with the shadows of people running. Heat rolled mercilessly across the square. I fought against the arms restraining me, then recognized who they belonged to and tried to stop. It was Charles. I didn’t want to hurt Charles.
“They’re taking you away. It’s over now. You don’t need to see.”
“Show me!”
“Nun—”
Worriedly, Charles called out to someone, “I think she’s delirious!”
Perhaps the revenant feared that if I didn’t shut up, someone would figure out I was talking to it. It relented, and my vision shifted. This time I was prepared to see the world through its senses—or thought I would be. But there was more than just the translucent, smoked-glass tint to the world, the muffling of scents and sounds. Something impossible was happening in the square. Silver forms were darting through the crowd, hunting, swooping toward the soldiers and the clerics on the platform. Spirits.
“Blight wraiths,” the revenant supplied.
But where had they come from?
Anticipating the question, it tugged my eyes toward the spirit we had exorcised. It hovered above the crowd, invisible to the Unsighted multitude below. Pointed slippers encased its skeletal feet; lavish robes hung from its emaciated frame. A miter crowned its head, the trailing ribbons framing a withered face, the desiccated skin stretched tightly over bone, giving its hollow-cheeked visage an expression of sour disdain.
Below it lay a scattering of large black lumps on the cobbles, like doused coals—bodies.
As I watched, it bent to lay its thin hand on the head of a passing woman as though in benediction. The moment it touched her, she collapsed to the street, dead of blight. It assumed a stance of prayer above her, and the golden light swirling within her chilled to cold, lifeless silver.
A white vicar.
These were the worst of the Fourth Order spirits, risen from clerics who had met violent ends. They were so feared that even clerics who died of natural causes were given elaborate rites to protect their souls from any risk of corruption. Supposedly, their kind had been eradicated from Loraille centuries ago.
The white vicar pointed, and the silver funneled out of the dead woman’s body, taking shape as it went. The newly formed wraith joined the others streaming through the crowd.
The revenant must have decided I’d had enough, because my senses flooded back in a roar of fire. The effigy had transformed into a tower of flame, lapping out folds of greasy black smoke, the heat of it blistering my face even from across the square. Everything was lit red with deep blue shadows in between, and embers swirled in the air overhead.
My eyes caught on a soldier engaging a blight wraith nearby, its silver glow illuminating the openmouthed terror on his face. I wasn’t conscious of reacting, but I must have tried to throw off Charles’s grip. Another soldier came into view, steadying me, blocking the wraith from sight.
“Nun,” the revenant snapped. “Nun! You’ve done enough. Let them help you.”
I shook my head, both in denial and in a hopeless attempt to think. As though jostled loose, a terrible thought sprang into clarity. “Charles.” My fingers tightened on his back. “Where are Marguerite and Jean?”
“They’re together,” he said into my ear. “They’re safe. I left them behind on the—” He broke off, perhaps realizing that that had been before the white vicar, before the wraiths. They might have been safe on the awning before, but they weren’t now. He stopped and scanned the people streaming past.
“Charles,” shouted the other soldier, barely audible through the din. “We need to go! We have our orders.”
Charles didn’t seem to hear. He had gone rigid. I followed his line of sight.
A possessed soldier had backed a group of people against a building. I couldn’t tell whether they were city folk or refugees, or a mixture of both; soot streaked their faces and clothes from the flying embers. The light made everything strange, like a scene from a nightmare. I wouldn’t have recognized Marguerite and Jean if it weren’t for Jean’s distinctive size—even hunched over, he was the largest person in the square.