Not even when you wanted Her to.
“You speak to Her,” Elaine said, her eyes filling with tears. From across the bedspread, Charles was looking at me with something approaching awe.
“No,” I said quickly, roughly. “About the effigy, that was only a guess. I’ve never…” There were some who heard the Lady’s voice—Sister Julienne had, certainly. Mother Katherine, I suspected. And probably Mother Dolours as well. “I’m not a saint. It isn’t like that.”
Everyone just stared. I was speaking the words, but they weren’t hearing me. I had lost them. I remembered the shed, where there had been nowhere to hide, and I started to feel as though the air were vanishing from the room, that there were too many bodies inside breathing it in, that I was going to suffocate.
Charles glanced at me in dismay. An idea crossed his face. “Artemisia needs to pray,” he blurted out.
“Of course,” Elaine said quickly, looking relieved. This, she understood. “Of course. Come along, everyone.”
“Put your head between your knees,” the revenant ordered, in such a curt, unsympathetic tone that I obeyed without thinking. “Good,” it said. “Now breathe. There’s plenty of air in here for your disgusting flesh lungs. Whoever made this building had the architectural skill of a village drunkard. There are drafts coming in through every nook and cranny.”
Bizarrely, that helped. My pulse began to slow. I couldn’t begin to guess what Charles thought; he was staying perfectly silent and still. Eventually, after my breathing returned to normal, I heard him stand, his boots scuffing against the rug.
“Marguerite’s at the market finding out what she can,” he said as though nothing had happened. “What the Clerisy’s doing about last night, and things like that. She should be back soon.” I glanced up at him and saw that his brow was knit with worry. To gather this information, she was putting herself in danger.
I felt a pang, remembering what she had said to me in the graveyard. It isn’t just gossip, you know.
He moved to leave, then hesitated. He took in my face, seeing something there—I had no idea what. Then he came back and knelt again.
“Lady vespertine,” he said.
“Stand up.” My voice sounded awful.
He didn’t listen, just squared his shoulders in determination and bowed his head more deeply against the coverlet. A lump formed in my throat. I wanted him to understand that I wasn’t Saint Artemisia; I wasn’t who he thought I was. He should have realized that by now.
“You said I was the fairest maiden you’d ever seen,” I reminded him.
He lifted his head. “You were,” he said. “You are. You saved us—me, Jean, the captain, everyone. I saw it happen. I’ll never forget it. You can’t live through something like that and not remember it every day for the rest of your life.” In his eyes, I could almost see a reflection of the revenant’s silver fire. The light that had saved him, and nearly killed him.
I swallowed. Of the two of us, Charles was braver. He had fought on the same battlefield, and he had done it even though he had believed he was going to die. He had faced his own possessed friends to keep others safe. Charging into battle with the power of a Fifth Order relic wasn’t nearly as difficult. If power were a measure of worth, Charles wouldn’t have needed me at all.
I wished I were better at speaking. All those thoughts were in my head, but I didn’t know how to get them out.
Seemingly unperturbed by my silence, he stood. “Thank you, lady vespertine,” he said kindly. “That’s all I wanted to say.”
* * *
The wait for Marguerite’s return tensely dragged on. A little while after Charles had left the room, Elaine’s family hauled in a wooden tub so I could scrub the last of the smoke’s lingering stink from my body before I put my clean clothes back on. Elaine handled them reverently, as though they were spun from gold, even though the cloak had holes in it and still smelled of damp wool. They weren’t finished drying, but I was grateful to be dressed; I could hear hushed voices in other parts of the house that the revenant identified as belonging to new arrivals. They were entering in a steady stream through a back door that opened out into an alley. It wasn’t difficult to guess what they had come to see.
Before long there were faces peeking in at me from around the door, despite Elaine’s audible efforts to herd them away. I had the sense that she had shared the news of my presence with a few close friends, only for word to spread through the neighborhood. The revenant was annoyed to be proven right about this particular aspect of human nature.
“They say it’s her hands,” someone whispered. “That’s where the scars are.”
“How old is she?” whispered someone else. “What happened?”
“I could devour their souls for you,” the revenant proposed. “It would be fun. Don’t pretend you aren’t tempted.”
I braced myself when a cloaked figure barged inside, thinking this was the dreaded moment at which someone was going to throw themselves at my feet and beg for a miracle—only to relax when the intruder shook a hood back from her hair, her cheeks flushed from the morning chill. Marguerite had returned.
“Artemisia!” she exclaimed in surprise. “You’re clean.” She wrinkled her nose at everyone’s horrified stares. “Don’t worry, we grew up together. Is there anything to eat? I’m starving.”
I never could have predicted how grateful I would be to see Marguerite. She cheerfully took charge of the household in a whirlwind of activity, somehow managing to transport me to the kitchen in a shuffle that placed me between her, Charles, and Jean, to the disappointment of everyone craning their necks for a look. At the table, she ushered me to the least visible corner in the back. Meanwhile Jean sat nearest the door, blocking everyone’s view from the hallway. He was drawing his own share of looks, but not for the reason I thought. I learned from Marguerite that he had carried me in his arms all the way here. People had seen, and were treating him as though he were part saint himself.
The little boy, whose name was Thomas, helped set the table. It was too early for the midday meal, but Elaine brought out a haddock and fig pie she appeared to have baked specially for the occasion, presenting a slice to me nervously, as though the Lady might smite her for offering me such lowly fare. When I tried to thank her, she fled.
We ate in a huddle, speaking in low voices. I couldn’t block out the awareness of being watched—the feeling that everyone in the house was committing every detail of this scene to memory, and a dozen different versions of it would be spread across the city by nightfall.
“There are all kinds of rumors,” Marguerite was saying. “Everyone thinks you were in the square, but as far as I can tell, there isn’t any proof. I heard too many different stories about what happened for any of them to be useful to the Clerisy. Some of them were really ridiculous—they got your hair color wrong in most of them, and in one you even brought somebody back from the dead. It’s obvious the soldiers who saw you kept their mouths shut.”
“Of course they did,” Charles said, offended.