And it appeared the strategy was working. The vendors were selling out nearly faster than they could make them. With my head down, I watched a boy working in a stall surreptitiously dip a splinter of wood into a jar of pig’s blood and then stick it in a bowl of sand to let it dry. I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t been looking down and happened to glimpse him working through a tear in the stall’s fabric.
Perhaps this was how history treated saints. It didn’t matter what was real, what had truly happened. Even as they lived, their lives passed into legend.
“Nun?”
I had halted in the middle of the square, the traffic flowing around me as though I’d turned to stone. A sudden impulse had seized me to tear off my glove and look at the cut on my hand. It hadn’t even finished healing yet. I felt as though I needed to prove it still existed as around me a dozen voices shouted my name, desperate to own pieces of me, uncaring of the truth: even if they butchered me like an animal, there wouldn’t be enough blood in my body to anoint their holy arrows. They would martyr me themselves to satisfy their hunger for a saint.
“Nun?” the revenant repeated.
“Nothing,” I said, and put down my hand.
A moment later, a shadow fell over me. I was distracted, so for the first time since entering the square, I made the mistake of looking up. Panic descended on me like the stroke of a gavel. When my wits returned, I found myself crouched in an alley with my heart hammering, feeling like an idiot as the revenant flitted through my body searching for injuries, finding nothing.
“What happened?” it demanded for the fourth or fifth time. “What’s wrong with you?”
A lot, no doubt. I wasn’t certain I should tell the truth, since “the cathedral is big” didn’t seem like something that should send a person careening into an alley in mindless terror. But the cathedral was big, and I couldn’t have come up with a lie even if I’d wanted to.
“The cathedral,” I mumbled finally.
The revenant went quiet. Possibly it was remembering that I had spent a considerable portion of my life locked inside a shed. Then it said, “Keep your eyes on the ground, like you were doing before. Close them, if you want to. I’ll tell you when we’re close.”
The rush of gratitude I felt in response was so potent that I was certain the revenant could sense it. Thankfully, it didn’t say anything as it guided me back into the square.
Now that I had seen it, the cathedral’s presence loomed. I felt the weight of its age-blackened stone towering above, encrusted with carved figures of saints and spirits, its spiny, intricate spires piercing the sky like the points of misericordes. It seemed that it might come crashing down at any moment, too huge and terrible to support its own weight.
It was no less crowded in the cool, dank shadows surrounding the cathedral, but here the voices were hushed, people huddled together as though for safety, waiting to be let inside. I picked through them until I found an empty space on the ground. Many of my neighbors looked like refugees; I wondered what it must feel like to have come to Bonsaint seeking shelter, only to discover that even the city wasn’t safe. To them, the cathedral represented the last bastion of refuge in Roischal, its holiness impenetrable.
After what I’d seen in Naimes, I knew better.
The first change I noticed in the square was a nervous ripple among the vendors. They started flipping cloths over their wares, hastily laying out different items. A figure was approaching through the crowd.
“The priest,” warned the revenant, right before Leander strode into view.
People stumbled to get out of his way. They would have done so even if he were a stranger, his reputation unknown. He looked immaculate in his full black and silver regalia, his beautiful face as cold as a drawn blade. From the looks he sent the vendors, it was clear he knew what they had been selling. They flinched, their eyes darting to his onyx ring.
I sat still, watching. From this distance, in the shadows, it would be impossible for him to pick me out from the crowd.
He strode the rest of the way across the square and up the cathedral’s steps. As though cowed into obedience by his approach, the great doors hastily swung open to admit him. I caught a flash of the sacristan’s crimson vestments amid a flurry of movement, suggesting Leander had startled a group of clerics inside. It took a moment for the incident to get sorted out and for the sacristan to begin admitting the waiting congregation.
“Pauper’s balcony!” a strident voice cried, directing those of us sitting on the ground toward a different door. I hadn’t noticed it before: it was a grimy side entrance set almost invisibly into the cathedral’s wall. As I joined the others in shuffling toward it, I watched the sacristan methodically turn aside those he deemed too slovenly for the main entrance, gesturing them toward our line instead.
We filed up a dim, sour-smelling stair, our shoes thumping on wood worn black and shiny with the passage of generations of dirty feet. We emerged onto a plain standing-room balcony. A wrought-metal screen separated the balcony from the rest of the cathedral, so the congregation seated in the pews below wouldn’t see us—or smell us, I assumed.
Looking out, I had to lean against the rail for balance. The vaulted ceiling soared upward until its details vanished in a haze of incense smoke. Seven towering stained-glass windows captured the sun and filled the nave with light. I recognized them from my vision in the stable, though I hadn’t been able to make out the details then.
Now I saw that each one depicted an image of a high saint. Saint Agnes occupied the central place of honor: pale and sorrowful, her hands crossed over her breast as though she lay on a funeral bier, surrounded by white lilies. Beside her stood dark-haired Saint Eugenia, wearing a shining suit of armor and clasping a sword. She smiled serenely down at the congregation from her lofty height, engulfed in silver flames.
A chill gripped me. I had never seen an image of Saint Eugenia wielding the revenant’s fire. I was conscious as I hadn’t been for some time that it was her fragile bone I had carried across Roischal’s countryside, that I had held in the palm of my hand.
As though sensing my thoughts, the revenant said in a tone I couldn’t read, “That doesn’t look anything like her.”
It nudged my gaze down to the altar. Beneath the white altar cloth, it was surprisingly crude in appearance, roughly hewn from dark stone. I guessed that it bore some spiritual significance—perhaps it was a saint’s sarcophagus, or it had been chiseled from a sacred place, like the site of a martyrdom. Since this was the Cathedral of Saint Agnes, I could hazard a guess as to whose. I felt the revenant inspecting it too, drawing its own conclusions.
Murmuring voices surrounded me as worshippers continued to pack onto the balcony. Through them, the revenant said, “This is unexpected.”
It didn’t say it in a good way. My mouth went dry. “What?”
“This spell… it’s strange, nun. It’s the same Old Magic I’ve been sensing all along, but it isn’t a new working. It’s hundreds of years old, at a guess.”
“Then Leander didn’t create it.” My voice merged with the balcony’s steady stream of chatter.
“No, but he’s certainly interacted with it in a way that no one else has. Perhaps he found out how to awaken the ritual and harness its power.” It paused, then said, “I can’t tell any more from here. We need to get closer. You’re going to have to touch it.”