“Saint Agnes!” she cried in rapture. “I see you—I hear you! Reveal your message to me!”
Everywhere, conversation halted. Across the pews, Leander began to turn.
My stomach dropped. I ducked my head and reached for the altar, hoping the revenant could make do with a glancing touch before I vanished behind the line. I moved too quickly to react to its startled warning of, “Nun, wait—”
My fingers brushed the stone, and pain exploded in my skull, worse than anything I had ever felt: a shrieking, red-streaked abyss, devouring thought and memory. For a moment I didn’t remember who I was or where, or why any of that mattered. All I wanted was to escape from the pain, even if it meant someone bludgeoning me over the head to make it stop. Something inside me was being torn apart, and the feeling was terrible beyond comprehension.
I thought nonsensically of the whirlwind of bats descending on the chapel’s bell tower, only in reverse: siphoning out in unnatural backward flight, the solid, dark mass disintegrating into scraps of wind-whipped black, scattering away across the night until nothing was left.
I realized someone was screaming, thinly and from what seemed like far away. I blinked until images swam into focus, their blurry edges haloed in light.
I wasn’t the one who was screaming—it was the woman collapsed on the carpet while bystanders collected around her. She was still crying out to Saint Agnes, and like an awkward participant in her act, I had fallen to my knees in front of the altar with my red, scarred hand extended, plain for everyone to see.
But no one was looking. Everyone was riveted by the drama unfolding at the center of the aisle, except for one. Across the aisle, behind the pews, Leander was staring at me. The lector he had been speaking to was saying something—asking him a question—but he didn’t seem to hear her as he took a step forward, slowly reaching for his onyx ring.
I had to get out. Something had happened to the revenant, something terrible; I couldn’t feel its presence inside me at all. I scrambled up, away, pain driving through my skull with every step, and didn’t notice when my glove dropped from the folds of my cloak to lie forgotten on the flagstones.
TWENTY-TWO
Pillars reeled past; a saint’s face gazed down at me, pieced together in stained glass. A banded door, the darkness of a stair—and then came the choking clouds of incense, rushing into my lungs like fire. Statues reared from the gloom, staring tranquilly from their dark niches. Fleeing in half-blind desperation, I had stumbled into the cathedral’s crypt. I felt my way along the niches for a door. There would be a way out, a way into the catacombs.
Staggering along, I almost collided with a pale candlelit shape in the smoke: a young woman in white, frozen in surprise. An orphrey.
“Leave us,” said a voice from the stair, and she obediently turned and vanished, slipping past the tall, forbidding figure on the steps.
“Artemisia,” Leander said. His face looked composed, but his eyes were rimmed in red. “Did you fall?”
The revenant’s fate obliterated all other thought; everything else seemed trivial in comparison. I looked at him uncomprehendingly, and he repeated, “Into the river—did you fall?” I didn’t say anything, but my face must have given him the answer. He laughed, a breathless, disbelieving sound. “You didn’t. You played me for a fool.”
“I thought you were used to that,” I said, and went back to feeling for the door.
I hadn’t meant it as an insult, only the truth, but he seemed to take it as one. Steps rang against stone, and a hand closed on my shoulder and yanked me around. Spots floated in front of my vision as he bent to put our faces level. Now that he was closer, I saw that he wasn’t as calm as I had thought. His lips were bloodless, his expression strained, his eyes a wild, vivid emerald even in the murky gloom of the crypt. I remembered what Curist Abelard had said about confessors—that they eventually lost their minds.
“You know about the altar,” he said, his hands gripping my shoulders, twisting up the fabric of my cloak. “Why were you touching it? What are you trying to do?”
I was surprised he had to ask. “To stop you,” I rasped.
He squeezed his eyes shut, looking pained. “Then I was right all along. You aren’t in control of the revenant, not completely. Whatever you are, you aren’t a saint. We’re alike in that, you see.” Something about that seemed to strike him as horribly funny. I thought he might laugh again, or even let out a sob, but instead he gave me a little shake and said, “Artemisia, whatever it’s telling you—whatever it has convinced you is true—you can’t trust it. You need to stop listening to it. It’s a monster.”
Didn’t he understand? The revenant was no longer here. There was a raw, bloody place inside of me where it had been torn away. Through the pain, I focused on Leander’s face, so he would know that when I answered him, I meant it. “I know.”
His eyes widened the instant before my head slammed against his nose with a sickening crunch. I barely felt it—which probably wasn’t a good sign—but he staggered and fell, half-catching himself against a saint’s statue. He touched his lips and looked at his fingers, then back at me.
“You won’t escape from me again,” he said, and brought his bloody hand to his ring.
This time, something happened that I hadn’t seen before. Silvery vapor came pouring out of the relic, boiling upward into a shape. And then I realized I had seen something like it once. This was what Mother Katherine had done in the chapel, when she had summoned her rivener outside of its relic to drive the other spirits back.
I knew I was in trouble even before the spirit finished taking form: a robed figure draped in chains, its broad shoulders bowed beneath their weight. Nothing showed within its hood, not even pinpricks of light for eyes—only darkness. In one gloved hand, it held a bell.
The shadowed hood regarded me, its attention weighted with a sense of somber despair, a silent crushing judgment. I redoubled my efforts to find the door. Without the revenant, I couldn’t fight it; I could only escape.
But it didn’t attack. Instead, it turned, slowly, to look down at Leander.
He had pulled himself up a little, his pallor sickly in the candlelight, sweat shining on his brow. When the hood turned to him, he gazed at it a moment frozen, as though seeing something terrible in its emptiness. Then he seemed to come back to himself. With trembling hands, he fed his censer a fresh cone of incense and held it aloft, shielding himself behind the smoke. And he bared his teeth, which were stained with blood.
“You will obey me,” he said. “Subdue her.”
The penitent turned back to me slowly, as though disappointed by the command. With every sign of great reluctance, it raised its bell.
A surface gave beneath my hand: a latch. I pushed through the door and slammed it shut behind myself just as the bell rang. The sound that reverberated through the wood was not the chime of a small hand-bell, but the deep, melancholy toll of a funeral bell—giant, cast in iron, held aloft with chains. The sound struck me like a physical blow, driving me to my knees. My vision grayed.
An agony of guilt consumed me. I had failed the Lady. I had destroyed the revenant. Without its power, everyone in Roischal would die, and it was my fault. The revenant wasn’t coming back.