Perhaps we were both wrong, both equally deluded, and it was never possible to trust a revenant.
Then the Divine shook her head. She said with quiet faith, “The sign… no—it was for me, I am certain of it,” and the illusion cracked, a mirror fracturing.
I spoke through gritted teeth. “You have to know by now that Sarathiel’s been controlling the spirits. It’s the one who told you not to lower the drawbridge, isn’t it?”
A sad smile crossed her face. “No. You are misinformed. Those spirits… they are why I must become Sarathiel’s true vessel. Otherwise, they cannot be stopped. Sarathiel has been helping me protect the people of Bonsaint; it would not take lives.”
“What about the sacristan?”
The Divine’s smile turned puzzled. She turned to look at Sarathiel, who was watching us intently. “Sarathiel, why are you staying in Leander’s body? When will we be together, like you promised?”
“Gabrielle,” it said quietly.
She rose and went to it by the window, cupping Leander’s cheek. “Perhaps you should rest. It must be taxing, inhabiting a body after so long without one.”
Sarathiel turned Leander’s face against her hand, closing his eyes as though seeking a momentary respite from the world. The Divine watched this with a tenderness that bordered on pain. I could tell she had been honest about her history with Sarathiel; there was a familiarity to their intimacy that spoke of countless hours in each other’s company, whispered confessions exchanged in the chapel’s shadows. I imagined her solitary, white-robed figure bent over the altar nightly in prayer. How pious she must have appeared—how lonely.
Suddenly her delusions made sense. Being a Divine wasn’t so far off from being a saint. Sarathiel was perhaps the only being in Bonsaint who knew her not as the Divine, untouchable in her holiness, but as Gabrielle. No wonder she had fallen for it. She hadn’t had anyone else.
After a moment Sarathiel drew back to look at me, seemingly unperturbed that I had witnessed the exchange. “If you tell us where the reliquary is, you will spare us a great deal of unpleasantness. We will release you unharmed, rid of Rathanael forever.”
I felt a spasm of distress from the revenant.
“What do you want?” I asked. I honestly wanted to know. “Not right now, but after you destroy Saint Eugenia’s relic.” Remembering what Leander had said to me in the harrow, I added, “Do you even know what you want?”
In his eyes, a flicker. My breath stopped. In that instant I had thought I had seen Leander looking out at me, as though appearing in a window of the great, crumbling ruin that was Sarathiel. And then he was gone again, reclaimed by shadow.
“I want to be free,” it replied without inflection, drawing a questioning look from the Divine.
Had I imagined what I had seen? My heart thumped so forcefully I could feel my pulse against every point of contact with my skin—my clothes, the cushions piled against my side. If something had just happened, Sarathiel seemed unaware of it.
“You already are,” I said. “What do you plan on doing next? Killing all the humans in Loraille? Then you’ll just be alone. You’ll have made the world your reliquary.”
“Be careful, nun,” the revenant warned.
“Sarathiel?” the Divine asked.
Instead of answering, Sarathiel drew her carefully into an embrace. It pressed Leander’s mouth to her curls. And then a sharp crack split the room.
At first I thought something had fallen off a shelf and broken, even though that didn’t make any sense. Then I saw how limply the Divine hung in Leander’s arms, the unnatural angle of her lolling head.
“I regret that the altar was destroyed,” Sarathiel said, gazing over her shoulder at nothing. “It would have been a fitting way to dispose of Rathanael. Rathanael, naughty Rathanael, with its vile little obsession with Old Magic. But I will confess, I almost find it comforting that some things haven’t changed. The world is so very different now than it was before.”
My nerves screamed with the urge to move, to fight, to run, as Sarathiel crossed the room, the scrape of the Divine’s slippers dragging across the carpet the only sound in the silent apartment. It settled on the chair opposite me, laying the Divine down so that her head was cradled against Leander’s chest, almost the same way she had held it in the chapel. Her open eyes stared glassily at the ceiling. I remembered comparing her to a doll, and felt sick.
“She was starting to doubt you,” I guessed.
“Indeed. Perhaps I should have tried being more like Rathanael. But I’m not certain I could stand it. I hate humans so very much, you see.” Seemingly unconsciously, it placed a hand on the Divine’s curls and began to stroke. “All those nights she prayed in the dark, yearning for someone to listen. How lonely she was, how uncertain. How desperate to prove herself as Divine. She required so much reassurance; it was sickening. And even then, it took me years to persuade her to trust me. How long did it take Rathanael? Days?”
I swallowed. “I didn’t trust it.”
“Oh, come now,” it said.
“I controlled it.”
The revenant winced. Leander’s hand stilled. “Is that what you believe?” it asked, in what seemed like real curiosity. I wondered again how much of this Leander was experiencing: if he could see and hear and feel it all, the warmth and weight of the Divine’s body, the softness of her hair, and if he were somewhere inside screaming.
“We came to an agreement,” I conceded, hearing how pathetic that sounded even as the words left my mouth.
“An agreement,” Sarathiel repeated, in a slightly marveling tone. “Rest assured that the moment you resort to bargaining with a revenant, you have already lost. The only reason you aren’t Rathanael’s thrall this very moment is because it chose not to make you one. It could have possessed you a thousand times over—every little moment that you were sleeping, injured, distracted. Quite honestly, I am surprised it didn’t possess you by accident.”
I remembered suddenly how it had vanished after the Battle of Bonsaint. It had nearly taken over my body, and then it had stopped. It had pulled itself back. It hadn’t abandoned me after all—at least not in the way I had thought.
“Silly Rathanael,” Sarathiel said, watching me through Leander’s eyes. “It always did care for its human vessels.”
Blood pounded in my ears. “The same way you cared about Gabrielle?” I asked.
It was as though the air had been sucked from the apartment. Sarathiel went very still. My revenant did too. The question had been a gamble, but it was increasingly obvious to me that its decision to kill the Divine hadn’t been logical. She would have been the perfect vessel, far better than inhabiting Leander in every respect, yet it had chosen to remain in his body instead. And the way it was holding her; I didn’t think it realized how it looked.
“Is that why you killed her?” I persisted.
“Nun,” the revenant warned, but now that I had started, I couldn’t stop. Pieces were falling into place. I remembered the things the revenant had raved about in the tunnels beneath the city—what it had said about Saint Eugenia.