Talbot, I remembered vaguely, putting a name to his face—not that it mattered. Captain Enguerrand was in prison. These weren’t his men any longer. The city guard was being led by someone named Halbert, who Charles had said was loyal to the Clerisy.
Talbot happened to glance my way and accidentally met my eyes. He looked away quickly. His throat bobbed as he swallowed.
It occurred to me, almost idly, that a being like Sarathiel, who had the power to kill anyone it wanted without effort, to obliterate the population of an entire city on a whim, would never stoop to wonder whether humans were capable of outsmarting it. Certainly not a human like Marguerite.
Talbot stepped away to knock on one of the cloister’s doors. An answering voice called out from the other side, and a key rattled in the lock. I looked at Marguerite more closely. She still had her head down, sniffling, her face mostly hidden behind clumps of hair, which was kinked and disheveled, coming loose from its festival braids. Her lip was swollen—someone had struck her.
Her voice came back to me. Something she had said in the infirmary. Everyone thinks I’m just a stupid, silly little girl without a single useful thought in her head.
I watched Talbot push open the door, revealing the knight guarding it on the other side. And I watched him slowly tip over, unconscious, landing on the ground with a boneless crash of armor.
Over him, into the courtyard, stepped Mother Dolours.
Our retinue came to a halt. Beside me, Sarathiel paused to take her in: the plain gray robes swathing her enormous girth, her eyes like gimlets above chapped, ruddy cheeks. “What is this?” Distaste crossed its features. “A nun?”
“Oh, you’re about to find out,” said the revenant gleefully.
The knights straightened, gripping the hilts of their swords. Before they could draw, the soldiers turned on them, unsheathing their own swords in arcs of steel that flashed blue in the shadows. The clash of blades filled the courtyard.
Mother Dolours strode through the melee, her robes billowing behind her like a ship’s sails filling with wind. Swords swung past, narrowly missing her; she didn’t look at them as she came. It shouldn’t have been possible to hear her through the noise, but her voice echoed from the courtyard’s walls, resounding. “Lady of Death, I seek Your mercy, for my enemies are many.”
A soldier fell to a blow from a knight. I jerked forward, but a merciless grip closed on my arm. Sarathiel yanked me against Leander’s chest, wrapping his fingers around my throat, prepared to snap my neck as easily as it had the Divine’s.
Mother Dolours didn’t falter. “May Your gaze fall upon them; may Your unseen hand strike them down.” Her voice had become less a voice and more a roll of thunder, the tolling of a great bell. “May they cower before Your shadow. May You fill their minds with desolation.”
As her prayer crashed over me, my senses sharpened to crystalline clarity: the hard warmth of Leander’s chest pressing against my back, his uneven breath stirring my hair. The faint smells of soap and incense clinging to his skin. The trembling of his hand.
Sarathiel might be powerful beyond imagining, but it hadn’t inhabited a human body in centuries. I expected there were some details it had forgotten. Sending a mental apology to Leander, I gathered my strength and drove my elbow against the concealed wound in his side. With a startled gasp, Sarathiel released me.
That was the only opening Mother Dolours required. She signed herself, and for a moment she seemed to transform into Mother Katherine, though the two of them looked nothing alike. Still I saw the elderly abbess framed by the opened door of the shed, my parents watching cowed behind her, their illusion of power stripped away. “By Your mercy,” she boomed, “cast my enemies into darkness.”
Ravens exploded cawing from the rooftops. Inside me, the revenant quailed and guttered like a candle in a winter’s wind. For a terrible heartbeat I was overcome with the mindless, primordial fear of a small creature crouched in the grass, paralyzed by a hawk’s shadow passing overhead. But the prayer wasn’t aimed at me. In Leander’s voice, Sarathiel let out a sharp, anguished cry and fell to the ground.
Amid the clashing swords, Mother Dolours turned to me. Fear lanced through my gut.
“Come, child,” she said, her eyes dark as night.
I hesitated, looking down at Leander, writhing white-faced on the flagstones at my feet.
Mother Dolours said curtly, “Even if we had the time, exorcising Sarathiel from his body wouldn’t help us. I can’t destroy a revenant—only delay it. And not for very long.”
I thought of Sarathiel’s true form hovering above me in the chapel, so gargantuan that it had filled the nave. Marguerite’s hand found mine. I let her drag me away. As we moved, the soldiers retreated and drew into a tight formation around us. In what seemed to be a mutual truce, the knights closed in around Leander, guarding him in turn. Light had almost reached the courtyard now, glancing from the rooftop finials and setting the uppermost windows aflame. Belatedly, it sank in that Mother Dolours had said Sarathiel’s name.
Something must have shown on my face. Marguerite said in a rush, out of breath through the pounding of boots, “After you left Elaine’s house and disappeared, I went to her for help. I didn’t know what else to do. I told her what you told me about the page Confessor Leander took from the chambers, and she looked at a bunch of scrolls and figured out he was looking for Saint Agnes’s ashes.” We passed into the deeper darkness of the opposite cloister. “And then, when—when you turned up in the cathedral and got arrested—she said she sensed two revenants all the way from the convent, even though everyone else couldn’t tell. It was awful—my shade was so frightened.” Her blue eyes sought mine. “Is it really true? He’s possessed by a revenant?”
I risked a glance over my shoulder. Between the knights, Sarathiel had rolled over and set Leander’s forehead to the flagstones, fingers clenched and body arched as though in the throes of a convulsion. I swallowed. Nodded.
Then we were out a door, into the blinding light and roar of voices, the dizzying swarm of movement that filled the cathedral’s square. A tide of people flooded past to slam the door shut behind us, throwing themselves against it, barricading it with their bodies.
“Artemisia! Marguerite!” This was Charles pushing into view. He had a wild look on his sweaty, grinning face, his tousled hair dusted with a coating of ash. “Jean and I freed the captain,” he shouted. “Halbert almost wet himself when the guard rebelled. Look!”
I followed his pointing finger to the cathedral’s front steps, onto which a group of people were shoving a wagon. Jean seemed to be doing most of the work, the muscles in his huge arms straining. He lifted one side of it and heaved; a cheer went up as it overturned with a crash against the cathedral’s front doors.
Carts were being dragged toward the other doors, toppled over in piles. Furniture, barrels, and pieces of disassembled stalls joined them. Loud thumps and clatters of wood suggested that similar measures were taking place at every one of the cathedral’s entrances and exits. It wasn’t just civilians helping, but soldiers too. In the distance, Captain Enguerrand’s hoarse voice shouted orders.