I couldn’t hold back the question any longer. “What are you going to do about the revenant?” I blurted.
The chair creaked as she leaned back. She eyed me keenly. “Do I need to do something about it?” she inquired.
A shiver gripped me. I couldn’t help wondering whether she had known the truth since the moment I had arrived in her convent and had been watching me the entire time. I found that I couldn’t meet her eyes. I felt as though I might see something in them if I did: a fathomless night sky, glittering with stars.
“Oh, don’t look so alarmed, child,” she said brusquely. “We had a nice long talk while you were sleeping, Rathanael and I. The Lady spared Rathanael for a reason, and I’m not going to argue with Her about it. She and I already butt heads enough as it is. These days I find I have to pick my battles, or I would never have time for anything else.”
I opened my mouth, closed it again. I suspected there was much more Mother Dolours wasn’t telling me. Had the revenant possessed me at some point while I had been unconscious to talk to her? I didn’t find the idea disturbing. But it struck me that Mother Dolours should have. She should have found it extremely disturbing. She should have performed an exorcism on me on the spot. What had the revenant said to her?
She had resumed darning the stocking. “Not everyone believes in wielding relics by force,” she remarked. “There is power that is taken, and there is power that is freely given. I’ll let you figure out what I mean by that on your own.”
My eyes went to her relics. She couldn’t possibly mean that she had befriended her own spirits. But it also seemed unlikely that Marguerite and I were the only ones to ever walk that path. And the way she had used her wretchling relic in the infirmary—tirelessly, effortlessly, almost as though it were cooperating with her…
Stunned, I watched her reach down to feel around in her darning basket. She grunted and drew out something that winked gold in the light. Crossing the room, she handed me Saint Eugenia’s reliquary. The revenant’s relief left me dizzy.
“If you’re to keep this, they’ll want you to become a vespertine,” she said gruffly. “You’ll have to put up with the robes and the duties, neither of which will suit you, I expect. You’ll find out soon enough that the trappings of high office exist for no reason at all except to keep people from being too effective at their jobs, which is a great inconvenience for the Clerisy.”
I looked up at her and back down at the reliquary, like a child handed a gift that might get snatched away at any moment. Then I paused, frowning, and sniffed it. “Where was it?” I asked.
She snorted. “Your friend Marguerite hid it in an empty pot of lard in the infirmary.”
The revenant shuddered, but I regarded Marguerite with new appreciation. Back in Naimes, I had been instructed to rub lard on my hands every night before bed to help soften my scars, a process that she had gloomily endured with watering eyes and a wrinkled nose. I would have neglected the treatment if not for the unknown sister who had pointedly set the jar on my coverlet every evening. She had kept up the habit every night for years.
At least, I had assumed it was a sister. Suddenly, I wasn’t so certain.
Mother Dolours was likely right about becoming a vespertine, but right now, getting to keep the revenant was the only thing that mattered. Turning the reliquary over in my hands, I heard her move toward the door. Belatedly, I realized that she must have found herself in a difficult position after the events in Bonsaint.
“What are you going to do now that the Divine is dead?” I asked.
Mother Dolours heaved a sigh. “Give in to everyone’s demands to take her place, it seems.”
I remembered what she had said about arguing with the Lady. Not long ago, hearing that from an abbess would have shocked me, but my recent experiences had been educational. “The Lady spoke to you?”
She barked out a laugh. “Well enough, she has. I don’t want to do it, which in my experience is the surest sign that I need to.”
* * *
The monastery was a place of winding stone paths and windswept battlements. The wind smelled of mountain air, woodsmoke, and pine resin. When it blew from the direction of the sacred groves, I could sometimes hear the tapping of hammers as brothers drove pegs into the trees. Afterward, they returned with pails of sap to render into incense.
The monks didn’t know how to react to me, which was fine, because I didn’t know how to react to them, either. Theirs was a remote stronghold that received few visitors; they went about their tasks in near silence, meeting gravely for meals and prayers. The abbot was a shy, soft-spoken man with a single frostfain relic, flustered by the sudden influx of pilgrims to his domain. Thankfully, the visitors weren’t allowed past the cloister, though incidents still happened. Once a man made it all the way to the refectory and prostrated himself at my feet before the apologetic brothers managed to coax him away.
I spent my days alternately resting and getting scolded by the revenant whenever I exerted myself too heavily. By its measure, this meant walking all the way down the hall by myself or climbing a few steps to see the view from the battlements. Marguerite was acting as its accomplice; as soon as I escaped my chambers, she would come hurrying, her chestnut hair flying in the wind. Often she was clutching a letter from Charles, halfway through reading it over again for the third or fourth time. Now that her identity had been uncovered, there was talk of letting her study as a curist in Chantclere. The sisters in Bonsaint were already sending references.
A week had passed before I found out that Leander had traveled to the monastery with us. No one had wanted to tell me, and by then it was nearly too late.
“He is not fit to see visitors, lady,” babbled the nervous brother whom I finally managed to corner in the cloister, after hours of chasing monks around like frightened sheep. “Truthfully, I think he may have been brought here to live out his final days in peace.”
Roaring filled my ears as though someone had plunged my head underwater. Distressed, and perhaps more than a little terrified, the monks hastened to escort me to the guest dormitory. I didn’t remember going up the steps or down the hall; it was as though I simply appeared in the doorway to Leander’s room, where I came to a sudden halt. I stood frozen, looking inside.
He lay on a bed, his slender hands resting across his stomach, as elegant and still as a marble effigy carved on a sarcophagus. He was dressed in a plain linen nightgown instead of his confessor’s robes. Most startlingly of all, his hair had turned completely white. It lay curled on the pillow around his head, emphasizing his sharp cheekbones and austere brow. His pale skin held the translucency of alabaster.
“He has only woken briefly,” one brother informed me, wringing his hands. “There is little that can be done for him, except to make him comfortable.”
I hesitated, taking in his spectral appearance. I had assumed him dead; I had never imagined he might have survived Sarathiel’s destruction, not after the torments his body had endured that day. Even now he looked as though he were lingering within the gates of Death, transforming into a spirit before my eyes.
My throat tightened. I wished he had died swiftly instead of suffering this drawn-out fate, and yet I was grateful to see him again, a feeling that startled me with its painful, punishing intensity—like swallowing a draught of water and finding that it burned instead of quenched.