Seeing my expression, the brothers made their excuses and hurried away. I found a stool and dragged it to Leander’s bedside. Then I waited.
The sun slid across the floorboards and onto the wall before his eyes opened. Unsurprised by my presence, he gazed up at me with the calm fatalism of the dying. I had started to get used to his appearance by then, but it came as a new shock to see his white eyelashes against the vivid green of his eyes. They looked like they were coated in snow.
“This dream again,” he murmured breathlessly. “My favorite.”
“What dream is that?” My voice sounded hoarse.
“The one in which Saint Artemisia stands over me in judgment.”
“I told you, I’m not a saint.”
“Even in my dreams,” he said softly, “you never cease arguing with me.” He said this in distant wonderment, as though it were a quality he admired. “But you must realize… if you weren’t one before… you are now. Not just a saint, but a high saint. One of the seven.”
“Technically, he’s right,” the revenant commented into the void that followed this remark. “Saint Agnes didn’t destroy Sarathiel. You did.”
Leander blinked. Frowned. “Have I been praying to you? Is that why you’re here?”
“This isn’t a dream.” My throat was dry. “You’re awake.”
His eyes narrowed, struggling to bring me into focus. “No,” he decided. “The real Artemisia wouldn’t be here.”
At that, an emotion close to anger prickled hot across my skin. My chest ached. It wasn’t fair of him to make me feel sorry for him. He didn’t deserve my pity. “Stop dying,” I told him.
A faint smile touched his lips. “Is that all?” he asked softly.
I remembered what the old curist had said in the convent, and realized there was another thing I wanted to know—especially since this might be my last chance to ask. “What happened to your brother?”
“Ah,” Leander said. His eyes drifted shut. He didn’t answer for so long that I thought he had lapsed back into sleep. Then he murmured, “The view from the battlements of Chantclere, overlooking the sea… it’s a very good place to think. My favorite place, in fact. Gabriel went up there during last year’s feast of Saint Theodosia. He jumped. I never found out why.”
Silence reigned between us, filled with the soft rasp of Leander’s breathing. I thought of the prayer book’s dedication. I’ll see you soon.
When he spoke again, I had to lean closer to hear. “In the cathedral, I meant to say… when I used Saint Liliane’s relic on you in Naimes, to hurt you, I had only been ordained as a confessor for a few months. It was my first time using it that way. I didn’t predict that it would be quite so…”
“Painful?” I suggested. “Cruel? I know you aren’t sorry. You’ve used it on plenty of people since.”
“I don’t expect your forgiveness. In fact, it would be better if…” He briefly seemed to lose the thought. He turned his head aside, blinked a few times, and then picked up the thread, “As I told you, one can’t like oneself in order to be a confessor.”
I shook my head, disgusted. “All those people you hurt—you did it to help control the penitent?”
“When you put it that way… but no.” Bitterness hardened his tone, turning his words as sharp and brittle as broken glass. “I did it so they wouldn’t slow me down. A necessary means to an end. I believed the Lady wouldn’t send anyone to help, and if I wanted to stop the disaster in Roischal, I would have to do it myself, alone. But She sent you. And you accomplished in weeks what I had been striving to accomplish for months. You succeeded where I failed.”
His hand moved slightly on the coverlet. I noticed for the first time that his fingers were bare. He no longer wore the relic of Saint Liliane.
“Do you truly want my judgment?” I asked.
That caught his attention. His gaze had grown clearer, sharper. I wondered if he had realized that he was awake, but his eyes held a fevered intensity that I doubted he would let me witness if he thought this was real instead of a dream. “Yes,” he answered, very quietly, so quietly I could barely hear.
“You aren’t a good person, but I think you could be if you tried. So perhaps you should try.”
For a long time, he didn’t respond. It wasn’t until I stood up to leave the room that he spoke. “Thank you,” he said softly, and seemed to mean it.
* * *
Slowly, I regained my strength. I didn’t visit Leander again, but I heard he had narrowly escaped death and was on his way to an astonishing recovery. I happened across a pair of monks huddled behind the refectory, discussing in hushed tones how he had begun improving immediately after my visit. “A miracle,” they murmured. “A true miracle…”
Too busy signing themselves, they failed to notice me slipping away.
One early morning before dawn, I wrapped myself in a blanket and snuck onto the battlements. I had chosen this solitary spot for a reason. Over the past few days, the revenant had been uncharacteristically quiet, obviously working itself up to something. We wouldn’t be disturbed here by Marguerite or the shy glances of brothers, their ears straining to make out the words of my frequent “prayers.”
Winter had fully descended upon Roischal. Snow flurries rushed down from the black sky to land shivering on my blanket’s wool; the cold numbed my ears and nose. But I didn’t have to wait long. The revenant soon said, “Nun, there’s something you should know before you choose to remain my vessel.” It was silent a moment, then plunged onward. “I’m the one who invented the binding ritual. I’m the reason why relics exist.”
My insides flipped. At first I felt sure it had made some bizarre joke, but then I thought—Traitor. Scorned One. Betrayer of its own kind.
Its vile little obsession with Old Magic.
I had never gotten a clear answer about why it was called “the Scorned.”
“I didn’t do it purposefully,” the revenant continued. “In fact, I never intended for the ritual to be used. I was trying to find a way to help Eugenia control my power. That particular version… I discarded it after realizing that Eugenia would need to sacrifice herself for it to work. But of course, being my vessel, she had helped me transcribe it. I couldn’t hide its existence from her.”
I listened as though bespelled, cocooned inside the blanket’s warmth. I had wanted to know more about Eugenia for so long, but I had never dared ask. Now I wondered whether I desired the truth after all.
“Later, there was a battle. She survived, but lost hundreds of soldiers—men who had followed her charge onto the battlefield. Their bodies couldn’t be recovered. In the next battle came the riveners.”
My chest tightened. I remembered the defeated rivener kneeling before me, struggling to rise. If there had been a chance of it being the soul of someone I had known, fought alongside—Charles, or Jean, or Enguerrand…
“After that, she changed. We failed to make progress on the ritual. She began praying to the Lady for hours, sometimes through the night. One morning, she blocked my voice from her mind. She went to her general and told him to find her a new vessel. She gave him the notes—the ways in which I could be controlled by a priestess after I had been bound to her bones. I fought, but she used every method at her disposal to subdue me, including the ones that I had taught her. And then came the pain, and the fire. I lived every moment as her bones burned to ash.”