“I’ll do anything,” I moaned aloud. “Please.”
Sister Iris’s face hovered above me. There was a cut on her forehead, which made me think about shards of glass flying through the air. How long ago had that happened? The cut was already scabbed over and beginning to heal.
“I know, Artemisia,” she said, brushing a sweaty lock of hair from my face. “Remain strong. Help is on the way.”
Part of me clung to those words fiercely while the other part thought about biting the nun’s hand. She moved away before I could decide. Soon I was given more syrup and no longer had to think about anything at all.
* * *
As the battle raged on inside me, time lost its meaning. Sometimes the world was dark. Sometimes it was light. But eventually I noticed something different: a sense of movement, a jolting and juddering, my head swaying against a padded surface that felt too flat to be a pillow. Horses’ hooves clattered in my ears, and the space around me gave little squeaks of wood and metal and leather as it bounced and jostled around.
The hot, stifling air couldn’t belong to a wagon. A carriage? I tried to focus, but my thoughts slipped from my grasp, slimy and elusive. The syrup’s taste still coated my tongue, and I was already drifting away.
Later, I was woken by shouting.
Consciousness returned in a slow trickle of sensations, each one more unpleasant than the last. My head pounded. My skin felt greasy and itched beneath my robes. The carriage jerked along at a slower pace now than before, queasily bumping over every rut and rock on the road. I blinked until an expanse of dark, cracked leather swam into focus in front of my face. It smelled musty with age and incense. Under that there was another, fainter smell, like old meat mixed with dirty coins. Blood.
Four long gashes scored the leather, as though someone had clawed through it with their fingernails.
“Stay back!” a man’s voice commanded. “Clear the road!”
I shot fully awake, my heart hammering. I recognized that voice.
When I dragged myself upright, there came a heavy clink of metal and a drag against my wrists. Looking down, I discovered that I wore iron shackles, their cuffs engraved with holy symbols. The thick links of the chain attached to them lay coiled at my feet.
I was in a carriage, but not a normal one. It looked like the inside of a confessional booth. The tall, narrow walls were lined with tarnished metal, stamped to give the appearance of ornate molding, and the single arched window to my left was set with a perforated screen, a somber red glow filtering through. Locks covered the door on the carriage’s opposite side. The chain’s slack fed into a winch sunk into the middle of the floor, which I guessed could be tightened to restrain me.
I knew what this was. A harrow, a type of carriage that had been popular over a century ago, designed to transport people who were possessed—usually the most dangerous cases, in which a divine was needed to perform the exorcism. I knew about harrows only because I had seen illustrations in the scriptorium’s books. I hadn’t known that any still existed.
The revenant must still be inside me, even though I couldn’t feel it. Perhaps the harrow had driven it into hiding.
I breathed in and out, fighting the nausea brought on by the harrow’s relentless heat and motion. Then I eased myself to the window and peered through the screen. I almost jerked back when I saw the crowd outside, dozens of people, hundreds, all standing along the side of the road staring, their faces dirtied by travel and drawn with fear.
After a moment, I relaxed slightly, realizing that they couldn’t see me through the screen. They were only staring at the harrow as it went by. But my relief proved short-lived as I took in the children’s hunger-dulled eyes, the mud coating the wheels of the overburdened wagons, the dead mule that lay in a ditch, buzzing with flies. Smoke gusted past the screen, streaming from incense burners fixed to the harrow’s roof. The setting sun lit the smoke pink and soaked the crowd in ominous shades of crimson, throwing long shadows across the rutted field beyond.
As I watched, a woman drew her child toward her body and signed herself. A dark blighted mark stood out vividly on her arm.
These people must have fled their homes, which meant we were probably traveling through Roischal. There had been stories of families abandoning their villages, fearful of spirits and possessed soldiers, but in however much time had passed since the attack on Naimes, the situation had clearly gotten worse.
Lifting one of the heavy manacles, I pushed up my sleeve. The weals left by my dagger’s consecrated steel had healed to pale pinkish stripes. I’d lost a week, at least.
“Clear the road!” called the voice again. “Let us pass by the authority of Her Holiness the Divine!”
I shifted until the speaker came into view, riding ahead of the harrow on a magnificent dapple-gray stallion, his black robes untouched by the filth.
The faces turned his way reflected both fear and desperate hope. My attention caught on a man arguing with his family. I willed him not to do whatever it was he was thinking of doing, but then he stumbled out onto the road, jogging to keep pace with the stallion. He looked dirty and unkempt beside the rider’s austere magnificence.
“Please, Your Grace, we’ve been driven from our homes—and we were turned away at the bridge at Bonsaint—”
The tall, golden-haired figure turned slowly to look down at him as he rambled on, unaware of the danger.
“We’re traveling north. There’s word of a saint in Naimes. They say she carried the relic of Saint Eugenia into battle and defeated a legion of spirits… and that she has scars, that we will know her by her scars. Please, is it true?”
Instead of answering, the rider made a subtle motion with his hands. The man toppled to his knees as though felled by an axe. In the crowd, someone screamed. As the harrow drew closer, I saw that the man’s face was contorted with guilt and anguish, and he was clutching helplessly at the pebbles on the road. “Forgive me,” he gasped over and over as the harrow rumbled past, spraying mud on him with its wheels.
The priest had changed since I’d last seen him. His pale, imperious features had frozen to the cold hardness of marble. He rode stiffly, as though he were favoring an injury beneath his robes, and dark shadows bruised the skin beneath his eyes. Saint Eugenia’s relic hung from a chain around his neck, the reliquary’s opals sparking fiercely in the fading light.
The man on the ground hadn’t recognized it. He’d had no idea that the relic was right in front of him or that the person they sought was chained inside the harrow, heading past them in the opposite direction.
By chance, the priest glanced toward me, and our eyes met through the screen. His hands tightened on the reins. Without expression, he spurred his mount onward out of sight.
Confessor Leander. That was what the page had called him. I couldn’t forget what he had said right before he’d used his relic on me. It was the same thing I would have tried to convince myself about the shackles, the harrow, the locks on the door. This is for your own good.
* * *
“Revenant,” I said into the dark. Again, nothing answered.
I’d been trying for hours. Night had fallen outside the harrow, and finally we’d passed the last of the wagons, only that hadn’t necessarily been an improvement—the abandoned villages had come next, their rooftops black against the darkening sky, the doors of houses hanging askew on their hinges, and the streets littered with refuse and occasionally bodies. I knew the priest had to have seen them too, but the harrow never slowed down.