“Not on purpose,” I said, glancing at the fading marks on my wrist. “I just assumed you wouldn’t like it.”
“How delightful. Being horrid must come naturally to you.”
I shrugged, not disagreeing. I was already thinking about doing worse. Despite the agreement we’d arrived at last night, I knew I couldn’t trust the revenant to uphold its end of the bargain. Now that I no longer had my misericorde, I might have to resort to other measures to keep it under control. I was certain I could manage something. Sleeping on a bed of nails couldn’t be much worse than sharing a room with Marguerite.
The revenant continued talking, but I had stopped listening, studying Leander. It hadn’t occurred to me that there might be a physical explanation for his stiff, straight-backed posture. He had looked that way even back in Naimes.
He seemed young to be wielding such a powerful relic. By that fact alone, I wondered if he was one of only a few people capable of controlling it. If it could have gone to someone older and more experienced, it likely would have. I knew little about penitents, only that they were rare even for Fourth Order spirits—so much so that they hadn’t been included in our lessons. Relics binding them had to be even rarer; the Clerisy likely went to great efforts to find suitable candidates to wield them.
I remembered how disdainfully Leander had spoken of lesser relics. Ironically, if he weren’t too arrogant to wield a First Order relic like Sister Iris and Mother Katherine, he wouldn’t need to limit its use, and he would have been able to sense the gaunt spying on us.
Mother Katherine. Without warning, the memory flashed through my mind: Sister Iris’s scream, Mother Katherine limp in her arms. None of my fragmented memories of lying fevered in bed afterward included her, only Sister Iris and the other nuns. Mother Katherine should have been there. If she could have, she would have come.
I couldn’t think about that, not now. I wrenched my mind away and stared hard at my hands, turning them palms-up in my lap, summoning the memory of heat and agony and letting it wash over me in a blistering wave, burning everything else to ashes.
“What are you thinking about?” the revenant broke in, its voice low and venomous. I realized I had been silent for several minutes.
“Nothing.” I sincerely didn’t want to talk about it.
“You’re lying,” it hissed. “There’s always something going on in your detestable nun brain. You’re going to betray me, aren’t you? You’re already thinking about breaking your promise.”
“What?” At first the revenant’s accusation merely surprised me. Then a lump of anger formed in my throat. “No, I’m not.”
“If you imagine that you can fool me—”
“You’ve spent the past week trying to take over my body. Of the two of us, I should be more worried about you betraying me.”
“Ha!” The revenant dragged itself up. I felt it stalking around the confines of my mind like a caged beast. Then it hissed savagely, “You have no idea what you’ve offered. You promised that if I helped you, you would do everything in your power to keep me from returning to my reliquary. Do you truly understand what that means? What you’re sacrificing?”
Unfortunately, I did. It meant that I was stuck with the revenant indefinitely. My soul would never know a moment’s peace. I would suffer a miserable, profane, defiled existence, constantly on guard against possession, poisoned by incense and consecrated steel.
But it was right. Perhaps I hadn’t realized the worst part after all. Back when I’d made the offer, I hadn’t known the revenant would talk so much.
It still hadn’t stopped. Now it was saying spitefully, “Before, you used the possibility of an eternity trapped in your company to threaten me.”
“I know how you felt when we fought in the chapel,” I said through gritted teeth. “You miss feeling things. You like being in a human body.”
“That doesn’t mean I want to be in yours!”
The last of my patience evaporated. “Then we can forget about last night.” My voice sounded like a death knell. “You can go back into your reliquary. Maybe you’ll never get another vessel. How long do you think it will take Saint Eugenia’s relic to disintegrate? Hundreds more years, probably. That’s a long time to be imprisoned inside—”
“Stop!” the revenant cried. I felt a painful scrabbling clutch, as though it had sunk its claws into my insides. “Stop,” it hissed again, more quietly this time, even though I already had.
I waited, then asked, “Are you finished?”
“The shackles,” it muttered after a pause. “When the spirits attack, we need to rid you of these shackles, or else we’ll both be next to useless. And my reliquary—we’ll need to retrieve it as well. If the humans believe that I’ve possessed you, they might decide to destroy it.”
I opened my mouth to argue that the Clerisy would never consider destroying a high relic. Then my eyes fell on the shackles’ holy symbols. I swallowed my words.
The revenant might not behave the way I had expected, but it had slaughtered thousands of people. Tens of thousands, the populations of entire cities. It would do all of that over again in a heartbeat if it gained control of my body. The devastation in Roischal was only a shadow of the terror it had wreaked during the War of Martyrs. To prevent that from happening again, the Clerisy would destroy Saint Eugenia’s relic if they had no other choice.
With the revenant’s power, I could save everyone. But if I lost control, I might burn the world to ashes.
I found it difficult to believe that this was truly what the Lady wanted. In all probability, it wasn’t, and She was merely making do with what She had. Which was, unfortunately for everyone, me.
I had come too far to start having second thoughts. We did need to take the reliquary with us, and not just for the reason the revenant had suggested. If it tried to possess me again, I might be able to resist its power for long enough to destroy the relic myself as a last resort. The bone had looked old and brittle enough to crush in my hand.
“All right,” I said aloud, before it could grow suspicious. “I’ll think of a way to get the priest close to us. He’s the one carrying the key.” Somehow I knew that to be true. Leander wouldn’t entrust it to anyone else.
* * *
By the time the sun reached its zenith, I still hadn’t come up with a strategy to lure him into the harrow. The revenant was growing increasingly impatient, pacing back and forth in my head as it pointed out every spirit that it noticed in the fog.
“Whatever you plan on doing, hurry. They’re close enough that I can sense them even through these accursed shackles.”
I was wondering whether I should finally admit that I didn’t have a plan when a raven’s raucous cawing erupted outside. A horse whinnied, and one of the knights swore. I straightened in my seat. Something about the raven’s cries sounded familiar. Looking through the screen, I couldn’t see anything useful: a knight had ridden close to the harrow, and his armor filled my field of vision. As I watched, he raised his arm as though to fend off an attack. Another flurry of heckling caws followed.
“It’s just a bird,” Leander snapped. “Stay in formation.”