“No.” I watched him pause with his hand on the doorknob. “If I’m able to resist your relic, you can’t force me to tell the truth. How will you prove to anyone that I passed?”
He had gone very still. When he answered, he spoke quietly and with deadly calm. “It would be my word against yours. I think you’ll find that my word is worth a great deal.”
“In that case,” I said, “I suppose it would be embarrassing if you brought me all the way to Bonsaint, only for the Clerisy to discover that I’m completely mad.”
Slowly, he turned. “The sisters will confirm your soundness of mind. In writing, if necessary.”
“Not if it’s a new development. Everyone already knows there’s something wrong with me. It wouldn’t be hard to pretend that the shock of confronting an ashgrim during your evaluation was the final straw.” I lifted my eyes to meet his gaze. “Alas, it seems that the reminder of my past simply proved too much.”
I wondered how long it had been since someone had last defied him. He flung the case aside and took several great strides toward me, his eyes like poison. I thought he might strike me. Then he visibly mastered himself.
“I take no pleasure in this,” he said, “but you leave me without a choice. Know that this is for your own good, child,” and he clasped his hand over his ring.
At first I felt nothing. And then I gasped. A crushing pressure gripped my heart, my lungs. After a dazed moment I realized it wasn’t a physical force but an emotional one, a despairing, ruinous guilt. I wanted to collapse to the floor in misery, to weep and beg the priest for forgiveness, even as I knew I was undeserving of redemption—undeserving even of the Lady’s mercy.
The penitent.
I clenched my teeth. I had resisted his relic before, and I could do it again. If he wanted me to crawl on the ground and repent, I would do the opposite. Painfully, I stood, fighting against every joint; and then I lifted my head to meet his eyes.
The relic’s influence evaporated. He stumbled a step back, grasping at the desk for balance. He was panting, regarding me with a look I couldn’t interpret, a lock of golden hair fallen loose over his forehead.
There came a loud pounding on the door. Before either of us could react, it swung open, flooding the room with daylight. The person who stood on the threshold wasn’t Sister Lucinde, but rather a terrified-looking young page, clutching a folded missive.
“Confessor Leander,” he stammered. “Urgent news, Your Grace. Possessed soldiers have been sighted in Roischal. Your aid is requested—”
The priest recovered enough to yank the parchment from the page’s hands. He unfolded the letter and scanned its contents, then clapped it shut again, as though whatever he’d read had stung him.
I had never heard of Clerisy soldiers succumbing to possession. The priest’s face had gone bloodless white, but not with surprise, or even shock; he looked furious at the news. He breathed in and out, staring straight ahead.
“I am not finished with you,” he said to me. He ran trembling fingers through his hair to put it back in order. Then, in a swirl of black robes, he stalked out the door.
THREE
None of the sisters said anything to me, but they had to know I’d done something, even if they didn’t know what. I kept my head down for a few miserable days, dazed with lack of sleep and dreading going back to the dormitory.
Marguerite had a wealthy aunt in Chantclere who sent her letters and drawings of the city’s latest fashions, or at least used to—the letters had eventually slowed and then stopped without explanation. For years, she’d kept them tacked to the wall above her bed so she could look at them every night. I returned to our room after the evaluation to discover that she had torn them all down. Standing in the pile of crumpled parchment, she had looked at me with accusatory red-rimmed eyes and declared, “I would rather die than spend the rest of my life in Naimes.”
Over the next couple of nights, her weeping kept me awake until the bell rang for morning prayers. I tried talking to her once, which turned out to be a terrible idea; the results were so harrowing I slunk off to spend the night in the stable, grateful that I couldn’t inflict emotional trauma on the goats and horses—I hadn’t managed it yet, at least.
Then more news arrived from Roischal, and no one was thinking about the evaluation any longer, not even Marguerite. As the first cold rains of winter seeped into the convent’s stones, whispers filled the halls like shades.
Everything would seem ordinary one moment, and then the next I’d hear something that tipped me off-balance: novices in the refectory, heads bent together, whispering fearfully about a sighting of a Fourth Order spirit—a rivener, which hadn’t been seen in Loraille since before we were born. The next day I crossed the gardens where the lay sisters were tearing up the last shriveled autumn vegetables, and I overheard that the city of Bonsaint had raised its great drawbridge over the Sevre, a measure it hadn’t taken in a hundred years.
“If the Divine is afraid,” whispered one of the sisters, “shouldn’t we be, too?”
The Divine of Bonsaint governed the northern provinces from her seat in Roischal, whose border lay only a few days’ travel to the south. Kings and queens had once reigned over Loraille, but their corrupt line had ended with the Raven King, and the Clerisy had risen from the Sorrow’s ashes to take their place. Now the divines ruled in their stead. The most powerful office was that of the Archdivine in Chantclere, but according to rumor, she was nearly a hundred years old and rarely extended her influence beyond the city.
Newly ordained, the current Divine of Bonsaint had once traveled to our convent on a pilgrimage to Saint Eugenia’s shrine. I had been thirteen then. Locals had turned out in bewildering numbers to see her, strewing spring wildflowers across the road and climbing the trees outside the convent’s walls for a better view. But what had left the greatest impression on me was how young the Divine had looked, and how sad. She had seemed subdued on her walk to the crypt, a lonely figure lost in splendor, her attendants lifting her train and holding her elbow as though she were spun from glass.
I wondered how she was faring now. As far as I could tell, the worst aspect of the unfolding situation in Roischal was that no one knew what was causing it. Spirits hadn’t attacked in numbers like this in well over a century, and in the past it had always happened in the wake of obvious events like plagues or famines or a city ravaged by fire. But this time there wasn’t a clear reason, and even the Clerisy didn’t seem to have an explanation.
The day that disaster reached Naimes, I was on my way back from the convent’s barnyard, hefting an empty bucket of slops. After an incident in the washing room when I was eleven, the sisters didn’t entrust me with any chores that might injure my hands. That day, I had scalded myself with lye and not told anyone—at first because I hadn’t been able to feel it and then because I hadn’t seen the point. I still remembered how, when at last someone had noticed the blisters, everything had gone quiet and the sisters had given me shocked looks that I didn’t understand. Then one of them had shouted for Mother Katherine, who had taken me away to the infirmary, her touch gentle on my arm. Ever since, I had been assigned work with the animals.