Vespertine (Vespertine #1)(6)
“A feverling!” she exclaimed.
Sister Iris’s lips thinned. She cast me a suspicious look. “And to which order does a feverling belong, Artemisia?”
“The Third Order,” I recited dutifully. “The order of souls lost to illness and plague.”
This received a curt nod, and Sister Iris moved on to questioning the other novices. I listened with partial attention as they described causes of death: exposure, starvation, flux, a case of drowning. None of the corpses provided to us had died violently; those souls could turn into Fourth Order spirits, and they got whisked off to the chapel immediately.
It was difficult to conceive of a time when Fourth Order spirits weren’t the most dangerous threat in Loraille. But Fifth Order spirits had been orders of magnitude more destructive. During the War of Martyrs, the seven revenants had raged across the country like storms, leaving entire cities lifeless in their wake. Blighted harvests had blown away as ashes on the wind. There was a tapestry in the scriptorium that depicted Saint Eugenia facing the revenant she had bound, armor flashing in the sun, her white horse rearing. It was so old and faded that the revenant looked like an indistinct cloud rising up over the hill, edges picked out in fraying silver thread.
I could still feel its hunger and fury, its despair at being bound. I imagined that if I listened closely enough to the stillness that yawned beneath the convent’s mundane everyday bustle, past the muffling hush of shadowed corridors and ancient stone, I would be able to sense it festering in the darkness of its prison.
“Are there any questions?”
Sister Iris’s voice snapped me back to the present. We were about to be dismissed. As everyone else drifted toward the door in anticipation, already beginning to murmur among themselves, I heard myself ask, “What causes a soul to become a Fifth Order spirit?”
Silence descended like an axe. Everyone turned to look at me, and then at Sister Iris. In all our years as novices, this was something no one had dared to ask.
Sister Iris pursed her lips. “That is a fair question, Artemisia, considering that our convent is one of few to house a high relic. But it is not an easy question to answer. The truth is that we do not know for certain.”
Whispering started up again. Uncertain glances traveled between the novices.
Sister Iris didn’t look at them. She was studying me with a slight frown, as though she knew again what was on my mind. I wondered if Sister Julienne had revealed to anyone what had happened in the crypt.
Her expression gave no clue as she went on. “It is, however, beyond a doubt that no more revenants have risen since the Sorrow, Goddess have mercy.” She sketched the four-point sign of the oculus on her forehead, a third eye that represented the Lady and Her gift of Sight. “The scholar Josephine of Bissalart believed that their rising was tied to the cataclysm that brought about the Sorrow—the Old Magic ritual performed by the Raven King.”
Everyone stopped breathing. All of us knew how the Sorrow had happened, but it was a topic rarely discussed and therefore carried an air of the forbidden. When we were younger, a popular dare had involved sneaking a history book from the scriptorium and reading the passage about the Raven King aloud in the dark by candlelight. For a while, Francine had had Marguerite convinced that speaking his name three times at midnight would summon him.
I was sure Sister Iris knew about all this. She sternly finished over the renewed whispering, “The ritual shattered the gates of Death and reordered the laws of the natural world. It is possible that some souls were uniquely corrupted by this act, resulting in the creation of the revenants. Josephine was correct on so many other accounts”—here she pinned the whispering novices with her gaze—“that I trust we need not fear a recurrence, particularly not while you all proceed in a timely manner to your afternoon chores.”
* * *
Weeks later, I sat watching my breath plume white in the cloister, the chill of the stone bench seeping through my robes and into my thighs. Dozens of other novices my age surrounded me, their nervous chatter filling the predawn gloom like early-morning birdsong. Some of them had traveled from as far away as Montprestre for the evaluation, the straw of wagon beds still clinging to their hair. They gazed around in awe at the cloister and stared at the ruby on Sister Lucinde’s finger, most likely wondering if it was really a relic, as their neighbor had claimed. Most of the northern convents were so small that only their abbesses wore a relic, and then just one; Mother Katherine wore three.
Marguerite sat hunched beside me, shivering. In her effort not to sit too close to me, she was nearly falling off the bench onto the ground. I’d moved over earlier to give her more room, but I didn’t think she’d noticed.
“I’ve never killed anyone,” I offered. That sounded less reassuring out loud than it had in my head, so I added, “Or seriously hurt anyone, either. Not permanently, at least. I assume they’ve all recovered by now.”
She looked up, and for an awful moment I thought she might actually try to talk to me. I wasn’t prepared for that. To my relief, the priest arrived then; brisk footsteps sounded against stone, and our heads craned to watch his dramatic figure striding down the center of the aisle. I glimpsed an imperious sweep of black robes and a flash of golden hair before he disappeared with a swirl of fabric into the evaluation room.
As soon as the door closed, the pious silence that had gripped the cloister dissolved into giggles.