Vespertine Read online

  I stared grimly at the floor until Sister Julienne released me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I answered, so clearly a lie that heat crept dully to my face as I spoke. I moved away and took Sophia’s hand. She looked genuinely frightened now, but when she clutched me back I realized with a pang of gratitude that it was Julienne who was scaring her, not me.

  “Suit yourself,” Sister Julienne muttered, shuffling past us to open another door, beyond which lay the stair to the chapel, spiraling upward. “But you can’t run forever, girl. The Lady will do what She wants with you. She always does, in the end.”

  TWO

  News of the gaunt traveled quickly. The next day everyone was staring at me, trying to get a look at the blighted marks on my wrist. Mother Katherine had ordered Sophia and me to the infirmary after we’d come into the chapel, but little could be done for blight; it healed on its own over time, slowly fading to yellow like a bruise. I was given some tinctures for the pain and didn’t take them. I told no one what had happened in the crypt.

  Life went on as usual, except for the staring, which I hated, but I was used to it. I’d grown skilled at avoiding it by taking convoluted routes through the narrow cobbled paths that wound between the convent’s buildings while I went about my chores. Sometimes the other novices shrieked when I appeared, as though I were skulking around specifically to frighten them—I was used to that, too.

  But I couldn’t avoid them forever. We trained in the cloister’s enclosed courtyard three times a week, Sister Iris watching us like a hawk as we practiced forms with our censers and daggers, and there were daily prayers in the chapel. Then, every morning, the lichgate opened to admit corpse-wagons into the central courtyard.

  For the past three hundred years, the Gray Sisters had carried out the sacred duty of tending to the dead. Souls that failed to receive the necessary rites would eventually corrupt and rise as spirits instead of naturally passing on to the afterlife as they had done before the Sorrow. When the corpse-wagons arrived, the most decayed bodies were rushed to the chapel’s ritual chambers, where they vanished beyond a consecrated door curling with smoke. Less urgent cases went to the fumatorium to be washed and wait their turn.

  The fumatorium was named for its perpetual fog of incense, which slowed the process of corruption. The lower level, where the bodies were stored, was built underground like a cellar, dry and cool and dark. On the aboveground level, large clerestory windows filled a bright whitewashed hall with streaming shafts of light. We attended weekly lessons here, in a long room filled with tables that bore a strong resemblance to the refectory where we ate our meals. I kept that comparison to myself, however, because the tables were laid with corpses.

  I’d gotten a young man this week, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, only a year or two older than myself. A faint odor of putrefaction hovered beneath the smell of incense seeping up through the floorboards. Around me, some of the other novices were wrinkling their noses and trying to persuade their partners to handle the more disgusting aspects of inspecting the bodies. Personally, I didn’t mind. I preferred the company of the dead to that of the living. They didn’t gossip about me, for one thing.

  “Do you think she’ll pass the evaluation?” Marguerite was whispering, or at least thought she was. I could hear her from two tables away.

  “Of course she will, but that depends on whether they’ll let her take it,” someone else whispered back. Francine.

  “Why wouldn’t they?”

  I opened the dead man’s mouth and looked inside. Behind me, Francine lowered her voice further. “Mathilde snuck into the chancery last week and read Mother Katherine’s ledger. Artemisia really was possessed before she came here.”

  Several gasps followed this pronouncement. Marguerite squeaked, “By what? Did it say if she killed anyone?” Multiple people hushed her simultaneously.

  “I don’t know,” Francine said, once the noise had died down, “but I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “I bet she did kill someone.” Marguerite’s voice throbbed with conviction. “What if that’s why her family never visits? Maybe she killed them all. I bet she’s killed lots of people.”

  By now I had heaved the corpse over—difficult, without a partner—and was examining his buttocks. I really didn’t want to listen to this. I wondered what I could say to get them to stop. Finally, in the profound silence that had followed Marguerite’s speculation, I offered, “I would tell you how many, but I wasn’t keeping count.”

  A chorus of shrieks erupted behind me.

  “Girls!”

  Everyone stopped screaming at once, except for Marguerite, who let out one final wavering bleat before Francine clapped a hand over her mouth. I saw that happen because I had looked up to watch Sister Iris swoop down on us from the other end of the hall. She looked straight-backed and severe in her plain gray robes, unadorned aside from a silver oculus pendant at her throat and a small moonstone ring that glinted against the dark-brown skin of her hand. Sister Iris commanded universal fear and respect among the novices, though by our age there was an element of pageantry to our terror. Most of us had figured out that she was a benevolent force despite her stern mannerisms and eviscerating glare. She had once stayed up all night in the infirmary when Mathilde had fallen gravely ill with sweating sickness, mopping her brow and probably threatening her not to die.

  She turned that glare on us now, lingering on me for a few additional seconds. She liked me, but she knew I was responsible for the screaming. I almost always was.

  “May I remind you all that a priest is arriving from Bonsaint in one month’s time to evaluate each one of you for admittance into the Clerisy. You may wish to use your time more wisely, for you will not,” she said pointedly, “receive a second chance to leave Naimes.”

  Looks passed between the girls. No one wanted to stay in Naimes and spend the rest of her life tending to corpses. Except for me.

  If I was selected for a higher education by the Clerisy, I would have to talk to people. Then, after I completed my studies, I would be ordained as a priestess, which would involve talking to even more people and also trying to solve their spiritual problems, which sounded horrific—I’d probably make them cry.

  No one could deny that I was better suited to the life of a Gray Sister. Administering death rites was important work, more useful than idling away my life in a gilded office in Bonsaint or Chantclere, upsetting people. Then there was the other duty of the Gray Sisters, the one I looked forward to the most. They were responsible for investigating reports of children with the Sight.

  I rubbed the scar tissue on my hands, conscious of the places where I felt no sensation. It was like touching leather, or someone else’s skin. If someone had looked harder, found me sooner…

  I doubted it would be difficult to fail the evaluation on purpose. The priest could hardly drag me out of Naimes by force.

  Sister Iris was watching me as though she knew exactly what I was thinking. “I see you’ve finished examining the bodies. Artemisia, tell me your conclusions.”

  I looked down. “He died of fever.”

  “Yes?”

  “There aren’t any marks on his body to suggest a death by injury or violence.” I was conscious of the other girls watching me, some leaning toward each other to trade remarks. I could guess what they were saying. Commenting on my stony, unsmiling expression, my flatly emotionless voice.

  Little did they know that this was better than the alternative. I had once tried smiling in a mirror, with profoundly unfortunate results.

  “And?” Sister Iris prompted, sending a look at the novices that quieted them at once.

  “He’s young,” I went on. “Unlikely to have experienced a paroxysm of the heart. He would be thinner if he’d died of a wasting disease or the flux. His tongue and fingernails aren’t discolored, so poisoning is unlikely. But there are broken veins in his eyes, and his glands are swollen, which indicate a fever.”

  “Very good. And what
of the condition of his soul?” The whispering had started up again. Sharply, Sister Iris turned. “Marguerite, would you care to answer?”

  Marguerite’s cheeks flamed red. She wasn’t as pale as me, but her fair skin could display a spectacular variety of colors—generally shades of pink, but sometimes an impressive purple flush, and occasionally an interesting greenish cast, when something I said to her almost made her throw up. “Could you repeat the question, Sister Iris?”

  “What manner of spirit would this man’s soul become,” Sister Iris said in a clipped tone, “if the sisters did not purify it before it succumbed to corruption?”

  “A shade,” Marguerite blurted out. “Most souls turn into First Order spirits, no matter how they died. If not a shade, then—” She cast a panicked look at Francine, who avoided her eyes. She hadn’t been listening, either.

  I shared a room with Marguerite in the dormitory, which was so cramped that our hard, narrow beds nearly touched. She signed herself against evil every night before she went to sleep, eyeing me meaningfully the whole time. Truthfully, I didn’t blame her. Mostly I felt sorry for her. If I were someone else, I was sure I wouldn’t want to share a room with me, either.

  Lately, I felt even sorrier for her than usual because I didn’t think she was going to pass the evaluation. I couldn’t imagine her becoming a nun, and I had an equally difficult time envisioning her as a lay sister, shouldering the convent’s never-ending burden of washing, cooking, gardening, and mending. But if she failed, those would be her only two choices. The Lady had granted her the Sight, which meant a life dedicated to service. None of us could survive without the protection of the convent’s lichgate, or the incense and consecrated daggers provided to us by the Clerisy. The risk of possession was too great.

  Sister Iris had her back to me. When Marguerite’s desperate gaze wandered over in my direction, I raised a hand to my forehead, miming checking my temperature. Her eyes widened.

  “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.

  “Girls,” said Sister Lucinde quellingly, but a great deal of stifled noise continued as the first novice was called into the room.

  The giggles stopped for good when the girl emerged only a minute or two later, white-faced and bewildered. Sister Lucinde had to take her by the shoulders and steer her in the direction of the refectory, where pallets were being laid out to accommodate the visiting novices. As she stumbled away, she buried her face in her hands and began to cry.

  Wide-eyed, everyone watched her go. Marguerite leaned toward Francine, seated on the bench opposite us. “Don’t you think that was fast?”

  It was fast.
She hadn’t been in there for long enough to answer a few cursory questions, much less take an evaluation. It was as though the priest had been able to judge her aptitude at a mere glance. Out of sight, my hands curled into fists.

  Dawn light crept into the cloister as the benches rapidly emptied, its pink glow seeping down the courtyard’s stone walls, flashing from the windows and glaring in my eyes. By the time the light flooded across the tamped-down grass where we practiced our forms, less than a quarter of us remained. The last novices filed out one by one until only Marguerite and I were left. When Sister Lucinde called her name, I tried to think of something encouraging to say to her, but I wasn’t good at that at the best of times. I was still trying to think of what I should have said when the door banged open less than a minute later, and she rushed past me where I stood waiting, her face crimson and streaked with tears.

  Sister Lucinde looked after her and sighed. Then she nodded to me. As I stepped over the threshold, my eyes struggled to adjust to the room beyond. It seemed dark indoors now that the sun had risen, even with a fire crackling in the hearth, stiflingly warm, and a few lit tapers scattered around, throwing shivering reflections from mirrors and polished wood.

  “Is this the girl?” asked a silhouette in front of the fire.

  “Yes, Your Grace.”

  The door’s latch clicked. Sister Lucinde had shut me inside.

  Now I could see better, well enough to make out the priest. His pale, austere face floated in darkness above the high collar of his severe black robes. He was tall, his posture immaculate, his sharp cheekbones casting his cheeks into shadow. His gaze had already returned to Mother Katherine’s ledger, its worn pages cramped with records of each girl admitted into the convent. Without looking up, he gestured formally at the empty chair in front of the desk. A ring flashed on his hand, set with a large onyx gemstone.