The Lady Chapel had no gaudy excesses of gold leaf and writhing cherubs: only white marble pillars, and slender silver traceries inlaid on the marble floor. It was a place of silence and blue shadows, which made the painting over the altar all the more jarring. It was like the gory portrait of the Dayspring that had been hung over Armand’s audience, but even worse. Not only did it show the Dayspring as a hacked-apart pile of limbs; the limbs were bleeding, twisted, deformed. The hands writhed, tendons bulging. The face was twisted in agony. The pieces were laid out in a spiral, like a scream given shape.
But Rachelle had a different goal. She turned to the side altar, where sat the statue of the Holy Virgin. Here she was depicted as the Lady of Snows, dressed all in white, with the great eagle wings she had been given to fly to the mountains and hide from the Imperium’s soldiers while she gave birth to the Dayspring. At her feet sat a multitude of candles, along with flowers, gold chains, bracelets, and earrings—whatever people saw fit to leave as offerings.
There was no sword.
Rachelle wasted several minutes looking in all the corners and crannies nearby and in trying to pry up paving stones. Then she remembered how Joyeuse had shifted and changed shape to let Armand hold it.
In the stories, Joyeuse had been made from a single bone.
She bent closer to the pile of offerings, squinting at the candlelight. And then she saw it: a little white finger bone, wedged in between two candles. She put on her leather gloves and reached for it.
Even through the glove, it was like touching hot iron. Her hand sprang away before she had even fully realized what she was feeling. It occurred to her that if she hadn’t knocked the guards unconscious, perhaps she could have bullied or bluffed them into moving the bone for her. But she supposed she would have had to touch it sooner or later.
She held her hands out over Joyeuse for a long moment—hesitated—and then seized it.
It shifted in her grasp, turning back into the sword. Red-hot agony seared up her arms. Still she turned and managed to walk halfway to the door before her hands simply wouldn’t grasp anymore. Joyeuse clattered to the ground, and after a moment of wavering, Rachelle fell to her knees.
She realized there were tears trickling down her face—tears of pain, but also frustration. She had, against all odds, survived the transformation into a forestborn with her mind and heart intact. She had fooled Erec and gotten to Joyeuse. And now she was going to fail and all the world would fall to darkness, just because she wasn’t strong enough.
She thought of Armand six months ago, bleeding alone and still able to hold back the Devourer, and she reached again for Joyeuse.
Bishop Guillaume’s voice rang out: “What business does a bloodbound have in the house of God?”
In an instant, she was on her feet. For there in the doorway stood the Bishop and Justine.
“Not a bloodbound,” said Justine, her face pinched with loathing. “A forestborn.”
Everything she had felt for him before, she felt ten times more now: the bone-deep revulsion and mistrust. Her fingers tensed with the desire to kill.
As if in answer, Justine’s hand went to her sword.
And Rachelle remembered why she was there, and that if she fought them, Erec and the other forestborn would probably notice. They would wonder what she was doing in the chapel, and that would be the end of everything.
The problem was that the Bishop and Justine were surely going to fight her. She was a forestborn in the house of God. Who wouldn’t try to stop her?
The Bishop took a step forward, and Rachelle did the only thing she could think of. She dropped to her knees and said, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been three years since my last shriving.”
There was a short, brittle silence. She saw the horror flicker across his grim face. I think he just got more than he asked for, she thought with bleak humor. I suppose now I find out if he really believes what he preaches.
Her stomach curled. What had she been thinking? She was on her knees before the man who hated her and whom she had always hated. She was going to die on her knees, because who would believe a monster? And who would refuse to strike it down?
Erec would laugh.
Then the Bishop exchanged a look with Justine. She nodded and stepped back, out of the chapel. And he took the last step forward and dropped his hand on the top of Rachelle’s head.
She flinched. But he said, “May the Lord be in your heart and on your lips.”
Her heart lurched. Her lips wouldn’t move.
It was the worst mockery of repentance to speak these words simply so he would trust her. It was the worst mockery of Aunt Léonie to think she could ever be sorry enough to win forgiveness. Who did the Bishop think he was, to act as if he knew she could?
And then she thought, Admit it. Most of all, you’re humiliated to speak your sins in front of someone you’ve despised.
So she made herself look up at him.
His hand had not fallen from her head. Rachelle could, if she wanted, seize his wrist, throw him down, and break his neck before Justine could intervene.
His mouth was a hard line; his nostrils were flared. She realized that he, too, was afraid.
“I confess—”