“You know,” she said glibly, “that is supposed to be one of the qualities of the Champion.”
“What is?” I asked, my heart suddenly beating faster. I had forgotten that Violette was considered an expert on revenant history. Of course she would have heard of the Champion.
She paused, watching me carefully.
“Don’t worry, I know about the Champion,” I said, and saw her relax. “Vincent told me about the prophecy. Although he didn’t know much about it. What does him speaking to me when volant have to do with it?”
“‘And he will possess preternatural powers of endurance, persuasion, strength, and communication,’” she quoted. “That is a part of the prophecy.”
“Wait a minute . . . endurance? That must be why Jean-Baptiste thinks Vincent is the Champion. He was able to resist dying longer than other revenants his age. What else did you say?”
“Persuasion,” she said, “which Vincent has got in excess. He is the one Jean-Baptiste always sends to represent him when there are problems among our kind.”
I hadn’t known that, either. Although Vincent had mentioned projects for Jean-Baptiste, I had always assumed they were of the legal type.
“Then there is strength. Is Vincent very strong?”
“I’ve never seen him fight except in training, so I wouldn’t know,” I admitted.
“Well, the communication thing sure had Jean-Baptiste worked up. The fact that a revenant had volant speech that was strong enough to reach out to a human. When Vincent told him about it, Jean-Baptiste called me right away to let me know. To see if I had any further information on the prophecy that might help verify that Vincent is the Champion.”
“And what did you tell him?” I asked, feeling a bit shaken by the whole conversation. Truth be told, I didn’t want Vincent to be the Champion. Whatever that meant, it sounded dangerous.
“I told him that he was lucky to have such a talented young revenant living under his roof, but that I seriously doubted that, if there were to be a Champion, it would be Vincent.”
“Why not?”
“Lots of reasons,” she said with a teasing glint in her eye. “There are several other stipulations spelled out in the prophecy. Conditions of time and location. And believe me . . . it is not here and it is not now. Honestly, the prophecy of the Champion is just one of many ancient prophecies. Most of them have not been fulfilled, and they are probably based on the ranting of oracles or questionable superstitions. Old guys like Jean-Baptiste lap them up like honeyed mead.”
I gave her a confused look.
“Fine, like vintage wine. That is a better comparison for Jean-Baptiste, anyway.” And then, with a wry grin, she launched into a story about how Jean-Baptiste once sent Gaspard on a wild-goose chase to find some ancient parchment that had never actually existed. She had me laughing so hard that I choked on my latte. The half a millennia she had spent on earth made Violette a veritable gold mine of good stories and juicy information.
One day, after an evening showing of one of my all-time favorites, Harold and Maude, we headed to the Café Sainte-Lucie. Over a shared platter of deliciously runny cheeses and a basket of crunchy sliced baguette bread, Violette told me about the old times, when there wasn’t as much animosity between numa and bardia. It was weird to hear her use the ancient term for revenants as if it was common lingo.
At that point, apparently, they considered themselves in the same line of work: the work of life. Preserving life, taking life . . . it all boiled down to the same thing. “It is all about a balance,” she said. “In our days, there was open communication between the numa and bardia.
“You know,” she continued, leaning forward confidentially, “Arthur has kept in touch with some of our ancient contacts in the numa world, and I am glad for it. My research would have suffered if he had not!” Seeing my shock, she said, “Kate, one cannot cut off a whole subset of our type just because they have gone out of style in recent centuries.”
“Your type? But you’re not even the same kind of creature!” I said, feeling a twinge of disgust at the comparison.
“Ah, but there you are wrong. We are exactly the same kind of creature. What has Vincent told you about how a revenant is formed? Or numa, for that matter?”
“That a human becomes a revenant after dying to save someone’s life. And a human becomes a numa when they die after betraying someone to their death.”
“Which is true,” she said. “But if you go back a step, bardia and numa are the same thing: revenants. Many, including me, believe that there is a ‘revenant gene.’ That we are a type of mutation.