“So you still see the marque?”
“I have been able to see the marque since I was a child. I just didn’t know what it was.”
“Then why did they even give the Tears to you?”
“It heightened my other senses. I was suddenly able to—this will sound mad—feel people’s life sparks. I am more aware of their living, breathing bodies, even if I cannot see them.”
“That is a gift I have had since I was a child,” I tell her. And more than once did it save me. I realize how useless Ismae’s gift of seeing marques would have been in my circumstances; I had no need to spot the dying, but every need to avoid the living, which sensing their pulses allowed me to do. “I suppose you let that blind old woman nearly put your eyes out with her wicked crystal stopper?”
“Didn’t you?”
“No, I took it from her and did it myself.”
Ismae gapes in shock. For a moment it is as if the old Ismae, the one who worshiped everything about the convent and followed every rule, is back. Then she laughs. “Oh, Sybella! I would have loved to be a spider on the wall and seen that.”
“She was most affronted.”
“Why did you want to know if the Tears wear off?” she asks gently.
I take a deep breath. “Because there have been men who I know are guilty of treachery—for I have seen it with my own eyes—and yet they are not marqued.” I look up and meet her gaze. “If Mortain grants mercy to d’Albret and Marshal Rieux, then I find it hard to want to serve Him.” I did not mean to confess that to her, but the words spill out of me.
She studies me a moment, then comes to kneel beside my bed. “Sybella,” she says, her eyes shining with some mysterious light. “I have met Mortain face to face, and the abbess, maybe even the convent, is wrong about so very many things.”
I stare at her dumbly, and my heart begins to race. “You have seen Him? He is real?” I ask.
“I have, and He is more kind and merciful than you can imagine. And He has given us such gifts!” She looks at her hands. “Not only am I immune to poison’s effects, but I can use my own skin to draw it from others.”
“Truly?”
There is not a whiff of hesitation or doubt. “Yes.”
I turn my face toward the wall and pretend I am snuggling into sleep so she will not see the hunger in my eyes. “Tell me,” I whisper. “Tell me of this father of ours.”
“Gladly.” She pauses, as if she must collect her thoughts. When she speaks again, it is as if her voice is filled with light. “There is so much kindness in Him. And mercy. All the judgment and retribution we have been trained to expect of Him was not there. In His presence, I felt whole and complete in a way I have never felt before.”
There is such certainty in her voice that I find myself filled with envy.
“We are not just His handmaidens, spawned to do His bidding. He loves us,” she says.
The idea is so foreign to me that I snort.
“He does! For He is trapped in the realm of Death, and it gives Him great joy to know that we who were born of His seed are able to embrace life.”
“If that is so, then why has He consigned us to lurk in the shadows and cloak ourselves in His darkness?”
She does not answer right away. I sneak a look over my shoulder and see that she is frowning at the window, as if she seeks the answer to this question there. “I believe those are not His wishes, but the convent’s.”
Those words are like a shower of winter hail down my back. I sit up and turn to look at her. “What do you mean?”
“I mean”—she chooses her words as if picking her way across a stream—“that I believe the convent misunderstands both Mortain and His wishes for us. Whether through ignorance or intent, I do not know.”
The magnitude of this makes my heart clutch in my chest. “Explain,” I say, shoving my hair out of my eyes so I may use every sense I possess to try to understand this huge revelation she has just shared.
“First, He does not insist we act with vengeance or judgment in our hearts. To Him, bringing Death is an act of great mercy and grace, for without it all people would be forced to struggle on in frail and broken bodies, riddled with pain, weakened. That is why He has given us the misericorde.”
“The what?”
Ismae looks at me, puzzled. “You do not have one?”
“I have never even heard of such a thing.”
Ismae reaches into the folds of her skirt and withdraws an ancient-looking knife, its handle of bone with chased silver. “It is an instrument of mercy,” she says softly. “Just one nick causes the soul to leave the body, quick and sure and painless. But I do not understand why the abbess did not give you one.”
“It could be she knew no one in d’Albret’s household was deserving of mercy.” Of a certainty, she knew I would not be interested in dispensing it.
She puts that aside for now. “But Sybella, what I learned is that He does not love us because of the acts we perform in His name—He loves us because we are His. What we choose to do or not do, how we choose to serve Him or not serve Him, will never alter that love.”
“He told you this?”
“Not in words such as you and I speak, but I felt it. I felt this grace and love of His surround and engulf me like a river, and it stripped the ignorance from my eyes.”
“Much like the Tears of Mortain allow us to see His will better.”
“Precisely like that. Only a hundredfold more.”
I reach out and grab her arm. “So have we been wrong all this time? Committing murder by striking when we see His marque?”
“Not wrong, exactly,” she says slowly. “But I would say instead it is not required of us. Those who are to meet Death bear a marque, whether they are to die by our hands or by some other means.”
“How do you know this?” Have I been killing men all this time, thinking I was doing His will when I was actually following some dark impulse of my own?
“After we were attacked at Nantes, I returned to the field to search for survivors among the fallen.”
“There were none,” I say tightly. “D’Albret does not leave survivors.”
“No, but each of the dying soldiers bore some form of the marque. And the men I saw marqued when I was a child—none was killed by another’s hand. I believe the marque appears when a man’s death is in sight, and that includes a death at our hands. The mistake I think the convent has made is about the nature of those marques. They are merely reflections of what will happen, not commands to act.”