Father Tyler finished the last bit of his chicken, then set his fork down with an unsteady hand. He was frightened. The summons had come just as he was sitting down to his lunch, a simple bit of fowl that had been boiled to blandness. Tyler had never had much taste for food anyway, but in the past two days he’d eaten as an act of utter mechanics, tasting only dust.
At first he was elated. He’d been a bit player in one of the great events of his time. There hadn’t been many great events in Tyler’s life. He’d grown up a farmer’s son in the Almont Plain, one of seven children, and when he was eight years old, his father had given him to the local priest in place of tithing. Tyler never resented his father’s decision, not even then; he had been one child among too many, and there was never enough to eat.
The parish priest, Father Alan, was a good man. He needed an assistant, for he suffered from severe gout. He taught Tyler how to read and gave him his first Bible. By the time Tyler was thirteen, he was helping Father Alan write his sermons. The parish congregation was not large, perhaps thirty families, but the Father couldn’t get to them all. As his gout worsened, Tyler began to make the Father’s rounds, visiting families and hearing their troubles. When those too old or sick to reach the church wanted to confess, Tyler took their confessions, even though he hadn’t been ordained yet. He supposed it was technically a sin, but he also didn’t think God would mind, particularly not for those who were dying.
When Father Alan was summoned to New London for promotion, he took Tyler with him, and Tyler finished his training in the Arvath and became ordained at the age of seventeen. He might have had his own parish, but his supervisors had already realized that Tyler was ill suited to minister to the public. He liked research more than people, liked to work with paper and ink, and so he became one of the Arvath’s thirty bookkeepers, recording tithes and tributes from the surrounding parishes. It was relaxing work; once in a while a cardinal would attempt to pad his own lifestyle by hiding his parishes’ income, and there would be some excitement for a month or so, but most of the time bookkeeping was a quiet job, leaving plenty of time to think and read.
Tyler stared at his books, spread over ten shelves of good Tearling oak that had cost most of one year’s stipend. The first five books had come to him from a parishioner, a woman who’d died and left them to the Church with a small bequest. Cardinal Carlyle had taken the bequest and made it disappear, but he’d had no use for the books, so he dumped them on young Father Tyler’s desk, saying, “You’re her priest. Figure it out.”
Tyler had been twenty-three. He’d read the Bible through many times, but secular books were a novelty, so he opened one and began reading, idly at first, then turning one page after another with the amazed, fortunate feeling of a man who finds money on the ground. He had become an academic that day, though he wouldn’t know it for many years.
He could no longer delay the inevitable. Tyler left his small room and shuffled down the hallway. He had suffered from arthritis in his left hip for some seven or eight years now, but his slow gait was less the effect of pain than of reluctance. He was a good bookkeeper, and life in the Arvath had been a comfortable, inexorable march of time . . . until four days ago, when everything changed.
He’d conducted the coronation in a state of near terror, wondering what perverse twist of fate had guided the Mace to his door. Tyler was a devout priest, an ascetic, a believer in the great work of God that had brought humanity through the Crossing. But he was no performer. He’d stopped giving sermons decades before, and each year he retreated further into the world of books, of the past. He would have been the Holy Father’s last choice to perform the crowning, but the Mace had knocked on his door and Tyler had gone.
I am part of God’s great work. The thought darted in from nowhere and disappeared with the same blinding speed. He knew the history of the Tearling monarchs in detail. The great socialist vision of William Tear had eroded after the Landing, dying in increments until it ended in bloody disaster with the assassination of Jonathan Tear. The Raleigh line had taken over the throne, but the Raleighs were not the Tears, never had been. By now they had become as fatuous and sickened as any royal line of pre-Crossing Europe. Too much intermarriage and too little education. Too little understanding of humanity’s tendency to repeat its own mistakes, over and over again. But Tyler knew that history was everything. The future was only the disasters of the past, waiting to happen anew.
At the time of the crowning, he hadn’t yet heard the story of what had happened on the Keep Lawn; the price for his seclusion and study was a woeful ignorance of current events. But in the days since, his brother priests had refused to leave him alone. They knocked on his door constantly, ostensibly for clarification of some point of theology or history, but none would leave without hearing some version of the Queen’s crowning. In return, they told Tyler of the freeing of the allotted, and the burning of the cages.
This morning Father Wyde had come in, fresh from handing out bread to the beggars who lined the steps of the Arvath. According to Wyde, the beggars were calling her the True Queen. Tyler knew the term: it was a female variant on the pre-Crossing Arthurian legend, the Queen who would save the land from terrible peril and usher in a golden age. The True Queen was a fairy tale, a balm for childless mothers. Yet Tyler’s heart had leaped at Wyde’s words, and he’d been forced to look out the window to conceal eyes suddenly bright with tears.
I am part of God’s great work.
He didn’t know what to say to the Holy Father. The Queen had refused to swear allegiance to God’s Church, and even Tyler knew the importance of that vow. The Regent, despite a complete lack of personal morality, had remained firmly under the Holy Father’s control, donating vast sums of money to the Church and allowing construction of a private chapel inside the Keep. Should an itinerant friar come along, preaching the ancient beliefs of Luther to an ever more enthusiastic audience, the friar would disappear and never be heard from again. No one spoke of these things, but Tyler was a perceptive man, and he knew the sickness of his church. Over the years he had chosen seclusion, loving God with his whole heart, intending to die quietly someday in the small room, surrounded by his books. But now he’d been inexplicably drawn into the great events of the world.
Tyler’s heart thumped in the narrow cage of his chest as he trudged up the enormous marble staircase toward the Holy Father’s audience room. He was getting old, yes, but he was also frightened. His private conversation with the Holy Father had been limited to a few words of congratulation upon Tyler’s ordination. How long ago had that been? Some fifty years gone. The Holy Father had aged, just as Tyler had, and was now nearing his hundredth year. Even in the Tearling, where the wealthy lived long, the Holy Father’s life span was impressive. But illness plagued him: pneumonia, fevers, and some sort of digestive ailment that reportedly prohibited him from eating meat. However, his mind had remained sharp as his body dwindled, and he’d managed the Regent so adroitly that the Arvath now had a steeple of pure gold, a luxury unheard of since the pre-Crossing. Even the Cadarese, with their enormous supply of underground riches, didn’t confer so much wealth upon their temples.
Tyler shook his head. The Holy Father was an idolater. Perhaps they all were. When the girl refused to take the vow, Tyler had made an immediate decision, perhaps the first of his entire life. The Tearling did not need the Queen to be loyal to the Church, with its infection of greed. The Tearling simply needed a queen.
Two acolytes were stationed outside the door to the audience room. Despite their shaven heads and eyebrows, they shared the narrow weasel’s look of all the Holy Father’s attendants. Both of them smirked as they unbolted the doors and tugged them open, the message clear: You’re in trouble.
I know, Tyler thought. Better than anyone.
He crossed the threshold, making a special point of keeping his gaze down. The Holy Father was rumored to become difficult when people failed to pay him proper respect. The walls and floor of the audience chamber were constructed of quarried stone that had been washed so white by the passage of water that the room actually seemed to glow under the skylight. It was extremely warm; with the skylight glassed in, there was nowhere for the heat to go. After his many bouts with pneumonia, the Holy Father reportedly liked the excessive warmth. His oakwood throne sat atop the dais in the center of the room, but Tyler halted at the foot of the dais and waited, keeping his head carefully lowered.
“Ah, Tyler. Come here.”
Tyler mounted the steps of the dais and reached automatically for the Holy Father’s outstretched hand, kissing the ruby ring, then retreated to the second riser and knelt. His left hip began to throb immediately; kneeling always played hell with his arthritis.
When he looked up, Tyler felt a small stirring of pity. The Holy Father had once been a well-built middle-aged man, but now one arm was withered and useless from the stroke he’d suffered several years ago, and his face was likewise lopsided; the right side sagged like a sail that had lost its wind. For the past few months, the Arvath had quaked with rumors that the Holy Father was dying, and Tyler thought this was probably the truth. His skin was as transparent as parchment; actual bone seemed to poke through his bald head. He had not aged so much as shriveled, and now he seemed almost the size of a child, nearly lost in the folds of his white velvet robes. He gave Tyler a benevolent smile that put Tyler immediately on his guard, dissolving the pity like sugar.
Beside the Holy Father, just as Tyler had feared, was Cardinal Anders, stately in his voluminous robes of scarlet silk. Cardinals’ robes had once been nearly orange due to the imperfect red that dyers produced in the Tearling, but Anders’s robes were true red, a clear sign that the Church, like everyone else, was getting Callaen dyes off the black market out of Mortmesne. In addition to the robes, Anders wore a small gold pin in the shape of a hammer, a memento of his time spent on the Regent’s antisodomy squads. Anders’s hatred of homosexuals was well known, exceptional even for the Arvath, and rumor said he was the one who had originally suggested the idea of a special law enforcement contingent to the Regent. But then, several years ago, he had gone a step further, volunteering for duty in his free hours. It had made for quite the scandal, a sitting cardinal working for law enforcement, but Anders had refused to quit and stayed with the squads for several years. Tyler wondered why the Holy Father still allowed Anders to wear the pin on top of his robes, now, when Anders had finally ended his involvement.
Cardinal Anders’s presence at this meeting meant trouble. He was the Holy Father’s clear choice as successor, even though he was only forty-three, over twenty years younger than Tyler. Anders had first come to the Arvath at the young age of six; his parents were devout nobles, and they’d intended him for the priesthood since birth. Smart and unscrupulous, he had risen through the ranks with extraordinary speed; at the age of twenty-one, he’d been the youngest priest ever promoted to the bishopric of New London, and he’d been named a cardinal only a few short years afterward. In all that time, his face never seemed to change; it was a slab of wood, heavy features pitted with scars that suggested adolescent acne, and eyes so black that Tyler couldn’t distinguish iris from pupil. Watching him was like staring at a Tearling oak. Tyler had met greedy priests, venal priests, even priests tormented by hidden, twisted sexual desires that were repugnant to the Church. But whenever he saw that wooden face, the face of the next Holy Father, which would look on God’s work and the devil’s horrors with the same clinical detachment, Tyler felt profoundly uneasy. He didn’t like or trust the Holy Father, never had, but the Holy Father at least was a predictable blend of religion and expedience; one could work with the man. Cardinal Anders was another matter altogether; Tyler had no idea what he might be capable of without restraint. The Holy Father was a weak check only, a check that would soon be gone.
“What service can I do Your Holiness?”
The Holy Father chuckled. “You think I’ve brought you here to consult your specialized knowledge of history, Tyler? Indeed, no. You’ve been bound up in extraordinary events lately.”
Tyler nodded, hating his own eager, servile tone. “I was summoned by Lazarus of the Mace, Your Holiness. He made it clear that I was wanted immediately, or I would have sent for another priest.”
“The Mace is a fearsome visitor, to be sure,” replied the Holy Father smoothly. “And how did you find our new Queen?”
“Surely there isn’t a soul left in the Tear who hasn’t heard the story by now, Your Holiness.”
“I know the events of the crowning well, Tyler. I’ve heard the tale from many sources. Now I wish to hear it from you.”
Tyler repeated the Queen’s words, watching the Holy Father’s face darken. He leaned back in his chair, his gaze speculative. “She refused to make the vow.”
“She did.”