“They say he pulled Agony from the sky.”
The sentence had been making its way through Pharelle since yesterday evening, gathering confidence with each retelling. By morning it had moved from rumour to the story in which everyone had observed directly and had opinions on, especially those who had been too busy to attend. And so, miracles become politics.
The bread queues repeated it. The market stalls elaborated on it. A woman on the Quai des Brumes told her neighbour she had seen it herself, which was technically true in the sense that she had been outside when the Pendulum fell dark and filled in the details from what everyone else was saying.
“The de Vaillants were there. In the front, no less,” carried a different weight. The miracle was Valère’s, but the proximity was theirs, and proximity, in Pharelle, remained a form of currency. On the Rue de Clairmont, outside the estate, a knot of people had gathered to look at the gates the way crowds gather outside hospitals: not expecting news, but unwilling to be somewhere else when it came.
Inside, the household had adopted a policy of selective deafness. Servants moved through the corridors with prudent care, having already agreed, without discussion, that today was a day for clean surfaces and closed mouths. Breakfast was produced. Fires were lit. Things continued in an orderly manner, lest they come to Cedric’s attention and one of his prepared contingencies be deployed.
? Legend held that Cedric had a binder with meticulously labelled contingencies. Double numbers were trivial everyday occurrences, whilst single digit numbers constituted legitimate crises of standing and manners. No one had ever enquired about Contingency One.
For Laila, all of that fell behind her as she stepped inside the nursery. Greta no longer jumped at her approach, which meant she was adjusting to the household. Good. Most people took the better part of a year, and some never managed it at all.
She peered down at Aurora. Her curls were dark brown against the pillow, and no trace of red remained. The Umbral taint that had shadowed the child since infancy was gone, drawn out by Valère’s hand two days ago. Aurora breathed softly, evenly. She had no idea what her cure had set in motion.
Whatever else these dealings had cost them, this much they had won.
Laila decided, without discussion, that she would employ a form of selective blindness, and politely ignore the three statues standing guard in the corner. Years of training made her good at this.
“I hope Madame la Duchesse finds herself well this morning,” Greta said quietly. She took her work personally, and it carried in her voice. “Aurora has only just gotten back to sleep. The poor dear was not sleeping well last night.”
“I’m sure it’s nothing.” Laila kept her voice low. “She had a very big day yesterday, and she seems settled now.”
“It is lucky for you the other children are good at being very quiet.” Greta smiled. “It is like Aurora has her own bodyguards.”
“Hm?” Laila’s attention had drifted back to Aurora. “Oh. The... the statues, yes.”
She leaned down and kissed her granddaughter’s forehead, tucked the blanket closer. Aurora stirred but did not wake. Her eyes moved beneath their lids, the small telltale flicker of a dreaming mind.
Odd. Even Wylan didn’t start dreaming until he was three.
She sighed to herself.
Another precocious infant.
She drew the door closed behind her and went downstairs.
The drawing room accepted them like criminal accomplices into its privacy, with the uncomplaining burn of a fire that understood it would not be thanked.
Laila saw Lambert staring out the window with his hands folded behind his back. Wylan was sprawled across an armchair not designed for it, somewhere between a slouch and a perch. If the position had been comfortable an hour ago, he was committed to the posture now.
Maximilian was seated and reading through the city papers, muttering things best left unheard under his breath. He was dressed to perfection, but Laila knew that was neither discipline nor happenstance, but Percival.
Three out of four.
“Aurora is sleeping,” she said. “Peacefully. Dreaming, perhaps.”
Lambert turned from the window. “I would have thought that unusual for an infant. But I am beyond expecting the expected from this family.”
For a while, no one had anything to say, and it was too early for a drink.
Wylan spoke first. “I’m sorry that Isabella isn’t here. I’m sure she’d have loved to have seen Aurora like this.”
Despite the hour, she watched him swig from a flask.
“She made a choice to go. If here was no longer home for her, then there is not much I can do for her. I am already working hard to keep this family together.” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Maybe when all of this is over there will be a place for her again.”
Maximilian stood. “Mother, please. Let’s focus on today. We have other matters of critical importance. As far as this city is concerned, we are Valère’s friends and allies.”
“One of those is going to be a problem for us,” Wylan said.
“Wylan.”
“Wylan is right,” Maximilian said. “We have thrown in our lot with Valère, for good or for ill. He has Caliburn, and if my gauge is right, he has the city.” He set down the papers he had been reading. “But you are Duke of Pharelle, you might say. Be that as it may, I do not command the hearts of its people. Yet even now I have read no fewer than ten letters from sycophantic noble houses who not two days ago treated us as pariahs.” He looked at Laila. “So I have to ask: why must our fates be so bound to his?”
“You know the answer to that,” Laila said. “We cannot rely on Church nor Crown. We have been fighting for years against an unseen enemy, and Valère is the only one who even offered to help Aurora. Not Aeloria. And not Seraphina.”
“What if Valère is unable to put Esteban on the Pontifical sede?” Maximilian said.
“Then either we hope our great-aunt remembers us as family, or we prepare to defend ourselves.” Lambert spoke as one presenting evidence. “Without Church protection, the d’Aubignes will not need to go through pretence to seek vendetta. And given her husband’s connection to the Sun King, I doubt we can rely upon the protection of the state. We would be alone.”
The fire crackled, doing its best to fill a pause it had not been consulted about.
“But does it really matter?” Wylan shifted in his chair. “I doubt any of us are going to be paying more than lip service to the Church at this point. Even with Esteban as Pontifex.”
“You would prefer the alternative?”
“I mean, regardless of who is Pontifex, what does the Church mean to us at this point? We’ve all seen behind the pageantry. The Church is a mortal, and importantly, fallible institution. Like any other.”
“I wish there was less truth to what you said.” Lambert paused. “But I must concede the point.”
“But that’s my point. Why should we care whether the Church endorses us as faithful, when you know we’re not? Not on their terms, at any rate.”
“Because the d’Aubignes don’t care what we believe!” Lambert’s voice rose and the room went silent. “Excommunication is not a theological position, Wylan. It is a legal one. It strips us of the Church’s protection, its courts, its diplomatic weight.” He paused. “It does not matter to d’Aubigne or the other noble houses whether the faith is earnest. The Church is real whether we believe in it or not. The shield is the shield, regardless of what it’s made of.”
Wylan considered this and took another pull from the flask.
“I will go to Notre Reine,” Lambert said. “Whether Valère succeeds or fails, this is where I face the Church and call it out for what it is. I would go alone if I had to.” A pause. “Though I will admit his alliance in this matter makes it easier.”
“We are all coming,” Laila said. “This decision affects us all.” She smoothed a crease in her sleeve. “And I could not stand to see another one of my children stand without some support behind them.”
The room went quiet in a different way.
“Madame,” Lambert said. “Then we shall face Great-Aunt Lydia Vaziri as a family.”
“And yet still Madame, and not Mother?”
“Of course, Madame.”
Lambert would have preferred the side door. It was the entrance he knew: the east cloister, the vestry corridor, the route of a man who belonged to the building’s working machinery rather than its congregation.
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But Maximilian de Vaillant, Duke of Pharelle, would have none of that. Lambert found himself steered through the front doors of Notre Reine by a brother who understood that today was not a day for side entrances. It really was a week for miracles.
He cast his eyes across the nave. The cathedral was full. The lowly umbers and charcoals of junior priests gave way to the deep indigos of Legates, the crimsons of Primates, and the majestic vermilions of Cardinals. It appeared that every Invictus priest of note in Pharelle had come to Notre Reine this morning.
And all because Valère had said he would be here.
Notre Reine itself remained indifferent to all of this. The vaulted ceiling held its silence as it had for the past two centuries. Patient stone had outlasted better arguments than the ones about to happen today. The gilded sunburst above the altar caught the thin winter light from the clerestory windows and threw it back. As always, the room was brighter than seemed sensible.
Around him, Lambert could hear half-formed whispers of gossip, which was the Church’s default mode of communication operating at unusual volume. Conversations broke apart as the de Vaillants strode down the nave. Whispers gave way to murmurs, murmurs to conversation, and conversation to a shouting match.
Then, almost as if on cue, the assembled clergy parted.
At the far end of the nave, highlighted by the best light, on a raised platform that had not been there ten days ago, Primate Lydia Vaziri sat in a high-backed chair of dark wood and gold leaf. It was not the Pontifical Sede, which remained in Auriliene, where it had sat for three hundred years. This chair merely happened to share its proportions and materials, and its unspoken suggestion that the question of succession had already been answered.
Her vestments were pontifical, her crosier rested against the arm of the chair, and her attendants flanked her in the precise configuration of an investiture that had not yet occurred.
Lambert had to admire the craftsmanship, even as his ire rose.
He stepped forward. Three paces past his family, into the open space of the nave. Here he would be seen by everyone and ignored by none. The shouting died unevenly, the way fires go out: the nearest voices first, then each farther behind in order as each neighbour fell quiet.
“Primate Vaziri.” His voice found the vaulting and the vaulting did what it was built to do. “Ten days ago, I stood in this building and told the Court of Reason that the Church’s orthodoxy was built on incomplete foundations. I was told I was irrational. I was stripped of my title, my office, and my standing.” He let the acoustics carry it.
“Yesterday, the man who laid those foundations stood in the Champ de Soleil and proved my thesis. He did it in front of half a million of the faithful. He did it with a sword and with light in his hands.”
The nave was very still.
“And this morning, I find you have built yourself a throne.”
Vaziri did not move. Her expression held great patience, and without responding, she inclined her head toward the north transept.
Calderon stepped forward.
He emerged with the reluctance of duress and protest. His vestments were formal and his expression carefully blank.
“Lambert sol Pallas.” Calderon’s voice carried with institutional candour. “You address this assembly without title, without office, and without standing. The Court of Reason divested you of your recognition. That ruling has not been overturned.” He paused.
“Your presence here is noted as a member of the laity. As such, Her Radiance does not recognise you. Your remarks are irregular.”
Her Radiance. The title had not been earned yet.
The word irregular did a great deal of institutional work, as Church vocabulary often did. It meant: we would prefer you were not here but have not yet found the correct form to make you leave.
Lambert looked at Calderon. Perhaps behind those vestments stood the man he had blackmailed.
“Irregular,” Lambert repeated. “Yes. I suppose it is.” He did not step back. “I wonder, Legate, whether the word you are looking for is ‘inconvenient.’”
“Inconvenient,” Calderon repeated. He did not appear to have anything to add to it.
Vaziri raised a hand. Calderon stepped back faster than protocol required.
“Lambert.” Not sol Pallas. Not Monsignor. His name, spoken by a great-aunt to a great-nephew, stripped of every title between them.
“You are not wrong that the Church must reckon with what happened yesterday. You are not wrong that these foundations require examination.” Her voice carried the calm of someone who had been reckoning with institutions since before he was born. “But reckoning requires order. It requires process. It requires someone in the seat.” She regarded him steadily. “Would you prefer the seat were empty?”
It was an excellent answer. Lambert had to concede it, but concession was not the same as surrender.
He drew breath to reply.
Without ceremony, the doors of Notre Reine opened and Valère walked in. His manner let all know that the building had been waiting for him and was embarrassed it had taken so long.
Caliburn hung at his side and his robes swept the stone.
The nave went silent: immediate and total, as several hundred people arrived at the same conclusion.
Valère did not look at Lambert nor the de Vaillants. He looked at Vaziri, seated on her chair of dark wood and gold leaf, his expression somewhere between recognition and contempt.
Behind her, the stained glass window of Aeloria caught the thin winter light. It had been there for as long as the cathedral had stood, depicting the goddess in radiant splendour, her hands wreathed in celestial fire.
“I see before me two false icons,” Valère said. “Neither deserving to be here.”
He drew Caliburn. The blade sang as it cleared the scabbard, and he cut the air once, a single precise stroke aimed at nothing and connecting with everything.
The stained glass window of Aeloria shattered. Coloured fragments rained down behind the platform in a cascade of broken devotion. The winter light that replaced it was plain, white, and unforgiving.
“And now for the other.” He turned to the platform. “Primate Vaziri.”
His voice carried warmth. It always did. “Your service to the faithful has been considerable. I do not diminish it.”
He let that settle.
“But the authority of the Pontifical Sede was not granted by conclave. It was not granted by tradition, nor by the consensus of clergy. It was granted by the man who founded this Church.” He paused. “That authority was mine to give. It remains mine to give. It was never delegated. It was lent.”
The logic settled across the nave like a verdict. Lambert watched the clergy do what they had been trained to do: follow the argument, test the premises, look for the flaw.
The premises held. That was the problem.
“It is my wish that Primate Ramirez Esteban ascend to the Pontifical Sede.”
He did not say I command. He said it is my wish, which was worse.
Esteban stepped forward. Lambert looked for the man he had pulled from the Sepulchre and found him, though quieter than he remembered.
Valère turned to him. From somewhere within his robes he produced a circlet of gold and solar motifs, and he placed it on Esteban’s head with the care of a man who had done this once before, a very long time ago, and remembered how it was supposed to feel.
Esteban received it. He did not bow. He did not kneel. He stood, and the circlet settled, and the nave watched a man become Pontifex in the space between one breath and the next.
One by one, the clergy knelt. Not all at once, but individual decisions, each making the next one easier.
? Theological conviction, when observed in large groups, behaves remarkably like weather. It moves in fronts.
Vaziri’s attendants closed around her. She stood before they could help her, descended the platform on her own terms, and did not look at Valère.
Esteban watched her go. Then he stepped onto the platform, took the crosier from where it rested against the arm of the chair, and sat.
He took his time. He arranged the crosier across his knees. He looked out across the nave, across the kneeling clergy, across the coloured glass on the floor where Aeloria’s window had been, across the de Vaillants standing in the nave, across the plain white winter light now filling the space her image had occupied.
He had waited for this. It did not show on his face, but it showed in his patience.
“The first matter before this sede is a declaration of canonical truth.”
The nave listened.
“It is the pronouncement of this office, ex cathedra, that the dragon cults were not eradicated following the événement. They persist. The Church’s former position to the contrary is revoked.”
One sentence. Lambert felt the architecture of the last ten days restructure around it. Esteban had just answered all of it with six words: they persist. The Church’s former position is revoked.
“It therefore follows that the case brought before the Court of Reason by Lambert sol Pallas and House de Vaillant is held to be sound in argument.” He looked at Lambert. “You have Reason.”
Lambert’s throat tightened.
“Lambert sol Pallas is restored to full standing within the Church of Invictus, with all titles, offices, and authority pertaining thereto.”
Each title landed like a stone returned to its wall. Inquisitor. Chaplain. Monsignor.
“House de Vaillant’s standing within the Church is confirmed without qualification.”
He paused.
“The testimony of Vivienne d’Aubigne, offered under oath before the Court of Reason, is found to have been presented in bad faith.” He paused. “Furthermore, in light of the charges of conspiracy and abduction established by the Court of Reason, the Church withdraws its recognition of Vivienne d’Aubigne as Countess. Her title is dissolved under ecclesiastical authority. Sentencing on the outstanding charges is remanded to the Court of Reason for determination.”
Esteban looked across the nave.
“Is there further business?”
There was not.
The chapel was empty, which suited him. It had been less occupied of late, and he had been more preoccupied.
Lambert knelt, hands folded, eyes open. He searched the bronze figure of Invictus with curiosity, but only found a statue today.
He prayed anyway.
Right hand could become accomplice so quietly that you would not notice the moment it changed.
His hand found the pendant at his throat. This time he did not pull it away.
“You still pray.”
Laila’s voice, from the doorway.
“Invictus hears my prayers regardless,” Lambert said. He did not turn around. “Whatever he is. Whatever the Church has made of him. The prayers arrive.”
She did not argue with this. She sat in the front pew. The wood creaked in the way old wood does when it recognises a familiar weight.
For a while, neither of them spoke.
“What do you think Alexios would have done?” Lambert asked, not looking at her. Looking at the altar that had no answers for him.
Laila did not answer immediately.
“The man I knew, the Alexios I married, that man would have fought every person in the Church and defied them to their teeth.” She paused. “The man I don’t know, the Alexios who was hidden behind secrets, that man I think may have traded conviction for outcome.”
“So you don’t know what he would have done.”
“I think I used to. But I think the answer lies somewhere between those two ideas of who he is.” She caught herself. “Was.”
The correction sat between them.
Then Laila unfolded the paper.
“I’ve been making enquiries about Isabella. Through every channel I have.” She smoothed the paper across her knee. “Nothing. No word from Voltari. No word from any of the contacts along the route. I’ve even written to Madame de Pompadour.”
“You wrote to Pompadour?” Lambert turned from the altar. “What did that cost you?”
“Only my pride, thankfully.” Laila folded the paper again, carefully, as though the creases mattered. “Madame was able to confirm that Isabella had visited the Rogue’s Gallery and seemed interested in Captain Voltari’s offer some days ago. But she hasn’t been able to confirm Isabella is on that ship.”
“Then where is she?”
“I don’t know. And that’s what worries me.”
“She didn’t want to be here, Lambert. She chose to leave. She chose a different name.” Laila’s voice held steady, but only just. “And now the silence is wrong, and I am supposed to decide how much of myself to spend on a daughter who told me this was no longer her home.”
“That isn’t a decision.”
“It should be. She left.”
“She’s family.”
“She doesn’t want to be.”
The chapel held this.
“Lambert, how do you do it? You hold two conflicting ideas in your head. I have tried to reconcile the two versions of Alexios that I know, and neither is correct. I love one. The other is a stranger.” Her voice thinned. “And now this. How am I supposed to hold both?”
“Perhaps I don’t reconcile them,” Lambert said. “Perhaps the division is the point. Perhaps the god I know is no more than a myth.” He looked at her. “But regardless of what I choose to believe in—”
He reached out and took her hand.
“The one constant I do have is family.”