Ruya · Rosehaven, Ardyn Kingdom
1724
The summons reached Aldwick on a Tuesday. Ruya read it four times before she believed what it said. She stood in the temple house doorway because the light was better there. The stove smoked behind her.
The assignment itself was ordinary. She was called to circuit duty in Ardyn, collecting tithes and giving blessings through its western provinces. It was six weeks of travel and whatever the diocese chose to attach to the end of it. The signature was the trouble.
The Pontiff did not sign circuit assignments. They carried a bishop’s signature and the diocese’s seal. At the bottom was an old man’s handwriting. The letters wandered more than she remembered. She ran her thumb under the last line. Brother Aldous had said the Pontiff nearly collapsed at an audience. She believed him at the time. Now she could see it for herself.
You will be in Rosehaven for the spring court sessions. I would consider it a kindness if, while you’re there, you paid attention to the city and wrote to me what you saw. Write in your own words and as much as you think worth telling.
He gave no hint of what she ought to notice. Nor did he say why a man with thirteen Cardinals at his call wanted a village priestess’s impressions of a provincial city.
The last hour before Rosehaven took her through clustered cottages and cow barns. The road grew so choked with handcarts that the final mile took longer than the four miles before it. Somewhere ahead a goat had gotten loose and at least three people were shouting about it. The whole road smelled of manure and bruised onion tops. Then came the wall, and beyond it a city.
Inside the gate the noise closed over her. Iron tires clattered on the cobbles, and hawkers shouted to sell bread and ribbon. A smith’s hammer rang, and from the cathedral square came the knock of masons’ mallets. After three years of small parishes it took Ruya most of a day to stop flinching at it.
Rosehaven sat where two trade roads met. Money passed through it, and so did the restlessness money brought. Scale’s Legion had burned it once, over a century ago. Ardyn rebuilt the city with good stone under painted shutters. Carved figures of house patrons stood above the doorways, and little shrines were set into the walls. The flowers left in them as offerings were browning at the edges. There were four temples, three of them recently renovated. In the cathedral square a large building had been under construction for at least two seasons and it was nowhere near finished. People walked faster here than anyone in Aldwick and barely looked at one another.
Collecting the tithes of three parishes took two days and one uncomfortable conversation with a priest whose sums always rounded in his own favor. She asked him pleasantly to explain the figures again. Then once more. By the time he reached the fourth explanation, the priest looked down at the page and corrected the numbers himself. She spent one night beside a dying weaver, because his daughter asked her to stay and Ruya could think of no good reason to refuse.
By the eighth day she had begun to understand what she was supposed to notice. Rosehaven was in a tense mood and everyone somehow agreed to pretend not to see it. Two of its four temples preached on stewardship within the same week. That alone might have been chance. Their nearly identical phrases about gifts given rather than gifts taken made it seem harder to deny.
In the market a smith and his customer broke off their talk the moment they saw she was clergy. When she asked about the building in the cathedral square, nobody would say who was paying for it. She wrote none of it down. By then Ruya suspected she had been sent here because she looked like a village priestess riding circuit, too unimportant for anyone to put on a show for.
Ruya saw Esrin on the ninth day, across a reception hall she had never meant to enter. They recognized each other. Neither looked surprised. Local lords mingled with prosperous merchants and two magistrates made a slow circuit of the room. A sprinkling of clergy lent the whole affair respectability. Ruya was one of them. Musicians in the gallery played a tune the guests talked over. The air smelled of beeswax and too much rosewater.
Esrin reached her within minutes. Ruya noticed how quickly and did not mind. She came through the crowd without once seeming to hurry. Her fair hair was pinned so neatly that Ruya became aware of her own braid.
“Sister Ruya.”
“Lady Esrin.” Ruya’s smile was sincere, which surprised her a little. “You’re a great deal more formidable than I remember from Caelmont.”
“Formidable.” Esrin weighed the word and seemed to approve of it. “I asked after you twice this year and was given two different provinces. Either the Church misplaces its treasures or it hides them very well.”
She looked Ruya over with blunt attention. “You look tired. But well.”
“I’ve been sleeping in a chair beside a weaver who’s dying. It’ll pass.”
“Will he live?”
“No.”
“And you’re going back again tonight?”
“Yes.”
Esrin nodded and offered no condolences. They had met three years earlier in Caelmont, when Ruya was newly ordained. At seventeen she was the most junior of four priests in a bishop’s delegation. Esrin was two years older. She was already a lady-in-waiting and seemed at ease in a court whose rules Ruya barely knew existed.
They disliked each other for two days. On the third day they were seated together at a dinner neither of them wanted to attend. They found out that both had spent the evening noticing the same things about everyone else at the table. A dozen letters had passed between them since. They were not friends in any way Ruya could have explained.
“You’ll want to know why I’m in Rosehaven,” Esrin said.
“I hadn’t asked.”
“You were about to. You had the expression.”
She took a glass from a passing tray, one she plainly had no intention of drinking. “I came straight from the Mercer unveiling without going home first, which my mother has already seen fit to complain about in writing. I’m here for sponsorships mainly. Four minor lords in this province have more money than influence and they seem determined to gain it.”
“And you’d like House Cortez to give them the backing they need.”
“Before another house reaches them.”
“That’s remarkably direct.”
“It isn’t direct at all. If you begin with something true early enough, everything afterward sounds just as true.” Esrin’s mouth curved. “You’d have seen through it by tomorrow. I’d rather not waste a day waiting.”
Ruya laughed out loud. In a room full of polite laughter the sound turned several heads. For the next hour they worked the room from opposite ends. Ruya watched Esrin closely. Esrin listened like a surveyor pacing out a field.
For six minutes she drew a minor lord into talking about his son’s marriage prospects without ever seeming to steer him. She left him thinking they had only chatted about his family. Ruya listened to the same man afterward. She learned that he was afraid his son would never forgive him for something he had not yet done. All she did was remark that he seemed to have been carrying the worry for some time. He talked for minutes. When he thanked her, she wondered if she had even said anything.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
Both conversations left him happier with an evening he had not wanted to attend. Only one of his listeners was working out what his worries were. That troubled Ruya less than it ought to have. She was still thinking about it when a magistrate’s wife caught her sleeve.
“The new chapel funding, of course. Nobody will say where it’s come from, which I find rather thrilling. Divine provision, Father Ramiro calls it.” She gave a delighted little laugh. “Divine provision with a very good accountant, if you ask me.”
“Nobody knows?” Ruya asked mildly.
“Nobody says, Sister.” She touched Ruya’s wrist, pleased to be asked. “That’s what makes it so delicious.”
Esrin found her near the end of the evening on the terrace, where the noise was bearable. The night air was cool and smelled of wet stone and chimney smoke. “You’ve been asking about the chapel.”
“The chapel and three other things.”
“You asked three people about it tonight, three different times.” Esrin leaned on the balustrade. Below them Rosehaven looked quiet and respectable. Over the cathedral square the unfinished building stood dark inside its scaffolding. “The last one, you asked as though you’d forgotten an answer you had already been given.”
“That—”
“Was a professional’s trick. Where did you learn it?”
“I’ve mediated a great many arguments between farmers over water rights.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“No,” Ruya agreed. “It’s a true thing said in place of one. I’m told that works.”
Esrin gave a short laugh and shook her head. “I hope the Cardinals never notice you.”
For a while both stood without speaking. Across the city the bells of four temples rang. Ruya heard them and thought of the weaver’s door. Esrin had not yet said what she came out to say, and Ruya wanted to hear it.
“Money is coming into this province through channels I don’t recognize,” Esrin said. Her voice had changed. The lightness was gone from it and she kept it low.
“It’s passing through houses I would have expected to handle it themselves. Even the influential houses are putting forward sums larger than they usually dare. I’ve traced the money as far as the chapel and other ventures, but not to its source.” She put her glass on the stone. “I’ve spent nine days trying to find out whose money it is and I haven’t managed to find one solid lead. I dislike admitting that more than I care to say.”
“Why tell me?”
“Because you’ll keep asking out of curiosity. Everyone else in that hall asks because they want something.” She stopped. “And with you…”
Esrin looked faintly annoyed with herself and went on anyway. “In all the years I’ve known you, you’ve never once doubted me when I told you something that was true. You simply believed me. And when I trusted you with something private or something that was weighing on me, you never used it against me. I’ve often wondered why.”
“It’s not that complicated. I simply don’t want anything from you.”
“Yes.” Esrin’s smile was thin and very warm. “That’s the part I’ve never understood.”
Ruya went back to the weaver that night. She had promised the weaver’s daughter she would be back before the bells rang. She had heard them ring from the terrace. A light still showed in the window when she reached the lane. The daughter opened the door before Ruya could knock. Her sleeves were wet to the elbow.
“He couldn’t get his breath,” the girl said. “I held him up till it came back.”
She did not step aside.
“Where were you, Sister?”
There was no anger in it. She asked it the way she might have asked the price of a ball of yarn.
“At a reception,” Ruya said. She made herself hold the girl’s eyes while she said it.
The girl looked at her a moment longer. Then the girl turned back into the room and left the door for Ruya to close. Ruya could smell the rosewater still on her own sleeve.
He had stopped speaking two days before. The little room smelled of fever and of linen overdue for washing. His loom stood against the far wall with a length of undyed cloth still on it, and the weaving ended where his hands had stopped. One lamp on the sill gave just enough light to show his chest rising. His breathing filled the room. Every change in its rhythm made his daughter flinch. Most of the changes meant nothing on their own, and that did not make them easier to listen to.
Over the next six hours Ruya rested her palm on his chest and eased his pain. It was all she could offer. Each time she lifted her hand away it was cold to the wrist and her fingers were slow. Between times she held a cup to his lips. His hand would not stop trembling in hers.
Some time after midnight the daughter spoke without taking her eyes off him. “Is it true the world’s ending, Sister?”
Ruya looked up.
“They were talking about it at the well. Mercer’s made a weapon anyone can hold. There’s a woman with no gift and she broke a post apart from across a room.” The girl’s voice was flat with tiredness. “My uncle says it’s the end of things.”
Ruya found her thumb had stopped moving across the back of his hand.
“Your uncle is wrong.”
“He usually is.” The girl wiped her father’s lips with a damp cloth. “I only wondered.”
After three in the morning the pauses between his breaths began to stretch. Ruya had stopped counting them. She only listened and waited for the next breath to begin. Each time it came the girl let her own breath go with it. Then one pause went on. Ruya listened past the place where the breath should have been. The lamp hissed softly on the sill while a shutter out in the lane knocked once in the wind. His hand no longer trembled.
He died quietly, in one of the pauses.
Several seconds passed before his daughter understood that this pause was different. By then Ruya had the girl’s hand. She had taken it before the moment came. The girl did not cry. She leaned toward the pallet and waited. Ruya held on and let her wait.
When the girl’s hand finally tightened, Ruya closed his eyes and prayed over him. Her own voice sounded strange to her in a room that no longer had his breathing in it. Afterward her fingers were cold from easing him, and they would not close on the blanket to straighten it. She stayed until the morning and the girl could be talked into sitting down to eat.
Two days later Ruya wrote to the Pontiff in the hour before dawn. It took her three tries before the letter said what she meant. She wrote by a stub of tallow candle. The first two drafts stopped at the part about the woman with no gift. On the third she made herself keep going.
Your Holiness,
You asked me to tell you what I saw. I do not think I found the thing you meant for me to find, so I will tell you what I noticed instead.
Rosehaven is a prosperous city and very proud of it. Beneath that, the city is tense over something no one wishes to mention. Two temples preached nearly the same sermon in a week. A chapel is being raised, and no one knows who is funding it. Everyone I asked about it seemed to have prepared an answer before I arrived.
A woman of House Cortez has spent the better part of a fortnight trying to trace the money and has not found the source. She is very good at what she does. I find her failure more troubling than the money itself.
I do not know what any of this means. I would rather admit that than give you an answer polished enough to resemble understanding.
Everyone here speaks of the weapon Mercer created. They ask whether such things are holy or whether they ought to be permitted.
I do not think that is the question.
They say the woman that held Mercer’s weapon had no gift. That seems to trouble people more deeply than the weapon ever could. I have thought about her often since I heard of it. No one here has told me her name. I am beginning to suspect no one thought it was important enough to learn.
A tool has never chosen what it is for.
This week I sat beside a man dying of a sickness in his lungs. No weapon gave him that sickness. No weapons could have taken it from him. His daughter will mourn him just the same.
I find myself thinking less about what this new weapon could do and more about what people think of it without even seeing it for themselves.
Since I arrived, everyone in Rosehaven has been careful around me. I think whatever is happening in this city began in its people long before the weapon was introduced.
I hope you are resting, which I know you are not.
— R.
She read it through once and decided it was either useless or the only true thing she had written in a year.
She sent it before she could lose her nerve.