Ruya · Aldwick, Sectar Theocracy
1724
The temple house at Aldwick was a single room with a stove and a bed that Ruya seldom reached before midnight. She barely dreamed most nights. She woke before first light as she had every morning since she was nine. In Solara, an under-sister used to walk the stone corridors with a handbell at an hour Ruya still considered offensive. The bell was years behind her now, but her body remained obedient. On cold mornings she sometimes wished her habits were a little less devout.
She coaxed a flame from the banked embers. A thin thread of smoke escaped into the room carrying the bitter smell of soot before the stove began drawing up the chimney. Ruya braided her hair by the weak light. Her hair was dark and unremarkable. It would be slipping free by midmorning. Nobody ever taught her to braid it properly. Asking someone at twenty to show her felt more embarrassing than continuing to do it badly. When the braid was done, she tucked the small gold pendant inside her collar. It was all she had of parents she had never known, and the worn mark on its face meant nothing to her.
Newcomers often took Ruya to be younger than she was. She was small. The face the basin water reflected back to her was brown and freckled across the nose, and her eyes were green. People did not expect those features from a priestess. The mistake usually lasted until she spoke.
She said the morning prayers quietly. There was no one present to judge whether she said them well, which she privately counted among the posting’s advantages. Outside, the village was already waking. Its forty-one households occupied the shallow valley three days north of anywhere a mapmaker considered worth naming. Ruya knew the number because she kept the register. She knew most of the people because they made anonymity impossible.
By the time she pulled on her boots, smoke was rising from nine chimneys. Down the field, goats were bleating over a child shouting furiously. Whatever it was, it was plainly urgent to the child. The goats appeared indifferent. Ruya stepped outside.
Before Aldwick she spent nine months in Wennet. Before Wennet came Fairhollow, her first posting. Nearly three years in the temple’s service, and all of them spent in muddy villages. Every letter home required some sort of explanation of where she had been sent.
It was not the career anyone expected of a priestess ordained at seventeen. By twenty Ruya was supposed to have been working in a cathedral, preferably one important enough that people in Solara recognized it. A cathedral offered polished stone floors and a choir. It also meant long days of administration for people whose approval mattered. If service to God required that much attention to rank, she wondered whether anyone still had time left for God. Ruya never wanted it. She had never quite understood why anyone did.
By midmorning Old Tamsin had been talking for the better part of an hour. Ruya had contributed perhaps nine words. They sat on overturned crates beside the goat pen. Straw lay crushed into the mud beneath their boots and the sour animal smell thickened whenever something shifted behind the fence.
Corwin stood across from Ruya with his arms folded so tightly that his shoulders had drawn inward. He would not sit. He would not leave either. For the third week, he had chosen to endure the company of a woman whose well he had shared for thirty years.
“My father set that marker,” Tamsin said. “His father stood there and watched him do it. Now I’m meant to believe a flood carried the thing a foot onto my grazing?”
Corwin stared toward the goat pen. “The flood took half the bank. Ask anyone who saw it.”
“Did anyone see the water carry that stone in a straight line? Just far enough to favor you?”
“Ask the water! Since you have no intention of believing me.”
“I’m asking you!”
Corwin finally looked at her. “You’re calling me a liar?” His voice caught slightly on the last word.
Tamsin’s mouth tightened.
Corwin went on before she could answer. “Thirty years, Tamsin. Thirty years you’ve known me and that’s what you think of me?”
Ruya kept her expression still.
And there it is. They had reached something that was not about the stone. A boundary dispute normally resolved before noon, if the boundary was actually the problem. When an argument lasted for weeks, Ruya had learned not to pay attention to whatever people claimed to be fighting over. People could tell her exactly where a fence ought to stand. They were far worse at explaining where they had been hurt. Ruya said nothing.
Tamsin turned on her instead. “And you! Three weeks you’ve sat on that crate and not one word out of you!” Her voice went up. “What’s a priestess for, then? My goats can sit and say nothing.”
Corwin glanced at Ruya as if he had wondered the same.
Ruya took the question to heart. At Solara she had asked it of herself over every fever her gift could not break. She could answer. She could walk down to the bank and rule on the stone within the hour. Tamsin would take that quarrel gladly. It was far easier than the one standing across from her with his arms folded. Ruya kept her hands folded in her lap. Tamsin would say it at the well tonight. Ruya was sure of that much.
Behind her a goat dragged its horns along the fence. Tamsin looked down at her hands and Corwin turned his attention to the pen. Neither seemed willing to be the first to speak. Ruya let it linger.
Eventually, she found an opening. “Tamsin,” she said. Her voice was clear, but it rasped a little after a week of sickrooms. “When did you last speak to Corwin about anything besides the marker?”
Tamsin drew breath as if the answer were obvious. She glanced at Corwin and her mouth closed. “Before his wife passed,” Tamsin said at last. “We used to eat together most weeks.”
“Have you sat with him since?”
Tamsin dropped her eyes. “No.”
Corwin’s arms loosened.
“I meant to,” she said. “Every time I passed his door, I thought about knocking. Then what was I supposed to say?”
“You could have asked whether I’d eaten.” His voice went rough. “You used to ask often enough.”
“I didn’t want to make it worse.”
“There’s enough quiet in that house without you adding to it.”
Tamsin’s head came up. “You might have told me.”
“I shouldn’t have had to ask.” He looked away the moment he said it.
Eleven months had passed since his wife died. In all that time neither had found a way across the space she left. Ruya stayed on her crate. The talk that followed dragged, with pauses long enough to tempt her into helping. She resisted. Tamsin began to cry. She swiped at her eyes, angry at herself for it. Corwin fumbled a cloth from his pocket and held it out. She took it without looking at him.
“I’ve stew enough for two tonight,” she said after a while.
“You always make enough for six.”
“Then you needn’t complain of going hungry.”
He rubbed a hand over his mouth. “I’ll come.”
They returned to the marker soon afterward and settled its place in less than five minutes. Ruya left them arguing over who would fetch the shovel. On the walk back to the temple house, she allowed herself the modest satisfaction of having been useful without saying much.
She stopped at the Hallows’ house on the way. The boy’s cough had improved, though not enough for his mother to trust it yet. The room smelled of warm linen drying beside the stove. A half-mended shirt lay beneath the window with the needle still caught through the cloth.
“He slept better,” his mother said. “Then this morning he coughed until he was about to vomit.”
“Only once,” the boy protested.
His mother looked down at him. “Once was enough.”
Ruya knelt beside the cot and the boy sat straight at once. He wore the solemn expression children often adopted when they believed an examination required seriousness. Ruya rested one palm against his narrow chest. His breathing still rasped under her hand. The sound was rougher than she liked, but the tightness she had felt three days earlier had eased.
She let the warmth come. A faint green glow gathered beneath her fingers. It seeped through the worn cloth of his shirt and spread gently into his chest. The boy watched her hand with great concentration. Ruya felt the gift answer, then weaken. There was little left for it to do. Her gift had always been small.
The great healers in temple histories worked on battlefields where they closed wounds that should have killed a man. Some were said to have set shattered bone beneath their hands while soldiers screamed into leather straps. Ruya had never done anything like that. She lowered fevers. She eased stubborn coughs. If she reached someone early enough, she could keep a small illness from becoming a dangerous one. She could dull pain for a while. She once felt embarrassed about how little her gift was until she began sitting beside people who had already endured hours without relief. After that, an hour without pain stopped seeming small.
The year before her ordination she forced her gift past its limits. She pushed until her hands trembled. Sister Merrow watched her do this for months before deciding Ruya would not get stronger. Merrow taught healing at Solara and was one of the finest healers in the capital. She was lean and gray-haired. She dressed so plainly that she looked more like a village midwife. Her hands set more broken bones than most surgeons. Ruya never once heard her raise her voice.
One evening, after Ruya nearly dropped a basin because her fingers would not stop shaking, Merrow took it from her and set it aside. Then she looked at Ruya’s hands. You cannot make your gift greater by punishing yourself.Ruya stared at the floor.
Merrow waited until she looked up. Use what you were given while you still have the strength to use it well.
Ruya lifted her hand from the boy’s chest. He began picking at a loose thread on his sleeve. The gift had left her mouth dry even for so little and she swallowed before she spoke.
Ruya glanced at his mother. “He’ll be running you ragged within the week.”
The boy looked up. “Can I go outside, then?”
Ruya sighed. “You see? He’s already planning his escape.”
“Not today.” His mother folded her arms.
The boy slumped.
“When his strength comes back, let him spend some of it. A little mischief will be a welcome improvement.” Ruya stood and brushed her skirt.
“You can say that, Sister. You won’t be chasing him.”
“I am deeply grateful for that.”
His mother laughed. Ruya turned toward the door. A hand caught hers. She looked back.
“Thank you.”
Ruya’s fingers tightened slightly around hers. “You’re welcome.”
“Truly. Thank you.”
By the time Ruya reached the door, warmth had climbed into her face. Gratitude ought to have become easier to accept by now. Some part of her still remembered being the girl at Solara whose gift could not do enough. That girl had never learned what to do when someone believed it had.
That afternoon Ruya ended up minding children, which was not part of her appointed duties. It started as a favor to one mother and grew until the room was full of them. Their damp cloaks steamed by the stove and filled the room with the smell of wet wool. They wanted the flood story again. They always wanted to hear how the world had drowned before the founding, and how God had drawn the land up from beneath the water. Ruya had lost count of how often she told it. The children would have considered that a poor reason to stop. She performed it as expected. As she got to the part where the water began to recede, the youngest leaned toward her and asked.
“Why did He let it flood at all?” The speaker was a sharp-faced girl of about nine. Judging by her expression, she had been saving the question for several days.
Ruya lowered her cup. “What do you mean?”
“If He could pull the land back up, He could have kept it from going under. Couldn’t He?”
A log settled in the stove with a soft crack. The other children went quiet and their faces told Ruya that the girl was the only one brave enough to ask. She looked at the child properly. There was a certain satisfaction in that small face, with curiosity underneath it.
“I don’t know,” Ruya said.
The girl frowned. “That isn’t what you’re supposed to say.”
“What should I say?”
“That His reasons are beyond us.”
“I believe they are. That still leaves your question unanswered, doesn’t it?”
The girl considered this with deep suspicion. “Aren’t you supposed to know?”
“Almost certainly.” A few of the older children grinned. Ruya set her cup aside. “But I won’t make up an answer just because you’ve asked me a hard question.”
“Then what am I to do with it?”
“Keep asking, and listen carefully to what people tell you. Being faithful doesn’t mean pretending to understand everything God has done.”
The girl drew her knees up. “What if I never understand?”
That was the harder question, and Ruya would have preferred someone older to be asking it. “Then it may trouble you for a long time,” she said. “I have questions like that myself. I still say my prayers.”
“That sounds hard.”
“It is. A wrong answer would be more comfortable but I doubt it would do either of us much good.”
The girl nodded with the gravity of someone agreeing to overlook a fault.
“You may ask again,” Ruya added. “Though I’d be obliged if you let me finish the story first.”
“I was waiting for the end.”
“So was everyone else.”
The girl smiled. Ruya returned to the story. Watching the children settle around her, she thought a cathedral would have to offer a great deal to make up for this.
Brother Aldous arrived two days later with dust to his knees and the quarter’s post strapped to his mule. His face suggested that every village between Aldwick and the coast road had detained him with the same questions. “Sister Ruya. You’re a hard woman to find.” He said it in the same tired level voice he used for tithes.
“I’m where the temple roster says I am.”
“The roster is three villages behind you. By now I believe it’s a doctrine.”
She brought him water. He drank half of it before he remembered to thank her, then lowered himself onto the temple steps with a groan. The mule shifted nearby and groaned. Aldous smelled of warm dust and of an animal that worked as hard as its rider.
“Post or news?” he asked.
“News, while we sort through the post.”
The first letter came from the Solara archive and confirmed a supply order. Beneath it lay a note from a sister two villages over. It asked Ruya’s judgment in a quarrel that would certainly become hers the moment she gave one. She set that aside.
“Something wrong?” Aldous asked.
“An invitation to make myself useful elsewhere.”
“A peril of the vocation.”
Under the note was a notice of revised tithe dates. It would go beside the door where people could walk past it for a month before telling her they were never informed. Aldous talked while Ruya read. Three weeks in the saddle had left him with strong opinions about washed-out roads and the officials responsible for leaving them that way. Several villages were complaining about the desert tribes again.
Ruya kept her eyes on the letter. “What have they done this time?”
“That depends who you ask.”
“That sounds promising.”
“It means no one knows.” Aldous gave her a tired look.
“Not even in Solara?” There was enough truth in that to silence him for a moment.
His report wandered through a dispute over tithes and eventually reached Solara. “There’s a young priest,” Aldous said. “He has become entangled with a merchant’s daughter.”
Her hand stopped.
“Entangled?”
“That is the inexplicit version.”
“And the other version?”
“Depends which Cardinal’s household you ask.”
Ruya lowered the letter. Aldous was smiling.
“Whose priest?”
“Cardinal Bulasmis placed him at Saint Orin’s two years ago.”
“And the merchant?”
“Supplies lamp oil to three cathedrals. His brother sits on the eastern trade council.”
Ruya understood. The girl didn’t matter in Solara. Neither did the priest. “What does Bulasmis’s opposition want?”
“The priest disciplined publicly.”
“And Bulasmis?”
“The matter handled quietly.”
“Of course.”
A public punishment would stain the Cardinal who had sponsored him while a private one would allow Bulasmis’s enemies to whisper that he protected his own. Either choice could be useful. Ruya folded the letter along its crease. “So the city is discussing a young man’s sins because several older men dislike one another.”
“That would be the short version.”
“And the merchant’s daughter?”
Aldous rubbed his thumb along the rim of his cup. “Mostly discussed as evidence.”
Ruya’s mouth tightened. Aldous took another drink. “Everyone is being extremely careful not to discuss it.”
“Why?”
“Bulasmis’s people are listening for anyone repeating the merchant’s version and the Chancery wants to know whether the cathedral courts will claim jurisdiction. Two Cardinals who have no interest in the girl whatsoever have lately developed very strong opinions about clerical discipline.”
“I had almost forgotten how exhausting the capital is.”
Aldous gave a faint smile. “Solara has not forgotten how exhausting you find it.”
“That sounds threatening.”
“Only if they remember where Aldwick is.”
“They have the temple rolls.”
“The rolls are three villages behind you.”
That drew a small laugh from her.
“Officially, nobody is discussing the matter.”
“Of course not.”
Then he paused to drink. “There’s word of His Holiness as well,” he said. “His health is no better. Worse, by some accounts. Nobody cares to say so plainly. He insisted on holding a full audience last month and nearly collapsed.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
With His Holiness ill, every dispute in Solara now carried uncertainty over who would protect his people and whose influence would survive once the chair became empty. Even a foolish priest and a merchant’s daughter could become pieces on a board.
“The Cardinals are already circling. Quietly, of course.”
Ruya’s hands went still on the letters. She hardly heard the part about the Cardinals. What she saw was the Pontiff in that vast hall. He was past seventy now, and he stayed on his feet because an audience had been announced and people expected to be received. It was the stubbornness she remembered, turned against a body that could no longer carry it.
She had been eleven when he first spoke to her. That day she was carrying linens across the lower cloister when she rounded a pillar and dropped the whole stack at his feet. The white cloth spread across the dusty flagstones. She stood staring at it and could not decide whether to kneel to the Pontiff or apologize for being in his way. The churchmen walking behind him stepped around the cloth. He spared her the choice by kneeling beside her even though he had bad knees. Together they gathered up every piece.
“Such a serious face,” he said. “Have you a question to go with it?”
She was already disgraced past repair, so there seemed little point in hiding what she wanted to know. Why did God trouble Himself over people who did not believe in Him? The Pontiff laughed until he had to sit down on the cloister step. Ruya stood there clutching the linens, certain she had made everything worse. Then he answered her. He took nearly half an hour and he spoke as though her question deserved all the time he could give it. She went away with the linens in her arms and had been loyal ever since.
“I should write to him,” she said.
Aldous nodded. “You should. He’d be glad of it.”
For a little while he left her alone with that. Then he shifted to ease his back and the day’s business resumed. “There’s a quarrel at Fairhollow you’ll hear of sooner or later,” he said. “Two households have gotten hold of those heated stones. Possibly three.”
“The Scale ones?”
“The very same. Somebody’s cousin brought them up from the coast. Half the village thinks them a marvel. The other half has discovered a new sin.”
Ruya looked up from the letter in her hands. “What does the priest say?”
“Enough in public to regret having said anything. I expect he’ll spend a fortnight explaining himself.”
“Wennet had lamps before I was posted there.”
“Solara has them too. You’ll find them in every parish house between here and the sea, and nobody has threatened damnation over those.”
“But a warm stone is another matter.”
“Apparently. A man may read his prayers by a lamp without offense, but let him keep his fingers warm in winter and someone will find a reason to object.” Aldous spread his hands. “I’ve given up trying to learn where they draw the line. Usually it’s wherever they happen to be standing.”
“Where they stand might tell us something.”
“About the stones?”
“About the people.”
He turned toward her. For all his complaining, Aldous listened to the answer when he asked a question.
“A tool doesn’t choose its user,” she said. “That was true when someone forged the first sword. I don’t see why a stone that holds heat should be any different.”
She ran her thumb along the crease of the letter. “Corwin and Tamsin spent three weeks quarreling over a boundary marker and what they finally needed to say had very little to do with grazing. I’d want to hear more from Fairhollow before I decided the stones were the issue.”
“You think they’ve found something convenient to fight over?”
“I’d ask what they were arguing about beforehand.”
Aldous watched her a moment. There was affection in his face and some worry beside it. “Keep talking that way and they’ll make you a Cardinal.”
“They have never made a woman a Cardinal and I don’t want to be the first.”
“Saint Jowenna commanded the Crusaders once.”
“And Joyce’s lords killed her for it. Besides, I have enough trouble persuading people to read a tithe notice.”
“Then you’ll find the work familiar.”
She gave him a look. Smiling, he handed over the rest of the village post and braced his hands on his knees to rise.
“That’s the trouble, Sister. In my experience it’s the ones who don’t want it who get it.”
His next village was three days’ ride. By midafternoon he was back on the road and the mule’s dust trailed after them until the bend took them both. Ruya carried the post inside. She entered the boundary agreement in the register before either neighbor could reconsider.
Boundary dispute resolved to the satisfaction of both parties.
It was nowhere near the truth and there was no column for the rest. Tomorrow’s lesson still needed preparing and she promised herself she would mend her hem before it caught on another nail.
She wrote to the Pontiff that evening. The letter took four pages, mostly about the children and the state of the roof. She found room for the goat that had learned to open a latch. His Holiness must receive any number of letters about important matters. She doubted that enough of them concerned goats.
She did not write that she had heard he was ill. If she asked, he would feel obliged to answer. She would rather he spent the effort on resting. She sealed the pages while they were still cheerful.
Fairhollow came to mind twice more before the week was out. Neither thought kept her long. It was a small quarrel, and the village had a priest of its own. There was work enough in Aldwick.