The first sign that the Temple of Grace had decided I was a problem was the silence.
Millbrook was not, by nature, a silent town. On an ordinary morning the square sounded like a kettle with opinions — vendors shouting over each other, dogs with grievances, the blacksmith's hammer keeping time like a town metronome. That morning, I came down the tavern stairs to find the street empty enough to hear my own boots.
Diane stood behind her bar with a rag in her hand and the expression of a woman who had just watched a funeral pass her window.
"Don't go out the front," she said.
"Why?"
She pointed with the rag. I stepped to the window and looked out.
The Temple's procession was coming up the cobbled road in perfect formation, and if you have never seen a religious order arrive to ruin your morning, let me assure you they have excellent posture.
At the front rode a woman in a carriage the color of old bone, and sitting beside the carriage — because the Temple of Grace apparently did not believe in walking — was a horse-drawn wagon loaded with what I could only describe as furniture. Filing cabinets. Desks. A full-sized interrogation desk, with a blotter, being hauled behind a cart like artillery.
"Is that a desk?" I said.
"That is Sister Maren's desk," Diane said. "She brings her own. Says she does her best thinking seated."
"That's either a power move or a bad back."
"I believe both things can be true."
I watched the procession arrive. The woman who stepped down from the carriage was tall, lean, in her mid-forties, with her hair pulled back in a knot so tight it looked structural. She wore the Temple's white-and-silver, a gray traveling cloak, and a face that had never once in her life been photographed smiling. She looked at Millbrook the way a health inspector looks at a kitchen.
"Who is that?" I asked, although I already knew.
"Sister Maren. Inquisitor of the Temple of Grace. Third Order." Diane's voice dropped. "Ethan. They don't send inquisitors for rumors."
"What do they send inquisitors for?"
"For people the rumors are about."
The procession took the town hall — the mayor, a man named Aldous Pettifer who had the spine of a jellyfish and the moral courage of a jellyfish's shadow, surrendered it within minutes. By noon, Maren had set up her desk in the hall's main chamber, hung a banner of the Temple behind her, and posted a notice on the town board. Paula brought me the notice herself, read it aloud in the tavern, and then stood there waiting for my reaction like the paper had personally insulted her mother.
"Public announcement," Paula read, jabbing the notice with one finger. "'By the authority of the Temple of Grace, an inquiry is hereby opened into reports of CORRUPTED TASTE in the township of Millbrook. All residents are required to cooperate. Any person found to be suffering from the affliction of corrupted taste is to present themselves voluntarily for examination and blessing. Signed, Sister Maren, Inquisitor, Third Order.'"
"Corrupted taste," I said. "That's me. That's just... me. They put my thing in a notice."
"Your thing has a notice," Willa said from the corner booth, where she was eating a leg of something with her hands. "Congratulations. You are a poster."
"It's not a poster, it's a legal document."
"You are a legal document." Willa tore a strip of meat with her teeth and grinned at me, her ears twitching. "The Temple wants to examine your taste. They will find it delicious. I have examined it extensively. Nine out of ten."
"Stop talking."
"The tenth examination was last night. I was lenient. I rounded up."
Paula, who had been standing very straight during this entire exchange, made a sound like a door hinge. She was trying very hard not to laugh and doing a terrible job of hiding it.
"Right," I said. "So. The Temple sent an inquisitor to investigate my taste in women. Anybody have a plan?"
"Yes," Paula said immediately. "Duel her."
"No."
"She would be no challenge. Did you see her posture? She rides sidesaddle. A sidesaddle rider cannot —"
"We are not dueling the inquisitor."
"Why not? The Temple respects demonstrations of honor."
"The Temple respects paperwork, Paula. She brought a desk. You can't duel a desk."
"I could break the desk."
"That would be a crime."
"I would pay the fine."
Diane set a plate of stew in front of me with the authority of a woman deploying a tactical countermeasure. "Eat. And listen to me, both of you. Sister Maren is not like the Temple ladies who come through at festival time to bless the wells. She is — she is the real thing. When I was a girl, she came to our village and questioned my aunt about her second marriage. My aunt was a solicitor's wife and thought she was clever. By the end of the afternoon my aunt had confessed to things she hadn't even done yet, and the Temple annulled the marriage and fined the solicitor."
"What did the solicitor do?" Paula asked.
"Married her. That was the confession. He married my aunt, and apparently that was enough."
"That's not a crime," I said.
"Not being graceful was the crime, dear. My aunt was — she was like me." Diane gestured at herself with the rag. "Big-boned. Big-hearted. The Temple called it 'an excess of flesh indicating a deficit of grace.' They fined him for marrying her and they sent her to a convent in the hills to learn modesty."
"Jesus," I said.
"I don't know him, but he sounds kinder."
"Paula, you had one job."
"Listening. I am listening."
The bell over the tavern door rang, and everyone in the room stopped mid-motion like we'd all been paused. A Temple acolyte stood in the doorway — a young man, pale, willowy, with the kind of delicate wrists that in this world made women swoon. He held a sealed letter.
"Ethan Parker?" he said.
"That's me."
He crossed the room, handed me the letter, bowed, and left. The letter was heavy parchment. The seal was the Temple's. The handwriting was small, precise, and furious.
Paula read over my shoulder. "'The bearer is summoned to present himself before Sister Maren, Inquisitor, Third Order, at the town hall at the hour of three, for questioning regarding matters of spiritual health.' Spiritual health," she said, disgusted. "They want to question your soul about your — about us."
"About my taste," I said.
"About my taste," she agreed, and her hand went to the hilt of her sword. She had started carrying it again, which I understood as affection and she understood as being ready.
Three o'clock came the way all unpleasant things come — slowly, and then all at once. The town hall had been transformed. Maren's desk sat in the center of the chamber like a throne with paperwork. Two acolytes flanked her with the blank, devoted faces of people who had never once been inconvenienced. The banner behind her showed the Temple's goddess, a willowy pale figure with her arms raised, looking down at me with what I chose to interpret as curiosity rather than judgment.
"Sit," Sister Maren said.
I sat.
She looked at me for a long moment. Forty-four years old, gray eyes, the kind of face that gave nothing away — not hostile, not warm, simply professional. A woman doing a job she considered important and dirty.
"Mr. Parker," she said. "Do you know why I am here?"
"I'm going to guess it's not the festival."
"The Temple does not send inquisitors to festivals." She folded her hands. "Mr. Parker, are you aware that you have been reported for the affliction known as corrupted taste?"
"I'm aware it's been reported."
"And do you deny it?"
This was the moment, I realized, where a smarter man would lie. But I had spent four weeks in this town and I was genuinely, hopelessly, embarrassingly in love with three of its most pitied outcasts, and lying about it felt like denying the weather.
"No," I said. "I don't deny it."
One of the acolytes flinched. Maren did not move. She made a note — one precise line, in a ledger that appeared to have been prepared for exactly this occasion.
"Honesty," she said. "Unusual. Most sufferers deny it for weeks. Tell me, Mr. Parker — when did you first notice that your taste had been corrupted?"
"I didn't notice it at all, Sister. As far as I'm concerned, my taste is fine."
"That is the nature of the affliction. The diseased do not feel their disease." She leaned forward. "Describe to me what you find attractive."
This was a trap and I knew it was a trap and I walked into it anyway, because there was no way around it that didn't end with me lying about Paula.
"Strength," I said. "Warmth. People who are genuine. A woman who can knock a man down with one hand and then feel bad about it for a week. A woman who runs a tavern like a ship and feeds the whole town. A woman who'd tear a wolf apart to protect somebody."
Maren wrote this down. All of it. In the ledger.
"I find it... not my type. They're fine. I'm sure they're lovely people. It's just — Sister, I don't want to be rude, but asking me to find grace attractive is like asking me to find a nice painting attractive. It's fine. It's a nice painting. But it's not —" I gestured helplessly. "It's not going to make my heart do the thing."
"What thing?"
"The loud thing. The thing where your chest gets tight and your brain shuts off and you think, 'I would walk into a burning building for that person.'"
Maren stopped writing. For the first time, something flickered across her face — not judgment, exactly. Something closer to bewilderment, as if I had described a color she had never seen.
"You would walk into a burning building," she said slowly, "for a woman the Temple has deemed graceless."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because she's worth it."
The chamber was very quiet. The acolytes were staring at me like I'd grown a second head. Maren looked at her ledger, at me, at her ledger again.
"Mr. Parker," she said, "you understand that what you are describing is a textbook symptom of spiritual corruption?"
"I understand that's what your book says."
She closed the ledger. The sound was definitive, like a door.
"Most men," she said, "when questioned, attempt to minimize. They say it was a phase, a confusion, the influence of drink. They beg for the blessing. You are the first to sit in that chair and tell me, calmly, that the disease is the truth."
"I'm not diseased, Sister."
"That," she said, "is also what the diseased say."
She stood, and the acolytes stood with her, and I understood that the audience was over.
"Here is what will happen, Mr. Parker. I will conduct a full investigation. I will question the women you have been seen with — the disgraced knight, the tavern keeper, the beastkin. I will question the townspeople. And then, if the investigation confirms what you have just told me, you will submit to the Temple's grace-measuring ritual, to determine the extent of the corruption."
"And if I refuse?"
"Then I will know the extent without the ritual." She came around the desk. "Mr. Parker, I have been an inquisitor for eleven years. I have examined two hundred and fourteen cases of corrupted taste. Do you know how many were genuine?"
"How many?"
"All of them, Mr. Parker. Every single one. And do you know how many I cured?"
I didn't answer.
"All of them," she said. "Two hundred and fourteen. Every one." She looked at me with something that might have been professional pity. "You will not be the first to tell me the disease is the truth. But you will be the last to believe it. I promise you that."
She turned to the acolyte. "Summon Paula Mercer, Diane Foster, and the wolfkin called Willa. Separately. Tomorrow. I will hear them one at a time."
I walked back to the tavern through streets that were no longer silent but were no longer normal either — people watching from doorways, whispering, the way crowds gather when something is about to happen and everyone wants to be able to say they were there.
Paula was waiting on the tavern steps, sword at her hip, jaw set.
"How was it?" she asked.
"She's going to question all three of you. Tomorrow. Separately."
Paula's hand tightened on her sword hilt. "Good. Let her. I will tell her the truth."
"Paula —"
"I will tell her," she said, "that you are a man of honor. That you defended me when the whole town mocked me. That you are the only man who ever looked at me and saw a knight instead of a joke." She looked at me, and her eyes were fierce and bright. "Let her write that in her ledger."
From inside the tavern came Willa's voice, raised in what sounded like an argument with Diane about whether an inquisitor could be bitten legally. Diane was saying no. Willa was saying the law was unclear.
"Tomorrow," I said, "is going to be a disaster."
"Probably," Paula agreed. "But it will be an honest disaster."
And behind us, through the tavern door, Willa said, very clearly, "If she touches him, I bite. That is the law now. I have decided."
I closed my eyes. The hook of the whole thing, the terrible beautiful hook, was this: Sister Maren was competent, she was professional, she had cured two hundred and fourteen cases — and she had absolutely no idea what was coming tomorrow.
None of us did.