They scheduled my excommunication for noon on market day, which told you everything you needed to know about the Temple of Grace's grasp of theater.
You don't spring a surprise excommunication. You advertise it. You give people time to arrange childcare, close up shop, bring a packed lunch. The Temple wanted maximum attendance for what they were calling, in the handbills they'd nailed to every door in Millbrook, a "Rite of Severance." Below the title, in smaller letters, was my name and the phrase "corrupted taste," which by now had become something between a legal charge and a local landmark. People gave directions by it. *Third left past the corrupted taste.*
I read one of the handbills while eating breakfast at the Gilded Tankard, and Diane watched me read it the way she watched everything lately — like she was deciding whether to laugh, cry, or throw something at a priest.
"They've spelled your name right," she said. "Small mercies."
"They've spelled 'Rite' with a capital R," I said. "Which tells me they rehearsed it."
Paula came down the stairs already dressed in what I recognized as her full armor. She only wore the full armor for two occasions: dangerous fights, and things she considered dangerous fights.
"What's the armor for?" I asked.
"If they try to drag you," she said, "I want to be prepared."
"They're not going to drag me. It's a ceremony."
"So was the last one I attended," Paula said, "and that ended with a lordling punched through a hedge."
Willa, curled in the corner of the booth like she'd been there all night and probably had been, lifted her head from her arms. "If they put a mark on him, I bite the mark off."
"They're not going to put a mark on me," I said.
"Then I bite the priest," Willa said, and laid her head back down, problem solved.
Vera swept into the room behind me with the kind of timing that suggested she'd been listening at the door. She probably had. She did most things with the confidence of a woman who considered rules to be other people's hobbies.
"Morning, darlings," she said, draping herself over the bench opposite me. "How does the condemned man like his eggs?"
"Runny," I said. "And not condemned."
"Not yet. Noon is noon." She took the handbill from my hand and read it with genuine delight. "Oh, they are going all out. 'Rite of Severance.' They haven't done one of these in forty years. There used to be music."
"You're enjoying this," Diane said.
"I'm enjoying the part where they think this will work," Vera said. "I've been excommunicated twice. It's mostly standing around. The worst part is the incense."
"You've been excommunicated twice?" Paula said.
"I'm a demoness, dear. It was bound to come up."
"She says it like it's a parking ticket," I told the room.
"Second one was more like a parking ticket. The first one they really meant." Vera set the handbill down. "The trick to surviving a Rite of Severance is understanding what it actually is. It's not a punishment. It's a performance of one. The Temple declares you cut off from grace, which means the graceful must shun you, which means your enemies lose the only weapon they had — the approval of people who were already against you."
"That was almost reassuring," I said.
"I've had practice."
Diane set my eggs down in front of me with slightly more force than the eggs had earned. "Eat. You're not facing them on an empty stomach."
"You're not facing them at all," I said. "Any of you. This is mine to handle."
Four pairs of eyes — amber, green, gold, and Vera's slow-burning violet — turned toward me with the unified expression of women who had heard me say something very stupid.
"Ethan," Paula said carefully, "do you remember the sermon?"
The sermon had been three days ago. I'd stood in the square and said, publicly and in front of roughly four hundred people, that I wasn't going to apologize for who I loved, that grace could go to hell if it demanded I pretend otherwise, and that Millbrook could keep its pity because I wasn't buying any. It had been, by several accounts, the most scandalous thing said in the square since the baker's wife's incident with the mayor and the prize pig, which I was still trying to get anyone to explain.
"I remember the sermon," I said.
"Then you remember what happened after," Diane said.
What happened after was that the town had divided in half, and then, slowly, over the following days, one of the halves had started drifting toward the tavern. First the outcasts, then the ones who'd never been quite graceful enough, then — to Sister Maren's visible horror — a handful of perfectly ordinary citizens who just seemed tired of the whole system.
And then the Temple's ultimatum had come. Recant, or be severed.
"I'm not recanting," I said.
"We know," Paula said. "That's why we're coming with you."
"You're really not going to let me do this alone, are you."
"Ethan." Diane sat down across from me and took my hands. Her hands were warm from the kitchen, and they'd been holding mine in one crisis or another for weeks now. "Sweetheart. You're not doing this alone. That's the entire point." New chapters come out on novelping.com first.
I ate my eggs. I drank my coffee. And at eleven thirty, the six of us — well, five of us and Vera, who was coming because, in her words, "I've never missed my own show, and I'm certainly not missing yours" — walked out of the Gilded Tankard and into the bright, packed, whispering square of Millbrook.
The Temple hadn't built anything new. They hadn't needed to. They'd taken the existing dais in the square — the one used for festivals and the annual cheese-judging — and dressed it up until it looked like the concept of authority had been draped in white silk and given a microphone.
There were banners. White, naturally, with the Temple's sigil, a stylized eye with a tear that was supposed to represent grace flowing downward or something. There were four acolytes with censers, swinging incense in complicated patterns that made Vera sneeze twice, loudly, from the back of the crowd. There was a choir of twelve, all of them pale, flat, and willowy, all of them singing in a key that suggested grace did not extend to music theory.
And in the center, behind a lectern carved with scenes of graceful people being graceful, stood Sister Maren.
She looked terrible.
I mean that in the literal, non-inverted sense — she looked like a woman who hadn't slept in days. Her face was drawn. Her hands, clasped on the lectern, were white at the knuckles. When she looked down at me — because of course I'd been placed in a small cordoned area directly in front of the dais, like the defendant in a trial that had already been decided — there was something in her eyes that I hadn't expected.
She didn't look angry. She looked afraid.
"People of Millbrook," Maren began, and her voice carried across the square with the trained projection of a woman who had spent twenty years being the loudest person in every room. "We are gathered here in the sight of the goddess, whose grace flows over this kingdom like rain, to perform a solemn duty. A Rite of Severance."
The crowd was enormous. I'd never seen the square this full. There were the graceful, clustered near the dais, straight-backed and solemn. There were the ordinary townspeople, filling the middle, curious and uneasy. And there were — I counted, because counting gave me something to do with my eyes — at least sixty people standing in a loose ring around the cordoned area, behind me and to the sides, like a guard of honor. Paula. Diane. Willa. Vera. Sable, arms crossed, soot already on her forearms because she'd come straight from the forge. And dozens of others. The pilgrims. The outcasts. The tavern regulars who'd started coming back after the sermon. People whose names I knew and people whose faces I only half-recognized.
Maren saw them too. Her gaze swept across that ring and came back to me, and for a moment the mask slipped entirely and she just looked like a woman who had been given an order she didn't believe in.
"For weeks," she continued, louder, pulling herself back, "this town has harbored a sickness of the soul. A man" — she pointed at me, because of course she did — "whose taste has been corrupted. Whose eyes have been turned away from grace. Who has, by his own admission and in full defiance of the Temple, consorted with—"
She hesitated. Just for a second. And in that second, I understood that the words she was supposed to say next were the real problem. Because the charge wasn't just that I'd failed to find graceful women beautiful. The charge was that I'd looked at the ungraceful — the muscular, the busty, the furred, the horned — and loved them anyway. And to say it out loud, in front of everyone, she'd have to describe what that meant. She'd have to stand there and say, in front of the whole town, that loving Paula Mercer was a disease.
"—consorted with those outside grace," Maren finished, "and who refuses to be cured."
There was a murmur from the crowd. I felt Paula shift beside me, and I reached out without looking and found her hand, and held it. Somewhere behind me I heard Willa growl, low, and Diane's voice murmur something soothing, and Vera say, very quietly, "Careful, darling. Not yet."
"The Rite of Severance," Maren said, "is the Temple's final mercy. It separates the diseased branch from the tree, that the tree may remain healthy. The subject is stripped of all standing in the eyes of grace. The graceful shall not speak to him, nor trade with him, nor offer him shelter. His name shall be struck from the rolls of the faithful."
The acolytes began swinging the censers harder. The choir sang a chord that was technically two chords fighting. An acolyte stepped forward with a white cloth, and another with a bowl of something that steamed, and I realized with a sort of distant fascination that they were about to perform the actual ritual on me, in front of everyone, and that it was going to be exactly as absurd as everything else the Temple had done.
"Nice," Vera murmured from behind me. "They brought the good incense for yours."
"Please be quiet," I murmured back.
"Ethan Parker." Maren's voice dropped into the formal register, the one she'd used during my examination, when the grace-measuring ritual had failed so completely that the crystal had cracked and she'd stared at the pieces like they were accusing her. "Do you recant? Do you renounce your corrupted taste and submit to the grace of the goddess?"
The square went silent. Even the choir stopped. Even the censers seemed to pause mid-swing. Four hundred people held their breath, and somewhere in the back a baby cried once and was immediately shushed.
I stood up.
I'd rehearsed this. Not the words — the words I'd decided not to rehearse, because rehearsed words would sound like a speech, and I didn't want a speech. I just wanted to tell the truth, one more time, in front of everyone, and let the Temple do whatever it was going to do.
"No," I said.
It wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. The silence carried it.
"No," I said again, because the first one had been for Maren and the second one was for everyone else. "I don't recant. I'm not diseased. I'm not corrupted. And I'm not going to stand here and let you tell me that the women I love are the symptom of a sickness."
I turned, slowly, so I could see them. Paula, straight as a blade in her armor. Diane, hands clasped, chin high. Willa, ears flat, eyes burning. Vera, smiling like a queen at a coronation. Sable, nodding once at me, slow and certain. And behind them, all the others — the ones who'd come to the tavern looking for someone who wouldn't flinch, the ones who'd stood in the square three days ago and chosen a side.
"I'm not going to apologize for seeing them clearly," I said. "And if that means I'm severed, then sever me. You'll find I'm not the one who's been cut off from anything."
The silence held for one more second. And then someone in the ring behind me — I never found out who — started clapping. And then another. And then it wasn't clapping, it was a roar, and the graceful near the dais were stepping backward, and the acolytes were looking at each other, and the choir sang a chord that was definitely a mistake but sounded, in the moment, almost like triumph.
Maren stood at the lectern with her hands flat on the wood, and she looked at me, and I looked at her, and in that moment I understood what she was afraid of. It wasn't me. It was what came after me. Because if one man could stand in the square and say no, and sixty people could stand behind him, then the Rite of Severance wasn't a punishment. It was an advertisement for the thing it was supposed to destroy.
"Then it is done," she said, and her voice was barely audible, but the ritual had its own momentum, and the acolytes came forward with the cloth and the bowl, and they performed the severance — the wiping of the brow, the breaking of a small white token, the formal declaration that Ethan Parker was cut off from grace forever — while the crowd behind me kept cheering and Vera blew a kiss at the choir and Willa barked, once, sharp and joyful, and the incense drifted over everything like snow.
It was, I thought, standing there with white ash on my forehead and the woman I loved holding my hand, the most ridiculous thing that had ever happened to me.
It was also the moment I understood that nothing was going to be the same again.
The celebration at the Gilded Tankard lasted until well past midnight.
Diane refused to charge anyone for anything, which meant the tavern lost a fortune and gained, by my count, roughly two hundred new regulars. Sable drank Paula under the table, which Paula insisted was a trick of the lighting and Sable insisted was a trick of Paula being a lightweight. Willa fell asleep on my shoulder at some point around ten and woke up at midnight to demand food with the single-mindedness of a woman who had missed dinner on principle. Vera held court in the corner, telling anyone who would listen about her first excommunication, which by the third telling had acquired a dragon.
It was, in every way that mattered, perfect.
I stepped outside around one in the morning, because the tavern had gotten too warm and too loud and I needed a minute. The square was empty now. The dais was bare. The banners had been taken down, and the handbills were already peeling off the doors in the night damp. Somewhere in the dark, a dog was barking at nothing, and the air smelled like rain and woodsmoke.
I sat on the edge of the fountain — the same fountain where, weeks ago, I'd first seen Paula being mocked, where all of this had started — and I let myself feel it. Not the triumph. The weight underneath it. Because Maren's face kept coming back to me. Not the performance. The fear. The Temple had played its strongest card today, and it hadn't worked, and whatever came next wasn't going to be a ceremony. The source of this chapter is g.com.
"Penny for your thoughts."
Paula sat down beside me. She'd taken the armor off at some point — she was in her shirt and trousers, hair loose, and she looked, in the lamplight, like the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. Which was, I supposed, the whole point of everything.
"Just thinking," I said.
"About?"
"About how today was supposed to be the worst day of my life."
"And?"
"And it wasn't." I took her hand. "It wasn't even close."
She leaned her head against my shoulder, and we sat there for a while, listening to the tavern's muffled roar and the dog and the rain that hadn't quite started. And I thought about how far I'd come from the office, from the gray mornings and the spreadsheets, from a life where the most dramatic thing that happened in a week was a printer jam. I'd been severed from grace. I was, by the Temple's own declaration, spiritually diseased and socially dead. And I'd never been happier.
Then a rider came into the square.
I heard the hoofbeats first — sharp on the cobblestones, too fast for this hour — and then the horse itself, lathered and blowing, and the rider, a Temple courier in white and gold, with a sealed case strapped to his back like he was carrying something explosive.
He saw me on the fountain. He reined in, and the horse danced sideways, and the courier dismounted and walked straight toward us with the stiff, formal gait of a man delivering a message he'd been told not to read.
"Ethan Parker?" he said.
"That's me."
He unstrapped the case, opened it, and drew out a scroll. Not a handbill. Not a summons from a local office. This was vellum, heavy and cream-colored, sealed with a wax stamp I recognized from every Temple banner I'd ever seen — the eye, the tear — but larger, and pressed deeper, and ringed with a border of tiny marks that I understood, without being told, were the personal seal of someone very far above Sister Maren.
The courier held it out. Paula took it — I was too stunned to move — and broke the seal, and unrolled it, and read it, and her face went through three expressions in two seconds.
"Ethan," she said quietly. "You need to see this."
I took the scroll. The handwriting was elegant, practiced, the kind of script that took years to learn and was designed to be read aloud in large rooms. The message was short.
*By the will of the goddess and the authority of the Temple of Grace, the severed one known as Ethan Parker is commanded to present himself before the High Priestess in the capital, that his corruption may be examined at its source.*
*He will come alone. He will come within the fortnight. The grace of the goddess is not mocked forever.*
I read it twice. Then I looked up at the courier.
"Alone?" I said.
"The command says alone," the courier said. He looked miserable. "I'm just the messenger."
"Of course you are." I rolled the scroll back up. "Tell whoever sent you that I got it."
He mounted up and rode off into the dark, and Paula and I sat on the fountain in the sudden quiet, and the tavern's noise seemed very far away.
"The High Priestess," Paula said. "Herself. Not a deputy. Not an inquisitor. Her."
"That's the top of the ladder," I said.
"There is no ladder above her. She is the top of everything." Paula was quiet for a moment. "Ethan. People don't get summoned by the High Priestess. People get summoned by people who were summoned by the High Priestess. This doesn't happen."
"I know."
"And 'he will come alone.' That's not a request."
"I know."
She took my hand again, tighter this time. "Then you know I'm coming anyway."
"Paula—"
"Don't." She stood up, pulling me with her, and for a moment we just stood there in the empty square, the scroll in my hand, the rain finally starting, light as breath. "Whatever this is — whatever she wants with you — you're not walking into it alone. That's not how this works anymore. That's not how any of this works."
Behind us, the tavern door opened, and Diane's voice called out, "Ethan? Paula? Everything all right?"
I looked at the scroll. I looked at Paula. I thought about the capital — a city I'd never seen, in a kingdom whose rules I'd spent weeks breaking, summoned by the one person in Aldermere whose authority outranked the fear I'd seen in Sister Maren's eyes.
"No," I called back, honestly. "Everything is definitely not all right."