The Fork in the Road

Lyra learned to be illiterate in a day and a half, and hated every minute of it.

It began with the tablet on the wall. It continued with the breakfast tray, which came with a small folded card printed in a fine black hand, Soft-boiled egg, with toast and honey; compliments of the Duchess, and which she held for ten minutes, turning it this way and that, before she understood that she was holding it upside down. It went on with the label on a jar of ointment, and the page of a prayer-book, and the spine of a volume on the bedside table, and the printed notice on the infirmary door. They were all the same. Black scratches. Little crooked marks, like the tracks of birds in snow, that meant something to everyone in the world but her.

"It's like being blind," she said, "in the one sense that matters."

"You're not blind," said Wren.

"I can't read."

"You can see perfectly."

"I can see that I'm looking at a word and can't say what it is. It's worse. Blindness would be honest." She dropped the card on the coverlet. "I read eleven languages. I could read a Pontiff's will in the dark by the smell of the ink. And now I can't tell a B from a D."

"You never could tell a B from a D," said Wren. "You always said they were the same letter facing different ways."

"That's because I was reading them upside down in the dormitory."

"Oh. Yes."

"This isn't the same."

"No," said Wren, gently. "I know."

She went on sitting on the end of the bed, small and solid and kind, plaiting and unplaiting one of her braids. Neither of them said anything for a while. A pigeon cooed on the sill. The afternoon light, thick and gold, fell across the quilt and lit the dust in the air.

Lyra stared at her own hands.

The fingers were thin and brown and stained blue-black at the tips. The scar from the Foundry rail had begun to knit, a line of pink across her palm. They were the hands she had always had. They had held a pen since before she could remember. And she looked at them now with a kind of horror, as though they had been stolen and replaced with another's, nearly identical, which did not know what to do.

I'm still here, she told herself. I'm still me.

But who was she, if not the girl who read?

…

He told her at dusk.

She had known he would. He had been sitting by the window for an hour, looking out, in a silence that wore thin as old cloth. His arm was out of its sling now, and the black Church tabard had been replaced with a plain gray tunic, borrowed from his mother's steward and a size too short at the wrist. He looked, she thought, like a man in somebody else's life.

"Lyra."

"Mm."

"There's something I have to tell you."

"The Pontiff," she said.

He turned his head sharply.

"Wren told me." She smiled slightly. "She cannot keep a secret. It's a charming defect. She told me at ten this morning, in a whisper, with her hand over her mouth, and made me swear on my life not to say."

"I should have told you first."

"You've been busy."

"I've been a coward."

"You've been waiting for me to wake up." She pushed herself higher on the pillows. "Come here. Sit."

He came and sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress dipped. For a moment he said nothing, only looked at his hands, big, scarred, still bruised at the knuckles from the fight in the vault. Then he took a long breath, and let it out.

"The Cardinals have offered me the Ring of the Fisherman," said Kaelen.

"I know."

"Eleven of them. In conclave. It was unanimous." His mouth twisted. "They say the Church needs a Pontiff the people trust, and the people trust the man who stopped the Quiet Sun. They say I am the only man in Aethel with a clean name and a sword."

"They say you're a hero."

"I'm nobody."

"That's the thing about heroes. They always say that."

"I'm serious."

"So am I." She reached for his hand. "Tell me what you want."

…

He told her.

It came out of him slowly, in fragments, as though he were pulling it up from the bottom of a well. He said that he had spent two nights in that chair thinking of nothing else. He said that he had walked up and down the corridor until the guards began to look at him sideways. He said he had stood outside the Chapter House door with his hand on the latch, half a dozen times, and gone away again.

"If I take it," he said, "I could do real good."

"Yes."

"I could open the Cathedral. I could throw the Archive doors wide. I could stand in that pulpit and tell the truth, and nobody would be able to say it was just a King's decree. It would be the Church itself, confessing." His voice was low and urgent. "I could take away the Tribunal. I could stop the burnings. I could pull down the Foundry's relic-mills and give the pilgrims back their pennies. Do you know how many people are still afraid to go to Mass because they don't know what they'll be told to believe?"

"I know."

"I could fix it. From the inside. In ten years. In twenty."

"Yes."

"And I'd be Malakor."

She said nothing.

"That's what I keep coming to." His thumb moved over her knuckles. "I'd sit in his chair. I'd wear his cope. I'd preach from his pulpit. And one day, in thirty years, a young man would come to me with a book, and I'd say, leave it to me. Because it's a thing the chair does. It teaches you that you know best." He shook his head slowly. "He didn't start out a murderer, Lyra. He started out a man who wanted to help."

"You're not him."

"Neither was he, at twenty-six."

It was the kind of thing that could not be answered, and so she did not answer it. She lay in the dim room with his hand in hers and looked at the long clean lines of his face, hollowed with weariness, set with a stern and desperate honesty. He was thinking it through to the end. He had always done that. He had walked into every dark room with his eyes open.

I love you, she thought. I love you so much I hardly know where to put it.

"I don't want to be a priest," said Kaelen.

"No."

"I don't want to be a ruler. I'm not even much of a believer." The ghost of a laugh. "I've been the Church's sword for fifteen years. I think I'd like to put it down."

"And what do you want?"

"To see the sea."

She blinked.

"I've never seen it," said Kaelen. "I was born in the mountains. I went from Varnhold to the Cathedral. I've lived in this city since I was ten, and I've never once been to the coast." He was smiling, a little sheepishly, with a faint flush along the scar. "Dain says it's an enormous amount of water. I find I should like to check."

She laughed.

It rose up out of her without warning, wet and cracked and helpless. She put her free hand to her mouth. He watched her, the corner of his mouth lifting, and she laughed until her ribs ached and the tears ran down her cheeks and the nurse put her head round the door and withdrew again hastily.

"Oh, Kaelen," she said, when she could. "You wonderful, impossible fool."

"Is that a yes?"

"It's not mine to say."

"It is."

"It isn't." She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. "I won't tell you which road to take. You'd resent me. You'd resent me for twenty years. You'd say, I could have been Pontiff, but my wife told me not to." She looked at him. "I'll walk whichever one you choose. That's all. That's the vow I can make."

"Even if it's the sea?"

"Especially the sea."

"You can't read."

"I'm aware."

"You'll be a stranger in every town. You'll lose your books. Your Archive."

"I know." Her voice dropped. "I know what I've lost. I'm not pretending. Some mornings I'll wake and not know my own name for a minute. But I was never the Archive, Kaelen. I was the girl who sat in it." She squeezed his hand. "I can sit anywhere."

"Even beside me?"

"Especially beside you."

He bent his head. She felt him shudder, once, along the whole length of his arm, and his forehead came to rest against her knuckles. His shoulders shook. He stayed that way for a very long time.

"Then it's decided," he said into the quilt.

"Is it?"

"I think it was always decided." He lifted his face. His eyes were wet, and bright, and clear. "I only needed someone to tell me I was allowed."

…

The Chapter House was a round hall with a vaulted roof, and twelve stone seats set against the wall.

Lyra knew it at once. She had seen it three days ago, in the crypt of the Founders: the same plain domed room, the same semicircle of chairs. She stood in the doorway with her hand on Wren's arm, in a gray borrowed cloak, and felt the hair rise on her neck.

They copied it, she thought. The Church copied the Council's room.

Only eleven seats were occupied. The twelfth stood empty. Eleven men in scarlet sat in a half ring under the great stained window, with their hands folded in their laps. They were old, most of them, with the soft pale faces of men who have lived their lives indoors. They looked exhausted. Their eyes, as they turned toward the door, held a flicker of something she had not expected to see in a Cardinal: a shy, frightened hope.

It was the morning of the third day.

A small crowd had gathered in the gallery above. She saw the Duchess Elowen in her gray coat, upright as a spear. She saw Cassian, lounging against a pillar with his arms folded. She saw Dain, bandaged and radiant, and Halloway in a fresh waistcoat of mulberry silk, and the King, perched on a bench with his chin in his hand. Torrin Redmayne sat on the floor, with his back against the wall, whittling a stick.

Kaelen stood alone in the center of the room.

He wore no armor. No cloak. No sword. He wore the plain gray tunic and a pair of old boots, and his hair stood up in tufts where he had run his hands through it. He looked very tall, standing there in the circle of scarlet, and very young.

"Captain Kaelen," said the senior Cardinal.

He was a tiny man of perhaps eighty, with a face like a walnut and an enormous nose, and a voice that quavered like a reed. His name was Aubrey Thistlewood. He had been in the Church for sixty years and had signed, Lyra remembered, the order for her removal from the dormitory. He rose now, slowly, leaning on a stick, and held out before him on a velvet cushion a ring of plain old gold.

"On behalf of the Sacred College," said Aubrey, "I have the honor to offer you the Ring of the Fisherman. The office of Pontiff of Aethel. By the unanimous vote of eleven of eleven." His hands trembled. "We beg you to accept it. The Church has no other hope."

Silence.

Kaelen looked at the ring.

It lay on its cushion like a small gold eye. The light from the window struck sparks off it, and threw a wandering rainbow across the floor. Lyra held her breath. She felt Wren's fingers tighten on her arm. In the gallery, no one moved at all.

Then, quite slowly, he put his hand into the breast of his tunic.

He drew out something small and round, and held it up in the light.

It was a tin disc, the size of a coin. A crude sunburst was stamped on its face, and a legend around the rim. It was scratched, and dented, and a little bent. He had torn it from his tabard in the dark of a cell, in the worst hour of his life, and Lyra had carried it against her heart for three days without once admitting that she had.

He had asked her for it that morning.

I'd like to give it back, he'd said.

Now he looked at it, and then at the old man with the ring.

"Your Eminence," said Kaelen. "I'm honored."

"My son—"

"I can't."

The old Cardinal's face crumpled.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." Kaelen's voice was steady, but his hand shook. "You asked me to accept the Fisherman's Ring because I had stopped a bomb. But I did not stop it. A woman did. A scholar. She gave everything she had. And an old man, who died saying a name, and a girl who recorded the truth, and a King who read it aloud." He drew a breath. "I did very little. I held a door."

"You held it with your life."

"I held it with a sword. That's all I was ever good for." He stepped forward, and laid the tin disc on the velvet beside the ring. It made a small sound, like a coin dropped in a well. "I swore on that when I was twelve. I swore to be the shield of the faithful. I have kept the oath for fifteen years."

He lifted his head.

"I release myself from it," said Kaelen. "In front of this College, and this city, and the Light, or whatever may be left of it. I am no longer the Church's Captain. I am no longer the Church's sword." His amber eyes swept the room. "I am Kaelen Varn, son of Rhodri and Elowen. And I am going to see the sea."