I RENOUNCE

They had given him new gloves for the wedding, and he found that he hated them with a clean uncomplicated passion that was almost a relief.

They were white kid, soft as butter and cut by the best glover in the Dominion, and a footman in the Chancellor's livery had presented them to him on a silver salver at the door of the vestry, together with a black coat edged in silver braid, a waistcoat of dove-gray silk, and a message that His Lordship hoped the Duke would find everything to his satisfaction. Soren had thanked the man gravely. He had put on the coat. He had drawn the gloves over both hands, one after the other, and flexed his fingers inside them, and felt the old familiar sensation of being wrapped in something that was meant to keep him from touching the world. It had been his daily armor for eight years. It was surprising how quickly it came back.

It is only for an hour, he thought. It is only until the right moment.

He stood at the foot of the nave in the gray light of Midwinter morning, with the great west doors of the Cathedral of the Founders rising behind him and the whole length of the aisle spread out before him like a road. It was the most magnificent building in the Dominion, and for the first time in his life he saw it as it truly was, a vast pale throat of stone swallowing its congregation whole. The columns rose a hundred feet into the gloom. The windows blazed. Garlands of white lilies and gilded holly hung from every capital, and thousands of candles burned in iron candelabra down the length of the aisle, so many that the air above them shimmered with the heat. And everywhere, in the pews, in the galleries, in the aisles and along the walls, there were people.

They had come from the whole of Highmark and the provinces beyond, in furs and velvets and silks the color of jewels, and every one of them had gold in their eyes. He saw it as he walked. The pews flashed with it like the glitter on a river. Bishops and generals and ladies of the Founding houses, ancient lords on canes and young men with their hair oiled, in their thousands, a great glittering sea of the Gilded rising and settling as a wind passes over wheat. A brass band struck up a fanfare in the gallery. Two hundred reporters scribbled in the press pews. And in the front row, in a dark red leather chair with a rug over his knees, sat an old man with white hair and closed eyes, whom no one looked at because there was no need to.

Father, thought Soren.

He began to walk.

…

It was a hundred and forty paces to the altar, and he counted every one.

The Frost Guard lined both sides of the aisle, in their gray-blue coats with the pale braid on the collar, a soldier at every other pew with his rifle grounded and his face turned stiffly to the front. He had seen them at Wexmouth. He had seen them in the great hall at the Chancellor's back, with their rifles and their orders, and the sight of them had once made his hands run cold. Now he observed them with an odd clear detachment, as one observes the pieces on a board. He counted a hundred and ten in the nave. He saw that perhaps one in three of them was very young. He saw one, a freckled boy of eighteen with a Calder accent in the set of his jaw, who looked at the Duke as he passed and then looked away quickly, with his throat working.

They are Hollows boys, thought Soren. They are ours.

He saw others on the way. He saw Lord Ashcombe in the second gallery, stout and sunburned and entirely out of place in his provincial broadcloth, with six deputies in a row at his side. He saw the stern Quaker lady from the Frost Coast, upright as a ruler, and a small group of Bayou delegates in black. They were sitting together in a tight and watchful clump, like people who have walked into a house they suspect to be on fire, and as he passed beneath their rail Ashcombe lifted two fingers from his knee in a gesture so slight that no one else could have noticed. It was not a promise. But it was not a refusal either.

At the head of the nave, in a pool of colored light from the great east window, the altar waited under a canopy of white and gold. And beside the altar stood the Archbishop of Highmark in his stiff embroidered vestments, a gaunt old man with a face like a hatchet and a gold crozier in his fist, who had baptized Soren in this very building twenty-eight years ago.

Soren stopped at the foot of the steps, and turned, and waited.

The fanfare rose to a crashing climax. The great doors at the far end of the Cathedral swung wide, and the whole congregation rose with a rustle like a forest in a gale, and Delphine Sterling came in on her father's arm.

…

She wore white.

It was a gown of the heaviest ivory satin, embroidered from collar to hem with seed pearls and threads of real gold, with a train that took four little pages to carry and a veil of Brussels lace that fell to her waist. It must have cost the price of a village. Her hair was dressed high in a coronet of white roses, and her shoulders were bare, and she carried a bouquet of white lilies in a trembling gloved hand. She was so lovely, in that golden light, that a sigh went up from the whole congregation. She walked with her head high and her back as straight as a ramrod, her eyes fixed on a point somewhere beyond the altar, and Soren, who had known her since they were both children, thought that he had never seen anyone look so entirely like a woman being led to the scaffold.

Then she came closer, and he saw her eyes.

They were gold. They were a luminous, glittering, perfect gold, the color of the great window behind them, brighter than any he had seen in a lady of the Court since his mother. But it was wrong. He knew it the moment she turned her face to him and the light struck sideways across the iris, because the gold had no depth. It lay on top of her eyes like paint. There was a faint dry matte sheen to it, and beneath it, at the edges, he caught the flat brown that it was meant to cover. She had had them done, he understood, by a specialist, with some preparation of gilt and glycerine that could be painted on the iris itself, and it must have been agony. There were tiny red lines at the corners. Her lashes were wet.

Sterling brought her to the foot of the steps and placed her hand in Soren's, and stood back, smiling a gentle benedictory smile at the multitude.

Her fingers closed on his. They were ice cold.

"This is your last chance," murmured Delphine, without moving her lips.

"I beg your pardon?"

"You heard me." Her voice was barely a thread, but there was something in it that tore at him. "Say your lines, Soren. Say them properly, and take your place, and let it be done. You can still live. Everyone can still live. After that, it will be out of my hands, and out of yours."

"Delphine, what have they told you about the ceremony?"

"Please do not ask me, because I could not bear to tell you." Her eyes, those terrible painted eyes, swam with tears that she could not shed without ruining them. "I am so tired, Soren. I just want it to be over."

He looked at her for a long moment. Then, very gently, he squeezed her hand, and turned to face the Archbishop.

…

The service was longer than he remembered.

It went on in Latin and in English, in antiphons and responses, in hymns that the Gilded sang in a thunderous roar that rattled the windows, and he stood through it with his head bowed and his hands clasped in front of him and his heart beating slowly, like a clock. Somewhere beneath his feet a deep faint vibration had begun, so low that he felt it in his teeth more than heard it. It came up through the stone. It seemed to grow with each hymn, and he knew what it was, and did not look down.

Tamsin is down there, he thought. She is walking through that, now, with a lantern and a key. She is nearer to it than I have ever been.

He had asked her not to go. He had asked her four times on the train, and once in the dark, and once more at the door of the vestry, and each time she had put her hand on his chest and shaken her head. You are going to speak, she had said. I am going to listen. We can only do the one thing each, Soren. We must trust that the other will be done.

"Dearly beloved," said the Archbishop, in a high dry voice that carried to the farthest gallery, "we are gathered in this house of the Founders, in the sight of God and of this company, to join together this man and this woman in the bonds of Holy Matrimony, and to renew the covenant upon which this Dominion was established, that the light might never fail."

The covenant, thought Soren. His mouth was dry. Let it be a covenant. Let the blood of the green feed the light of the gold.

"If any man can show just cause why they may not lawfully be joined together, let him now speak, or else hereafter forever hold his peace."

There was a long pause. The candles burned straight and tall. The congregation, breathing as one, held the silence like a bubble, and nobody stirred.

"Soren Edmund Aldridge," said the Archbishop, turning to him, "wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife, to live together after God's ordinance in the holy estate of Matrimony? Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honor and keep her in sickness and in health, and, forsaking all others, keep thee only unto her so long as ye both shall live?"

It was the moment. He felt it come, as one feels the edge of a cliff in the dark, a hush in the blood and a dreadful clarity.

"Your Grace," said Soren, "before I answer that question, I must ask the Archbishop's indulgence, and the indulgence of this company, to say a few words that cannot wait."

…

A shock went through the Cathedral.

He did not wait for it to settle. He took off the white gloves, first the left, then the right, and dropped them on the step at his feet where they lay like two small dead birds. His hands were bare. The left was pale and a little crooked from eight years of leather. The right was brown and callused and scarred across the knuckles from a chimney in the Hollows. He heard a woman cry out, somewhere in the pews, and a muttering that rose behind him. Then he put his hand into the breast of his coat and drew out the book.

It was a large book, bound in cracked brown calfskin, with a brass clasp and a ribbon of faded red silk. It had no title on the cover. He held it up in both hands so that the light from the window fell upon it, and said in the clear, level, carrying voice that he had used for ten years in the Council, "This is the Ledger of the Founders."

A gasp went up from the pews, followed by a scraping of boots, and in the second pew a stout general half rose from his seat and sat down again.

"It is a copy, made in the second generation by an honest clerk, who was appalled by what he was asked to record, and who hid it in the wall of the Archive of Vandermere Hall, where it remained for three hundred years. It was found last month by a man who has served my family for forty years and been paid a pittance for it." He turned the clasp. The book fell open, as a book does that has been opened many times at one place. "I will read the first entry. It is dated the third of March in the year of the Covenant, and it is written in the hand of Edmund Aldridge."

Delivered into the Well this day, forty-one souls of the Green Blood, men and women, by the common consent of the Founding houses. Yield of light in the first cycle, abundant. The families of the Founding rejoice. The river has been made safe.

His voice did not shake. He read it to the end, every word, and then he lifted his head and let the silence stand.

"There are four hundred and thirty-two pages," said Soren. "Each page is a year. Each line is a name. I have counted them. In three hundred years, the Council of the Dominion has taken from the Rootkin of the Hollows and the Bayou and the Prairie Provinces eleven thousand, six hundred and four people, and fed them into a well beneath the floor on which you are standing, in order that your eyes might shine." He drew breath. "I am the last of the House that began this. I have carried its name for twenty-eight years. And I have not come here to be married."

…

At that moment, from the galleries, the snow began to fall.

It came from the clerestory, from the high triforium that ran above the aisles, where a dozen small gray figures in shabby coats had been waiting among the pillars since the early hours. They were the daughters of Mrs. Ketteridge, and their cousins, and their cousins' cousins, who had gone up the back stairs with the choir at dawn, and they had bundles tied to their waists. As the Duke began to speak they cut the strings. White sheets cascaded down from the roof, hundreds upon hundreds of them, fluttering and turning in the draft of the candles, and settled over the heads of the congregation like a blizzard. A single sheet landed on the shoulder of the Archbishop. Another struck the face of a general. Hands snatched at them, and the Cathedral filled with the rustle of paper, and he heard from every side the hiss of indrawn breath as people began to read.

He did not need to read them. He had written the headline himself, two nights ago, in the cellar of the tannery, with Finch bending over his shoulder. It was six words long, in the largest type the Quiet Press owned. THE WELL IS BUILT ON BLOOD. Beneath it, in six columns, ran the entire story: the Ashfall, the Gray Cough, the gilt salt in the Silverwater, the river logs of 1789, the Dispensary registers, the tonic, the Committal lists, and the name of every person in the Chancellor's household who had signed an order. In an hour, he knew, the same sheets would be fluttering down on the Square, and in the Wards of Ash Row, and the markets of the Old Quarter, from a hundred rooftops, wherever a printer's boy could climb.

Lord Ashcombe had risen to his feet in the gallery. He stood with a sheet in his hand, reading, and his heavy red face was gray.

"By the authority of the Ninth Article of the Founding Charter," said Soren, "and with the Imperial Seal that was placed in my hand by my father, I declare that this company is a Convention of the Provinces, and I call on every governor and deputy present to attend what I say." He held up his right hand. On the middle finger, too big for it, the great gold ring of the Emperors caught the light and flashed. "Now hear me. I renounce the Crown of Aldridge."

The Cathedral made a sound like a single indrawn breath.

"I renounce the name that built it on blood. I renounce the title and the lands and the privilege that were paid for with the lives in this book. I will not marry into the house that has kept the Well fed, and I will not stand by while it feeds again." His voice rose, ringing under the vault. "And I will stand with the people it destroyed."

…

The silence broke like glass.

Somewhere a woman screamed, and a man bellowed in the pews, and another woman fainted. A dozen lords were on their feet at once, shouting at each other and at the Archbishop, and the brass band had stopped in mid-note. The reporters were running for the doors with their sheets in their fists. In the front row an elderly bishop was loudly reciting the Lord's Prayer. And over it all, clear and cold and utterly calm, a voice that he knew as well as his own cut across the uproar like a knife through silk.

"Arrest that man."

Harlan Sterling had not moved from his place at the foot of the altar. He stood with his hands folded over the gold head of his cane, and his face wore an expression of grave and weary regret, as if he had been obliged to correct a promising pupil. He had not lifted his voice. He had not needed to.

"His Grace is plainly unwell," said the Chancellor. "He has been suffering for some time from a delusion, brought on by the strain of his mother's death and the influence of certain disloyal persons who have preyed on his grief. These papers are a forgery. The book is a forgery. I ask the captain of the Guard to take His Grace into custody for his own safety, and for the peace of the realm."

The captain of the Frost Guard, a heavy man with a gray mustache, had already stepped forward with a sergeant at his shoulder. He raised his hand. Along the aisle, at his signal, a hundred rifles came up to the level. The click of the bolts running down the nave was like a rattle of dry bones.

Soren stood with his bare hands open at his sides and did not move.

For a long moment nothing at all happened.

He had not expected it. He had braced himself for the shot, with a distant clarity, and for the burn of the ball. But the captain's hand was still raised, and the line of rifles wavered, and he saw that the freckled boy from Calder had not lifted his weapon at all. The boy was staring at the sheet that had landed on his boot. He had picked it up. His lips were moving over the words, slowly, as he read, and the rifle hung forgotten in the crook of his arm.

"Sergeant Hobb," said the captain sharply. "Take the man."

"Sir," said the sergeant, and his voice cracked. "Sir, it says here that they took the Ketterman girls. It says it was in the spring of the year ninety-one. That's my mother's village. That's where my sister went, sir. She was nine." He looked up, and his eyes were wide and wet. "She went to the Wards, and they said she died of a fever. It says here that she didn't."

"Take him, Sergeant!"

"I'm not going to, sir."

One by one, up and down the long aisle, like a field of wheat bending to a wind, the rifles were lowering.

…

Soren turned his head and met Delphine's eyes.

She had not moved. She stood on the altar steps in her great ivory gown with the bouquet shaking in her fist, and the painted gold in her eyes had begun to run, in two faint bright tracks down her cheeks. She was looking at him as one looks at a man who has stepped off a high roof, and who is falling, and who has not yet noticed that he is going to land. Her lips formed a word. He thought it was fool. He thought that it might also have been thank you.

I will come back for you, he thought. I swear it. When this is done.

"Very well," said Sterling softly. His face had not changed, but his eyes had gone flat as slate. "Then we shall proceed without it."

He lifted his cane an inch from the stone, and let it fall.

The sound of the ferrule was very small. But it reverberated, as a struck bell reverberates, and the whole Cathedral rang with it. A deep groan ran through the floor. Dust sifted from the vault. The candle flames bent flat all together, as if a wind had swept the nave, and the glass in the windows shivered in its leads. And beneath Soren's bare feet, under the stone, under a hundred feet of rock and three hundred years, he felt the vast slow hum of the Sunwell rise, and rise, and swell into a roar.

His heart stuttered in his chest. It missed a beat, and then another, and for an instant he could not breathe, as though a hand had closed on it from a great distance and squeezed.

Something has happened to Tamsin.