Ersday, 17th of Frostember 1788
Pharelle woke to a new promise.
The banners had appeared overnight, or near enough. Gold suns on white cloth, hung from lampposts and stretched between buildings with coordinated precision. Their ubiquitous and spontaneous presence suggested they had been waiting in a warehouse for this moment.
Come and See.
The phrase was heard down every major thoroughfare, growing more emphatic with repetition.
The bread queues were longer than yesterday, but they were also quieter. Though the cold had deepened, it seemed the people at the back had made their peace with it. A woman adjusted her shawl. A man stamped his feet. A child held a banner, albeit dragging through the frost. Presumably he hadn’t been educated on its importance.
Laila moved through them, visible but untouched. By this point they knew who she was and what her presence meant: more food, better food. Her practical cloak and practical boots could no longer offer her anonymity when her charity made her famous.
Come and See.
Banners had multiplied toward the river quarter, professionally made and mapped to the city’s optimal foot traffic.
She wondered privately at the providence of divine return that coincided with the worst winter in living memory.
A promise can do more to warm a city than firewood at times.
The queues at St. Dreven’s stretched around the corner once more. These were ‘the Masses’. Stripped bare of pastoral pretence, the word felt cold in the morning light.
She did not go inside, for today was not for soup and conversation. It was to observe a city hungry for faith, when it was starving.
She had come with alms, and left with answers.
The workshop smelled of copper and progress.
Wylan had been awake since five, which was evidence of enthusiasm rather than insomnia. Three vials sat in the rack before him, each containing a measure of his own blood in various stages of refinement. The first was merely treated: anticoagulants, a humoral stabiliser, nothing remarkable. The second had been sublimated through a three-stage catalytic process until it turned a deep, arterial gold. The third was the one he kept coming back to.
He held it to the light. The liquid caught the glow of the Immolator lamp and threw it back richer than it received it. He’d added an aromatic compound overnight, a trace of the Amber resin he’d sourced from Saffron’s cellars. The result smelled appetising, even to him.
He uncorked it once more. The scent was warm and layered, the notes of Amber clear even in the workshop’s haze. If the second vial had been a shout, this was a conversation. Intimate, specific, and tailored to a palate he had only studied, and wished to study closely, in uncomfortable detail, with anatomical interest.
Hypothesis: vampiric haemoreception operates on principles analogous to pheromonal chemotaxis. Blood from a known donor (me), sublimated with sympathetic reagents, produces a targeted response disproportionate to volume.
He wrote down another observation.
The project had started as strategy: a tool for leverage against the vampire court, something that could compel them in a way he found himself compelled. That justification still held, technically, which was exactly what she had said of the flowers Alexios had presented her at the signing of the Merovian Accords.
He recalled Augustine’s face upon exposure to the prototype, and concluded, with clinical detachment, that he wanted to see it again.
He corked the vial and set it in the rack beside its siblings. Somewhere in the house, a clock struck seven.
He had time. He reached for a fresh vial.
The chapel was empty, which suited him.
Lambert knelt on the stone floor before the altar, hands folded, eyes open. He had tried praying earlier, but the words had come back to him unchanged, which was worse than silence.
The bronze figure of Invictus regarded him from above the altar with the serene confidence of a deity who had never been questioned. In his right hand, he held the solar disc of Agony. In his left, the ankh that symbolised Death. The two pillars of the faith Lambert held tightly to.
Now, what do I believe?
The question had taken up residence, and kicked out the former tenants.
He no longer believed in the Church as an institution, but he believed in the Reason at its core. He believed Esteban had the capacity to restore it, and tomorrow he would see Valère’s appointment of that man to the Pontifical sede. At least in theory.
I wonder how that will go in practice?
But what do I know?
Firstly: the cure was real, or at least a version of it. He had watched it with his own eyes, and Valère had found the Umbral taint in Aurora’s blood and drawn it out with care. His niece was healed of that at least.
But was that actually Aeloria’s curse on the girl?
Dragonfire sat unmistakably in Aurora’s Brand, and whatever Valère had done had not touched it. Nor would he, apparently.
Perhaps he did not see it as something that needed curing.
Then, after a moment: Perhaps he did not even see it at all.
The heat of dragonfire at the heart of Valère had been immense and Aurora’s had been so small.
The chapel was still, the one room in the house that kept candlelight, and the shadows it threw across the bronze figure shifted restlessly, waiting for him to reach a conclusion.
Valère had not lied. Valère was not a man who seemed to need to.
And so the conclusion came home: Valère did not know.
He contemplated his niece, still touched by dragonfire, but absent of Umbral taint. ‘Out of the cauldron and into the fire.’
He rose from the chapel floor and found the house already in motion.
Laila had returned from the city with frost on her cloak and opinions she was keeping to herself. She had changed into the long iridescent gown that carried the faintest memory of the Autumn Court, its colours shifting as she moved. The gown said: I belong to more than one world, and I am comfortable in all of them. Lambert suspected it also said several things in diplomatic registers he lacked the training to parse.
Wylan emerged from the workshop smelling of copper and something he declined to identify. He changed under protest into his court waistcoat, the deep blue and silver that Laila had chosen for him and that suited him better than he would admit. He checked his satchel twice before leaving, which was once more than science required.
Maximilian was already dressed. The Duke’s formal coat sat on his shoulders with settled authority; he understood that today required being seen. He had been ready since ten and had not shared what he’d done with the intervening hours.
“We should leave within the hour,” Laila said. It was not a suggestion.
Lambert put on the cassock he considered best. The distinction between his three was invisible to anyone who was not Lambert.
? The Church of Invictus officially recognised three grades of cassock: formal, informal, and emergency. The last one was typically reserved for unexpected displays of piety, which is why political appointees kept hold of the best.
In the west garden, Greta and Divina were playing hide and seek with the triplets. Salt, Pepper, and Mustard had failed to grasp the fundamentals. They stood in the open, perfectly still, perfectly visible, with the absolute confidence of marble that believed not moving was the same as not being seen.
The carriage was brought round. It had been polished for the occasion which it bore with indignity and quiet resentment. Its preference was to be useful rather than decorative. Laila took the rear-facing seat, which gave her the window and the authority. Maximilian sat beside her. Lambert and Wylan faced them. The configuration was familiar: the family arranged for public appearance, each carrying private weight.
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The gates closed behind them, and the estate fell away.
The streets were already moving. Not the usual Frostember traffic of carts and commerce, but a tide, all flowing in one direction. Families walked together, wrapped against the cold. Young men moved in groups, some carrying banners, some carrying the flushed conviction of people who had somewhere important to be. The Come and See flyers were everywhere, trampled underfoot and pinned to doors and clutched in hands that had nothing warmer to hold.
The carriage slowed as the streets narrowed and the crowds thickened. Lambert watched through the window. He had seen Pharelle gather for festivals, for executions, for the Pontifex’s funeral procession. He had never seen it gather like this. The city was being drawn toward something, the way water finds a drain.
A knock came from the roof, not the driver’s signal. Wrong rhythm.
Laila’s hand moved to her temple. Wylan’s went to his satchel. Maximilian did not move, which was its own kind of readiness.
A card was passed down through the window. Lambert took it.
Percival asked I look after you all. — G.
The carriage had not stopped, but its rhythm had changed. The driver’s hands were different, steadier and more deliberate, the hands of someone who had driven under less comfortable circumstances.
“Gawain,” Lambert said.
Laila tilted her head toward the roof. “If you can hear us, thank you.”
The carriage continued. Nobody spoke for a while after that. The knowledge of a second set of hands on the reins settled into the cabin alongside everything else they were carrying today.
“It will be interesting to see how this works,” Wylan said. “Endorsing Esteban is one thing. Convincing the Church to accept a Pontifex on the word of a man they haven’t seen in two centuries is another.”
“It was our big day yesterday,” Wylan continued. “I suppose today is Esteban’s.”
“Something tells me today is Valère’s big day,” Lambert said.
“I would wager he has something planned.” Laila watched the crowds through the window. “We were on his schedule. The entire time. The negotiations, the terms, the timeline. All of it. We thought we were making a deal. We were being fitted into one.”
It reframed the negotiation rather thoroughly. They had believed themselves partners. They had been on a schedule.
“There is something else,” Laila said. “I was able to mention this briefly to Lambert during the ceremony yesterday, but the whole affair was being watched.”
Maximilian turned from the window. “By whom?”
“It felt like Theodora,” Laila said. “It was magic, not theurgy. But old, and prideful.”
“If Theodora knows Caliburn has changed hands,” Lambert said, “then the cult knows. And today is the most public that sword will ever be. The faction that warned us specifically to keep it out of his hands has been watching us since yesterday.”
“Are you worried about another dragon attack?” Laila said.
“I’m not,” Wylan said. “Nothing good old Lambert hasn’t dealt with before.”
“Last time I had Isabella,” Lambert said. “And the water guns of Bassin-de-Marne.”
“And this time you’ve got me.” Wylan quickly unholstered Diplomacy. “And these guns.”
“I’m not sure that’s any better.”
“Wylan. Put that away before you hurt someone.”
Wylan holstered the pistol looking undervalued.
The Champ de Soleil announced itself before they saw it.
The road had left the city proper some time ago, and the crowds had not thinned. If anything, they had thickened, the way rivers do when they approach the sea. The carriage slowed to a walk. Then slower than a walk. Then a pace that suggested the horses had opinions about continuing and were keeping them to themselves.
Lambert opened the door and stepped down. The others followed. The carriage would go no further, and Gawain, presumably, would find somewhere to wait.
The field stretched before them, vast and frost-white, and it was full.
The natural amphitheatre sat at its centre, carved into the hillside in tiers of pale stone. Sunburst motifs adorned the walls, relics of an age of sincere belief, as the stone waited patiently for vindication. The amphitheatre could hold thousands and did so. The rest had spilled across the surrounding field in every direction, a congregation that had outgrown its church and simply kept going.
Lambert had never seen this many people in one place. He tried to estimate and gave up. The field was a single organism, breathing frost into the winter air, and it had come because it had been told to come, and because it wanted to say it had been there.
The pathways groaned with commerce. Stalls had appeared with the entrepreneurial urgency of people who had smelled opportunity and brought stock. Carved sunburst pendants, crude etchings of Valère’s likeness, ribbons bearing Come and See in progressively ambitious calligraphy. Vendors called out over steaming cider and roasted chestnuts. The air smelled of woodsmoke and spiced wine and the excitement of a crowd that had not yet been given what it came for.
? Commemorative merchandise had been quietly stockpiled in someone’s warehouse for years, awaiting the right conditions. Propheteering, as a trade, had excellent margins.
Lambert noted the Church’s section near the front. Roped off, populated by robes and rigid posture. Vaziri’s people, mostly. They had come to observe, and their faces suggested they were still deciding what they were observing.
The family made their way toward the section reserved for guests of honour. Laila moved through the press of people the way she always did: directly, and with the expectation that the crowd would accommodate her. It did.
Then silence swept the amphitheatre. It rolled outward in waves, stilling the vendors, the chatter, the shuffling of feet, until even the faintest murmur had been swallowed. Half a million people held their breath at once.
A glint of light at the centre of the amphitheatre. Then Valère was simply there, white and bronze raiment catching the weak winter sun and making it richer. His companion walked beside him, carrying a cloth-bound object with the reverence of a man who understood exactly what he held.
Behind them, already positioned on the raised platform, stood Esteban in his Primacy robes, the deep red that someone had found for him at the estate, with d’Amboise at his arm. They looked like what they were: old friends who had survived something, standing together in public for the first time in a decade.
The crowd released a sound lower than a cheer, more involuntary, the sound a congregation makes when it discovers it believes.
Lambert felt Laila’s hand on his arm. She leaned close.
“We’re being watched again,” she murmured. “The same presence. I think it’s Theodora again.”
He said nothing. Laila said nothing further.
“I have returned,” Valère said. His voice carried across the amphitheatre without effort, filling the space the way light fills a room. “And I bring demonstrations of my word.”
He nodded to his companion. The cloth fell away. Caliburn caught the winter light and held it.
Valère reached down and took the sword. As his hand closed around the hilt, his entire form blazed with illumination, a brilliance that turned the frost to gold and threw shadows sharp as knives across the amphitheatre floor. The crowd drew breath.
Then Valère raised his free hand toward the sky. The way a man reaches for something on a high shelf, confident it will be there.
He plucked Agony from the heavens.
The burning point of light that sat above the world, that the Pendulum caught and cast across the flat of the earth as daylight, simply descended. It came to his hand the way a falcon comes to the glove.
As it drew closer, it held its size and then slowly resolved. What had been a distant fire revealed itself: a sphere of bronze and flame no larger than a man could hold. The viewing glasses made sudden, terrifying sense; Valère’s people had distributed them before the event, had known this was coming. The logistics of miracles.
The Pendulum continued its arc, but its great mirrored surface had nothing left to catch. The daylight it cast across the world simply stopped.
Half a million people stood in shadow.
A child cried out. Someone dropped to their knees. Then someone else. A woman behind them began to pray, quietly and urgently, the words spilling out of her the way water finds cracks. The Church section had gone rigid, every face upward, every calculation suspended.
Laila’s fingers were white on the edge of her cloak. Maximilian stood very still, hands at his sides, choosing not to react. Wylan had taken out a notebook and put it away again, twice. Lambert’s hand found his sun pendant and held it.
And at the centre of the amphitheatre, one man held the source of all daylight in his open palm. His expression had not changed.
Then he opened his hand.
Agony ascended, steady and deliberate, climbing until it rejoined the sky. The Pendulum caught its light and daylight returned, soft and unmarred, as though nothing had ever disturbed its course.
The air hummed.
The crowd erupted.
The cheering lasted long enough for Valère to let it. Then he raised a hand, and the amphitheatre obeyed.
“Citizens of Pharelle. You are cold. You are hungry. And you have been told that this is the natural order of things.”
His voice filled the space without effort. It found the corners of the amphitheatre and the edges of the field beyond it and the people standing at the back who had come because everyone else was coming.
“Your Pontifex, ?elik, was a good man. He believed in the Church as an instrument of Reason, of education, of service. He is dead, and the institution he served has not paused to mourn him. It has paused to calculate his successor.”
Lambert watched the Church section. Not a face moved.
“You have been governed by men who wear the sun as a title and leave you in the dark. Lucian XVI sits in his winter palace at L’Orsienne beneath the Sun Crown, and you stand in the frost. The Church collects its tithe, and the bread queues lengthen. You have been patient. You have been faithful. And your patience and your faith have been answered with silence.”
Every word of this is true. Every word of this is calculated.
“I did not return to offer you comfort. Comfort is what they gave you when they had nothing else. I returned to offer you Reason.”
The crowd was still with recognition, hearing their own grievances spoken back to them by a voice that understood their weight.
“The Church was built on Reason. On the principle that light belongs to all, that knowledge is not the preserve of the powerful, that enlightenment is the birthright of every citizen. That principle has been buried under politics and ambition and gold. I intend to dig it out.”
Not reform. Not revolution. Something built from the Church’s own materials, reassembled with an authority the Church could not challenge because the authority predated the institution. He was watching a man rebuild a house using the original blueprints, and the current tenants had no legal standing to object.
“I do not take the title of Imperator. I do not seek a throne. I am, as I have always been, a son of this city. And as a son of this city, I claim the title that was mine before thrones were built and crowns were forged. Aurarch. First among equals.”
The word settled across the amphitheatre. In the crowd around the de Vaillant section, heads turned and eyes found Maximilian, the Duke of Pharelle, whose family crest bore the sun, whose fire had lit the city’s defences. Two claims to solar authority: one ancient and returning, one young and already here.
Maximilian met their gazes and held them. Whatever mandate Valère claimed, this was still his city.
He’s not reforming the Church. He’s not claiming the crown. He’s building something that sits above both.
Valère let the silence hold. When he spoke again, he was delivering a schedule.
“And tomorrow, I will go to Notre Reine, claim back what is mine, and confirm for you, your next Pontifex.”
A hush.
And then a cheer. It began at the front and rolled back across the field, gathering force, half a million voices finding the same word at different times.
The Church section was animated, but did not join in the cheering. From their roped enclosure Lambert saw a swathe of men and women perform political calculus through the medium of schismatic yelling.
“Well,” Wylan said, casting his eyes out over the rippling crowd. “Was that what you were expecting, Lambert?”
Laila and Maximilian said nothing.
“I think the Church believes him now,” Lambert said.