treatable sick or the infectious and those closer to death.”
They walked together beneath the rustling fruit trees of the orchard, the pruned branches just over their heads with green apples showing like the fists of babies. Most of the settlement was dark as well, with only a few lanterns glowing, but the high rose window of the church shone.
As they approached down a narrow lane flanked by poplars, Ritva heard slow solemn music and voices singing. A swelling chorus of women’s voices, rising and then sinking to a background as a single high clear alto rose with an almost unbearable intensity: “Ave Maria, gratia plena
Dominus tecum, virgo serena;
Benedicta tu in mulieribus
Que peperisti pacem hominibus
Et angelis gloria
Et angelis gloria-”
For an instant she shivered with a feeling that was chill down her spine, yet without the slightest hint of threat or malice. It was not her faith, nor was this a way of life that had the slightest attraction for her, but there was a power and clarity in it that could not be denied.
Many paths, she thought. Trite but true.
They came to a small door; the nun unlocked it before them and then secured it behind again. Up a narrow staircase, feeling her way along with one hand on the worn pine of the handrail. Then the kindly glow of lamplight from under a door. The nun made a gesture to stay her and slipped through the door; a moment later after a murmur of voices she returned, beckoned, and then left with a smile.
That’s a little odd, Ritva thought an instant later as she returned the nod. We didn’t exchange more than a few words, but I actually feel as if I knew her.
The chamber within was an office, but there was a neatly made cot in one corner, and a window that probably gave on the interior courtyard when it wasn’t tightly shuttered as it was now. The walls were unplastered brick, and the battered pre-Change metal desk and shelves bore books and account-books and sheaves of indexed letters arranged very neatly. The only touches of color were a portrait of a robed woman with St. Hilda of Whitby beneath it, a Madonna and Child, a beautifully carved modern crucifix and a portrait of the current Pope, Pius XIII, that looked like a woodblock done from a photograph.
Ritva made the gesture of reverence that the Dunedain shared with the Old Religion towards the holy images, clapping her palms twice, softly, and then bowing with them pressed together and fingers beneath her chin. Her people were courteous towards the fanes of others, whether it was reciprocated or not. Then she stood easily, waiting a moment for the lady of the plain clean chamber to speak first if she would.
It wasn’t a bleak room, though; the austerity was of a friendly sort, the bareness chosen because it sufficed and didn’t distract from things thought more important. The stern-faced woman behind the desk probably looked friendly often enough too, judging by the way the lines around her mouth and eyes lay. Right now she looked very tired, and not just because she’d probably been up all night, and extremely serious. Her face was rather horselike, and Ritva judged she’d been about the Ranger’s age at the time of the Change.
No point in a who-can-wait-longest match, and I’m the guest here asking for a favor, Ritva thought.
Then she put her hand on her heart and bowed. “Ni veren an gi ngovaned, naneth aen,” she said. “In the Common Speech, I am very pleased to meet you, Reverend Mother.”
“Sit, my child,” she replied, with a wry quirking smile. “I have been expecting this visit for some time, since my last talk with Rancher Woburn.”
Ritva pulled a small knife from her boot-top first, slit open a seam on her belt, and produced a set of thin onionskin paper documents. The abbess took them in worn fingers, fished spectacles out of a pocket, turned up the lamp and read. At one point she looked up sharply. “The leaders of the Dunedain?”
Ritva spread her hands, and the Abbess nodded.
“Yes, there is no need for me to know more about that.”
At last she sat back and sighed, then crossed herself and bent her head over clasped hands for several long moments, in prayer or meditation.
“You come highly recommended,” she said when she looked up again. “Not least by Abbot-Bishop Dmwoski and Father Ignatius. I know of the Order of the Shield of St. Benedict, and news of the good father’s vision of the Virgin in the Valley of the Sun-”
She paused to bow her head to the Madonna.
“-has spread widely to us of the Church.”
“I was with him on that journey, Reverend Mother,” Ritva said. “I’m not of your faith, but he is a very holy man. And a very clever one as well; clever, brave, a faithful friend. The High King has appointed him Lord Chancellor of Montival.”
The eyes of the Abbess were a cool blue-gray. They studied her for a moment before the religious spoke herself: “But his is a militant order, and necessarily involved in politics and war. We… are not. We have our life here according to our Rule, here and in the daughter-houses we have established since the Change. We work, we teach, we heal, we help God’s poor, and for our joy and our rest we have prayer. All this I would endanger, if I help you and you fail. Possibly even if you succeed, in the end.”
Ritva nodded gravely. All that was perfectly true. Reverend Mother Dominica had to think of it. She was responsible for her followers, after all; and for all those who depended on her Order.
“Everything you are and do is endangered if we lose, Reverend Mother. As it was in the days of Duke Iron Rod, but more so.”
The older woman flinched; very slightly, but Ritva was sensitive to such things. Oops, she thought. She must have been a member back then too. Or one of Iron Rod’s prisoners, or both.
“I have tried to forgive,” the nun whispered after a moment. “But to forgive evil men is not to submit to the evil they do. You are right that we owe your family a debt from those days.”
She sighed. “I’ve also heard of this Sword of the Lady. A pagan thing, and a pagan King wields it.”
I’m a pagan thing myself, Ritva thought; she restrained herself from arguing: It’s all different avatars of the same Lady, right?
Christians could be irritatingly rigid about that. She’d had two years of Father Ignatius’ implacably polite certainty to drive home the lesson.
“I’m the High King’s half sister,” she pointed out instead. “And I’ve known him all my life and besides, it’s the same with us Dunedain as it is with the Mackenzies: it’s a point of our faith that everyone finds their own path to the Divine. We’re in more danger from you than you from us. There will be a lot more Christians in Montival than anyone else, and your type of Christian is the commonest. Matti… the High Queen Mathilda… is one of you. Whereas the Church Universal and Triumphant…”
“They are evil and they serve evil,” the Abbess whispered. “I don’t say that idly or simply because their theology, the public version, is absurd. There must be freedom-even for error.” She smiled a little. “Even for taking the stories of a long-dead Englishman who was a good Catholic with appalling literal-mindedness, for example, my child.”
Ritva suppressed an impulse to stick out her tongue. She suspected that the Abbess read it anyway.
“But while that may be wrong, it is not evil,” the Abbess continued earnestly. “And General-President Thurston has… changed since he came back from his meeting with the false Prophet Sethaz in Bend last year. He was always a very hard man, very ambitious, but.. . the new decrees are ominous.”
“They’re straight out of the CUT’s book,” Ritva said; she’d been reading the briefing papers the leaders had brought along during the ride south. “And they’re just a start.”
“Can you tell me what use you will put our aid to, if we give it?”
“No, of course not, Mother Superior. You don’t need to know. That’s need to know in the technical sense. You know we’ll use it to fight the CUT and the parricide Martin Thurston and I can’t give details.”
A long silence, during which the older woman’s gaze turned inward. Then: “Yes. Tell me what you need us to do.”
“No more questions?” Ritva asked.
The Mother Superior smiled. “If it is to be done at all, it should be done well. When you make a decision, think carefully, pray, consult where appropriate, and then make it. Half measures give you all the drawbacks of each alternative and none of their advantages.”
