The Mystic Marriage (3 page)

Annoyance finally overcame forbearance. She pulled her hand back saying, “The name is Chazillen. It was once a noble and honorable name and God willing I’ll make it so again. I’ll thank you to use it!”

He nodded stiffly. “Then God keep you, Madame Chazillen.”

That had been unkind but she had no room in her heart for kindness. She had no room for anything except the path that lay ahead. She turned away so that she wouldn’t see the carriage disappearing behind her.

Chapter Two

Margerit

Margerit Sovitre gazed around the royal council chamber trying to keep two things foremost in mind: that she truly belonged here, in the presence of Her Grace, Princess Anna Atilliet, and in the company of the renowned
dozzures
of Rotenek University and of Archbishop Fereir himself…and that she would do well to keep silent until she was addressed. Four years ago Margerit would have had no trouble holding her tongue. Four years ago her godfather, Baron Saveze, had not yet named her his heir in pursuit of his own tangled plans and given her the chance to seize what a woman could claim of a university education in Rotenek. Four years ago she hadn’t yet discovered how the visions she’d experienced since childhood gave her the skill to develop new holy mysteries. Four years ago she couldn’t have imagined that she would sit here, named by appointment as the royal thaumaturgist. But being here, now, among those notables, she found it hard to hold her tongue. The impatience helped tamp down her trepidation.

It went beyond daring to present her case to this audience. It wasn’t as if she were taking an actual degree at the university, where her studies would be guided and given imprimatur. A schoolgirl’s dabbling in mysteries wasn’t even worthy of attention, much less of disapproval. If she’d confined herself only to studying, her work would be of no more concern than the charm-wives who sold blessings in the marketplace or the ceremonies of the fraternal guilds that were more social fêtes than religious worship. But the princess had proposed that the Royal Guild celebrate her thaumaturgist’s first new mystery at the feast of All Saints this year, and for that Archbishop Fereir’s consent was necessary. If she were to fulfill her appointment in truth—to serve openly as Princess Annek’s thaumaturgist—she needed, if not the sanction of the Church, at least its open disinterest.
Princess Anna
, she corrected herself silently. Everyone called her by the fond pet name Annek in private, and she was said to be flattered by it. But it would be a dreadful faux pas to use it here.

Dozzur Alihendin, the most prominent of the teachers of theology at Rotenek University, had been droning on for half an hour. He was pompous, condescending, dismissive of her talents…and he was there as her advocate. “As you know, we have found that young girls often have a…a sensitivity regarding the mysteries that can be put to use. There is a danger that these sensitivities may verge onto hysteria and it’s important not to place too much stress on the child. But she has been examined by a number of learned men and we are satisfied that her visions are true and reliable and that they are of God and not mere phantasms. As to the accuracy of the specific observations she reports, there is less consensus. As I need not remind you, Your Excellency, the divine manifests itself in many ways. Several reliable individuals were asked to report their own visions during the Great Mystery of Saint Mauriz recently celebrated, and though the generalities were in agreement, none perceived the level of detail that Maisetra Sovitre claims to have seen.”

She might have hoped for a more effusive recommendation, but that wouldn’t have served as well. The archbishop was known for taking his own way despite tradition and advice. That was what had begun this matter after all: his changes to the text of the Mauriz mystery. His eyes turned finally to her, fixing her from under black brows that contrasted incongruously with his white hair. It gave his face a sinister cast that Margerit knew came entirely from her own imagination. She felt her hands tremble. Would he even give her a hearing? At worst he could forbid her work entirely; that was the gamble. With no other preamble, the archbishop asked, “What have you to say, then?”

She understood suddenly what drove LeFevre, her business manager, to shuffle papers ostentatiously before a presentation. It focused the attention and marked a beginning. She fought off the urge to imitate him and began laying out the sheaf of diagrams and drawings that sat beside her. This would be the proof of her talent and skill: the observations she’d made of how divine power flowed through the ceremony, and how it stumbled and faltered at the points where the ceremony had been revised. It was not enough to know all the esoteric vocabulary of the field; she must convince him that she understood it, and that her understanding did not stray too far from the orthodox. There was no turning back now. She glanced up once at the princess for guidance, but Annek only gazed silently with those dark, hooded eyes that marked her as her father’s daughter. The slight play of an approving smile at the corners of her mouth was all the encouragement she gave. Margerit took another deep breath and began.

“When I first came to Rotenek and witnessed the celebration of the Mauriz
tutela
in the time of Prince Aukust—God rest his soul—several things struck me as odd about the way the
fluctus
manifested, particularly at the
markein
and the
concrescatio
. At the time, I was only beginning my studies and had no way to describe what I was seeing.” She laid out a sequence of pages, each marked at the top with a section of the mystery as it was performed. As the pages progressed, the diagrams of the cathedral layout were washed with colors and marked with small symbols indicating how she had perceived the
fluctus
, the presence of divine grace within the course of the ceremony. For the first time in her life, Margerit regretted that her education had not included the use of watercolors or even drawing, beyond the most basic skill. The rough paintings were nothing like the true substance of her visions. But would technique have told the story more clearly? The colors weren’t true colors, only impressions of them. And the patterns of movement often felt more like the swelling of song. So perhaps the crude indications were better to convey the idea than something more refined would be.

She led them through what had appeared to her: the way the divine light responded to the words of the priests, the actions of the royal celebrants and the responses of the congregants. “Now here,” she pointed, “is what first caught my eye.” She indicated the constricted flare of the
charis
, marking the saint’s response, at the conclusion of the rite. “At first, all I knew was that it felt…wrong. But later, when I’d had a chance to study the text of the
expositulum
, and then when I witnessed the ceremony again, I noted the way the
fluctus
convulsed every time the celebration shifted from the older text to the new.”

There was no response from those watching, so she moved on to the second set of drawings. “Now this is the ceremony the first time that Her Grace presided using the new version based on the Lyon rite exactly as written. You see here and here and here—” she pointed out the sections where the two differed most strongly “—the effects are clearest. Those are the parts where the lay presider—” she nodded in Annek’s direction “—details the
markein,
giving the physical scope of the requested blessing. The places where the language is most changed from the older version that Prince Aukust used.”

She rushed through the next set of examples hoping to pass over the political aspects of what they had done. When Aukust had refused to change the words he’d spoken all his life, it could be chalked up to an old man’s stubbornness. “And this is from the ceremony just performed, when Her Grace returned to the older language for her parts.” And that had caused no end of fuss. Whatever the reasons she had given publicly, it had been because she, at least, had been convinced the structure of the mystery was damaged. “We can see that the differences in effect come from the ceremony itself and not from changes in the celebrants.”

The archbishop finally raised his hand to interrupt her. “This is all very fascinating, but not much to the point. Do we know that the results of the new ceremony are different from those of the older one?”

“It’s true that I never witnessed the older version in whole,” Margerit admitted. “But mysteries from the Penekiz tradition are used widely in local celebrations. All the Penekiz
tutelas
have the same general form. And I’ve found at least two village churches dedicated to Saint Mauriz that use a version of the same text as ours—without the elaborations, of course. Akolbin is near enough that I was able to witness theirs on Mauriz’s feast day this year as well as our own.” She began setting out the last sequence of diagrams. “Here and here are the key points, especially the conclusion, the
missio
, when the
charis
is granted.” She indicated the swirl of exploding colors in the new image. “Saint Mauriz is supposed to solicit God’s grace to encompass the entire parish the way it does here. Instead, in the Rotenek ceremony, the
charis
sinks away beside the altar. I believe the change in wording directs the
charis
to encompass only the buried relics of the saint.”

The archbishop was signaling for her silence again. “I meant,” he said emphatically, “that you have not demonstrated that any difference in the forms of the celebration would change the results. Do you think divine grace comes and goes at our command?”

Margerit hesitated, fearing a trap in his words. This wasn’t a question she had expected to answer. Was he suggesting that the visual manifestations of mysteries were meaningless? She recalled Barbara’s comments on why the ancient scholar Fortunatus had couched all his more daring conclusions in the subjunctive. She said cautiously, “If it were only necessary that God look into our hearts, then prayer and worship would be unnecessary, wouldn’t they? If it matters that we give spoken voice to our petitions, then why shouldn’t the form of that speech matter as well? And if the form of speech matters, then wouldn’t it be well to use what tools we have to know what would be most pleasing?” She watched his face carefully, but he gave no sign whether her answer had been acceptable. She reached for an analogy from her readings. “Any arrow you loose will hit something, but if you want to hit the mark, it matters that you can see to aim.”

The archbishop said dryly, “I see you have been studying Gaudericus.”

Once again she looked for a trap—she recalled the stares and questions she’d received when hunting down that particular book. “It would have been difficult to do this without his work,” she acknowledged. Gaudericus and his circle had nearly caused a schism between those who viewed the mysteries purely as worship and those who saw them as granting power. Strangely enough, it had been the Protestant rejection of thaumaturgy that had saved Gaudericus from being condemned outright as a heretic. But there was still a fine line drawn between the mechanists and those with even less acceptable philosophies.

The archbishop gathered the several series of diagrams into a stack and placed them at his right hand. “I will examine these further,” he said.

Margerit stifled a protest. There were details, analyses that she couldn’t easily reproduce from memory. The notes from that last ceremony that Aukust presided over would be impossible to duplicate. She wished she’d thought to make copies. And yet this was what she’d hoped for: to be given a hearing and have her work acknowledged and tolerated. There had never been a reasonable expectation of more. The flaws in the Mauriz
tutela
would continue to haunt her, but she was learning to choose her battles.

“Was there anything else, Your Grace?” The question was directed at Princess Annek.

Her answer was deliberately casual and she waved one long-fingered hand as if to dismiss the matter. “Nothing of great importance. The Guild of Saint Adelruid would like permission to celebrate a new mystery in the cathedral.”

The request should have been only for form’s sake. The Royal Guild was the most exclusive and prestigious of the lay guilds—certainly the most important of those sponsored by the cathedral. There would need to be good reason to deny it. Their private mysteries were their own affair, unlike the Mauriz
tutela,
which belonged to the cathedral.

“And what would be the nature of this ceremony?”

“Do you recall that unfortunate matter of the Atelpirt
castellum
? The one that caused such a fuss back before I was confirmed as my father’s heir? We’ve reworked it. Or rather Maisetra Sovitre has. The basic structure is sound and it seems a good addition to the royal mysteries.”

Margerit knew it was tactful of everyone not to mention the part she’d had in designing the original, treacherous version of that ceremony. The one that had ended with Iohennis Lutoz banished and Estefen Chazillen executed. This was her hope of redeeming that disaster: the adoption of the mystery as part of the divine protection of the realm.

“As you wish,” he replied.

It seemed an anticlimax: all the preparation, the courting of the
dozzures
to support her presence, the careful analysis and diagramming of her visions. But there had been two goals and both had been achieved. She had been presented to those who mattered as the princess’s thaumaturgist, with her work not dismissed outright, and her first great mystery would have its place on the calendar.

* * *

Finally released from the council chamber, Margerit looked around to find where Marken would be kicking his heels, waiting to escort her home. Her armin would have preferred to fulfill his duties by standing behind her throughout her ordeal, but that would not have been proper. His mandate did not extend to the council chamber, only to the streets and ballrooms where an unmarried heiress might need protection for her reputation and her person. But instead of his stolid bulk she saw a tall, slim figure in mannish riding clothes, rising from the window-bench opposite the door. The sight made her heart leap every time, even after so short an absence. “Barbara! I didn’t realize you were back.”