Glasswrights' Apprentice Read online

  Rani swallowed hard and turned back to the priest, affecting the humility she thought a pilgrim should express. “Please, sir. I fear that I am not the proper person for this great honor.”

  “You are the first of the new counting of the Thousand Gods. Step forward and claim your rights - and obligations - as First Pilgrim.”

  As a young girl, Rani had played with Varna in the street outside their families’ shops, donning black rags and processing down the “nave” of the paved road. Once, Rani had even convinced Bardo to play the role of the High Priest, standing on the threshold of the Trader shop, greeting the First Pilgrim with all the gravity of the holiest day of the year.

  Nevertheless, games were one thing, and reality a completely different beast. Rani balked at stepping over the threshold, hesitated at entering the cathedral and approaching the altar where Tuvashanoran had met his death. The priest at the door seemed pleased with her humility. “Very good, First Pilgrim. You recognize the seriousness of the course you take. Where are your parents? They shall look on as you assume the honor of First Pilgrim.”

  Rani’s voice trembled. “My parents have crossed the Heavenly Gates.”

  “What! How did you make the pilgrims’ journey, alone and unattended?”

  Rani thought quickly. “My father died when I was merely a babe, I never knew him. My mother started out on our pilgrimage at my side, but she fell ill far from the City. We were taken in by a hospice honoring the great god Zake and tended by the chirurgeons dedicated to his holy name. My mother was several weeks dying.”

  “And how did you come to the City?”

  “My mother would not deny my father’s dying wish. He wanted to see me on the cathedral steps. She entrusted me to the care of other pilgrims who passed the hospice.”

  “And their names?”

  “Farna, sir. Farna and her husband Hardu.”

  “And where are they?”

  “We were separated during the Procession, back in the marketplace. I think they are already in the cathedral - Farna is uncommonly short and wanted to be certain she could see the ceremony. I had to come this last way alone, but I had the Thousand Gods as my companions.”

  Rani’s brave resignation affected the priest deeply. He made a holy sign, in gratitude to the pilgrims who had helped Rani along her troubled way. “You are a noble pilgrim, and an honor to all the worshipers gathered here today. Come now, let us not keep the Defender of the Faith waiting.”

  Defender of the Faith! For just an instant, Rani raised her head, hope written clearly on her face. Defender of the Faith - maybe there had been some terrible mistake! Maybe Tuvashanoran still lived, and all of the running about, all of the hiding and scraping and horrible deeds had been a frightening error.

  As Rani stepped into the incense-shrouded cathedral, though, she immediately recognized her mistake. Of course Tuvashanoran was dead. Shanoranvilli, King of Morenia, was still the Defender of the Faith, still bowed beneath the weight of the title he had hoped to pass on, before his young, brave son was cut down on the cathedral altar. King Shanoranvilli, who had ordered all of Rani’s family murdered in his dungeons.…

  And now that old king stood on the dais, a look of annoyance beginning to creep across his craggy features as he fingered the J’s of the chain of office looped around his neck. In fact, most of the people in the cathedral looked at Rani with open hostility. They had all hoped for the honor of being the First Pilgrim; they had all completed months of pilgrimage to be in this place at this time. Rani decided not to dwell on what they would say if they knew that she had not taken one step on the long Pilgrims’ Road, had not even completed the Path of the Gods here in the City, the humblest journey a Pilgrim could take and still rightfully bear the title.

  Rani felt dizzy as she approached King Shanoranvilli, anchored only by the pressure of the priest’s hand on her shoulder, commanding her to kneel, ordering her to incline her head. A trumpet fanfare rang out through the stone building, echoing off the marble columns and ceilings with brassy pride. Rani gulped a deep breath, swallowing the scent of rose petals scattered upon the altar behind the king. Jair’s Watchers ranged themselves behind her, down the cathedral aisle.

  “And who approaches the altar of all the Thousand Gods on this morning of the Pilgrim Jair’s feast day?” Shanoranvilli’s voice rang out to the cathedral’s high vaulting, bouncing back from each pane of glass in the shimmering windows. This was King Shanoranvilli who spoke, the self-same king who had ordered Rani hunted down like a deer, who had ordered her family tortured and killed. Standing before the monarch, Rani swayed, blinking away a crimson curtain, a film as bloody as the drops she had shed for the Brotherhood. Apparently unaware of her inner turmoil, the priest nudged Rani, and she forced herself to look into the king’s face.

  “It is I, -” she swallowed hard, remembering just in time that heralds had been crying the name of Ranita Glasswright in the streets for weeks. She could not divulge her guild name, dared not even trust her birthname, Rani. Desperate, she thought of the Touched leader she had just abandoned in the marketplace. “Marita,” she improvised, still staking claim to a guild name. “Marita Pilgrim, most honored Defender of the Faith.”

  She barely made herself choke out his title, barely managed to squeeze the words past her tight throat. She was unprepared for the smile he gave her, for the royal blessing that had charmed all of Morenia - soldiers and nobles, guildsmen and merchants - for decades.

  “Do you have your Cavalcade, Marita Pilgrim, showing that you have completed your pilgrimage of Jair?”

  Rani clutched the parchment scroll that Salina had thrust into her hands. “I do, most honored Defender of the Faith.”

  “Then present that Cavalcade, that I may verify your willingness to be the First Pilgrim and your suitability for that most honored office.”

  The scroll trembled as she proffered it to King Shanoranvilli, trembled with fear and twisted anger. He raised the document in both hands, displaying it to the crowd, which rippled with appropriate respect.

  “And so, Marita of … Zarithia,” Shanoranvilli read from the Cavalcade, and Rani forced herself to pay attention. She might never see the written words that marked her supposed passage, and they would likely prove important before this charade was done. “You began your pilgrimage in the town of Zarithia?”

  “Yes, Defender.” Rani’s response satisfied the king.

  “And you sanctified your journey to which god?”

  “To Charn, the god of knives,” Rani improvised. Coming from a land of armorers, such a response was likely to meet with approval. In fact, Shanoranvilli nodded, as if he had expected her words. He could not know that she thought of a knife as an instrument of revenge, a tool to extract the honor owed her family.

  “And you traveled by way of Borania?”

  “Yes, Defender.”

  “And there you dedicated your stay to which god?” Once again, the King looked at her directly, and she presumed that the record of her individual dedications was not inscribed on her Cavalcade.

  Her suspicion was confirmed when he nodded approval at her hastily improvised “To Nome, the god of children.”

  Again, a logical choice, for one as young as she. The King read through her entire Cavalcade, quizzing her on each stop of her pilgrimage. She gained confidence as she answered, naming her patron, Lan, which invoked a laugh from the assembled worshipers, who must have imagined the little pilgrim stuffing her belly before her journey. She also named the god of animals (she had always wanted to spirit a pet into her parents’ home), the god of music (the trumpet fanfare still resounded in her ears), the god of flowers (the blossoms strewn upon the altar filled her nose with a wonderful, heavy scent), and the god of ladders (Roan, her old favorite, who certainly had something to do with her presence here, in light of her ill-timed ascent of the scaffold outside the cathedral.)

  Shanoranvilli accepted each offering, nodding and making a holy sign as she responded to his questions
. However false her words rang in her own head, the Defender was prepared to hear them. The congregation was prepared as well, and individual pilgrims cried out at her offerings, embracing her dedications as their own. Jair’s Watchers looked on with apparent approval as passion built in the congregation.

  “And so, Marita,” Shanoranvilli concluded, rolling up Rani’s scroll with obvious satisfaction, “you stand before this congregation and dedicate your Pilgrimage and the coming year to which god?”

  The question took Rani by surprise, but she scarcely hesitated before her soprano voice piped to the far reaches of the cathedral. She remembered the black ashes of her home and the lost chaos of dinner at the Trader table, before she had been spirited off to the glasswrights, before her life had collapsed. “To Fell, the god of families.”

  If she had expected King Shanoranvilli to show remorse at her choice, she was disappointed. She named Fell as a challenge, as a gauntlet thrown at the royal feet, but the Defender of the Faith did not appear to recognize the meaning behind her words. Even as Rani dredged up memories of her own happy, murdered family, though, she saw King Shanoranvilli wrestle with his own recollections.

  The steel in the old man’s spine sagged, and the gulleys around his mouth deepened. Rani read his sorrow as clearly as she knew her own. King Shanoranvilli had lost family as well; he had lost his treasured son. Rani’s mind spun with her own memories of the noble Tuvashanoran, and she blinked hard.

  When she opened her eyes, she saw the king as more than a willful sovereign, as more than a cruel beast who had ordered her family destroyed. Now, she could view him as a desperate father, a despairing member of a family who longed for something that could never, ever be. Shanoranvilli longed for his beloved son to return from a funeral pyre.

  In that instant, Rani’s heart went out to King Shanoranvilli. For the first time since she had knelt in Dalarati’s blood, Rani felt a modicum of peace. She had been right to execute the soldier. Dalarati had grieved the king; Dalarati had driven King Shanoranvilli to exact revenge against Rani’s own family. By killing Dalarati, Rani had redeemed her own family’s execution.

  Rani felt as if a veil had been lifted from her eyes. Swallowing hard, she realized that she had more in common with the king than she had ever dreamed. She felt that bond almost as a physical thing when the Defender began to turn her toward the altar, to continue with her investiture as First Pilgrim. Something made Shanoranvilli hold back, though, and when he looked down on her, a sad smile lit the depths of his eyes. “And, young pilgrim Marita, what guild do you represent here today?”

  The king clearly intended the question to be an honor, a break from the traditional service as he recognized Rani’s unique status as an apprentice and a faithful penitent. Nevertheless, she was wholly unprepared for the query, and she could not think of a response.

  “Your Majesty?” she whispered, stirring a flurry of amusement among the other pilgrims.

  “What guild do you represent? Your name proclaims you a guildsman, and you are surely old enough to apprentice. What guild saw the desire of the Thousand Gods and freed you to walk the path from Zarithia to the City?”

  Rani’s throat closed over her response. The sunlight streaming through the stained glass windows was brilliant, distracting, and she could think only of the guild she had been sworn to. If she spoke that word, though, she would sign her death warrant - all present knew that glasswrights were forbidden throughout the kingdom, and their name was anathema in this most holy of places.

  “Come, child,” Shanoranvilli whispered to her, a gentle smile cracking his ancient lips. “You can’t become shy now. Speak to the people and tell them your guild.”

  Rani hated naming the lie, hated spinning out a tale for this old man who had suffered so much, like her. Still, she could not make him look a fool in front of his people. She swallowed hard, and then proclaimed her supposed guild, throwing her words past Jair’s Watchers to the farthest reaches of the cathedral: “I am a bard, Your Majesty. Or rather, a bard’s apprentice.”

  “Then you will be able to spin out the tale of your journey properly, First Pilgrim! You’ll be able to entertain generations with your stories of living in the palace for a year. But before you can join the House of Jair, you must offer up the last of your worldly concerns, Marita. What burdens do you carry into this house of the Thousand Gods?”

  Rani’s hand automatically scrambled in the pouch at her waist. Her fingers skipped over the circlet of cobalt glass that she had hoarded from her true guild. Given enough time, she might fashion a story of why a bard’s apprentice carried a fragment of pure, color-fast glass. Now, however, she was not prepared to stand by such a lie. Her soul already burdened the scales of justice; the additional weight of keeping silent about the cobalt glass was negligible.

  Digging deeper, she found an offering she thought would satisfy the Defender. When she extracted her doll from the pouch at her waist, she tried to move her body, to hide it from the crowd. The poppet was a child’s toy, a silly plaything that had no place in the life of a girl who had survived alone in the streets for weeks. It was a laughable prop for the glasswright’s apprentice who had slain one of the King’s own guard in the service of the Brotherhood. A flush of embarrassment crept over her cheeks.

  “What have you there?” exclaimed Shanoranvilli, and he appeared surprised for the first time in this panoply of religious devotion.

  “A doll, Your Majesty.” Rani’s whisper was lost in the cavern of the cathedral.

  “A what?” exclaimed the king, and she might have offered him moonlight and fairy dust for all the incredulity in his voice.

  “A doll, Your Majesty.” Rani improvised, “My mother gave it to me, before we began our journey.”

  The king nodded gravely as he took the offering and set it atop the altar, but a smile twitched at the corners of his mouth. The assembled pilgrims murmured in amusement at this turn of events. While they might resent such a young First Pilgrim, they could scarcely fail to recognize the sheer entertainment of this spectacle. “You must value it greatly, to have kept it throughout your pilgrimage.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty. I loved my mother.”

  “Well spoken, Marita. We should all love our mothers.” And our sons, the king might have said, for the sorrowful lines grew even deeper in the gulleys of his face. “And have you any other offerings to set aside before you ascend the altar and take on the responsibilities of First Pilgrim in the Kingdom of Morenia?”

  The disk of cobalt glass weighed down Rani’s sack like an entire coil of lead stripping, but she shook her head and answered loudly, “No, Your Majesty.”

  “Very well, First Pilgrim. Shed the cloak of your office and the burden of your Thousand Pointed Star and prostrate yourself before this altar and the eyes of the Thousand Gods.” The king reached royal hands toward Rani’s black cloak, and her fingers mechanically worked the intricately woven brooch. She could scarcely believe that she - she, a merchant’s daughter - was letting the king wait on her as if he were her own valet. Ah, the tales she longed to tell Varna. Or Mair. Or Shar.

  Rani complied with the king’s command to kneel before him, and then to stretch out before the altar. She reclined on her back, all the while fixing the old man with steady, trusting eyes. The sun chose that moment to move from behind a bank of clouds, and a beam of brilliant blue light streamed through the highest window in the cathedral - blue light for the Defender. Rani’s gaze was transfixed by the glasswrights’ final handiwork, and she was frozen by the realization that she was lying in the very pool of light that had brought death to Prince Tuvashanoran.

  For one instant, Rani thought she would cry out. Her face swivelled involuntarily to the window. She could picture Tuvashanoran’s handsome face, infinitely warmer and kinder than when she had embalmed his lifeless limbs. She remembered the hushed expectation that had gripped the cathedral on that other day. There should be an arrow waiting for her. She had lied to get to the cathedral. She
had cheated. She had stolen. She had murdered.

  The harder Rani worked to forget the events that had brought her to the cathedral, the more she longed for her adventures to end. Her breath came in sharp gasps, and her hands clenched and unclenched, as if she suffered a seizure. She wanted nothing more than to wake in her attic cot, feel the sheets tucked tight around her chest as her mother sponged away a fever from her brow. She only wanted to hear Bardo’s steady voice, instructing her on how to bargain for a load of knives or a brace of buckles.

  “There, there, Marita.” The voice was not the one she had prayed for, but it was filled with painstaking kindness. “Be easy, First Pilgrim.” Shanoranvilli offered her his dry, withered hand. “The speech of the Thousand Gods is loud, and it moves the hearts of men. How much stronger are those words in a child’s ears? Rise, First Pilgrim, and take your place in the House of Jair.”

  Rani clung to the king like a lifeline, clambering to her feet without releasing his papery flesh. King Shanoranvilli rested his withered hands on the crown of her head, and then he bent to kiss her once on each cheek. She was still breathing the royal fragrance of musk and bergamot when the Defender of the Faith settled her pilgrim’s cloak once more upon her shoulders. “Be brave, little one,” the king whispered, and then he turned her about to face the crowd.

  The assembled pilgrims had fallen silent at Rani’s fit, struck by a child’s simple faith. Jair’s Watchers looked on stolidly. Such devotion was certain to bring new worshipers streaming through the cathedral doors when gossip spread through the City. Shanoranvilli settled his sere hands on Rani’s shoulders as she stepped out of the flowing cobalt light, and he proclaimed, “Behold the First Pilgrim!”

  Well-trained acolytes flung open the cathedral doors, preparing the way for the royal recessional. Rani shook her head, trying to clear away the fog raised by her trembling limbs. Only when she had blinked owlishly in the white light pouring down the nave did she make out the shape of one pilgrim who had already moved to the doors, who already stood beyond Jair’s Watchers, on the threshold between the cathedral and the City.