Chapter 160: The High Septon's Word
HELAENA
Dawn in the Great Sept was cold, and the cold came up through her shoes.
Helaena had chosen the hour herself. Before the bells, before the petitioners gathered at the doors with their grievances and their sick children, while the city still slept off its wine. The High Septon heard no supplicants at dawn. That was the whole reason for it. Whatever was said this morning would be said without a gallery.
Their steps carried in the empty nave. Pale light came down from the high windows and lay across the marble in long grey bars, and above them the Seven stood in their alcoves, carved and painted and patient. The Mother's hands were open. The Stranger's face was turned away, as it always was. She had prayed under these statues as a girl, and been told she was blessed, and then had told them what she dreamed, and been told she was ill.
Ulf hadn't said a word since they left the Keep. He walked with his hands loose and his eyes on the doorways, never once on the statues.
"You hate it in here," she said quietly.
"I've prayed in septs. Nothing ever came back." He shrugged. "The Seven and I keep our distance. It's a fair arrangement."
The private solar sat behind the great altar, small and warm, its walls stacked with texts in cracked leather. A fire was going in the hearth and someone had thrown incense on it, so the room smelled of cedar and burnt resin and, under that, of old paper. The High Septon rose to meet them. He was old, his face folded deep by decades of kneeling, but his eyes came up quick and stayed on her.
"Your Grace," he said, waving them to the chairs. "You've come to ask for the Faith's blessing on a child the realm is calling a bastard."
So he already knew. Not the shape of it, the substance. Three days since Fossoway's ambush in open court and the High Septon had the whole of it before they'd asked him for anything.
"I've come to ask for the Faith's blessing on a child who deserves to know his parents," she said. "The realm can call him whatever it likes. I call him my son."
"Yes." He lowered himself into his own chair. "Let us be plain, since the hour is early and neither of us wishes to be seen. Doctrine is not silent here, and I would rather name my ground than have you guess at it. A widowed queen who lay with a man not her husband. A child got outside of marriage. And that queen letting the realm believe her chaste for two years while she kept both hidden in a fishing village." He held up one hand, three fingers. "Lust. Bastardy. A false face worn before the gods. I could stand at that altar at noon and preach those three, and there is not a lord in the Seven Kingdoms who could call me a liar for it."
Helaena's hands were folded in her lap and she kept them there. This was the thing she had dreaded since Aegon was born, plainer than any vision had ever given it to her. Not war. Not knives. An old man in a warm room, deciding whether her son was a sin.
"But you have not preached it," Ulf said.
"No." The Septon watched the fire. "Condemnation is cheap. Any hedge septon can condemn, and half of them do it drunk. Mercy is rarer, and the smallfolk have had very little of it lately. If the Faith says a queen sinned, we are a scold. If the Faith says a queen sinned and the Seven forgave her, and shows them the forgiving done in front of the Iron Throne, then every fisherman with a bastard in a back room learns that the door is open to him too. That is worth more to me than your shame. Considerably more."
"The Faith does not condone children born outside of marriage," he went on. "But the Faith also does not condone children being punished for the circumstances of their birth. If you are asking me to recognize this boy, to give him the Seven's blessing, to absolve him of the stain of bastardy, I will do so. On conditions."
"Name them."
"First: the boy will be publicly acknowledged, not quietly acknowledged. The Faith's blessing is not a secret to be whispered in corridors. It is a declaration, made before the gods and the realm. Second: the succession must be absolutely clear. Jaehaerys is the rightful king. This boy will never sit the Iron Throne, and that fact must be enshrined in law. Third—" He paused. "Third: the boy will be raised in the Faith. He may learn the sword from his father and prophecy from his mother, but his soul will be entrusted to the Seven."
She thought about it for the length of three breaths. None of the three took anything from Aegon that Aegon would want.
"Agreed. On all three conditions."
"And the price," Ulf said.
The Septon didn't pretend to be insulted. "Seven septs. Leave to raise them on crown land, four in the Crownlands, three in the Reach where the burning took ours. The Faith names the septons who serve in them. And a gift, given openly, from the throne, to the orphan houses of this city. Twelve thousand gold dragons."
"Twelve is a war chest."
"Twelve is what the realm will remember when they ask why the Faith was generous."
"Then we'll count it out the way the realm can watch," Ulf said. "Four thousand before the disclosure, so no one says you were bought after the fact. The rest within a moon's turn of the day you speak. If you don't speak, the eight thousand stay in the vault."
"You would put a condition on a High Septon."
"I'd put a condition on my own mother. Sites agreed together, not chosen after. Crown land only. Nothing on a lord's ground, because a lord will call that a taking, and then you'll have a war over a sept and I'll have to end it." He leaned back. "Orwyle draws the charter. Sealed and read back to us before we leave this room. Not a promise. A document."
The old man's mouth moved, very slightly. "You have done this before."
"Not with priests."
"Then you'll find we keep our word better than lords, and write it worse." He inclined his head. "Agreed. Four thousand and eight."
It had been bought, then. Her family, weighed and costed and settled in the time it took a fire to burn down half a log. Helaena found that she was not ashamed of it, and was surprised to find that.
"There is one more term," she said, "and it isn't gold. When you speak, you will speak about a boy. Not about the crown's mercy, not about my repentance, not about what the Faith gained by being kind. Aegon is two years old. He will hear those words repeated to him for the rest of his life. Give me words he can live inside."
"You wish to write my sermon, Your Grace?"
"I wish to hear it. Now. In this room, where I can still argue with you."
He was quiet a moment. Then he stood, and something in him changed as he rose, the ease of a man settling into work. He lifted two fingers as though a font stood between them.
"Aegon Waters. You are acknowledged before the Seven. You are blessed." His voice had gone up and out, filling a chamber that wasn't there yet. "May the Mother watch over you. May the Father guide you. May the Warrior grant you strength and the Smith grant you purpose. And let the realm take instruction from the mercy of its queen, who—"
"No," Helaena said.
He stopped. He did not seem angry.
"You've made him a lesson. He'll be old before he's out from under it." She stood too. "He is not an instruction. Tell them what he is not, and then tell them what he is."
The High Septon looked at her, and then, slowly, nodded. "Then the Faith will bless your son. Bring him to the sept when you're ready, and I will speak the words myself." He raised his fingers again, and this time his voice came softer and carried further.
"May the Warrior grant you strength and the Smith grant you purpose. You are not a secret. You are not a shame. You are a child of the Seven, and the Seven do not abandon their own."
The fire cracked. Helaena breathed out.
"That one," she said.
"That one," Ulf agreed, already rising. "Now the charter, Your Holiness. Before the bells."
The Septon crossed to the hearth and pulled the bell rope beside it, twice, and somewhere below them a door came open and feet began to climb.