Back when I wrote this, here’s the rest of what I had written. It was the start to a NaNoWriMo, so maybe we’ll just blame that November is approaching. (’Course, by the time the month gets here, I’ll have burned out this compulsion to write snatches for Rose Red and gone back to finishing Silm fic, maybe). So this is maybe the first half/third to what would be the first chapter. Again having almost one of the names for fantasy alternative papacy and political and clerical structures is a hassle (this time I’m not writing around formal names for the same reason I normally do). But does give a better grounding to what the hell any of this is.

• Hound Prologue

“Where is the lord of this
place?” Urwin asked, unwilling to mask the irritation in his voice and the
impatience he felt.

The castle was in the old style, a
tall wall of stacked stone atop a bit of raised earthwork not quite enough to
be labeled a hill. This inner wall encircled a collection of buildings that
Urwin could reasonably estimate would together be no larger than the plaza in
front of a minor temple back in the capital. From what Urwin could see peaking
above the simple fortifications, the buildings looked to be constructed mostly
of wood, the roofs of which were fresh unpainted shingles. A carved bird of
some sort capped the main roofline, the blue and green and red of its painted
wings and long tail providing a splash of unexpected color. Urwin wondered if
the piece had once adorned another building somewhere else, brought to give
this refurbished outpost a hint of style. The village surrounding the castle was
on the small side as well, with at least half the buildings of new
construction. They were long wooden houses with high pointed roofs same as the
castle, the style which still looked peculiar to the young man raised in the
holy capital of Staffansgrave. The wall that surrounded the village was thicker
than the castle wall but not any higher, an earthen bulwark with wooden stakes
bristling like a hedgehog riddled with bald patches. The patchiness spoke of
how unconcerned the inhabitants were at the possibility of anyone reaching
their valley with a hostile army. Formality was observed, but the village gate
was only a deterrent to bears and other wild animals, and Urwin had yet to see
anyone armed or who would qualify as a guard. He could not think of a reason
someone would attack this valley, for there was no important route and the land
while fertile was not large enough to tempt an army. Urwin was not sure why the
castle and its village had been so recently rebuilt and what had attracted a
lord of the House of the Antlered Crow to move to this remote location and a
handful of families follow him.

The villager Urwin interviewed
admitted that there were only twelve or so families in the village, seven of
which were native to this valley, though two had been trappers and
wood-collectors up in the slopes of the mountains, and all so intermarried
through cousins and generations that it would be more accurate to call them one
large clan. Most worked now in the castle, which held both a manor house and
the round temple complex where a priestess and attendants lived. There was a
section of the village cleared for the eventual construction of a proper
temple, and Urwin could see the white rope tied to a large circle of sticks in
the ground that showed where the central apse of the temple would be. The lord
was a member of the House of Teotuila, an actual blood relative of the clan and
not just a retainer, which Urwin found surprising and suspicious. Another red
banner with the antlered crow in black hung next to the gate leading into the
castle. A loose milch cow was eyeing it speculatively.

“Lord Tovias?”

The old farmer, who may or may not
have been the owner of the cow but at least knew whom that cow belonged to and
if nothing else had an obligation to stop that disobedient bovine from
devouring the official symbol of the lord who governed and protected the farmer
and any livestock he owned, scratched at the wisps of white hair on his chin.
Urwin twitched. He could see the cow sniffing at that flag, an insolent long
pink tongue. The young priest had little experience with animals, but he
doubted something as expensive as a healthy-looking cow would be allowed to
wander free and threaten the integrity of banners. He counted it a small
blessing that the gate into the castle complex was closed. Otherwise Urwin
imagined all manner of barnyard creatures would be free to roam inside its halls
and into the chapels, grazing at their leisure.

“Is Lord Tovias the name of
the noble of House of the Antlered Crow who owns this valley?” Urwin
asked, measuring his words to sound calmer than he felt. Just because this old
man was not the seneschal Urwin wished to speak to was not leeway to offer him
discourtesy. A priest was humble and even in his treatment to all Imperial
citizens and believers of the faith, another commandment found in every holy
text.

“That he is,” said the
old man. “Young fellow. Very pleasant. Arrived here with the priestess. Pale
foreigners, can’t miss ‘em.”

A remnant of the younger, less
dutiful boy Urwin had been wanted to laugh at the last comment, for compared to
the cosmopolitan people in the center of the Holy Empire, the half-heretical yokels
of the rim regions like this dismal little valley were pale and strange and too
close to the taint.

“The priestess?”

The old man’s face brightened into
an enthusiastic smile. “O’yes, a very comely young lady. One of the
sancter-priests and not just here for singing the Star-days chants and blessing
the babies and weddings. Used to have an old man for that, but then he died
last year and we had to walk to the next valley over for that. Frightful worry
that was, to not have a priest on hand for rites. Did our best to recite the
words, but you know how that holds. Wild taint was starting to creep into the
fields, and there was talk about moving away if we didn’t get a holy one. Then
the good sires send us the m’Lord Tovias himself and that young priestess, and
she a shining one.”

The reply confirmed four things
for Urwin. The first was how powerful the taint was, the memory of malice from
unspoken ones that hated creation and sought to corrupt it, how left untended
the taint crept from the wilds. In civilized regions one could forget how
powerful the taint was, or how virulent to could be.

The second was that the villagers,
as was expected of the northern hinder-region, were followers of Saer’s school
of thought that an individual was responsible for the daily purification of the
forest-taint, which aside from the patently false belief that any individual
was capable of expelling the taint had a dangerous opening into unorthodoxy.
Such attitudes could skirt into heresy by opposing the authority of trained and
appointed priests. In remote regions, where any priest was difficult to find
and the wandering circuits for the incantation-priests covered large areas that
made administration of necessary rituals a possibly only once or twice a year,
this was to be expected. Distasteful, certainly, but sadly while any large and
long-settled city might have hundreds of priests to apply the daily blessings
and the trained sancter-priests and priestesses who could banish the shadow of
taint and unsacred malice from the world with holy word and song, they were
hard to find in the places where they were needed most. But to lack even the
lay-priest for the tending of simple needs was unacceptable. Urwin mentally
recited the first catechism, that the light of the Life-brighter saw all even
when Her manifest as the Sun-in-Glory did not illuminate, that all shadow was
illusion, that this glaring absence had been seen and corrected. The clerical bureaucracy
was slow and riddled with human corruption, as Waleran’s nephew well knew, but
could reach out from the highest of priestly cities to this miserable remote rural
spot. A priestess had been sent before the irreversible occurred. It was not
Urwin’s duty to fix. Anyway, doctrinal errors in the attitudes of peasants were
to be tolerated, especially as long as it was Saeric philosophy or the
Horse-rider Branch who, while those denominations structured the administration
of their temples and monasteries oddly and emphasized different portions and
interpretations of the holy texts, at least gave some nominal deference to the
principal temple in the capital. Theological conclaves cropped up every few
years where the differences were debated, and Urwin dimly remembered his uncles
and their various allies and confederates among the upper-priests complaining
of how the fiefdoms in the Yewwood, Horse-river, and Northfall, as well as the
free charter cities, rarely paid the necessary tithes and refused to accept the
primacy of their authority in Staffansgrave as the voice of the Sun-in-Glory
among the people. Urwin recalled his uncle’s favorite saying, that the
authority of the great temples came as the hand’s shadow behind that of the
Emperor; to swing one was to swing the other, and where Imperial power, or at
least its roads, did not go, then neither could its priests. True heresy, to
deny the authority of the Vessel in the Mirror Realm, or the Pure Ones revolt,
was to be guarded against. But one could ignore the harmless practices of peasants
trying to survive with the daily threat of the forest-taint.

Third confirmation was that the
priestess had been responsible for the touch Urwin had felt over the valley and
upon the barrier-stones. Not every priest could imbue their chants or songs
with the power to wash away the malice of the unspoken ones, though
incantation-priests were taught from childhood the rituals and could imbue at
least some will and intent to stall the growth of taint until it could be
banished. One could not complete even the most rudimentary seminars of a
lay-priest without accomplishing that feat. Yet to feel the touch of a single
priestess’s efforts from a ritual that was likely weeks if not months past all
the way to the edge of the valley spoke of an uncommonly strong talent, one
that was rarely sent to an isolated and unimportant little fief.

Last, the envy Urwin felt for a
fully-recognized sancter-priest had not disappeared. This realization was most
galling. He needed personal reflection to determine if his envy or his arrogance
in thinking he had overcome that flaw was more unbecoming. Mentally he listed
the verses for righteous attitude and the admonitions for envy, a topic of
lectures he was rarely personally subjected to as a child, but given much
attention to in Otker’s third volume. The instructor of Urwin’s last seminar
had been fond of Otker’s fifth volume, as the material was most useful to a
captain-general. Still, the old desire lingered, adding more resentment on a
tiring load. The family had many nephews to place in key positions in the
church hierarchy, and Urwin’s uncles had decided before he reached puberty that
this particular nephew was best served by grooming his talents to eventually
take over one of the martial orders. He had the promise to become a saucter-priest,
the innate skill to load his chants with the power to remove that musty cold
feeling that spoke of in-creeping taint. But even a strong gift for
purification was not rare enough to shift his intended fate, so Senior Guardian
Waleran’s nephew was given the full instruction for all incantation-priests to
receive their beads and nothing more.

His instructors praised him as brilliant,
and not because they had to. Stuffed with all the pride of a preteen boy, Urwin
accepted that praise as due course, and he had enjoyed the drills, the lessons
on swordsmanship and archery, the body conditioning and running. Well, the
running and winning the practice bouts, that he was not one of the trainees
with perpetually sprained wrists and smacked fingers, how easy the answers had
come to him when quizzed over old battles, that he had excelled. He would have
excelled as a captain-general of the clergy, but also if he had been allowed to
further his talents with spiritual purification.