As a mark of favor, she allowed him to kiss her ring.

Her attendants escorted her through Novomo’s gardens and open corridors to her audience chamber. The day’s supplicants had been waiting, crowded outside the chamber. Inside, Antonia stood with arms outstretched as her servants arrayed her in the holy vestments. She settled in the high-backed chair with the Holy Lance of St. Perpetua laid on a table, on cloth, beside her. The golden cup was filled with wine and placed on an embroidered tablecloth draped over a table behind her. A dozen scribes sat at a table to her right, prepared to record the petitions, the litigants, and her decisions.

Clerics opened the doors. The petitioners crept forward on their knees and one by one pleaded, begged, and made excuses.

“I pray you, Holy Mother, I have in my possession this letter granting me the benefice of St. Asklepia in Noria, but without an escort of twenty armed men I cannot risk the journey south along the coast. Without my presence, there is no accounting for the riot and ruin that may afflict the land. I cannot pay taxes into your treasury if I am not there to supervise. Pray delegate soldiers for this task. …”

“Lord Atto has set his own bastard son as abbot over our monastery, Holy Mother, and this scoundrel keeps three concubines in his chamber and a pack of dogs in the chapel. We pray you, let our good Brother Sylvester be raised to become Father over the cloister of St. Justinian. Have this evil man turned out as he deserves. …”

“I pray you, Holy Mother, every last stand of ripe grain was burned and all our vineyards destroyed last autumn. I have no stores and the people in my parish are starving. …”

“It’s true we are obligated to provide thirty armed and provisioned soldiers and their mounts for the skopal palace. We are hard-pressed in our own county at this time and need all those men to hold off brigands and outlaws. …”

“Our biscop died last autumn, Holy Mother. We pray you, appoint a worthy successor. …”

Every day except Ladysday she heard such cases, or ones so similar that without the record of the clerks she might have gotten confused when a competing group of brothers from the same monastery of St. Justinian arrived to press a claim for the very bastard son whom they said had been slandered by evil men and who was in truth a most pious and learned shepherd who would be happy to offer a generous donation to the papal treasury to prove his worth. Folk would shirk their tithe, and then turn around and beg her to take various foundlings and wastrels into foundations she controlled, but she knew it was only an attempt to fob off extra mouths onto others more willing to feed them. Still, she did not turn away the unwanted. They could always be put to work, and they would be grateful to be alive. The cleverest among them could be trained to act as servants in her growing schola, the least could clean out stables and sweep streets, and the queen always had need of the wicked to toil in the mines. The strong would survive; the rest would smother under the weight of their sins.