Grand Prior John Wishart left the queen to a palace full of spiders and roaches and mice. The former Archbishop of Lorica had hated cats, and ordered them exterminated, so there were suddenly rats in the grain supply. And the first detachment of nuns and brother knights looked exhausted; they had dark circles under their eyes and many were utterly drained of potentia. Prior Wishart dismounted with sixty Knights of the Order at his back and another fifteen nuns from the northern priories, and before the evening bells rang for vespers, they were grinding Umroth bone to powder and working ops in the infirmary.

Harmodius, the greatest magus in the kingdom, was with them. He had spent his power like a wastrel son on the ride south from the Inn of Dorling, working cures every day, casting wide into the countryside and returning empty in the evening from visiting plague-stricken hamlets and solitary farms, sometimes alone, sometimes with a priest and a pair of nuns with powers of their own, or merely with the human power of their devotion.

Ser Gerald Random, the kingdom’s richest merchant and the acting Chancellor of the Kingdom and Mayor of Harndon, had seized every ounce of Umroth ivory in the city, and sent it to a pair of veteran practitioners—just emerged from the archbishop’s prison cells—to be tested. As soon as the ivory was judged and valued, it was ground to powder by apothecaries and sent to the grand priory in the ancient temple. There, workmen struggled through the night to fit panes of horn to mend the great windows smashed by Gallish brigands and the Harndon mob, too; the sound of breaking glass had proven equally beautiful to both sides. Even as they blocked the draughts, novices and squires mixed philtres while the mages and the brother knights with power to heal worked on the growing crowds of plague victims; and too many people who were merely afraid.

And there, while attending to a woman so afflicted that her life hung by a golden thread, Prior Wishart heard the news from one of the Order’s initiate squires; Eufemmie Muiscant had just come from the castle with more Umroth ivory, and she had seen the imperial messenger bird and heard the queen’s comments.

Wishart tried to keep his focus as he wrestled with the notion that the nun with whom he’d debated the perils of love just months before had had a public apotheosis in the midst of her convent.

The Prior of Harndon, second officer of the Order in Alba, Ser Balin Broadarrow, looked up from his own patient in the next bed when young Eufemmie was done telling her news.