Crown of Shadows - C. S. Friedman [122]
Her children were coming! So many, all at once. They had never gathered together like this before, not for any one purpose. Would it make a difference? she wondered. Would there be a power in the sheer mass of their gathering, a force born of their limitless variety, that might shed a ray of hope into the void of her despair? If she killed the disobedient ones now, she would never know. They would disperse again, the strong ones and the weak ones and the ones so distant that it seemed none could speak to them at all. What would it take to bring them together again after that? What kind of tragedy would she have to invoke? It was far easier to withhold her punishment now, she thought. Far easier to let them all come here first, and then cleanse the family as tradition required.
Hope. It was almost an alien concept to her now. She savored it, reflecting.
And waited.
Where Power Abides
Twenty-eight
They came by ones and twos, and then—as the day progressed and they gathered courage and friends—in small, fiercely bonded groups. The Patriarch met with them all. His advisers protested that by doing so he was only encouraging people who would feign great faith in order to stoke the fires of their own self-importance, and—to be fair—they were not entirely wrong. For every genuinely faithful man there were half a dozen whose only purpose in coming was to brag at a later time that they had been in the presence of the Holy Father. For every truly devout woman there were half a dozen whose friends fluttered around the doorway to his chamber like anxious birds, their only purpose being to serve as witnesses that this unique honor had really taken place. But though he heard the truth in his peoples’ warnings, he chose to disregard them. There was no other servant of the Church who could see into these people’s hearts as he did, and therefore no other one who could choose. It was that simple.
At times his visitors were exactly the type he would have predicted: coarse and simple men, whose faith was as rough-hewn as their manner, whose innate preference for a world divided into clear domains of black and white was uniquely well suited to this enterprise. He didn’t doubt that among those faces were many that had been seen in the pagan quarter at night, and indeed several of them seemed familiar to him from his brief appearance at Davarti’s Temple. Those were the men he had expected his proclamations to draw, and he welcomed them in a manner that was sure to secure their loyalty. Others were more surprising. There were more women than he would have expected, for one thing; given that gender’s lesser propensity for organized violence, he had expected that few would sign on for such a venture. But he had underestimated the symbolic power of the Forest in the minds of his female congregants, and the depths of their hatred for the Hunter. Some claimed that they would give their lives in order to bring that demon to his knees, and he did not doubt for a minute that it was true.
There is the kernel of a warrior in all of us, he thought grimly, as he watched the futures that swirled madly about each applicant. God give me the strength to control it, once I have encouraged it to dominance.
He judged them each individually, one after another, with his eyes and his new Vision both. With some it was instantly clear what manner of support—or danger—they might provide. With others he was forced to unravel a tapestry of potential so tangled, so volatile, that it took all his self-control to maintain a human conversation while trying to make sense of it all. It wasn’t under his control, this new power, but swept him along in a flood tide of prescience that threatened, at each moment, to drown him utterly. Did his advisers suspect the weakness in him? Did they sense how fragile his grip on