Sister Oda stepped across the vestry threshold into the candlelit gloom of the chancel, her dark woolen skirts whispering across the soot-stained granite flagstones.
She did not flinch from Sir Cael Ardent’s drawn broadsword, nor did she glance at the shattered oak pews or the sharp shards of green glass littering the central aisle. Held flat between her weathered hands was an ancient liturgical scroll of salted sheepskin, its edges brown with age, its lines inscribed in the archaic sepia ink of the valley’s first monastic foundation two centuries before the first royal garrison was established in Harth.
Her singing did not falter for a single syllable.
The voice was steady, resonant, and effortlessly pure, rising into the vaulted ceiling with an acoustic power that seemed to expand the stone ribs of the nave. It cut through the muffled roar of the siege outside, silencing the frantic crackle of burning houses in the market quarter:
“Not by the sword alone the wheel is stayed, Not in the blood of kings the stone is laid. Two hands upon the sluice, two crowns of lead, One for the living house, one for the dead.”
Cael stood frozen in the center aisle, the broadsword held at waist height. The manic arrogance that had sustained his threats to burn the inn dissolved from his features, replaced by a sudden, jarring paralysis. His pale blue eyes were fixed upon the sheepskin scroll in the nun’s hands, tracking the movement of her lips with mounting, superstitious…
