Chapter 55: The Legate Swallowed His Own Bull in Front of Three Hundred Nobles

"The Holy See does not revoke canonizations, Majesty. It has not happened in four hundred years."

The papal legate said that standing in the throne room, with the same escort of twenty and two clergy fewer than the first time.

"In four hundred years nobody had been canonized in nine days either."

"The process was abbreviated for urgency."

"The process was abbreviated by a man who exists on no payroll." I raised the sheet. "Petition for abbreviated process, diocese of the Vado, dated the twenty third. Read it, or I will."

The legate didn’t take it.

The Council secretary read it.

Diocesan signature at the bottom. And at the top, in the petitioner’s line, the fast ugly hand already known to eleven Towers clerks, four supply men, and a sixty one year old master of arms.

"That signature," I said, "appears on the Chancellery payroll forty one times across forty posts."

"Majesty, the petition does not invalidate the process."

"Who is the petitioner, legate?"

"The file says representative of the crown."

"I am the crown." I lifted my hand toward the hall. "And these three hundred are the ones who argue with me about it. Let the man who signed that stand up."

Nobody stood.

"Legate, there are three hundred men in this room who would give an arm to sign an imperial canonization." I lowered the sheet. "Not one of them did. Doesn’t that strike you?"

"The petition is the process." I came down a step. "You didn’t verify a miracle. You verified a paper sent to you by a stranger, and in nine days you handed a title to a boy you never examined."

"The diocesan tribunal..."

"The diocesan tribunal has twelve witnesses." I looked at the third tier. "Three of them are here. Sister Oret, did they examine you?"

An older woman stood in the third tier with her hands folded.

"They asked whether we had seen the young man pray," she said.

"And what did you say?"

"We said yes. He prays every morning." She straightened. "Nobody asked us about any sick person. I told the notary twice."

"Is that in the record?"

"I don’t know, Majesty. They didn’t let us read it."

"Did you sign anything?"

"We signed a blank sheet at the bottom." Sister Oret folded her hands. "The notary said what we’d said would go above it and be copied in later."

"And you signed anyway?"

"I have spent forty years signing what a Church notary puts in front of me, Majesty." She lifted her chin. "This is the first year anyone has asked me whether I read it."

Three hundred nobles made that ugly sound I know by now.

Calista stood at my right and had not said a word all session, which was exactly what we’d agreed.

"Legate," I said. "You have two roads and both are bad, so I’ll make it easy."

"Majesty."

"One. You uphold the canonization, and this court records that the Holy See elevated a man at the petition of a murderer who forges documents." I raised a finger. "Two. You revoke both bulls today, admit the procedural error, and the empire pays the diocese of the Vado for the new hospice it has been asking for these eleven years."

"That is buying a revocation."

"That is paying for a hospice." I lowered my hand. "The revocation you sign out of your own shame, which costs me nothing."

The papal legate looked at his twelve clergy and found help in none of them.

"The hospice," he said. "How much."

"Whatever it costs. Sister Oret has the figure. She’s had it for eleven years."

The old woman stood again without being asked.

"Four thousand crowns for the building," she said. "Six hundred a year for the beds."

"Granted."

"Majesty, I haven’t finished." She kept her hands folded. "And a physician on salary. Not a visiting one. Eleven years we’ve asked for the physician and eleven years they’ve given us blankets instead."

"Granted."

"Majesty," the legate said, "a crown salaried physician in a diocesan house is irregular."

"So is canonizing a man in nine days." I sat back down. "The hospice takes crown money and answers to the diocese. Sister Oret writes the terms tonight and you sign them before you leave the city."

"And if I refuse the terms?"

"Then you leave the city without them and I read this petition into the record on Monday." I let the sheet fall on the arm of the chair. "You’ve already lost the argument, legate. What’s on the table now is what you get to take home."

"The second bull," he said. "The apostasy."

"That one you revoke first."

"Sister Bloom publicly renounced her vows. That does not depend on the young man’s process."

"No," said Calista, and it was the first thing she’d said in two hours.

She came down the three steps.

"Don’t revoke it," she said.

The whole hall turned.

"Calista."

"Let me finish." She didn’t look at me. "Legate, I renounced my vows in the basilica of the Vado in front of my diocese and I would do it again tomorrow. That was not a procedural error. That was a decision."

"Then the apostasy stands."

"The apostasy stands." She lifted her chin. "What I want is the other half."

"What other half?"

"The burial." She held the legate’s eyes. "You took my vows and with them the right to be buried beside the hundred and forty people I treated. Give me back the ground and keep the title."

There was one of those silences that cost money.

"You are asking to be buried in consecrated ground as an apostate," the legate said.

"I’m asking to be buried where I worked."

"Those are the same request in different words."

"No." Calista put her hands behind her back. "One of them is about my soul and the other is about eleven paces of earth beside a well. Decide which one you’re refusing and say it out loud to the sisters in the third tier."

The legate looked at the third tier and the third tier looked back.

"The grant is irregular."

"The grant is a line in a parish book," she said. "You’ve written harder things this week."

The papal legate signed two revocations and one grant of burial that same afternoon, and was out of the capital before dark.

When the great door closed, Calista stood at the foot of the stair with her hands in front of her, the same as the first time.

"You could have taken the title back," I said.

"I could."

"It was yours."

"It was theirs." She turned to me. "Vaelion, a title they can take away in nine days was never yours. Ground is different. Ground stays where it is."

"And if they offer it again in a year?"

"Then I’ll say no again and it’ll cost me less."

"And the hundred and forty?"

"The hundred and forty are buried." She put her shawl on. "I didn’t treat them to be made a saint. I treated them because they were in front of me."

Roderic Alden came down off the second step and approached as the hall was emptying.

"They gave you the cemetery back," he said.

"They did."

"I asked them to give you the title."

"I know what you asked for." Calista held his eyes a second longer than she needed to. "Which is why I’m talking to you in the corridor instead of leaving you standing there."