"The Patriarchs are right," said a gruff voice. "As they always are."
A man had stepped out of the line of knights.
He was old, though not frail, a broad slab of a man with a face like a weathered fence post and a scar that ran from temple to jaw.
Faust knew him, though he had never seen him around for the past months.
'I was wondering if he actually died.'
Volkmar Stein, Marshal of the Frost knights, who had served Isbert for sixty years and had stood at the old man's right hand.
His grey cloak was knotted over a dented breastplate.
His eyes were red.
"The details of an Accolade are not for strangers," Stein said. "I would not dream of arguing it. We know the consequences of sharing details too well."
He turned and looked at Faust down the length of the chapel, and for one moment Faust saw something in the old soldier's face that he had not expected.
It was a rough, tired, unmistakable approval.
"But that man is one of the elements of the Accolade."
The silence in the chapel became a different silence.
"And as the Concord well knows," Stein went on, in the same flat voice, "when it comes to Accolade missions, matters grow...complicated."
He drew a breath.
"The █̷̡̖͇̯̮̫̭̞̮̰̓͌̄̆̏̽̿͘͜͠ͅ█̷̡̪͍̦̞̱͚͎̏̾̿̉͒͗͜͜͝█̶̛̱͈̭̗͖͎͙͔̖̣̰͗̋̿̍͌̑̇̎̚█̵̛͓̠̠͕̬͕̠̳̀̔̎͊́̿͘█̸̧̨̘̰̗̳͎͕͓̮͚̘̲̏́̃̀̏̒̍̎̑̈́͠ can prove the eligibility of the Patriarch's mission."
Faust flinched.
It was not a sound. It was the absence of one, a hole the shape of a word. Stein's lips moved, and into Faust's ears there came a shriek like a bell cracking mid-stroke, a grinding of glass on glass, a noise that stabbed in through the drum and rang on in the bone behind it.
He pressed a hand to his ear.
'They did not hear it. Or they heard it and did not mind.'
He took his hand away and found it trembling.
Whatever Stein had said, the world itself had refused to carry it to him.
It was the same trick the Tarot had played when the cards tried to speak their maker's name.
A censored word.
A thing the universe held its breath over.
'Another door,' he thought. 'Another locked door.'
The Patriarchs conferred again, briefly, in murmurs. The woman with the white hair did not turn round. At last Ottilie Brandt stepped forward.
"The Concord has heard the Marshal. The matter is grave and it is not tonight's to settle. Tomorrow, at noon, the Concord will convene, and the Accolade of Isfrid Ernst Frost will be acknowledged officially." Her gaze swept the chapel. "Until then, the First Successor of the Frost line is to proceed with the mission set him. The Right of Challenge is held in abeyance. Whatever its outcome, the claim of Reinhardt, of the cadet branch, will be reckoned as that of the Second Successor."
"Of the cadet branch," Stein muttered, quite audibly, "or whatever he is calling himself this season."
A few knights smothered coughs.
Reinhardt smiled at the floor.
"Naturally," he said. He stepped back from the ring of swords, each blade lifting a hair's breadth to let him pass, and bowed to the Patriarchs, to the bier, and last, with exquisite courtesy, to Isfrid. "Cousin. My deepest condolences. I shall see you tomorrow."
He walked down the nave and out through the great doors without once looking back.
Silence.
Isfrid let out a breath that shuddered in the cold air, and his shoulders came down.
Beside the bier, the old Frost elder sat heavily on his bench.
Ottilie Brandt turned away, and the Concord's Patriarchs followed her out in a murmur of fur and silk.
Faust had just risen, meaning to go to the boy, when the world outside went boom.
The chapel windows rattled in their leading.
A cloud of dust drifted from the rafters.
Every head snapped toward the doors.
Faust let his vision go.
It flew.
It poured out through the stone and the oak and the cold winter air, over the gravel drive and the long white lawns, past the frightened servants running toward the east avenue.
There.
One of the old oaks that lined the drive had a great raw wound in its side.
The trunk had been hollowed from within, the heartwood blown out in a ragged hole big enough to stand in, and from it a thick black column of smoke was rolling up into the grey sky.
Below the tree, at the top of the chapel steps, stood Reinhardt Frost.
He had his back to the smoke.
He was drawing on his gloves, quite unhurried, one finger at a time.
But his left hand, as Faust watched, curled slowly into a fist, and the smoke from the oak thickened as the fist tightened.
Then Reinhardt raised his head.
He did not look at the tree.
His eyes travelled up the air, across the lawn, over the gravel, and came to rest exactly where Faust's vision hung, a hundred yards from the chapel door, invisible to every living soul.
They were wide and bright and not quite sane.
Reinhardt Frost smiled at him, slowly, with every one of his teeth.
Faust snapped back into his own body so hard that he staggered against the pew.