“I did not wish to disturb you.”
He studies me, then walks toward me, the hem of his robes whispering across the stone.
“I assume,” he says quietly, “that you are not here for comfort.”
“No.” I rise to face him. “Or maybe yes? I guess it depends on your answers. I-I will not waste your time with pleasantries. Someone has confided in me about the bargain that was made for a queen’s soul.”
He does not ask which bargain, he barely reacts at all.
“The one made with the devil?” I add.
He does not laugh, he does not even look surprised. Instead, he turns his head slightly and gestures toward the chapel doors behind me. “They are iron,” he says. “Do you see the fracture near the hinge?”
I turn.
It is subtle, but it is there—a thin, jagged line running through the metal.
“Yes.”
“When Charles married the woman before you,” the bishop continues, “he believed she was the one. The soul that would finally satisfy the pact. But she was rejected.”
The words echo unpleasantly in the sacred space.
“When it became clear that nothing had changed, that the bargain had not settled, he stormed from this chapel in a fury. He struck those doors with such force that the iron split.”
I stare at the crack again, imagining the sound of it, the rage it must have taken.
“Are you telling me it is real?” I ask.
“I am telling you,” he replies carefully, “that the story did not begin as rumor.”
“I do not know if I believe in God,” I admit after a moment. “Or in the devil. I have seen men commit cruelties that require no supernatural explanation. If there is a devil, I am not convinced he is worse than we are.”
The bishop’s expression shifts, not offended, but thoughtful.
“The devil is not evil in the way people like to imagine,” he says. “He does not create ugliness. He reveals it. He tempts, yes—but temptation only works where something already waits to be awakened.”
I think of Charles. Of the way his love feels less like devotion and more like hunger.
“So the bargain itself did not corrupt them?” I ask. “It merely gave them permission to be their true selves?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
I let out a slow breath. “If my life was promised before I was born,” I say, “if I am simply another name on a list of queens meant to be weighed and discarded, then what is the point of anything? Of resisting? Of hoping?”
The question sounds smaller aloud than it did in my head.
The bishop regards me with an intensity that makes it impossible to look away.
“All our paths are laid out before us,” he says. “Scripture teaches that nothing unfolds beyond God’s sight. But foreknowledge is not the same as imprisonment.”
“That sounds like comfort, not truth,” I laugh ruefully.
“It is truth precisely because it is not comforting,” he replies.
He begins to pace slowly, hands clasped behind his back.
“If fate were immovable, there would be no need for faith. No need for struggle. No need for conscience. We would be no more than pieces on a board.”
