POV: hrathen
Summary
Hrathen sits at his desk still in armour and stares at a single page for a very long time. It is the accounting of Iadon's finances by his own Derethi spies and it is unambiguous. The new contracts out of Teod have closed the gap left by the sinking of the king's ships. The next tax day will pass without humiliation; the merchant aristocracy will not turn on him; Telrii will not be king. The whole second prong of his Arelene campaign, the prong he was already falling back to after Sarene gutted the first, has been pulled out from under him. Beneath the spies' paper sits another list, every name on it crossed off. Every working arteth in Kae has now refused the head-arteth seat. The only ordained candidate left is Dilaf.
The losses pile faster than he can answer them. Dilaf already runs the day-to-day of the chapel; the arteth does not even bother to tell him about half the meetings and sermons he organises, and the gap can be defended in the abstract because gyorns traditionally do not concern themselves with administrative trivia. Even if Hrathen does not formally name him head arteth, the result will arrive in any case. Arelene nobles who used to come to him route around him to Dilaf now; his conversion rate is rising but not fast enough; the demonisation of Elantris has been blunted by the spectacle of the Teo princess feeding the city. The image he is sending back to Wyrn is of a gyorn who cannot hold his own house. And under all of it lies Omin's question on the wall — what has happened to his faith — and Hrathen's honest answer to himself in the journal entry the other night. The seed of uncertainty he has been keeping bound has taken root and is not easily pulled out.
It tips. The room narrows on him — walls and ceiling pressing in — and he stumbles, plate biting his skin at odd angles as he goes to his knees on the marble. He goes to prayer the way he has not gone to prayer in years. The hours Hrathen spends weekly in the form of prayer are really a methodical sort of meditation, an organising of thought. Tonight he begs. He reaches, in plain words, for the Jaddeth he had served so long ago that he had almost forgotten what He sounds like, the God he had shuffled aside under layers of logic and rendered impotent within his own life while spending his life expanding His empire. He admits, for once in years, that he is unfit to do the work alone and asks for help. He does not know how long he kneels.
A knock breaks him out of the trance. He calls "come" without looking up. A minor underpriest apologises for the intrusion, slides a small wooden crate inside the door, and withdraws. The room is dark; he had begun before noon. He gets up, light-headed, sets the crate on the desk, and pries the lid up with a dagger. Inside, packed in straw, is a rack of four sealed vials and a courteous note. The note is from Forton — apothecary, loyal subject of Wyrn — and confirms that the contents match the specification: a slow-acting poison ingested rather than applied, with no symptoms presenting for about eight hours after the dose. Hrathen had almost forgotten the late-night order he had placed when Dilaf still seemed the obvious target. He had vaguely meant the dose to remove the arteth quietly. That plan is far too small for what he needs now. He needs something public, something the chapel and the city will not be able to look away from. He lifts a vial out of the rack, looks at the dark liquid swirling inside it, pulls the stopper, and drinks it down in a single swallow.