The Pale Choir

The Pale Choir is the church of the Wound, and the ruling order of the highland country called the Pale See. Founded at Ostrovane in 58 AS, two generations after the Sundering, it teaches that the old gods have shut their eyes against the world and that the pale scar in the sky is the opening eye of another, coming slowly into being. Where other peoples fear the Wound or simply endure it, the Choir sings to it. It licenses the Hollowed as Ash-Clerics, sends its missions into every corner of the Reach, and presses, with growing insistence, its claim that the Glassmere is holy ground and ought to be placed under its governance.

Origins

In the Grey Years the eastern highlands starved as badly as any country in the Reach, and their priests prayed to gods who gave no answer. The archive's oldest account — itself written a century later, and so to be handled with care — tells of a shepherd's widow called Mother Seraphe, who stopped praying at the roadside shrines and began instead to sing through the night, on a bare hill above her village, facing the Wound. Others came to sing with her. What they were answered by, if they were answered at all, the accounts differ on and no two witnesses agreed even then. What is certain is that by 58 AS a rule had been written, a canticle of nine vigils set down, and a cathedral raised at Ostrovane on ground kept deliberately bare: nothing, the Choir holds, should stand between the congregation and the sky.

The old gods shut their eyes against us. Give thanks that another opens.

Organisation

The Choir's ranks are few and plainly named. Below are the lay singers, the ordinary faithful who keep the vigils. Above them stand the Cantors, ordained men and women who lead the singing, hold the courts of the Pale See, and levy the pale tithe — a tenth, taken in grain, coin or labour, that keeps the cathedral roofed in lead and the mission houses fed. The Hollowed who take the Choir's seal are ordained as Ash-Clerics. At the head of all sits the Archcantor, currently Ilyth the Seventh, chosen for life by the Seventh Circle, the seven senior cantors who meet behind the Psalter Gate and admit no record of their counsels. In the Pale See the Choir is not a church alongside a state; it is the state, and its cantors judge disputes, keep the roads and tax the winter markets like any lord's reeves.

Practices

The Choir's worship is conducted at night and out of doors wherever the season allows, the singers ranked facing the Wound, the canticles slow and low. Midwinter, when the Wound brightens, is its great feast. On ashcraft the Choir holds a doctrine no other power shares: it teaches that a memory burned in a working is not lost but given, an offering that goes upward to the eye. Its Ash-Clerics are therefore licensed, examined and tithed like clergy, and — alone among the Hollowed of the Reach — they are forbidden, once sworn, to keep remembrance-books. The Choir's dead are laid on open stone beds beneath the sky without barrow or marker, save in Unquiet country, where even cantors burn their dead and do not speak of it afterwards.

Relations with others

With the Regency in Caldmere the Choir keeps a cold correctness. Its demand that the Glassmere be declared holy ground under Choir governance has been refused by every Lord Regent in turn, Edric Ardent among them, and the mission houses in Varrow's towns are taxed the heavier for it. The Collegium of Ash in Saverra is its open rival: the Collegium calls the Choir's doctrine of offerings a dressed-up superstition, and the Choir calls the Collegium's ledgers blasphemy measured in coin. The Lantern-Wardens will take Choir coin for a contract but will not let an Ash-Cleric march with a warden-company, and the wardens' written lanterns are spoken against from Choir pulpits as a hoarding of what should be given. In the Hask, where the Wound is named the Cold Seam and the Hollowed are exiled, Choir missions have been turned back at the fjord-moots; the Khaddan, who call the Wound the White Road, let its cantors pass but do not sing with them.

Rumours

It is recorded as fact that in 289 AS the Seventh Circle seized the books in which Cantor Anselm Vey had measured the Wound's midwinter brightness for twenty-nine years; why, the Choir has never said, and Vey died sworn to silence. Beyond that the archive offers rumour only. Travellers from Ostrovane say the Circle keeps a tally of every memory burned as an offering within the Pale See, tithed and entered like the grain dues — to what end, no one explains. It is said, and denied, that Ash-Clerics have been sent to the Glassmere's edge to sing at night, though all nations forbid the waste. And there are those who note that the Choir grows richer, and its missions bolder, in the same winters that the Wound grows bright.