“Shame!” shouted someone almost before he had finished, and now all over the hall men were on their feet and shouting, but among other cries there was one of “Forgery!” Mathurin seemed to be waiting for that moment. “Forgery!” he cried, his voice going up almost to the cracking-point. “If you think it is forgery, look at it yourself,” and threw the paper outward, as one might the caught hunted animal to the dogs. “Will you call it forgery when I tell you also that the whole Tritulaccan fleet has been placed on war standard? The nation is betrayed!” Now the tumult seemed completely out of hand, men moving from place to place confusedly or trying to say something (and in every eye Rodvard could catch there was nothing but mere fury, which expressed itself in a color of maroon). Mathurin looked out on the scene, making no effort at control; but from the first row there rose a tall old man with white hair and a face set in a habitual expression of benevolence, who raised high his white staff of office, by which Rodvard recognized him as the Arch-Episcopal, Teurapis Groadon. Eyes caught the staff; voice after voice was abstracted from the uproar until only a few still tried to speak, then two, then none. The Arch-Episcopal waited until there was a silence broken only by a cough; Mathurin pressed Rodvard’s shoulder to read the eyes, but the old man only cast one swift glance at the dais before turning to address the assembly. “Ser writer,” he said, “and you, lords and estates of the realm, this is not a pleasant thing that we have heard. There may be some question of the authenticity of this message, or it may have been written merely to deceive; a document from the hand of the heretic Pavinius, who would make himself the equal of God. Yet I will not deny that we must behave as though it were true; for if we do nothing, and it proves to be so, it will be too late. And for myself I fear it is true; for it is given to the spiritual estate to discern the machinations of the powers of evil. There is before us, then the question of how, joying in the protection of God, we can circumvent the machinations of the Enemy, who has made man and women naturally good, into instruments of evil. “Let us therefore prayerfully address ourselves to the question of how the realm may escape this trouble. In an emergency equal to this, in the reign of King Cloar with Queen Berdette the First, the assembly of the realm set aside their rule in favor of their daughter, with her husband, the great King Crontinianus, of glorious memory. But now there are no heirs female, and of heirs male, only Prince Pavinius. Thus we seem faced with the hard choice of accepting him, and so selling the soul to preserve the body, or of adhering to the Queen’s will and saving the soul through bodily submission to Tritulacca. But I do not think God demands of us such submission, for our God is a God of joy.