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The Keys Of Heaven [Chapter 1: He Will Come Again In Glory]

A/N: I've had this idea since I saw Conclave in October, but I never imagined it would coincide with an ACTUAL papal conclave 😅 Thank you so much for reading and I hope you enjoy "volcano fic" at long last!!! 🌋❤️

Series summary: Three years ago, Father Aemond Targaryen performed a miracle. Now he is a cardinal, a media sensation, and a frontrunner to be elected pope. You are a nun who has been brought to Vatican City to assist with the papal conclave. But when your paths cross by happenstance, you must both reckon with your decision to join the Catholic Church...and what you want from the future.

Series warnings: Language, sexual content (18+ readers only), references to abuse and violence, volcanoes, bodily injury, death, peril, scheming, pining, some drugs/alcohol/smoking, Catholic trivia you never asked to learn, kangaroos!

Word count: 6.6k

🦘 A very special thanks to my Aussie slang consultant @bearwithegg (any mistakes are mine) 🦘

💜 All my writing can be found HERE! 💜

Tagging: @mrs-starkgaryen @chattylurker @lauraneedstochill @ecstaticactus @neithriddle

🗝️ Let me know if you’d like to be added to the taglist 🗝️

“Are you responsible for the koi?” a man asks.

You whirl, spilling pellets of fish food across the pebble pathway, sand-colored tuff made of volcanic ash. Cardinal Targaryen is standing there, and of course you recognize him immediately. His hands are clasped behind his back, his head is tilted thoughtfully to the side. He wears a gold cross, a zucchetto upon his still-blonde hair, and a cassock, scarlet to symbolize the blood a martyr is willing to shed for the Faith; it has exactly thirty-three buttons, one for each year Christ spent on earth. You grin proudly. This is a promotion, an escape from doing the washing in a basement full of spiders. “I sure am, Your Eminence!”

“Including that one?” He points: by the edge of the pond, a large red-and-white koi is floating with dull, dead, lidless eyes.

“Oh no,” you moan, taking a closer look. “No, no, no, it’s rooted. This is not good.” You turn back to the cardinal. “Please don’t tell Sister Augustina. She already thinks I’m an idiot because I don’t know how to work a fax machine.”

Cardinal Targaryen chuckles. “A fax machine?”

“I didn’t think people still used those.”

“I didn’t either.” He’s still watching you closely. “Have we met before?”

“I don’t believe so, Your Eminence.” You saw him arriving at the Domus Sanctae Marthae this morning—rolling his luggage, handing over his phone, sequestering himself from the outside world—but it was other nuns who tended to him, not you. You had been assisting Cardinal Bogdi Marcu of Romania, who probably has first-hand experience with stegosauruses and mastodons.

“You remind me of someone, but I can’t recall who...” Cardinal Targaryen studies you for a little longer, then beams benevolently. “Well, the Lord commands us to be compassionate, and so I will help you hide the evidence and spare you from Sister Augustina’s wrath.”

You should protest—surely this is beneath him—but you are so overwhelmed with gratitude that for a moment you forget this. “Oh, bless you!”

As the cardinal scoops the deceased koi out of the pond with two large, cupped hands, you use your fingers to dig a makeshift grave under a lemon tree. It is December, and the Vatican Gardens are not dead but slumbering, the air cool and the sky grey, the soil soft and dark and damp as you burrow until you hit the impassible layer of clay beneath. Cardinal Targaryen lays the koi to rest in the trough, then together you hastily inter it. When the hollow has been filled and the dirt smoothed, he looks around the nearby flower beds for a large stone and finds one, places it atop the koi’s clandestine crypt, and stands back, admiring his work.

“Now you will escape all suspicion,” he says.

“Thank you, Your Eminence.”

“You may call me Aemond.” He bows his head in greeting, holding his hands behind his back again. His speech is formal and measured, crafted in English-taught boarding schools, just a ghost of Mediterranean inflection like the lingering pink of a sunburn. “I’m Cardinal Targaryen of Greece.”

You tap your own left cheek, indicating his scar. “I know who you are.” But you would even if it wasn’t for his mutilation, his eye that was permanently stitched shut. Three years ago when he was thirty-eight, the same age you are now, Aemond commandeered a fishing boat and saved a group of fifty tourists from a volcanic eruption on Santorini, where he was a priest at the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist. He instantly became a pop culture phenomenon—news interviews and televised sermons, statements on current events and viral memes—and was made a cardinal soon after. Miracles are so rare in the modern world; those who wield them must be elevated to prove the magic still exists.

You give him your name, and the cardinal—you cannot bring yourself to think of him as Aemond, too informal, too intimate—surmises: “You’re here for the conclave.”

That is sort of true. “It’s such an honor.”

“Hm.” He is scrutinizing you again, his remaining eye sharp and blue and fascinated. “Are you certain we haven’t met before?”

“I don’t know where we would have, I’ve never been to Greece.”

“Perhaps on one of my diplomatic missions. The Philippines, Indonesia, Colombia, Japan, China, Bangladesh.”

You smile. “Never been to any of those either.”

“You’re from Australia.” Your accent makes this apparent. He’s touching his chin, he’s determined to puzzle it out. “Which part?”

“Up north in Queensland, originally. But I’ve mostly lived in Sydney for the past fifteen years.”

He shakes his head, mystified and frustrated by it; not much eludes him. “I visited Sydney once but it was forever ago, I was just a kid.” He is still thinking. On other pathways through the gardens, red dots of cardinals are walking off their flights from six different continents, murmuring solemnly to their colleagues or lost in the solitude of prayer. “How was this arranged, you traveling to the Vatican?”

And so you tell him the most abbreviated version: Mother Maureen Ashwell of the Sisters of Charity of Australia wrote to Sister Augustina, a friend for decades, a pen pal of sorts, and asked if she could use you. When the cardinals convene each time a new pope must be elected—ten years since the last conclave, or twenty, or thirty—there is a great need for labor, and particularly the labor of women, anonymous and thankless and uncomplaining: washing, cooking, serving, scrubbing, safeguarding, the endless, ever-patient matrilineal caretaking. Sister Augustina acquiesced, and so you flew to Rome with another nun from your convent, Sister Rhaena, who is very young and very in awe of everything all the time. Whatever affection Sister Augustina has for Mother Maureen has not translated to you. She scowls, she huffs, she loathes how you fold clothes and make beds. When Rhaena playfully tried to give her the nickname of Sister Tina, she received a pair of cuffed, ringing ears in return.

As you speak, Cardinal Targaryen gazes at you fixedly; and then his jaw drops open in amazement. “Dear God,” he says, his remaining eye wide and starry. “You’re the girl from the beach.”

~~~~~~~~~~

How old must you have been? It comes back like sandbars revealed by low tide: you are around nine, and Aemond perhaps twelve, and you meet when your parents have—separately yet providentially—planned family vacations to Sydney for the same week in December, when the Northern Hemisphere is shivering and the South is in the early days of summer.

You drove ten hours south from Toowoomba, he flew over nine thousand miles east from Athens, and you fall into step together on wet sand that collapses into the shape of your footprints. And while your respective siblings are elsewhere—getting slathered with marshmallow-white sunscreen, being fished out of the rough waves—you and Aemond build sprawling sandcastles and decorate them with seashells, and make banners out of dried seaweed impaled on pieces of driftwood, and share the picnics your parents packed: you have Vegemite or tuna sandwiches, meat pies, Tim Tams, Granny Smith apples, and Illawarra plums, while Aemond contributes soft triangles of pita and a platter of accompaniments, tzatziki, hummus, other spreads made of feta cheese or eggplant or fish, the cold crisp relief of a Greek salad wet with olive oil.

You find each other each morning of that week, an infinitesimal eternity. He is the first boy you see as a man—his shadow tall, his voice patient and wise—and there is a powerful pure drive to be close to him, a phantom longing for something you don’t know exists yet. You make him smile and laugh; he loves the way you say sanger instead of sandwich, and esky instead of cooler box, and togs instead of bathing suits, and defo instead of definitely. You tell Aemond you want to move to Greece with him. He tells you he wants to marry you one day. He weaves you a ring made of seaweed greener than any emeralds, but you leave it on your nightstand before going to sleep and wake to find that your mum has thrown it away because it smelled like the ocean, salt and sun and eons of lives coming full circle in the depths.

On your last night in Sydney, the four parents arrange to have dinner together at a pizza place by the boardwalk, and you hear them chuckling as they make light, patronizing exchanges: too bad long-distance phone calls are so expensive, awfully sad for them to have to say goodbye, kids have such short memories, they’ll get over it. As Aemond leaves with his family—he’s the last one out the door, glancing back at you again and again—you watch him vanish into the inky darkness and the glare of the streetlights, and from a little black radio beside the till there is a song playing, maybe Dylan or Joel or Springsteen, one you’ve never been able to remember well enough to find again.

And when you arrive home after an impossibly long day of driving and open your suitcase, the seashells you hid in the bottom have been jostled and crushed until only the dust of them is left, and the loss hits you, sharp and deep, and you begin to sob so loudly your mum comes running, thinking you must be bleeding to death.

~~~~~~~~~~

He finds you where you are plating the antipasto to be ferried to the cardinals—cured salami and prosciutto, tomatoes, olives, pepperoncini, artichoke hearts, ribbons of fresh basil, and cubes of provolone and mozzarella glistening with olive oil—and tells you to follow him. You want to listen, and you have to anyway; in the Church all men outrank all women, and the distance between a cardinal and a nun is particularly vast, a transcontinental flight, the depth of an ocean.

You step away from the plates, looking back at your compatriots. Sister Augustina is glaring at you, bruise-blotched hands gnarled but steady, eyes like a basilisk’s. Sister Rhaena’s lineless face is alight; Tell me everything he says! she mouths, as if Cardinal Targaryen is a celebrity she’s had tacked to her bedroom wall since she was in secondary school...and actually, that might not be too far off the mark. The other three nuns you find yourself working with most often—Sister Penny from the U.K., Sister Nuru from Kenya, and Sister Helvi from Finland—watch you leave with puzzled, transfixed stares.

At first you’d found it impossible to use his given name, but now that you remember him, it’s very difficult not to. You have to remind yourself that you are not alone, not children on a beach where roos hop in the rust-fire dawn; you are in the midst of one hundred and six cardinals, plus a few who are eighty or older and therefore ineligible to vote, yet have nonetheless come to lend their wisdom to the deliberations. Some of their faces you know, many others you don’t, even after hours of research before your arrival in Vatican City.

You say as you trail Aemond uncertainly: “Cardinal Targaryen...?”

“Sit,” he orders when he reaches his table, pulling out a chair. You peer back at the nuns again. Sister Rhaena is exuberant; Sister Augustina looks like she’d enjoy burning you at the stake. You drop sheepishly into the red velvet chair and shrink under the intrigued gazes of the four cardinals who are seated with Aemond. You recognize Cardinal Orlando Almazan of the Philippines and Cardinal Luckson Louissaint of Haiti, whose large dark eyes roll to Aemond as he sips his wine and smiles to himself. Aemond tells his allies as he sits down beside you: “This is Sister Sydney.”

“Welcome, Sister Sydney!” booms a chubby man in his fifties, a warm perpetual flush in his full cheeks, salt-and-pepper hair, a short tidy beard.

You titter and bow your head, deferential. Your hands are clasped together in your lap, resting uneasily on the white wool of your habit. “Thank you, Your Eminence, but that’s not actually my name.”

“Are you from Sydney, Sister?” Cardinal Almazan asks; he is a small quiet man who is easy to lose in a crowd. He is presently doling out lollies and bikkies with labels you’ve never seen before; he must have brought them with him from the Philippines. He slides one over to you. Jelly Straws, the colorful package reads.

“We met there as children,” Aemond says. “About thirty years ago. And we hadn’t seen each other since.”

“C’est pas vrai!” Cardinal Louissaint exclaims as the others chatter incredulously. “Really? Is it possible? And now you find that you have both come to the Church by different paths? Incroyable.” He introduces himself with a broad grin and another curious glance at Aemond.

“How fortuitous for the Lord to bring you together again,” Cardinal Almazan says. He tells you his name and gestures for you to open the Jelly Straws.

“Yes,” Aemond muses, almost like it’s an afterthought, as if divine intervention hadn’t occurred to him. While you’re still hesitating, he rips open the Jelly Straws and takes a green one for himself, crystals of sugary coating snowing down on the table. “Mmm. Watermelon.”

“Aemo, give me a mango one,” the loud salt-and-pepper haired man says, holding out an open palm. And you recall abruptly, like something shattering against the floor: Did I call him that on the beach? I think I might have.

Aemond tosses him an orange Jelly Straw, and then tells you, pointing at the man: “Kazimierz Nowak of Poland.” Then he indicates to the last attendee, fluffy brown hair and round glasses, composed, bookish, mid-forties, the second-youngest cardinal here in the dining hall of the Domus Sanctae Marthae, the residence of the cardinals for the duration of the conclave. “Shane Campbell, American by birth, now serving in Mongolia.”

“Easiest assignment,” Cardinal Nowak mutters as he tears open a package of Sky Flakes, and the other men chuckle.

“Kazi, you are being rude again,” Cardinal Almazan scolds him, but he’s smiling. Unfamiliar snacks rotate around the table: Fudgee Barr, Kopiko, Super Stix, Hello Panda. Cautiously, you take a pink Jelly Straw from the package and pass the rest along. It tastes like strawberries, sweet and summery, golden sun beating down like it has in every other December you’ve ever lived through.

Cardinal Campbell tells Kazi: “I would happily die by arrows or being roasted over a gridiron if it would at last win me your esteem.”

“You could just lose four fingers like Jake,” Kazi suggests. He waves to a cardinal at a nearby table: Jacob Green, a Brit serving in Iran. You know his face; last year his capture and torture by a militant group was widely publicized, as well as his commitment to remain in Iran after the Church paid a hefty ransom and arranged for his safe release.

Cardinal Campbell holds up his hands and ponders them. “Which fingers could I spare?”

“Start with the ring fingers,” Cardinal Luckson Louissaint says. “You won’t need them.”

You all laugh, and Rhaena appears with plates of antipasto, including one for you. She cannot disguise her excitement; she is glowing with it, she is beaming, she almost drops Aemond’s serving on the floor as she goes to set it in front of him. “Thank you very much, Sister,” Cardinal Almazan murmurs as she scurries off again.

The men begin to eat. They speak with great familiarity and have nicknames for each other: Aemo, Kazi, Lucky, Lando, Cam. You pick up your fork and peer nervously around the dining hall. Many cardinals are watching you now, some amused, some fond...but others are frowning.

“Eat, Sister, eat,” Lucky urges you. He is short and round and has a gruff voice and hands calloused from the sort of work most cardinals abstain from. “You are in the right place, I promise. This is the kids’ table.”

Cardinal Orlando Almazan, Lando to his friends, appears startled. “I’m sixty.”

“That’s mid-twenties in cardinal years,” Kazi says. “Hey, Lando, did you ever watch that show I emailed you about?”

“Oh, it was awful.” He spears a chunk of salami with his fork.

“What show?” Aemond asks.

“Cribs,” Kazi says, and the others snicker.

“So wasteful!” Lando laments. “All those bedrooms, bowling alleys, movie theaters, garages for ten cars...all I could think about was the good those resources might do elsewhere.”

Kazi sighs. “You can’t look at anything without seeing orphans.”

Lando opens his hands. “And is this such a failing?”

“Well, it’s not very interesting.”

Lando grins. “Interesting men make poor cardinals. We figured that out in the 1500s when they kept murdering each other.”

“Might be a good tradition to revisit,” Lucky jokes, but in a very low voice. And he nods towards a table across the room, where several cardinals are glaring and hissing conspiratorially amongst themselves. You recognize some of them, older men with forceful fields of gravity: Bernardo Ferrari of Italy, Florent Auclair of France, and Matej Jahoda of the Czech Republic, a favorite to be elected pope.

Kazi says: “Jahoda thinks he is entitled to lead the Church because atheists killed his family.”

You are horrorstruck, a palm pressed to the white wool over your heart. “Did they really?”

“Prague Spring,” Aemond tells you, a phrase that carries with it vague connotations from Modern History in secondary school: 1960s, Eastern Bloc, Soviet invasion, self-immolations, tanks and smoke in the streets.

“It is very sad, what happened to his people,” Lando says softly.

“Yes, of course, but you cannot buy the Chair of Saint Peter with tragedies,” Lucky replies, then winks at Aemond. “Although perhaps you can earn it with miracles.”

“It wasn’t a miracle,” Aemond demurs, as he is expected to. To agree would be sanctimonious, prideful, unholy. No cardinal may campaign for himself, nor be seen to covet the papacy. It is disqualifying to be perceived as ambitious; and so those who want it most become good at pretending.

Cam leans across the table to whisper to Aemond: “Jahoda calls you The Cyclops.”

Aemond smiles as he crunches on a hunk of cucumber. “For something to be a monster, you have to be afraid of it.”

You take shy nibbles of your antipasto. On the other side of the dining hall, Cardinal Jahoda rolls his eyes and glowers at you and Aemond, then turns to say something you can just barely hear to his companions: “He will do anything for attention.”

“What was that, Cardinal Jahoda?” Kazi shouts across the void, and a hush ripples through the men dressed in red, the women in white or blue or black—depending upon which order they belong to—skittering soundlessly on the outskirts as they fetch water and wine and bowls of pancetta and pea risotto, the next course. Over one hundred souls wait to see what will happen next. The lines have been drawn and the frontrunners are no secret: the conservatives favor Jahoda or Leopoldo do Carmo of Portugal, the moderates are split between Jacob Green and Gideon Saati of South Sudan, and the liberals by and large are planning to vote for Aemond when the cardinals are locked in the Sistine Chapel.

Slowly, Cardinal Jahoda rises to his feet. He is an imposing man with iron-grey hair, broad shoulders, and large hands that could have gone to war if he’d chosen a different vocation. His voice is not gravelly like Lucky’s, but clear and deep and colored with a strong Czech accent. “Brothers, this is a time for reflection and solemn prayer, not fraternizing.”

Aemond stands. Enraptured gazes follow him, eyeglasses are put on; some cardinals smile, others glare, others only observe, opening their hearts to be swayed in either direction. “Cardinal Jahoda, surely you do not believe that our sisters are fit to prepare our meals but not to share them with us.”

Jahoda is dismissive, as if Aemond is a child to be shushed. “Ah, you do nothing with pure intentions. Do not pretend you care for her.”

“You are upset,” Aemond says with mock earnestness, and there are chuckles in the audience. “Perhaps you are lonely and in need of better company. Perhaps you would like to invite one of the other sisters to join your table.”

“God has ordained different roles for us. I would not presume to alter them.”

“And this is the thinking that has left our Church in such a precarious state,” Aemond says, and there is a chorus of responses: groans and objections from the conservatives, cheers and water glasses thumped on the tables from the liberals, the moderates splitting the difference. “You would not presume to question anything, and so you are content with an institution that stands still as the world keeps moving.”

“The Holy Father, may God rest his soul, was a progressive,” Jahoda counters, sparring with words like blades that clang together and slice just millimeters from the blue shadows of veins. “And for all his triumphs—serving the poor and the destitute so faithfully, welcoming with open arms migrants and refugees—he failed to strengthen the Church. Millions around the world are leaving Catholicism to become Evangelicals. The Vatican is deeply in debt. Recent press coverage of the Holy See has been marred by misinterpretations and vagueness, mixed messages, claiming to champion human rights while enabling China and Russia—”

“Concessions must be made if we are to have inroads to reach the people of these nations.”

“And so you would negotiate with tyrants.” Jahoda gives Aemond a hard, searing look, as if this is a betrayal. “Appeasement is not the solution to our problems.”

“Neither is alienation from modernity! We can choose to challenge ourselves and our Faith in order to meet the needs of the time we live in and reinvigorate the Church. We can explore the possibility of ordaining female deacons, we can extend blessings to same-sex couples, we can make celibacy optional for our priests as so many other religions have done already, we can do more to protect the climate which will in turn save countless human lives, we can allow the divorced and remarried to participate in communion!”

But this is too much: the conservatives are jeering and the moderates look startled, as if a fire alarm has just gone off. The liberals are gamely trying to drown out the opposition with cheers, applause, bangs of fists and water glasses against the tables. The nuns clutch their rosaries. You exchange a glance with Rhaena, who stands nearby carrying a bowl of risotto she’s completely forgotten about. She is mesmerized by Aemond. She mouths to you: Can you believe him?

You can, but you can’t; he’s exactly the same as the boy from the beach, he is so different, he is still watchful and clever, he is sharper and bolder and scarred.

“Brothers, brothers, please!” Cardinal Blaise Seaborn is pleading. He is the dean of the College of Cardinals, responsible for summoning them for the conclave and presiding over the proceedings. He is eternally flustered, his hair in disarray and his cassock rumpled. “We can discuss these matters in the general congregations tomorrow. Now is not the time. You’ve traveled so far and you must be exhausted. Please, I implore you, take your seats and finish your meals that the sisters have worked so diligently to prepare.”

Jahoda waves a hand flippantly as he lowers himself back into his chair. “You cannot understand, Cardinal Targaryen. But it is not your fault. You do not have the wisdom. You’re just too young.”

And as Jahoda retreats, Cardinal Auclair leaps up from the same table and strides to the center of the dining hall. He is tall and lean like Aemond, white-haired since his thirties, fiendishly quick, a fox, a peacock, a mercenary. No one would ever vote for Florent Auclair to be pope; it is well-known—yet never said aloud—that at home in Paris, there is a widow he has taken a special interest in and three children that share his aquiline nose and small, icy eyes. But this does not mean he is impartial. In your corner of the room, Lucky is drumming his knuckles heavily on the tabletop. Kazi passes you a half-eaten Choc Nut.

“Your Eminences,” Auclair begins with a sweep of his hand. Cardinal Seaborn peers around as if searching for someone to stop this, as if it isn’t his job. “The Holy Father was known for his humility and his gentleness. Let us now bring balance to the Church with a leader who is strong, and experienced, and attuned to the ancient history of our Faith. Not an idealistic youth.”

“I wonder about this fixation upon age,” Aemond says, and all eyes snap back to him. Cardinal Seaborn looks on wearily, feebly. “We believe in a Savior who redeemed the world at thirty-three, but a man at forty or fifty is not fit to lead His flock?”

Auclair is incensed. “You compare yourself to Christ?!”

“You pretend to know my mind!” Aemond thunders. “And the gifts that God has bestowed upon others. There is no greater arrogance.”

Auclair mocks venomously: “What is the saying? He who enters the conclave as pope leaves it as a cardinal.”

“And I have voiced no such aspirations.” But he has led Auclair into the trap of speaking them to life, and now they are loose in the air like fireflies and no one can forget them.

Auclair switches to Latin, and Aemond follows him seamlessly. Then Auclair pivots to French, a language that many of the cardinals have at least some proficiency in, and Aemond hesitates; you have the impression he can understand most of what is being said, but Auclair talks so swiftly—surely this is intentional—and Aemond stumbles over his words when he tries to defend himself.

Lucky surges up from the table and meets them in the middle of the dining hall, assailing Auclair with a deluge of French. Aemond gracefully retreats. As the emperors stand back, the gladiators bloody the floor. Now the cardinals are in uproar, a deafening rumble of palms and fists against the tables, an incomprehensible storm of languages. Kazi and Cam are bellowing to cheer Lucky on. Lando looks at you, smiles placidly, shrugs, takes a bite of his risotto.

“Cardinal Louissant, please!” Cardinal Seaborn begs. “Please, Brothers, let us return to our seats! This is no way to honor the memory of the Holy Father!”

The cardinals fracture away from each other, Auclair returning to one side of the room, Lucky to the other. Auclair hisses at Aemond as he withdraws: “Even your hero Saint Thomas Aquinas agreed that pride is the most reprehensible of the seven deadly sins.”

Aemond says: “And fortunately for you, Your Eminence, lust is the least.”

“Le salaud!” Auclair roars, and again the cardinals erupt into chaos. “Le crétin, la bête!”

As the dining hall is engulfed in jeers and laughter and applause, Aemond stands by his chair and sips his wine, cool, composed, too statuesque to be human. You gaze up at him and think: What happened to that boy from the beach? Cardinal Seaborn physically places himself in Auclair’s path to stop him from crossing the midpoint of the room. Sister Augustina is crossing herself.

“You still need one more miracle to be a saint, Targaryen,” Auclair seethes as Cardinal Ferrari coaxes him back to their table. “Surely that is what you dream of. No throne on earth is high enough for you.”

Aemond does not reply. He sits as if no one has said anything and eats his risotto, neat but famished forkfuls. Lucky, Kazi, Cam, and Lando give him encouraging thumps on the back. In return, Aemond flashes them a sly, crooked smirk. Then he turns to you. “Tell me about the work you’ve done with the Sisters of Charity of Australia.”

It’s a command, not a request; still, you deny him. You stand, casting a wary glance at Sister Augustina, who is lurching towards you on jolty, arthritic legs. “I really must go serve dinner with the rest of the sisters, I’m only here in Vatican City with Sister Augustina’s blessing and I fear she is dangerously close to revoking it.”

Aemond’s companions wish you goodnight, but he’s not quite done with you yet. “That’s not why I did it,” he says, indicating to the seat he led you to. “To prove a point.”

“I know, Aemond.” And you should have called him Your Eminence or Cardinal Targaryen, but you didn’t, because he’s not just a cardinal. He’s your friend.

As you depart, Aemond picks up a pack of chocolate-flavored Sky Flakes from the table and offers them to you. “Bikkies, right?”

You grin. He remembers. “Too right.” You take the Sky Flakes; you’ll share them with Rhaena tonight.

But when dinner is over and the dishes have been cleared, Aemond finds you again, this time at the threshold between the dining hall and the corridor that leads to the stairwells and the elevators. The Domus Sanctae Marthae—Latin for Saint Martha’s House—is essentially a hotel, built in 1996 by Pope John Paul II for guests to Vatican City and to house the College of Cardinals during a conclave. It can accommodate one hundred and thirty-one souls in small, spartan rooms: no televisions, no radios, no computers, no cellphones, no worldly distractions, no undue influences upon the cardinals’ meditations. They are to listen to the whispers of God, not journalists, not family or friends, not bribes or threats or pleas, not even the crowds of faithful Catholics that gather in Saint Peter’s Square with handmade signs and flickering candles.

Aemond asks, spotting the plain iron medallion hanging from your throat: “Who are you wearing?”

“Saint Agatha.”

“Bona of Pisa would have been better. The patron saint of travelers. Or perhaps Mary MacKillop, the patron saint of Australia.”

“Yes, Aemond, you’re very smart.”

He chuckles and watches you, and even when he doesn’t say anything you feel no instinct to leave; this is unfinished. His hands are clasped behind his back again, as if he is afraid of what he will do with them if they are untethered. A scarlet torrent of cardinals lumber past as they journey to their rooms. Rhaena, curious but not wanting to intrude, loiters a ways down the hall as she waits for you.

“I still remember saying goodbye to you, isn’t that mad?” you tell Aemond. “We were with our families at that pizza place, and it was dark outside, and as you left it was like you vanished into the white glow of the streetlights. And there was some song playing...I don’t know, I’ve never been able to find it again. But it was sad, and I think it had a harmonica.”

Surely he thinks you’re a bit gone for holding on to that moment from almost exactly twenty-nine years ago; maybe he’ll even think you’re making it up. But instead, Aemond gazes off into the Red Sea of cardinals—a lava flow, a bloodrush—and then after a while he comes back to you. “It’s a Bruce Springsteen song,” Aemond says quietly. “It’s called Atlantic City. If you look it up when all of this is over and we’re no longer sequestered, I think you’ll discover you recognize it.” And as you stand there, speechless and thunderstruck in your spotless white wool, he begins to leave. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Sydney.”

“Defo,” you reply; and when Aemond blinks at you, stunned, you smile.

He smiles back, touches the gold cross that hangs from his neck, turns away from you and is lost in the gore-red current.

~~~~~~~~~~

Everyone agrees he is smart, but how far has that gotten him?

He has leapt from one island to another: born on Nisyros, educated at British boarding schools and seminaries, and finally assigned to Santorini, and it is here that he waits to become someone. The Church has been the refuge of superfluous sons for two thousand years, a throne that requires no inheritance, a ladder to material comforts, security, status, power, fame, immortality for those who climb high enough. And what is the price you must pay? A relatively painless sacrifice when one considers the rewards: you may not marry, you may not have children, you may not experience romantic love if you are still under the belief that such a thing exists.

He came to the Faith through his mother, Irish by birth and always yearning for somewhere that was cool and wet and green. But perhaps its roots cannot thrive here in the dry air and volcanic soil. Of Greece’s ten million inhabitants, only one percent are Catholic, and while that number grows with each new wave of refugees from Lebanon, Syria, or Iraq, he finds himself languishing in scenic Mediterranean irrelevance. At the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist, he ministers to sunburned tourists and dozing old people. He has a plan, but it’s happening so slowly; and patience is a virtue but he has no illusions that he possessed many of those.

It’s summer, hot and glaring and the height of tourist season, when he feels the earth shift beneath his feet as he is ruminating on his disaffection at the Old Port of Fira. Across a narrow strait of the Aegean Sea, he sees the sky change color above Nea Kameni, an uninhabited island and popular site for hiking and sightseeing. Because he was raised on Nisyros, he knows what signs foretell an eruption. Because he’s been on yachts with his boarding school friends—sons of dukes, daughters of prime ministers, bottles of vodka and MDMA pills—he knows how to sail.

It’s late in the day, nearing dusk, and so most of the tours are already back; but there is at least one group left on Nea Kameni, and he knows this because he can just barely see their boat moored to the dock and thrashing on suddenly murderous waves. And then the crater of the volcano explodes, and smoldering rubble pours down onto the dock, and the boat is crushed and they are stranded. He can almost hear their screams. He can imagine the lethal red heat of the lava that will soon be swallowing them like Jonah was wrenched into the belly of a whale.

For the very first time in his life, Aemond could almost believe in God, in divine intervention, in miracles; because in the scorching black plumes of poison rising from Nea Kameni, he sees the white of the smoke when the College of Cardinals has elected a new pope.

~~~~~~~~~~

“Should we have a cuppa?” you ask Rhaena as you place a kettle on a hotplate in the small kitchenette. A corner of the ground floor of the Domus Sanctae Marthae has been set aside for the nuns, each bedroom containing two single-sized beds; you and Rhaena are roommates.

“That’d be lovely.” She sighs as she sits down at the table and rips open the package of chocolate-flavored Sky Flakes. She looks exhausted, shoulders slumped, eyes puffy.

“You alright?”

Rhaena nods. “I’ve just been flat out since the second we got here. And I still have another load of washing to get done tonight. Did you see those spiders in the basement?”

“Oh yeah, heaps of them.”

Rhaena shudders, then perks up when she takes a bite of a Sky Flake. “These are good though.”

“I’ll help you with the washing.”

“Is he like you remember?” she says, and you know who she means. Light floods back into her face; gravity lessens in her bones. She is sitting up straighter. She is entranced. “Was he the same way as a boy? So clever and fearless and magnetic?” Then Rhaena gasps and glances worriedly at the third nun in the room, whom she had forgotten about: Sister Augustina is at the opposite end of the table, collapsed with her head resting on her forearms, her body eerily motionless. She’s always doing this.

You smile. “She’s asleep, Rhaena. She can’t hear us.”

Nonetheless, her voice drops to a whisper. “She won’t stop hitting me.”

“I’m sorry.” You pull back your sleeve to show Rhaena the discoloration of a bruise left by one of Sister Augustina’s clawlike hands. “Keep your distance as much as you can. I’ll try to distract her.”

Rhaena gives her unconscious tormenter one last mistrustful look. Despite Sister Augustina’s mortal faults, you have compassion for her. Wrath comes from pain, a vivid red like stoked flames or fresh blood, and something terrible must have happened to her: a lost loved one, a suffering nation, betrayal, rejection, abuse. But she’s still in the Church, she still has faith, and you find that beautiful. She wears a black habit and a medallion depicting Saint Zita, the patron saint of servants, housekeepers, and lost keys.

Rhaena prompts you: “Well?”

Her question still burns in your skull, low like embers: Is he like you remember? “It’s difficult to explain,” you say slowly. “Sometimes he’s just like that boy from the beach. And then in other moments he looks like a stranger.” He is cunning, he is prideful.

“He would make an extraordinary pope, don’t you think?” Rhaena says wistfully as she nibbles on her Sky Flake. “He’s so well-versed. He’s young, he’s charismatic. And he’s performed a miracle. The lava stopped when he held up his hands, that’s what the tourists he saved told the reporters. What other cardinal can say that? Who else could claim to have been chosen by God?”

Your reply is vague, and not only because you’re supposed to believe God alone will decide who the next Holy Father will be; you aren’t sure how you feel about Aemond being pope. “We’ll have to see what happens.”

“And we get to witness it...right here, where Saint Peter founded the Church two thousand years ago...” Rhaena is in awe of your good fortune, Sister Augustina and the spiders and the endless chores notwithstanding. “What was it that you said to Mother Maureen to convince her to send us to Rome?”

You haven’t told Rhaena the real reason why you’re here. It would hurt her, you think; you are like an older sister to her, or perhaps even a mother, a resurrection of the one she lost to a postpartum hemorrhage when she was a girl. Engraved on her plain iron medallion is Saint Jerome, the patron saint of orphans and abandoned children.

So you lie. “Papal conclaves are so rare, maybe once every ten or twenty years. I won’t have many more opportunities to see one. When the Holy Father passed, Mother Maureen and I were discussing it, and I mentioned how fascinated I’d always been by the process and how I would love to assist with a conclave someday. And she made a call to Sister Augustina that same night.”

Rhaena smiles warmly. “Mother Maureen is so kind.”

She really is. “We are very fortunate to have her.”

You pour boiling water into two cups with one teabag each—Yorkshire Tea, of course, brought in your luggage—and let them steep. Then you turn to contemplate Sister Augustina, still sleeping.

“Don’t,” Rhaena pleads.

You smirk guiltily. You can’t bring yourself to exclude her. It’s not the right thing to do. “Sister Augustina, would you like some tea?” you ask loudly. She doesn’t stir.

“Leave her alone,” Rhaena begs you. “She’ll just find something to snap at us about!”

You try again: “Sister Augustina!”

She still doesn’t move. Now you and Rhaena are perplexed; it’s never been this difficult to rouse her before. You go to Sister Augustina and prod her shoulder, then scream as she spills bonelessly across the floor.

She’s dead.

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