Doremin is a Declaration-priest of the second ring of Tarolin, neither high enough to sit near the Ecclesiarch nor low enough to be forgotten, and he has spent most of his life performing the ceremony that decides what every child in his district will become. He was good at it. He read the futures cleanly, pronounced them without flinching, and never once doubted that the Declaration was both true and kind, until the morning he was handed a girl named Tamari and saw nothing for her at all.
A null Declaration is the rarest failure the Temptari recognize and the one they speak of least. The priest looks into the child's futures and finds nothing to pronounce, only the blank where a life should be. By the rolls of Avalon, no child ever given a null Declaration has reached adulthood. The ceremony is supposed to be a reading of what will be, so a child with no future is a child the world has already closed its hand around, and the families bury them quietly and are not asked questions.
Doremin did not see no future. He saw Tamari's future with more clarity than he had ever seen anyone's, a long and ordinary life laid out plainly in front of him, and in the same instant he understood why the ceremony was meant to fail. He never recorded what he saw. He has never told anyone, including Tamari, what her life contains or why the Ecclesiarch's own sight returned nothing where his returned everything. What he did was forge a Declaration. He wrote her a plausible, modest destiny in the proper hand, sealed it with the proper rites, and handed her family a future that was not the one he had read and not the absence the system expected.
A true Declaration and a false one are written with the same ink, in the same hand, sealed the same way. The only difference is whether the priest believed it. I have stopped being able to tell which of the ones I wrote before her were true. — from a private account kept by a Tarolin priest, unsigned
The forgery went where forgeries are not supposed to go. It passed through the Solum Impervium, the high-priest order that governs Avalon by auditing and interpreting the Declaration rolls, and not one of them caught it; a false destiny written in the proper hand and sealed with the proper rites sits filed among the true ones, undetected, in the ledgers of an order that believes it reads everything.
The forgery is why Doremin is no longer merely a priest. A null Declaration that the Ecclesiarch did not foresee, on a child the Ecclesiarch is now known to be watching, is proof that Maurolin's sight has a hole in it, and Maurolin's rule rests entirely on the belief that it does not. Doremin holds that proof. He has never named his price, which is the cleverest thing he has done, because a demand could be met and then answered, and an open secret cannot. The two men have not spoken of it directly. Maurolin has foreseen every future in which he silences Doremin and watched the secret survive each one, so he leaves the priest alive and watched. Doremin, for his part, did none of this to gain leverage. He came into the leverage by accident, by refusing to let a child die, and he is now bound to the most dangerous game in Avalon because he was, on one specific morning, merciful.
Whether the mercy holds is an open question. Doremin is not a conspirator by temperament and the weight of the secret is changing him. He drinks now. He has begun, quietly, to wonder what Tamari's future actually is, and whether the reason her life was meant to be cut short is something he would have been right to prevent.