Every temple of the Seven, on every inhabited isle in the Reaches, holds seven seats at its principal altar. Six of them belong to the six named living gods — Velisara, Thorin, Vessen, Korr, Aevan, and Sylth. The seventh seat is kept. It is dressed seasonally, with the same cloth as the others. It is dusted by the temple-attendant on the same schedule. It is not prayed to, in the temple’s own teaching, and the official position is that the seventh seat exists “for the one whose star is dim.”
This is a careful phrase. It does not name. It does not commit. It is the phrase the priests use with children, and it is the phrase the priests use with foreign delegates, and it is the phrase the priests use with one another, and yet every adult in the Reach knows what the phrase means. The seventh seat is for Mara, of the deep currents, whose star went dim within living memory. The temple does not say so aloud, and the laity does not press them.
What the temple does say, when pressed, is that the seventh seat is kept because the temple is not yet certain whether the star is gone or only sleeping. This has been the official position for some four centuries. It will, the priests will tell you when their guard is down, probably remain the position for four more.
What the laity does at the seventh seat is more interesting than what the temple says about it.
In most reach-households’ personal altars — the small ones kept on an inside wall, six seats and a seventh — the seventh seat is not empty. It is dressed. The most common dressings are these:
- A small piece of blue cloth, folded once, tucked at the back of the seat. The blue is not just any blue — it is the particular pale blue of deep water seen from above, a colour that fishermen’s wives know on sight and dye-makers do not formally produce. The cloth is cut from old sails, by old custom. Most households’ cloths are second-hand, third-hand, older
- A single fragment of sea-glass, placed flat on the seat. The glass is collected from any beach. Children collect them for their households unprompted. A child who finds a particularly good piece — round, frosted, the right colour — will, in many reach-villages, give it to their grandmother first. The grandmother decides whether the household altar already has enough
- A small clay bowl of salt water, kept fresh by the household. The water is changed when the household remembers, which in practice means weekly or thereabouts. The water is replaced from the rain-barrel, never from the kitchen tap. This rule is not written. It is simply how it is done
What people do at the seventh seat varies by household. Most do nothing — the dressing is enough. Some, particularly the older women of fishing villages, will whisper at the altar in passing. The whispering is not loud enough to qualify as prayer in the temple’s strict definition, and the temple has, in four centuries, found no practical way to prosecute a whispered word. Some households leave small offerings — a piece of bread no larger than a thumbnail, a copper coin, a feather from a sea-bird — at the foot of the seat on certain days. The Memorial of the Two Stars (a folk-festival not on the temple calendar) is the most common.
What the temple does in response to all of this: nothing. The temple sees and does not see. A priest of the Seven who entered a fisherman’s house and found the seventh seat dressed in sail-cloth blue and sea-glass would, by long unwritten custom, make no remark. They would proceed with the rite they had come to perform — a blessing, a healing, a household ceremony — as though the seventh seat were dressed exactly as the temple’s altar is. The laity would notice the not-noticing. The not-noticing is the courtesy.
What is the seventh seat for, then?
The temple’s official answer remains: it is for the one whose star is dim. The laity’s working answer, which they will not articulate to a priest but will articulate among themselves, is something like hope — though they would not use the word. They keep the seat dressed because the star might not be entirely gone. They keep the seat dressed because the deep currents still carry every ship of their people, and the carrying is a kindness, and the kindness must come from somewhere. They keep the seat dressed because it is what their grandmothers did, and what their grandmothers’ grandmothers did, and they would feel obscurely foolish to be the first generation to stop.
The seat is dressed. The water is fresh. The cloth is blue. The eye that sees this — Aevan’s eye, by the temple’s accounting — sees and does not say. Four centuries of seeing and not saying have built, in the quiet space between official doctrine and household practice, a tradition the temple does not endorse and cannot abolish, and which the temple has, in its most candid private reflections, stopped trying to.
“The seat at home is dressed. The seat at the temple is dressed too, in the same cloth — though theirs is finer, of course. I have never asked the priest about it. He has never asked me. We have known one another forty years. There is a great deal we have not asked one another. This is one of the things.”
— attributed to Old Berta of Ember’s End, in conversation with a visiting almanac-keeper, 411 AU