"Of course." He doesn't particularly expect Valia to be beaten or raped in Her Majesty's prisons, but there's good enough odds someone is angry enough at her to try to kill her that he's stayed here the night. He's a paladin, it's what he's for.

He says that like he doesn't, actually, understand the question. "I mean, for spells. Blai and I aren't caught up on everything but he was explaining to me that they cost the Goddess something. And they took my holy symbol and they're not going to let me cast them so -"

"I think the odds you will go the rest of your life without getting a chance to cast the spells you pray for this morning are very low. - If someone breaks in to try to murder you, borrow my dagger, it's a holy symbol too."

That is oddly soothing. She beams at him, and closes her eyes, and prays for her spells. And Iomedae grants them. This doesn't settle all of the uncertainty seething miserably in her heart but it does make it more bearable. 

Feliu also prays for spells at dawn; he used a few of them (though not most, because most of his spells are for killing extremely powerful Evil things and there weren't any on the streets last night) but mostly he is just happy about getting his Lay On Hands effects back. He can really use channels.

But he doesn't need to say anything. If Valia wants to talk, she can talk.

Valia wants to ask him questions but she doesn't have questions, just the massive cloud of confusion draped closely over everything, making it impossible to guess which things she ought to do in order to guess which other things -

- no, actually, that's fixable. "Is there anything that you think that I should do, today."

"Offer to channel if you see someone you can offer it to? They may still be short today, I'm not sure. Beyond that - your fate is in the hands of other people and I don't know what actions you can initiate will contribute to things going well."

So it doesn't matter, the deep miserable blanket of confusion. Maybe she will be unconfused in Heaven someday. She stands up and ties her hair back again where it's all mussed up from her terrible sleeping position, and she paces until not asking any of her questions is actually unbearable. "Am I bothering you if I ask things?"

"No."

"Did they kill the evil nobles last night?"

"Probably some of them. I wasn't tracking that."

But it seems pretty important to track, if one is deciding how to feel about the whole thing! It was awful regardless, of course, war always is, but - 'a lot of people died successfully deposing all the old Asmodean nobility' and 'a lot of people died failing to depose all the old Asmodean nobility' and 'a lot of people died doing some other worse thing' are really importantly different! "What were you...tracking."

"Where the fighting was, how many people were dead, how many channels I had, where I could cut them off, whether they looked like I could talk to them - the nobles can buy resurrections, Valia." 

This is a fact about the world Valia didn't know, or didn't really know all the way through. When you killed nobles in Pezzack they stayed dead. "Are they ...wealthier than under Hell? Or are resurrections like channels and cheaper from the Good gods?"

"If they're minor nobility, they might die and stay dead. But if they're counts or dukes or archdukes, who are the people in town for the convention, they can leave instructions with the Church of Abadar to resurrect them and they'll pay the Church back over the next twenty years with a share of the income from their lands. I suspect that Asmodean Cheliax didn't have that because Asmodeus wanted nobles killing their parents for power and there wasn't anyone as trustworthy as the Church of Abadar to go to."

"But people still tried to kill them, knowing that? Or did they not know that like in Pezzack no one knows that?"

"Hard to tell. They did try to also kill all the Abadarans, though I think that was wanting to rob the banks more than it was a plan to stop resurrections. I'd guess they didn't know, or at least weren't thinking about it?"

"Do you think that they were - wrong? That they were risking their lives for something they would not have risked it for, if they'd known the whole picture?"

"Yes."

"That's my fault."

"Mostly. This wasn't the first riot this year and it won't be the last."

"Do you think that the people who died in the riots will be all right?"

"Some but not most, I think?"

"Most people aren't bad. Most people are brave and good, when they can be. It was Asmodeus's lie, that everyone was evil and damned."

"It was something he worked very hard to make true, and the closer to his puppet's capital he was, the better at it he was."