"Valia?"

"Blai!" She does not race across the room and hug him because they're both Chelish but she takes two steps forwards and brightens noticeably. "You're - I found you dead - did they catch the people who did it -"

"I... don't actually know, that wasn't one of the things I prioritized asking. Though I did ask before I came here if I was supposed to use lethal force in self-defense and it turns out I was after all, so now I know that."

"...I guess of things to not know that's less damaging than the things I didn't know. I'm glad you're all right. I never met anyone who rose from the dead before - did you get to go to Heaven first? Was it nice?"

"I don't remember anything. - I'd guess Axis. But I don't remember either way."

"Oh. Axis is also all right but I thought that Iomedae's people went to Heaven." This is actually quite important for her near-term expectations and there's a bit of an edge to her voice. 

"Maybe She can make special requests, if She wants us. It's not always true of clerics in general."

"Oh." Valia's voice is small and tired. "Well. That's not - really important. I'm glad you're back. I'm sorry that you - I think if I had given a more careful speech there might not have been riots and then you wouldn't have died. I wasn't expecting this but I'm sorry."

"I don't - it's - if there were a lot of riots, the one that caught me might have been inspired by the general mood but -

- they were looking for me by name and they had a reason and that is not your fault."

"- I don't think they could possibly have had a very good reason to murder a priest of Iomedae in the street!"

"They thought - they - there was a pamphlet with - well, it spelled my name wrong, but -"

"They took my speech and made a pamphlet saying rip all tieflings limb from limb," says Valia sympathetically.

"Not like that." Why can't she read. She is certainly already aware of the fact that it would be convenient if she could read and she has been trying but if he could just hand her a fistful of letters and - well, no, he destroyed his copy of the denouncement -

"It said in the pamphlet, that I was actually a priest of Asmodeus.

"Because I was one for twenty years."

"Oh.

....why were you a priest of Asmodeus?"

Why did she ask that question and not any of the ones he thought of in advance? He thought of so many possible reactions she could have in advance. He was ready to duck if she tried to hit him and everything. "They picked us out toward the end of school, like with wizards only a little later on, and - it might help if you had more specific questions, I don't know where to start."

"Well. I don't - there are a lot of things about the world I don't know. But if I woke up one day and was a priest of Asmodeus somehow, and everyone else thought I was a priest of Asmodeus, I'd go try and be a Worldwound priest of Asmodeus, and I take it you did that because you were at the Worldwound, and then I would renounce Asmodeus and go try to make it to one of the other forts. ...I guess unless my fort was immediately going to fall if I did that? That'd be a pretty good reason to wait it out until the Worldwound was closed..."

"I did go to the Worldwound. I didn't renounce Him. He pulled my spells the same day as everyone else's."

" - but that was after the Wound closed, right? Why be a priest of Asmodeus once it's not even helping prevent the world from being overrun by demons?"

"It's very kind of you to assume I had a reason."

Valia is not usually a person who is lost for words but she is kind of lost for words! The only thing she can think of to say is 'what went wrong such that you didn't think of renouncing Asmodeus and running away the day the Wound closed' but when the Archmage Cotonnet did that to her she hated it, because it was - 'assuming my thing is the most important thing in the world, explain your error in not having noticed that sooner'. The thing in question is 'not serving Asmodeus' which really does seem like a good candidate for the most important thing in the world, but that doesn't mean it'd land any better. But she can't exactly think what to say instead. 

"Are you...do you think that you did the right thing?"

"...almost never, no."

"Oh. 

Are you trying to do the right thing?"

"Very poorly! Apparently I should have been killing people who were responding to what they, quite reasonably under the circumstances, imagined to be a priest of Asmodeus walking among them! I am fantasizing about challenging Ser Cansellarion's arguable underuse of his boots of teleportation to see if I can get some kind of accelerated catechism course so that I can have a church superior who can tell me!"

"Feliu's pretty good at explaining things. I don't think you should have killed people who were responding reasonably to what they thought was going on, who told you that?"

"The Lastwaller in the temple who told me that I ought to have used lethal force to keep the mob off me. I probably could have gotten away, if I'd responded to concern about a mob reading that pamphlet by walking the streets armed and prepped with that approach in mind - Sanctuary doesn't last long, I wasn't carrying my mace in the streets..."