"Huh. I guess we can - adapt the sermons to be, uh, more enthusiastic about Good."

"I'll try another draft of the first one for the city."

Summer isn't the worst time to try to get people together for a project. There are crops to be tended in the fields, but the work's not heavy enough to require everyone. It's Queralt who tries, although most of the real organizational work is done by the town's working artist, who doesn't work for free, but asks very little, for this. They haven't finished tearing out the torture chambers, but those doors can be locked. They get a ladder in and tear out the spiked cages, since apparently Iomedae doesn't like torture no matter what. She agonizes about the broken windows, but those are already gone. She tries sketching new ones, and realizes she doesn't know what ought to go there, at which point she just orders the remaining broken glass removed. The heavy glass work won't pick up until winter anyway; that's a better time to fix them properly, and better to do a good job of it than a rushed one, she thinks. Her father wanted a glorious rebuilding, after all, before he sent the architect away. They can at least make this place look decent, if not spectacular. 

In the end they paint over the hell mural with enough coats of white that you can't tell it used to be anything. It's not that there isn't probably something worth salvaging in it artistically - it's very skillfully done, and she does feel that there's probably some way of rehabilitating it. Maybe if the armies of heaven were on the other two walls. But it's a delicate operation, and if you do it wrong it looks half-assed, or even mocking. Disloyal. Better to have nothing, for now. They can always paint something else over the white later. The star on the floor they paint over in black, so you can almost, almost pretend that it wasn't ever there at all. It's not so very much work in the end, not that she did any of it besides have opinions at people. The end result is very clearly a work in progress, but it's no longer an especially obviously hellish one.

She doesn't have to make sure that everyone of any consequence attends the opening, of course. The Archduke does that. And even if he didn't, almost all of them would be moved enough by terror.

"Welcome, people of Kantaria. Thank you for coming today. I am Marit, and this is Arn; we are of Lastwall, where we trained in the teachings of Iomedae, and we are here to teach them to you, and also the other teachings of the gods of Good. Today's sermon is based on the advice of the good people of Andoran, which was also long ruled by Hell, and which has ten years now been free of it. I do not know how true the stories they sent us to instruct you are: they are meant to be useful for understanding Good, even if the events got quite mangled in the retelling. You do not have to believe the stories. Iomedae does not like rules that people have to believe things."

"Andoran sent us three stories. This is the first.

Once upon a time, in Varisia to the distant west, there were two feuding clans. No one remembered how the feud had started; the Axelsens said that the Holm had betrayed them bitterly, and the Holm said that the Axelsens had, and both of them were right. When they could get away with it they struck at each others' homes in the dead of night; they stole each others' animals; they killed each others' men; they stole each others' women. Whenever they came across each other there would be a bloody fight. Once they had both been mighty clans of hundreds, but their war had whittled them away, and eventually there were only a few dozen of each of them.

Emil Holm had a son, Asmund, who was strong and brave and kind. He always protected younger children; he was never cruel, even to the least of the workers in his household; he taught all the other boys, for he had no fear of making his brothers and cousins stronger, and when they surpassed him he was glad for them. He was very troubled by the terrible feud with the Axelsens, but his father told him that they were dreadful people, barely better than beasts, and when he was twelve the Axelsens raided and killed his father in front of him and nearly killed him also, and it did not trouble him after that to war with the terrible Axelsens, and as he was a brave and powerful warrior he was very good at it. 

Heni Axelsen had a daughter, Bente, a beautiful girl who was fair and clever and generous. She was never moved to anger. She was a hard worker. She shared her portions of her food with her younger siblings, and with the servants, and her father scolded her that she'd have too little to eat and grow weak, but instead they returned the favor and she grew tall and strong. Nearly every man who saw her asked Heni about her hand, but Heni had some premonition that his daughter would be greatly important, and it grieved him to see her leave, so he told them, when she is older, when she is twenty, then I'll pick the man she should wed.

So Bente remained in her father's home, and grew more beautiful still. She was a gentle soul, and grieved to hear of war, so of the Holms her father told her no more than that they were bad men. When he went out to kill Holms he told her it was by wild animals he had sustained his injuries. She worried over him, and sang over him, and wished them good fortune, and stayed up to pray when they went out to raid. Word of this remarkable woman spread far and wide, and men would detour to her father's house to hear her recite poetry and sing, to see the things she'd woven, to petition her father to wed her. And word spread to the Holm, and they conceived of a brilliant stroke by which they could humiliate their hated enemies, and so one day when the Axelsen men were out in the fields they stole into the home and killed the servants and the children and stole Bente and carried her away. When they returned with her, she was weeping bitterly, for the murder of her sisters and brothers and the servants she had loved as dearly as sisters and brothers, and she demanded to know what Evil Asmund served, that he had visited it on her innocent family.

Asmund Holm was outraged, for her family was not innocent at all, and he told her of the most recent raid by the Axelsens, in which their own children had been murdered, their own daughters seized, their own people slaughtered, for it was the Axelsens that were the evildoer. Bente, who had not been told of this, did not believe them at first, and demanded to know the details, the very night this had been done, what injuries the attackers had, and slowly she pieced together that it was true, that the war her father had been engaged in had not been against animals, and her screams of grief and dismay could be heard all out to the hills.

And Bente's father heard them, and gathered the men for a counter-raid.

Asmund was very confused. "Why are you wailing?" he asked her, angrily. "I haven't done anything!" and Bente paused in tremendous confusion, and explained to him that she was weeping for his people, dead by the hands of her own, and for hers, dead by his, because all of them had died pointlessly and for nothing as their enemies were not in fact monsters.

Asmund had never wept, for his father's death. He had imagined he ought to be a man and be strong. He had never seen anyone weep for his father's death. He was speechless, as Bente wept, and he was angry, and he was terribly confused. Then she demanded to know how the feud had started, and Asmund realized that he did not know; and he went and found a wise old elder, and she also did not know, and Bente demanded to be taken out to the grave-yard to count the dead, all the Holms that Axelsens had killed, and told him the names of all of the Axelsens the Holms had killed.

"Do you see?" she said to Asmund. "All of it for nothing."

"Not quite nothing," he said. "All of it for you."

But at this Bente's eyes glowed with something fierce and terrible, and she said to him, "if you speak truly then you speak of a curse, a horrible curse, for if I could have stopped this bloodshed with my death I would have slit my own throat when I was three years old. But I think that instead you are lying. This was not for you; this was not for me; this was for nothing. You and I were born of it, but another hundred heroes that should have been lie in these graves, and their families were denied them for nothing. This was stupid, and it was evil, and you have not won me by it. You will let me leave."

Asmund at first intended to be outraged, that she would command him so, but when he looked on the only woman that had ever mourned his father, outrage was not what he felt. "Yes," he said, "you may leave," and that is when the Axelsens attacked.

For a while nothing could be heard over the din of fighting, the Axelsen men determined to avenge the murder of their families, the Holm men defending their home; and then Bente stepped out onto the ramparts, in the white nightgown she had been kidnapped in. "No," she said, and her voice echoed to the hills. "No. Stop. Stop killing each other. The only way to stop creating more to avenge is to stop avenging it. Peace, all of you! Peace!"

And Iomedae chose her, in that moment, and she took a real sword and found she could employ it as her holy symbol, and healed all the injured, of both sides, and then stood there between them, aglow and grieved and very very angry. She knew nothing of swords, and any of the men could have struck her down, but none did, and she demanded of all of them the answer to what had started the feud, but no one knew. "Well," she said, "no more"; and she told them to bury all the dead together, in a single graveyard, so that none could forget what had been lost to their petty war. They did this. And as they worked side by side, the Holms had to admit that the Axelsens were hard workers, and the Axelsens had to admit that the Holms worked metal well, and they grumbled and they worked and by dawn the work was done."

"Now," said Bente, "let any man who kills another for this foolish feud have no defenders among his own family; bring him to me, and I'll know what to do with him." And the men were greatly afraid of her, except Asmund who by now was very much in love. He proposed marriage to her. "After there has been peace for a year," she said, and so he set himself to it, with great stubbornness, and made it known to all that if there was any interruption in the peace they would face his wrath also. And while half a dozen times, in that year, the men came nearly to blood, they turned from it every time. And after a year Bente and Asmund were married, and had twenty children, and the peace endured not just as long as they lived but as long as they are remembered."

"And this is the second:

Long ago when great wizards could see the future, one looked into the future and foresaw that into a small village called Enares, a great warrior would be born who would overthrow the King. The King did not approve, of course, and so he ordered all the little boys born into that village killed, that none might overthrow him. Off he sent his finest imperial soldiers, to do the deed; but his soldiers were corrupt and lazy, and so they hired some other men to do the deed, and those men hired some others, and the men who actually arrived at the village were dreadful thugs. And foolishly, the night before they reached the village, they drunkenly boasted to an innkeeper's daughter of their mission.

The innkeeper's daughter was brave and Good, and she was horrified. So she told her brother and he left in the night, to ride in secret to the village and warn them. And when he reached the village they were horrified, for that year had been a good one, and a great many of the families of the village had borne sons, and there were twelve healthy beautiful little boys in danger by the King's decree. 

And an old woman, who had no fear of the world to come, said, tie a bit of cloth around your son's little legs, so that I can tell them all apart when I bring them back, and then give them to me, and I'll bring them out of the village and to a safe place I know. And the parents did this, and kissed their little sons, and prayed over them, and then bundled them all - six on her back and six on her front - and off she walked. And when the thugs came to the village, the families of the village said that already a disease had stolen away the only sons born that year.

Except for one man, a greedy man, who had himself no son to lose. He thought to betray the other villagers and collect a rich reward, and so he warned the thugs that this was a lie, and that an old woman had absconded with the babies into the hills, and advised them to follow her. 

And so they did. 

The old woman had walked to a small hunting cabin in the hills, with a goat that could feed the babies, and she set herself to keeping them from crying, all twelve of them, two at her bosom and two with the goat and one in each arm and one bouncing on each knee and four playing with little sticks she found. She sang to them. She told them that their parents loved them, and that their brothers and sisters loved them, and that in Heaven their ancestors looked down in love for them, hoping not to see them too soon. And for most of the night she kept the babies quiet, but as dawn approached a cold wind blew through the cabin, and one of the babes wept, and the thugs, hunting, heard her. They came to the cabin. The woman heard them approaching, and stood in the door, and she fell to her knees and pleaded with them.

"What right has even a king to kill a child?" she asked them, and they drew their weapons, for surely any woman who would speak so of a king was a dangerous witch. "And what has this king done for you, that you will do this for him? For in the doing you will be damned, that is for certain; no man is more damned than a man who kills innocent children on the orders of a powerful man who will never even learn if it was done. You could go back. You could say that you killed them. What has the king done, that you will go to Hell for him?

And the thugs looked uneasily at one another, but they stepped forward to kill her, because they were too afraid to do anything else. But in that instant the sun rose, and with it came a blessing of Sarenrae, one of her favorites, one of the simplest of blessings, and it was this: that each of the men knew the hearts of the other men.

I do not want to kill these children and be damned, thought the first man, but I cannot say this to the others or they'll kill me as a traitor.

I have a son at home just that age, thought the second man, but I cannot say this to the others or they will see me as weak.

I hope the boy does grow up to kill the King, thought the third man, and I hope I do not need to explain why he could not say this.

And when they knew each others' minds, they knew they were safe; that none of them wanted to do this, and none of them needed to. And so they turned right around and marched back to the village, to go kill the man who had claimed there were babies in the hills. Because that man they knew was the only man in the village that would betray it to the authorities.

But the rays of the rising sun had reached that man as well, and when it did he was horrified with what he had done, and he had raced into the hills to try to save the woman and the children, because he knew he could never live with himself, looking ten weeping mothers and weeping fathers in the eye and knowing what a pittance he had done it for. When he saw the soldiers returning from the cabin he knew he was too late, and he fell to the ground and waited to die.

"You lied to us," said the first of the thugs. "There were no children in the hills."

"What?" said the man.

"You lied to us. There were no children in the hills."

"- oh," he said, and his heart soared with joy, and he still expected to die but was no longer afraid of it. "Yes. Yes. I lied to you. There were no children in the hills."

"Well," said the thug with a son just that age, "can't have people lying to us about things like that."

"No, you can't," he agreed, and closed his eyes.

"So," said the thug who hoped the king would be overthrown, "next time anyone comes to check, don't be lying."



The next time anyone came to check that man lied, with the rest of the village, and the boys all grew up healthy and strong, and one day they overthrew the King."

He really has mixed feelings about that one. He's worried that it has the kernel of Andoran's piracy problem in it. But 'kill these babies' is an illegal order, so.

"And the third story is -

Once upon a time, in Andoran, in the middle of the civil war, there was a man who knew that the Asmodeans were looking for him, and he was greatly afraid. He was not a good man. The Asmodeans were looking for him because he had burned a warehouse, and they thought he had done it for the revolution, for the cause of freedom from Hell. But he hadn't. He had done it to punish a man who had not paid his protection money. 

When he got word that they were looking for him he went and hid outside the city, in the woods, where terrible howls and growls filled the air, and he contemplated his death, which he was sure was upon him sooner or later. He had fled with the dinner he'd been about to eat - one cooked chicken leg, and an onion, and a potato, and that was all. If the monsters did not get him he supposed that he would quickly starve. He was sure that he would go to Hell. He did not want to go to Hell, but he had never heard of anyone escaping it. He did not even know what one would do, to escape Hell. But he did not want to burn forever. He had heard that you would burn forever. He shivered there in the dark, and he thought about burning forever, and then he heard a weak scared voice, a little girl's voice, saying, 'sshhhh, sssshhhh, it's all right, it's all right'. He followed the voice and he found a girl, of no more than ten, carrying a little boy of no more than three. The boy was whimpering, and the girl was trying to keep him quiet. 

"Oh," said the girl, seeing him, and she sounded relieved. "You're not with the Asmodeans." Because his clothes were tattered and splattered with mud and he was quaking with terror.

"No," he said truthfully. 

"Can you carry him? My arms are tired, and we've a long way still to go." And she handed him the little boy, before he could protest, and then kept walking.

He would ordinarily have protested this, but he did not have a plan, and she did, and the boy snuggled contentedly against his chest, and so he followed her. "Where are we going."

"Home," said the girl. "Sssssshhhhh."

So he followed her, in silence, while the creatures of the forest howled and chittered but kept their distance, and after a while they came to a cabin in the woods. It was a cozy little cabin, with a wood-burning stove already hot, though it was empty, and they hurried in and shut the door and barred it and spent a few minutes warming up in silence.

"Where would you want to go," asked the girl, "if you could choose?"

"Axis," the man said. Then he thought that probably she meant if they could escape the civil war, so he said, "Absalom."

"Do you think you'll go to Axis?" said the girl. 

"No," said the man. "I have done Evil, and no Good at all."

"You carried a little boy through the forest to safety. Do you mean to abandon him in the morning?" 

"No," said the man, though only because it seemed like the wrong answer.

"You burned an important warehouse full of files for Hell's secret police. A great many men and women live today because of you."

He was not happy to hear that, but rather horrified, because it meant they would be looking for him all the more diligently. "I didn't know," he said. " - I should not stay with you and the boy, then, if -"

She beamed at him. "That was Good! Thinking about the danger in which you had placed us. Burning the warehouse, saving the boy, trying to spare us further danger. I think you are not inevitably damned at all. - they cannot find us here."

He began to feel terribly uneasy, despite the comforting warmth, and the thick walls, and the quiet. "Where is this place?" he asked. 

"It is a secret place that the rebels built, and hid with powerful magic. The only people who can find it are those who bear in their arms the innocent, and seek only safety."

"Are there others coming?"

"Why do you ask?"

He was not sure of the right answer, at first, but the little boy stirred at his feet and his stomach rumbled. "Because... I suppose we ought to cook for them."

She smiled at him again.

"I don't have much," he warned her. 

"Some things go farther shared," she said, so he started cooking.

They came all night. Tired, frightened men and women, cold and afraid and sometimes injured. He served them stew, and indeed somehow it did not run out. One of them prayed to Iomedae, for protection from Hell. 

"I thought Iomedae is a god of Good people?" asked the man.

"Iomedae doesn't want anyone to go to Hell, idiot."

"Why not?"

"Well, do you want the Asmodeans to catch any of us?"

The man looked around at the people huddled on the floor drinking stew. He did not, in fact, want the Asmodeans to catch any of them. "No," he says.

"Well, it's like that."

"Iomedae," said the man, very uncertainly, "save us from Hell."

Another prayed to Erastil, to see his wife again. "Do you have a wife?" he asked.

"Haven't seen the nagging bitch in two years," said the man.

"But she was afraid," said the little girl, "when she heard they were looking for you, and she prayed you'd get away safe."

"She was?" said the man.

"Oh, yes," said the little girl, "listen," and for a moment he could hear his wife's voice on the wind, praying to Milani for his freedom.

"Well," said the fellow who prayed to Erastil, "sounds like you owe your wife an apology, and don't you ever call her a nagging bitch again."

In the morning, ten people were sleeping on the floor of the little cabin, the pot on the stove was still full, the little boy was snuggled tightly around him, and the girl was gone. "Where's the girl?" he asked the boy.

"What girl?" asked the boy. 

"- the girl who carried you to the cabin."

"You carried me to the cabin."

"The girl who said I am not inevitably damned."

The little boy looked up at him, a brave rebel cooking dinner for brave rebels on the camp stove, half a dozen children snuggled warm and safe around him. "Any person would say that," said the boy.

"Don't be ridiculous. There was a girl. I need to talk to her."

"Why do you need to talk to her?" asked the man who'd prayed to Erastil.

"I need to go find my wife, get her out of the city."

"And you need a little girl to do that?"

" - she said we can only get back in if we're carrying an innocent person."

The man who had prayed to Erastil stared at him, confused. "Then ...carry one."

And so the man departed, for the home where his wife had once lived, hoping she was still there, hoping the city still stood. And it did, or at least that quarter of it, and when she opened the door she went white as a ghost. "You're a wanted man," she hissed.

"There's somewhere safe," he said. "Come with me. - and we'll need to take a child, too, so we can get in, have the neighbors any?"

"You bastard," she said, and stepped aside, and there behind her was a little girl of a year and a half, their little girl, who he hadn't even guessed of. So he took his wife and took his child and led them back to the cabin in the woods, where they sheltered until great trumpets rang out news of peace. And he never saw the little girl again, until his own daughter was ten, at which point it became clear that it was she who had guided him."

"Does anyone have...any questions."

She shouldn’t have been annoyed about the proclamation about sleeping with slaves. At least that time it was remotely clear what they were telling anyone to do. Although, really, she probably should have guessed that they would be like this from the holy book that's an epic poem instead of any sort of list of actual instructions.

Okay, uh… you should refuse to kill babies… you should act very upset and scream and cry whenever anyone dies, even if you hate them… you should burn down warehouses full of documents… you should commit treason against rulers if you don’t like them??… wait, wait, wait. Okay. Listing them all out like that makes it really obvious that this is a test of who has so little brain that they’ll immediately believe that they’re supposed to rebel against the government just because a priest said so. Tomorrow they’ll round up and kill the people who thought so, and then they’ll give them the real lessons. Maybe about how to be lawful good, or maybe it'll turn out the old priests disappearing was all part of the trick. Well, she’s not one of them, you hear, she thought it sounded off from the start.

There was definitely a lesson in all of that, but unless the priest absolutely demands that someone speak, it’s probably safer for someone else to get torn apart first for not knowing what it was.

Is that why they’re not supposed to kill babies??? Are the babies somehow already full grown somewhere else and so you’re always also killing someone who actually matters??? Is there a plane where the spirit of the fully grown person lives??? Can you see the future by contacting them???

Have Axis and Absalom been words for the same place all this time? That explains a lot, really.

No wonder they don’t have a shrine to Sarenrae. He notes that they still don't have one, probably because she's completely impossible to live with.

Wait, Iomedae is against killing people??

She isn't someone who would pray for her ex-husband if he were in trouble, but admittedly there's nothing stopping her.

...so, are they supposed to lie to the government about everything, or only some things? Is the government on board with this? Maybe they're supposed to keep telling the priests, and let the priests sort it out? She's never really thought about what one would do if the state and the church disagreed -

Sorry, why is Asmund in love with Bente? Did she miss that part? 

.....is one night of being good to people really all it takes, or is that only if you accidentally save a bunch of people's lives first -

He’s trying to count whether he’s killed more or fewer than twelve babies. He thinks fewer than twelve unless you’re counting really weirdly, but more than four, which is what each person would get credit for if there were three of them, right? Of course it only matters if you don't want to go to hell, but they're not supposed to want to anymore -

This is really kind of an alarming density of treason and rebellion. The stories are from Andoran, of course, and it makes sense that Andoran would think of treason and good as tightly intertwined, but Kantaria has just surrendered to the forces of good.

Probably they know what they're doing. But maybe he can ask that the next sermon provide some, ah, clarification, on the circumstances under which treason is and is not admirable. 

Her heart twists, as she listens to the first one. How Bente raises her voice even though she's weak and can't defend herself and doesn't know how to use the sword, but Iomedae picks her because - she was brave, and did it anyway, and so it works, and she lives.

- but that's not why, is it, or she would have picked one of the people who died, too.

She doesn’t quite understand what she’s feeling, and gives no sign.

In the first place: that Iomedae is not a goddess of beginning violence, but a goddess of ending it - by further violence if necessary, but only if necessary. (She's only getting that by putting it together with the context from the duel, but she does have that.)

In the second place: that protecting the innocent is more important than following orders.

In the third place: ...she's not sure, exactly. The man is evil, and then someone asks him to do good, while he's hurting and afraid, and then from that point forward he does nothing but good, as if nobody had ever asked him before. 

....does that work?

No, no questions.